Battle plans involve essentially painting arrows on the map, and it’s wonderful. “We wanted to control the army as a general of the period would,” Dan says as he sweeps across the map with the cursor, leaving behind a gigantic arrow pointing towards an enemy target. The goal is to remove unnecessary micro-management. Instead of commanding individual units — something you can still do — you can link up multiple units in a single battle plan, and they’ll march in the direction of the arrow when the plan is activated.
You might not want to activate the plan right away, however. The longer troops are left to prepare, the stronger the assault will be. It isn’t in-game at the moment, but Dan explains that there will be a ticker that shows the strength of the plan as you charge it up. Longer preparation times are still risky, though, as it gives the enemy time to discover what you’re doing and create a counter plan or throw up a solid defence. They could even have spies in your ranks, stealing your plans and informing their superiors.
This is where it can become delightfully complex. If you’re working on a big plan and can’t afford to have your enemies discover it, you can create a bunch of weaker ones and throw your foes off the scent. While they are anticipating your poorly thought out assault, perhaps even laughing at you, you sweep in using the real battle plan and decimate them. Since plans can be split into phases, you can send troops forward a bit, rest up, send smaller forces off in different directions, and before you know it you’ve got arrows going everywhere and it starts to look a bit like the intro sequence to Dad’s Army.