Yet to RTS fans who were fortunate enough to play Kohan, Wardells reference is music to the ear. Kohan remains a fascinating RTS experiment, an evolutionary branch of the genre that was tragically ignored in favor of more lavishly-produced, conventional fare. One of its key innovations, and one that Ashes borrows, was to make armies, not individual units or control groups, the unit scale that players controlled.
So while Ashes might look like a game about commanding absolutely bonkers numbers of units, appearances are deceiving. While you always have the option to micro-manage small clusters of units yourself, most of the game is spent commanding a handful of armies comprised of dozens or hundreds of units.
Its an important difference, Wardell insists, because a control group is a different beast from an army, in terms of AI. See, the problem with a control group is that you still end up with the case where someone at the edge of your control group is getting killed and the rest of your guys are just standing there.
But when its an actual meta-unit, if youre nailing someone on the end of the line, someone else is coming over. If someone needs some health, hes going to get healed because theres a healing unit as part of the overall group. As opposed to it saying, Sorry, youre five pixels outside of my zone, so youre just going to die.'
Because an army kind of behaves a single collective entity, it will fight differently depending on its composition in order to maximize its efficiency. To help them do that, they receive subtle buffs based on their composition to help them play a specialized role if necessary.