I just got dragon commander, and I am having a pretty good time, but I just came across what is essentially a stalemate situation with naval battles. in part 2 of the game, I decided to send my 5 ironclads against 5 juggernauts and 2 ironclads. when the screen that lets you choose the general appears, the a.i. decided to include with his fleet a mercenary card that summons 4 shamans. I begin the battle and I destroy his fleet mainly by dropping mines and luring the juggernauts into them, sustaining 0 casualties on my side. I am sitting there waiting for the victory screen, only to realize that the ai's 4 shamans are still floating around above my fleet.
so what ends up happening is my fleet that owns the map has to retreat from the field all because 4 "land" units in a NAVAL battle are keeping me from winning. and to add insult to injury, when I retreat from the battle, the game doesn't even take into consideration the fact that I destroyed his entire fleet, and somehow those 4 shamans magically took out 3 of my 5 ironclads, and half of the enemy fleet suddenly returned to life.I am quite surprised that nobody thought of this sort of thing before.
from my perspective, there are a few things that can be changed in order to remedy this situation.
1. make it so that instead of killing every single enemy unit, you only have to destroy non-mercenary units.(this could make sense lore-wise because these are mercenaries after all, and when they watch the main army get creamed they probably don't want to stick around and fight to the death)
2. if in naval battles neither side has damaged each other in the past a non-specific amount of time, you should win by default. or if that doesn't work, make both sides retreat from the battle with only the units they currently have on the map.
3. make a more realistic retreat mechanic. I remember in Star Wars: Empire at war, if you could not win the battle, you could choose to retreat, and then all of your units would make a b-line for the nearest map edge to escape the fight. something like this would fix both the stalemate and the the fact whatever happens in the battle view does not affect at all what happens to your units in the retreat report.
once again, I am loving this game so far, but I am quite surprised that something like this got past the Q/A department.
