Implicit unit grouping

[bert_the_turtle]

I'm tossing around the idea to add unit group support to my server (really long thinking about the long term her). The challenge is that I can't change the client UI, so groups must be defined by something other than dragging a box.

I propose to use explicit state changes. Say you have six carriers in two fleets of three. You switch both fleets to bomber launch mode: voila, you have just defined a group of six carriers. Sending a launch command to one of the group will automatically launch bombers to the same target from the other five carriers. The launched bombers will be automatically put into a new group. Order one of them to attack a target, and the others will follow. Want to execute a beam attack against multiple targets? Switch three of the bombers to SRBM mode, this will put those three into a group. Order one to attack a radar, and all three will attack it. Switch four of your silos to launch mode, then order one of them to nuke some cities. The others will attack the same cities in the same order (of course, without doing any fancy timing stuff to make the nukes land simultaneously).
Groups would need to be managed over chat commands; you'll always be informed about the groups you currently have (not counting losses, the server won't know about them) you could disband groups or temporarily disable automatic group selection.

There is a small problem with this approach: The shift-click trick to switch the mode of a whole group. The regular click will send a message even if the state change is redundant, so you can put a carrier into a bomber launch group even if it is already in bomber launch mode; but the shift-click will only send state change messages for those ships in a fleet that are in some other mode, and there is no way for the server to tell a shift-click that only effectively switches one ship (and should therefore add the whole fleet to the group) and a regular click. I would probably assume it was a shift click, because I can't think of many situations where you want exactly that ship in a fleet to a bomber launch group that was not in bomber launch mode before.

Of course, all of this would be disabled by default, and both the server admin and the player would need to activate it in some way.