Assigning tasks to multiple units?

[Lincoln Peters <sampln at sbcglobal dot net>]

I've been doing some more experimenting, and I've once again encountered
the rather painful difficulties associated with moving hundreds of units
every turn.  So I've tried to think of a few ways to reduce the amount
of such work required.

Semi-automatic AI control, of course, has already been discussed at
length, but simply being able to manually assign the same plan/goal/task
to multiple units would help significantly as well.  This would be most
easily accomplished if there was an easy way to select multiple units
and give them orders simultaneously.  I'm thinking one or both of the
following mechanisms:

1. A "lasso" tool comparable to the tool of the same name in Photoshop
and the GIMP, so that you could draw a marquee around an area and select
all units within it.

2. A method of selecting and deselecting units based on various
criteria.  Perhaps a dialog that looks something like:

http://homepage.mac.com/lmpeters/select_units.png


It would also help to have a better mechanism for creating formations,
and for adding and removing units from those formations as needed, but
this would require even more work just to figure out how it should look.

---
Lincoln Peters
<sampln@sbcglobal.net>

I was in Vegas last week. I was at the roulette table, having a lengthy
argument about what I considered an Odd number.
		-- Steven Wright