Is it really an epic battle?

[AFM984]

As I remember in MTW the Battles, in the single player campaign, were not epics in a full sense, the largest army you can have on the field is 960 men the remainder is brought as reenforcements, What is the use of having a engine that can support 10,000 units at a time if you can only muster 960men at a time, If I had an army of 4000 men & my enemy had 960 men we would start the battle with the same no. of men.
IS RTW THE SAME???? I don't have it so please help me .

[MonkeyMan]

As I remember in MTW the Battles, in the single player campaign, were not epics in a full sense, the largest army you can have on the field is 960 men the remainder is brought as reenforcements, What is the use of having a engine that can support 10,000 units at a time if you can only muster 960men at a time, If I had an army of 4000 men & my enemy had 960 men we would start the battle with the same no. of men.
IS RTW THE SAME???? I don't have it so please help me .

Hi AFM welcome. In MTW you could change the unit size to huge units, doubling the members of the standard units (was under performance options iirc). You could therefore have armies or stacks containing 16*120 (normal units) = 1920 men max. However in multiplayer battles or rare single player battles with allies you could have 4 such armies. 1920*4 = 7680. Although the stack limit was 1920, in the battles in MP and in SP where you sorted the reinforcements out properly, you could have all spear type units so the max size of a unit was actually 200. i.e. 200*16*4 = 12800 men potentially. Call it a bit of creative marketing, it was a true statement, event though your average single player game would have a max of about 4000 in battle at the same time.

RTW allows you to control 20 units at a time. With huge units on most are about 160 men. So in general untis under your control will reach about 160*20 = 3200 (I guess max unit size is 200 again but i've had the game less than a week). Your reinforcements rather than being called on to replace current units are now ai controlled, so i suppose you could see battles with approx 10000 men per side but with only 3-4000 under your control. I'm unaware of the actual stated maximum, but i guess it lies somewhre in the region of 20-30000 and that sounds reasonably epic to me. Hope that clears it up a bit for you, maybe someone has tested the limits of this and had 9 (or more??) full stacks involved in a battle.

Personally i've never had problems controlling 20 units myself, so i guess i'd like to see this number brought up, i don't really like the ai being in control of my precious men.

[AFM984]

Thank you.

[Orpheus]

If you put all of your 'General' characters into your primary army, they don't seem to take control of your reinforcements for you. Instead, the reinforcement units will all wait at the edge of the battlefield until one of your 20 'unit slots becomes free, either when you lose or withdraw a unit (much like the reinforcements that used to come in during M:TW battles.) This can be preferrable to losing a general (and his army!) due to the stupid AI kamikaze tactics!

[csebal]

While MTW had the stupid 960 men limitation, RTW doesnt seem to have it, meaning you can easily stack 16 huge (240) units of infantry into a single force, which means about: 3840 man

Considering that each army had 8 'sides', so you can position 8 such armies around a single one, each battle can have at most 9 armies, of 16 units each... with 240 men, thats 9*16*240 units on the field. 34560 total.

Then again, in the totalwar.ini file, there is a line called unit size, or something like this. It controls the size of the largest unit (peasants) in the game.
I've tried to set it to a non-standard value : 180, and it worked, so there is the possibility, that you could set this to more than 240 (i havent tried). In that case, you could have armies filling the battlefield... Given you get enough population to train them.