I certainly hope they implement the range property either by a general setting or by special abilities...
as much as I agree that the battle system before was more tricky and therefor more strategy could be implemented, I believe the updated system.. at least IMHO.. is definitely better.. of course still not good but the prior one was just crap.. this grouping thing.. no words for that idea...
Yeah the old system had a lot more tactics but it made no logical sense.
This new system is garbage but it has a lot of room for improvement.
at least is feels as if the physics of this world would apply to the math used in the new battle system... vs. with the old system it was more like borg math...
and another question:
could you elaborate a bit more about that steem.war engine you want to build?
I cant judge this but for me you seem like a pretty decent programmer.. but to create a backbone/middle ware battle system on the back of steem just in your spare time seems a bit of a huge task..
so if you would do it full time, do you have any idea of timeline, budget and resources?
Considering I'm still a super JavaScript novice it's more about just learning right now. There's a good chance that if I create anything useful I'll be tempted to rewrite it later because of all the new tricks and functionality I figure out over time.
Honestly it's impossible to say how long these things will take. Developers are notoriously bad at picking a date that is way too early... just look at Steem development. Soon™