Age of Strategy Forums

Given the rigidity of rectangular movement, I'd suggest to implement a new type of movement, permutation (swap): One unit moves into the tile of an adjacent unit and that adjacent unit takes its place. This is a quite usual movement in the battlefield, and would allow to quickly swap out wounded units in front against healthy ones positioned behind them.
Of course this swap should only work on adjacent units.

I can do something like this now by using terain that restricts the flow of enemy units and using some sort of jumping technique to rotate the melee troop so healers can top off their health. Three troops are in single file, the first hits and jumps to the back. The now middle one jumps forward and strikes to free up the space for the last one to move into. Elephants are great for this but you can only use two elephants due to the movement range. It's a great strategy.

Indeed, that's the idea. The change I suggest is that the "leaving" unit can move into an already occupied square, the unit which was there automatically taking its place. So potentially each turn you just swap the same two units: One is in front getting hurt, the other is in the back getting patched up.

The problem right now is that you can only move to an empty square (which you obviously fill up). Which is unfortunate if this square was also the square a fresh unit would need to start from to be able to reach the emptied front line spot...

A "swap" type movement would make maneuvering in crowded places much more easy (and it's very easy to crowd places, given the extremely small movement allowances of most units).