Board Thread:Suggestions forum/@comment-110.32.75.153-20190908215015/@comment-38139955-20190913154721

well, it would be cool, and in fact I might have a way to do it: by actually letting the players themselves customize the formations. Let me explain.

It might not be the best of solutions, and nowhere near to what an RTS like age of empires could achieve, but it would be a lot better than what there currently is. It goes as follows:

So, when giving npc's a squadron, those npc's are now bound to it and will only react when an item also bound to that same squadron is used. This means that they are conditioned to it (here is where my idea comes into plan), and that squadron which they are bound to can now be tweaked per say. We now introduce formations, which are predetermined placement and positioning of units, these would be independent of all other things. The positioning of the units can be done with a grid, where the player would select some blocks where the units are supposed to go. When using a horn of comand on a command table, on top of being able to assign a sqadron, you would have an option to "assign formation". In order to turn the sqadron into a formation, minecraft must understand how to do this, which is solved by automatically and assigning numbers to the NPC's, effectively turning them into units. Now that they have been numbered, the game can position them. Remember the grid? the positions chosen by the player will be assigned a unit (1st unit to the 1st selected tile from left to right and up to down), and the unit (once the process is finished) will stay on that block based uppon the X and Z coordinates. Now the hired troops belonging to a squadron will get into position when the using horn of command (to which I would add a different category in addition to summon and halt called form ranks/ dissolve ranks). This will of course have some limitations such as max number of units or even the disfunctionality of having different NPC's in one formation, but it's the best I can come up with.