Quote Originally Posted by vartan View Post
What is a proper army and do you really want to fill all 20 slots? Why do you suppose under-20-slot armies are too low in number? There is a setting for huge unit size, after all. 15 units on a huge setting are still prone to causing lag. Most online battles you see don't have many if any elites as it is. People tend to find numbers and overall strength and cost-effectiveness much more important to success--that is, they find success and victory the eventual goal in battle, not simply the fielding of a...proper army, for the sake of fielding a proper army. After all, this is a game.

That being said, let us suppose we're dealing with a 30k budget cap, and 28k for pre-Marians. Now, presumably you can still field 20-slot armies, or just for example a 15-slot more heavy-oriented army. Currently, because 20-slot armies are so ubiquitous in our 36k model, we don't provide proportions (i.e. percentages) for skirmishers, archer/slingers, cav--heavy cav, and so on and so forth, but rather we have slots. That is, we don't say maximum 20% army can be archer/slingers, but we say 4/20 slots. If we were to reduce budget to 30k or whatnot, would we still maintain same system and same numbers of slots, or would we have to resort to proportions? When using proportions, this would bring about more complexity in that the player, when creating his army, must consider that each time he uses one more slot, the percentages adjust. Integers are simple. Percentages complex (relatively, i.e. in this scenario). What say you?
In my mind a proper army has one or two elite, some heavies and mass medium/levy units. The others' PCs won't handle the Huge size, even if we use only 15 units. There are people who don't use all the slots even with 36k. Online battles are about victory, but how will you achieve that? I personally more like when I don't have to spam a very cost-effective unit to win. If we reduce the budget too much, we will begin to see exactly the same units and builds everywhere, everybody will buy the cost-effective one, because they won't have more mnai to buy a bit better. I see 36k as a balanced budget.

We could use the units by percentages with 36k too. (The slot system being replaced with the % one is appealing.)