Question on numbers for those who play EB.

I am currently researching another historic battle for EB, but the numbers involved are incredible - larger than Raphia. My question for those who play the game then is when a custom battle is played what is the model limit before you start seeing major performance hits. The number I am looking for is at the top, right-hand corner of the army creation screen for custom battles.

The number crunching that I have been doing shows me that both 1:40 and 1:25 ratios work well mathematically, but while I could do both versions it would be nice if I only had to do one of them. This information is of course relevant for future historical battles even if the historical totals and ratios change.

Well for me, the number turns red at about 6,500, and I do notice some laggishness at that point.

My laptop is fairly good though. I can play the game almost perfectly at mostly high specs.

For me it's 2400. Laptop's about 2-3 years old and was medium-high range back then.
I have a suggestion: How about you do two versions, one for the people who can show upward 3- or 4-000 and another for those who can't? All it would take, I guess, is changing the unit size numbers.

With the lowest possible graphic options, a battle with 9640 men runs smoothly. That is equal of two full stacks with each unit being 241 men strong. Didn't test any more than that, but I see no reason why I couldn't have a few more units in a new stack, and still have it run well.

The red number is only 6400 though, and with my usual graphic settings (maxed), that would lag.

I tend to be able to run fairly large battles even on my laptop (6000+ men), HOWEVER, heavy archery fire brings it to its knees for some reason. 6000 Phalanx units - no problem, 2000 horse archers - jerk central.

Each arrow is tracked as an unique instantiation of an arrow object so 2000 HA firing 2000 arrows is almost like doubling the entities in play in the battle for a few seconds.

I can run about 5 full stack armies on large before my PC comes COMPLETELY to its knees. I think the most epic thing I did was have 6 stacks of Parthian Late Katanks charge a stack of Macedonian Late Phalanx.

About 15,000 with missiles etc on max settings is my limit, things can get real jerky with 20,000+ troops.

I don't know the numbers but almost every battle we would consider including has more than we can show on the RTW engine, so I personally like to have a full army (20) possibly with added units under control of an AI captain on a far wing also, with enemy in same situation or more. This is on the two largest unit size settings also. I just don't like going through the trouble to run a huge historical battle when the number of units is reduced to such a fraction of the original numbers that it seems like a small skirmish, even if tactics can be used more (since tactics is where the AI gets a lot dumber).

I want to play my big historical formation against his big historical formation.

Around 3000 for me:2thumbsup: