Quote Originally Posted by Nerouin
I've noticed this- for example, in STW, when you conquer all of Japan you may have something like 20,000 troops in your armies.. twenty FULL armies (armies are 960 men max.. maybe twice as big if you're playing with units of 120, I don't know). This may even be a bit on the high side.

Meanwhile, there were hundreds of thousands of troops on the battlefields in Japan! At Sekighara- the battle in 1600 (also the biggest battle in ancient Japan, I believe) that established the Tokugawa shogunate- there were around 220,000 alone. Altogether in Japan there must have been at least 300,000.
There is a reference to army sizes, in the "The Way of the Daimyo" document in STW. It makes the comparison between the size of clan armies, being numbered in the tens of thousands each and the combined size of the armies on either side in the English Civil war, less than a century later.

As has already been pointed out, there are limits to processor power and graphics card memory - or rather, there were, at the time of its release - so the limit of 16 units per side, in battles was necessary.

Check your logfiles too. If you take more than one stack into battle and the opposition does too, every single man in every unit is accounted for in the logfile. Sometimes, a side will be routed to the extent that even though it had a stack of reinforcements due to appear, they don't show up and they're all recorded as NOT_DEPLOYED in the logfile. Two or three thousand on each side makes for a huge logfile as things stand. Perhaps it's better not to model 20,000 each!

Incidentally, I've just finished an STW campaign, Hojo, normal difficulty, unit size 60. By the time it was all over, my army maintainence cost was on or under the 10,000 mark. I did have a number of ashigaru garrisons, away from the frontline (half-cost) but total numbers couldn't have been much more than 11-12,000.

The Final battle was about 1.8 stacks of mine versus 3-and-a-bit stacks of Imagawa but, as described above, most of their reinforcements never showed up, so they 'vapourised' while 12 units went into their newly completed fortress and the game granted me Total Victory without even waiting for the siege losses and/or assault to occur. Very odd. I'd expected at least two or three failed 'attrition' type battles to grind them down.
Garrisons aside, I think I only had enough for 4 or 5 full stacks on the frontline, at the end. I see what you mean about regarding 1 man representing 10 but it just goes to show that it's all relative anyway. You can still win the campaign with much smaller forces.

Its interesting to note that the farmland output settings they put into the game (and the other income sources), even when improved by 100% are scaled in such a way as to restrict the overall size of armies you are able to raise. I think 20,000+ would be a stretch and, besides, you will have beaten all the AI clans long before you reached the stage of needing that many.