Cavalry, Cards, and Raid Lines

Colony fights used to feel like a crowd of individuals with HP bars. This ship turns the apron into a unit battle: cards you can read at a glance, formation pads you can aim, horses that charge instead of jogging, and raiders that pick roles.

Unit cards as the selection SSOT

The battle HUD is a centered bronze beam with gilt rails. Each squad is a card: hotkey, portrait bust (rider framing for cavalry), name, strength, and a bar. Click a soldier and you select the unit. Detail for the active card sits above the strip so ten cards stay on screen without covering the fight.

Flags, pads, and facing

Selected formations show gold-rim pads with faction fill, a facing chevron on the front edge, and tall vexilla so mid and far still read who is who. Grass shows through the pad instead of a solid blot. The markers are meant to feel like Total War selection chrome, not debug boxes.

Cavalry that plow through

Equites and barbarian horsemen share infantry orders (select / move / attack). Attack from a run-up is the charge — build speed, impact with lance bonus, spears brace, punch past a rank, then peel off and cycle. Horses stay on the formation rail until impact so the bag does not dissolve into a cloud of riders on the approach.

Raid AI with jobs

Attacker raids no longer nearest-neighbor into a blob. A deterministic commander assigns pin, flank, reinforce, screen, siege, and regroup. Focus fire soft-caps so secondaries get pressure; sticky roles cut thrash. Formation bags also stop stalling on ATTACK_SQUAD detours when a tangent looked like a flank at range.

Scale and colony chips

Formation rails, far-field skips, and cheaper melee keep a few hundred troops playable. In the colony, Timberborn-style overhead chips call out paused, no-workers, and disconnected buildings, and path-isolated huts auto-stop until they reconnect.

What to feel in a build

• Open a colony raid or battle sandbox — pick units from the bronze strip, not per-man bars.
• Order Equites into a line from a run-up and watch the impact punch through instead of planting.
• Let a raid run: flanks and a siege detachment should show up instead of everyone dogpiling one squad.
• Place a workshop off the town-hall path graph — the chip should say it is disconnected until you link it.