number of soldiers in unit question

Hi,

I am a noob to this game and have been studying the different units and stats. One thing I have overlooked and now wonder about, is the advantage that is offered by having a larger number of men available to fill a unit. For instance the Macedon melee units have 60 and the Roman melee were around 40. Is having another 20 extra men a big factor? Are the statistics given for entire units or individual soldiers. If they are for individual soldiers then obviously unit size would be a large influence on its power. Anyone know?

I think generally speaking the larger unit size (60/120 men) are for levies and phalangites. Examples are the peasants, eastern spearmen, barbarian warbands, levy pikemen, silver shield pikemen, etc.

To answer your question I think the stats are given for individual soldiers, so it's actually up to you to weigh the advantage of numbers versus quality..... does that make sense? :sweatdrop:

Yeah I guess that does make sense. But it also means that even tho they are a crappy lot, because there are more of them they have a little more potential. However I should not get my panties in a wad over the numbers either since they are meh. I think the egyptian archers are a bigger group to and they look pretty good.

I think that the numbers thing is a game balance sort of thing. For example a unit of Hastati v an EQUAL NUMBER of warband would give all things equal result in a win to the Hastaii 99% of the time.

So given that an army of 20 Hasatii units would be very difficult to beat for the barbarians.
(barring terrain, experiance, weapon upgrades, tactics etc). So giving the warband 50% more troops goes some way toward evening things out. Although the Romans are very hard to beat fullstop.

So as for the number of soldiers in a unit I think you should concentrate more on the COST and UPKEEP as a sort of indicator of unit strength. Although this can also be misleading...:wall:

I think the key advantage of having more men in a unit is that it takes longer for the unit in question to die that a unit with equal stats. Of course most of the units with more men in them are very poor defenders against certain types (or even all) weaponry, which probably counteracts this. Warbands, for example, are a fairly weak unit, as are Phalangites against almost anything ranged due to their sheild size. There are exceptions though, such as Legionary First Cohorts.

Larger units also have the advantage of the ability to provide a greater frontal surface area allowing them to protect a larger area of land. They also can go into a deeper formation which, I think, protects from cavalry. These advantages are much more trivial though, since the difference is only small.

A good estimate of strength probably could be made by looking at the units statistics (averaging them maybe) and them multiplying them by the number of men in the unit to work out overall power.

Hope this is helpful ~:)