REMINDING MYSELF ABOUT COMBAT

Combat works like this - A unit's weapons are compared to the opponent's armor/defenses first. If superior, enemy defense is lowered, if inferior, own attack skill is lowered. Same goes both ways. After that, the unit with highest speed on the battlefield takes their first attack. I'm going with 10-tick combat phases, meaning that each unit adds an amount of 'ticks' constantly until it's someone's turn again- For example, a warrior will get 3 ticks each time and a regular civie will get 2. So it'd be every ~4 turns that the warriors do their attack, and every 5 for the civies. As an example, Warriors would go Turn - 3 - 6 - 9 - Turn at 12 - 15 -18 - Turn at 21, and so forth. Of course, units don't have to constantly attack. They can do other stuff, such as defend certain divisions, flank, attack and retreat, shit like that. To do this, you give the army a battle plan beforehand. Your troops are attacking me directly in the forest. You have 10 warriors armed with basic bows and 10 warriors armed with stone spears. I have 5 warriors armed with bows and 5 with spears. For the purpose of this, both our commanders are absolute garbage and contribute nothing to this besides allowing to form an army. In regular battle, the commanders could boost the skills of a certain amount of troops based on the commander's leadership skill, as well as fight themselves. My troops hold a terrain advantage in the forest, increasing their defense by 50%. All of them being warriors, that's 6 for all of them. But 1 point is removed because they are patrolling instead of defending, resulting in 5. The terrain also interferes with ranged combat, reducing the effectiveness of the ranged troops by half. So, if a unit were to normally do 10 damage, they'd do 5 instead. In a normal defending scenario, when a unit is either defending or fortified, the defending army gets first turn if one of their troops has the highest speed. But, since the enemy was patrolling, the attacker gets first turn if they have the fastest unit. Once again, everyone is a warrior on foot, so the speed is equal, meaning your troops go first. Ranged units also have the upper hand, and take their turn before melee units. So you can expect the turns to go your ranged troops - my ranged troops - your melee troops - my melee troops. To design a battle plan, you can separate your troops into divisions, decide which divisions will take the front lines and which will take the back, and once you get beyond tribal organization, also decide which units take which flanks. You can give each division a command each turn they take: They can attack, take defensive positions, protect another division, retreat, attack and retreat (Useful if you have fast shock cav), or simply move (You can move your troops behind the enemy in two turns so long as your troops are faster than the enemy - If the enemy has faster troops set to attack, they're likely to intercept them. Also, ranged units are a thing.) Now, you can also mix melee units with ranged ones in divisions. It might get a bit messy, tho.

https://snag.gy/QpGLYK.jpg

So, yeah. You can divide your 10 warriors and 10 archers into two groups however you like, and give them whichever orders you want. You can give either detailed orders for each turn, or broad orders for the entire battle. going into combat, you naturally wouldn't know your enemy's battle plan, except for a couple cases where you can against AI if you have intel on them. What I'd do as a defender, knowing I have a troop disatvantage, is try and do one of two things- as a player, I'd try and get at least my ranged troops the hell out Or, as an AI, be a big dumb tribal chieftain and charge right ahead. in the first scenario, my ranged units would be ordered to retreat right off the bat, and my melee units ordered to protect them in case they failed their attempt. Your 10 ranged units get to fire first. Since I forgot to mention any armor, let's say everyone's naked- So that'd be a pretty big attack advantage all around. My troops have a defense value of 5, lowered by 3 because of the whole bows and arrows >​ being naked thing  That's an attack of 4 against defense of 2, then. Since I used d5's to generate stats for leaders, I decided to go ahead and also use d5's as combat modifiers. the damage is then calculated by taking the result, in this case -1, adding that earlier weapon >​ armor advantage if it exists, so +2, and then multiplying it by the amount of troops you have.  Anyway, that means the damage done is 20, halved by the fact that it's a forest, and then divided among the two divisions, due to one protecting the other.