Army Limit 16 Units

[Gixer]

I would like to know why the 3D Battles limit you to only 16 units when in the advertising and blurb it says battles with 1000's of men on screen at once. Given this limit my army usually reaches only about 900 or so and therefore dosn't allow me to field anywhere near the 1000's of men as mentioned, even though I may have several armies in the province.

I know you can bring on reinforcements during the battle but I was expecting to have more then just a few spearmen, arches and some cavalry.

Is there away around this limit? Or am I missing something obvious? As with the limit in place it seems more ideal to invade a province with several armies and just do an auto battle, rather then going into the 3D battle with your greatly reduced and limited force.

Any opinions?


Cheers....

[Soapyfrog]

Well... in the Game Options you can greatly increase the default size of a unit.

Also brig extra units is useful since they can be brought inot the battle as reserves when your frontline units are destroyed/routed/withdrawn. This is critical in very large battles.

[MajorPain]

Do say greatly increase??? I dont think so its only twice as normal.

And when that reinforcment arrive it usually to late cause the units dont rout or withdraw that fast.

I was disapointed too about that when it said that I could control thousands of men, in a way I can do that but, with the reinforcement, but I think that is a very mislead information.

[TexRoadkill]

I was a little dissapointed in the army sizes also. Is it any bigger than STW? For some reason I was thinking MTW would have armies several times larger. The engine obviously supports a lot more men on screen in multiplayer so why not have more units for yourself?

[Kraxis]

ok... 16*200 = 3200 men... Thousands! That is very possible if you go for an all spear/peasant army. It might not be bright, but it is certainly possible.

And you could in theory have a 4v4 of those numbers so it would be 8*3200 = 25600 men all on the battlefield at once.
But in such a case you should expect at least a little bit of lag. http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/biggrin.gif

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[NARF]

booya

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[Gixer]

Guys,

Thanks for the great replies, but yes must say I am rather dissapointed with the restrictions as was expecting to be able to have Napolianic sized battles, not small skirmishes with reinforcements. Which for me takes away alot of the strategy in the 3D Map, maybe I'll just have to concentrate on highly upgraded hitech units rather then mass armies.

Especially when it comes to Sieges, I'd like to have batteries of siege catapults etc and masses of troops not half a dozen of each.

And do feel that it takes away the use of building big armies to be used in 3D battles and more usefull to overwhelm enemy armies and just auto compelte the battle.

Someone mentioned Lag? are we talking multiplayer games? if so I can understand the restrictions, but not in single player campaign.

Anyway, just my gripe on what is a great game.


Cheers...

[spiffy_scimitar]

My gripe was being unable to play a custom game with reinforcements.

How do I win a cool seige game with a citadel full of troops if I have no reinforcements to call when my 8 mongonels and trebuchets are finished knocking down walls?

[candidgamera]

Be interested to hear from our devs on why 4x16 per side couldn't be the limit, corresponding to splitting down the middle potential availability in a multiplayer battle.

Am sure its just too much for the campaign engine to choke on.

Would be nice to have 4x16 for play on your own single battles.

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[The Green Knight]

Glad this was raosed. I too was "disappointed" about the size of armies on screen. However, I played the battle of hastings whioch has many units on screen, and it was verry laggy. so you see I dont think some of our machines would cope with the amount of info involved if the battles were massive.

[GilJaysmith]

The maximum number of men is indeed 25,600. To achieve this, slide the unit size up to "Huge", then set up a custom battle with eight factions, each with 16 units of 200 men.

It's not so common on the stratmap, but a big assault on an enemy stronghold can often involve 3,000 troops between two armies... or up to twice that number if you play with Huge units.

Granted, your machine will need to be a bit of a powerhouse to manage 25,600 men, because they're all doing at least basic thinking for themselves, and especially during melee there's a lot going on. Amongst other things, you won't notice our men happily marching over one another (unless there's really no alternative http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif Doing this sort of checking takes time.

However, existing top-end machines can play a 25,600-man battle at a reasonable frame rate.

Gil ~ CA

[The Green Knight]

Thanks Gil

Further question - I have set unit size to huge - this has had no effect on campaign in progress - I suppose this is normal?

[GilJaysmith]

Quote Originally posted by The Green Knight:
Thanks Gil

Further question - I have set unit size to huge - this has had no effect on campaign in progress - I suppose this is normal?[/QUOTE]


If I remember correctly, if you set the slider and then load a saved game then new units will pick up the new unit sizes but old units won't change.

The slider is not available from the Options menu when accessed from the In Game menu... i.e. you can't change it if you're actually playing a campaign, only before you start or load one.

Gil ~ CA

[Kraxis]

Quote Originally posted by GilJaysmith:

If I remember correctly, if you set the slider and then load a saved game then new units will pick up the new unit sizes but old units won't change.

Gil ~ CA
[/QUOTE]

So I can actually save my game, go out and put units on Huge, go back in and merge, reinforce and retrain important units to that size (120 Longbowmen, 80 Chivalric Knights, 41 Royal Knights for the king and heirs ect ect), then save again and set the units to default again, and of course load once more.
Then I have a massive advantage in that I can actually field mcuh more powerful army that I could normally, and I have protectem my king that much better (or are they permanently at 20?).

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BTW, Danish Crusades are true to history.

You may not care about war, but war cares about you!

[Didz]

I've certainly been involved in STW MP games with three players per side and 120 man units that had nearly 12,000 men on the table.

And I sometimes set up custom battles with even more troops in place but the maximum a player can command at any one time is 16 units, say 3,200 men tops.

Mind boggling when there are several other clans/factions marching about the battlefield and coming at you from every which way.

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Didz
Fortis balore et armis

[Soapyfrog]

The SP battles are exactly the same size as STW battles:

With default unit sizes...

STW: 16x60 = 960
MTW: artificial limit of 960

Which is kind of a shame. You can't really try quantity vs quality... i.e. I SHOULD be able to field 1600 men (an army made up entirely of spearmen and peasants, frex) but I cannot...

I think it would be intersting to play WITHOUT the 960 man limit.

[Daevyll]

I actually like the way it currently works with reinforcements brought on etc.

It creates yet another layer of strategy in big engagements (do I include that hard-hitting unit in my initial line-up, or do I save it to deliver a killing blow late on? etc).

The best battles I've had (SP) were the 3000 vs me type battles (usually against the Almoheads who seem to have a penchant for huge armies).
I loved it the first time I defeated the first wave, only to be contronted by a second wave which I barely fought off (all ammo gone by then because I hadnt conserved any in my foolishness), only to be smashed by a third wave consisting of fresh Almohead troops while my forces were all exhausted and depleted.

great stuff.

[GilJaysmith]

Quote Originally posted by Soapyfrog:
I SHOULD be able to field 1600 men (an army made up entirely of spearmen and peasants, frex) but I cannot...
[/QUOTE]


Sure you can - you just invade with two armies instead of one. When you hit the battlemap you'll be able to field sixteen units and keep the rest as reinforcements.

Gil ~ CA

[candidgamera]

Giljay:
Still wondering specifically what stopped the step of letting 4x16 units controlled by one faction on map in campaign and custom battles as limit - the same as a multiplayer 4x4 that the game will allow. Especially since if you set up an eight faction custom battle ai is controlling 7 other factions besides the player controlled one in some way - what "makes hard" player directly controlling directly 4 sets of 16 - putting an arrow maybe to the left or right of troop display to scroll between sets.

Not necessarily complaining - am coming around to the feel rather than the literal - in these battles - just curious.

I wouldn't necessarily be for this in terms of just getting raw numbers - but flexibility - and sure be a lot rougher to control your forces.

Probably have to think about subcommanders and an overall commander then too.

[Kraxis]

candid, this might interest you.

During the time when all we had was the Demo I searched through the files...

Lo and behold, I found file called unitbar_22, right next to a file called unitbar_16. So to me that looked very much like there had been an attempt to create the possibility of more units.
But clearly it had been too much, or else we would now be fighting battles with 22 units instead of the 16 we have.

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BTW, Danish Crusades are true to history.

You may not care about war, but war cares about you!

[candidgamera]

Quote Originally posted by Kraxis:
candid, this might interest you.

During the time when all we had was the Demo I searched through the files...

Lo and behold, I found file called unitbar_22, right next to a file called unitbar_16. So to me that looked very much like there had been an attempt to create the possibility of more units.
But clearly it had been too much, or else we would now be fighting battles with 22 units instead of the 16 we have.

[/QUOTE]

Interesting. Wonder what that would have looked like on screen - maybe smaller unit boxes. Wonder if its all about display issues as much as raw choke factor.

[Soapyfrog]

Gil: Then why have the hard 960 man limit per "stack"??

I mean now that I think about it, you're right, I just bamboozled myself with the hard limits on the stack...

[Stu35]

as was expecting to be able to have Napolianic sized battles

Not a napoleonic game, get over it.


I wonder why you are limited to 960 men as well, seems a bit... strange.

I would have liked to have a few more men under my command to go with the bigger maps... but i didnt make the game, its not my place to complain about the feasability of such things (unlike some people who like to insist that CA can do anything with the greatest of ease)

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Alba Gu Bragh

[GilJaysmith]

960 man limit: good question, and I amn't on the stratmap team so I can't say for sure, but my guess is that the red bar on each army shows the percentage of the maximum size which that army has, and 960 must have seemed like a good value since the average unit size is probably still 60.

We did consider breaking the 16-unit limit but basically we couldn't figure out a satisfactory user interface in the time available, so we proceeded with what we had. As I say whenever anyone asks about this, at least we broke Shogun's limit of 65,000 men across all the armies on the stratmap http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif

Kraxis: yes, you can do that (change the unit size for one turn only), but frankly, this is a bit of a "tactic", isn't it? ;-) It's also risky, in that if you do this on a turn when the AI players are feeling broody, they might profit from it more than you do...

The 16-unit and 22-unit graphics which someone referred to are the grids within which we draw the "selected" and "available" unit icons on the army selection menus. Nothing to do with bigger armies, I'm afraid.

Gil ~ CA

[candidgamera]

Quote Originally posted by GilJaysmith:

We did consider breaking the 16-unit limit but basically we couldn't figure out a satisfactory user interface in the time available, so we proceeded with what we had. As I say whenever anyone asks about this, at least we broke Shogun's limit of 65,000 men across all the armies on the stratmap http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif

Gil ~ CA[/QUOTE]

The arrow idea at an end of the 16 unit display harder than it looks then?

Here's another idea set maybe for the future:
Up to four flags, like the one to the left on top of the 16 unit battle display,leftmost is the supreme commander - move from group to group display by clicking on the army button of choice, which is highlighted of course when displaying - per earlier each has a subcommander, except the one with supreme commander-he commands his troops and the overall army.

No problems now with displaying only 16 at a time which still serves well.

Keep armies straight by sub-army with a little crest on the top of the unit flag pole - like the STW golden mons, or an eagle or ball on your everyday flagpole in real life.

Keep them simple, maybe uniform by faction.

Together with group stuff now this could really take things to a new kind of operational level - more generals get to play.

Keep in mind this doesn't mean all four subarmies have to be filled up either - works in the other direction too as an added group tool.

Can imagine big things for this direction for Napolionic or ACW.

Interface is still simple, elegant, accessible, logical.

Would suggest too that player can't mess around with army composition once he moves into province except to be able to switch whole up-to-16 unit armies in/out of his on map four - - his four armies he has to organize normally before marching in. The fifth and up go into reinforcements blob and handle like now.

Simple rule for supreme commander: first guy to move into province. Little 1 and 2 unit augments fill up like now, but filling up first the supreme commanders army and then in order of who marched in after that, or go into reinforcements blob.

Again controlled, but with logic.