0.75 Unit Positioning

As I was playing a few more turns after I posed this I realized that my two caster heroes (my sovereign and a henchman) are both equipped with melee weapons.  My sovereign has the caster staff you can equip for 1 point at creation and my henchman has the legendary broadsword (for the +init).  If the positioning is decided based on weapons equipped, that's the problem.  

Not sure if this is then more of a critique of the positioning system or the overwhelming lack of caster-centric weapons in the game.  Either way my two relatively lightly armored caster units start battles in the vanguard.  Not good.

My range units(archers) are still being put out of harms way  but i got my first npc hero(went with the more mage one) and even after selecting path of the mage, he is constantly put with in reach of mobs getting to him on the first round and killing him.  I dont understand why this is happening, because it hasnt before.  I dont think that enemy units should be that close, to close and engage in their first round and be able to wipe out any of my units.  Or at least let us decide where to put them, that way if we do fight high mobility enemies, our defensive units can be up front or however we like it.  Even then, why not put enough space on the tactical map that it takes more than one round(unless they have magic to increase their speed) to cross and engage?  Make it a bit more on the strategy side?

In the end, I think the best solution is just to allow us to place our armies if we choose to, or have it happen as is.  On the first battle you have, or in the options, just have the player select and off we go.

I have been frustrated my last several battles with my impulsive warg riders stuck behind non-impulsive and slow initiative melee units and terrain obstacles.  

Agree that we should have a basic formation we can set or make it a level up perk like HoMM 3 Tactics hero skill. 

It really doesn't help that some maps have extremely cramped battlefields, and injured units seem to end up on the front lines quite often. I've had cases where injured units are trapped between their own forces and the enemy. It gets even worse when they have the same initiative, but the injured units move after the healthy. This means that your healthy units spend the turn defending, the injured spend the turn retreating, and the enemy gets another free attack.

There should definitely be more caster specific weapons included in the base game.  I would love to see wands, a 0 attack high-initiative weapon that would be used by pure spell-casters.

Draw the icon and the pictures and I'll put it in the game as a mod

Trust me, I've been thinking about including this in RotM for a while now.