Reinforcements delayed?

[dedmoroz]

This happened to me yesterday:
My small julii army (general unit and 4 units of hastati) was attacked by huge Macedonian army of around 2500 men.
Luckily there was full brutii chunk right next to my army so in the pre-battle screen I saw them as reinforcements.
When the battle started, I was amazed to discover that there is no brutii army on the mini-map and right after that I got message about reinforcements delayed and that I have to fight all by myself.
As if it's not enough, I had no option to retreat my troops from the battlefield.
Needless to say my army was destroyed and I lost my 6 star general
Can somebody explain me what this all about???

[Sin Qua Non]

Distance from the fight seems to be the biggie, along with weather. Possibly a random element too. I've rerun battles in both fair and bad weather, and the worse the weather, the lower the chance of reinforcements arriving. This seems like a good area for further experimentation. Of course, that can be a good thing: you can use distance and bad weather to prevent a rivals reinforcements, or to keep your own overly bellicose AI controlled army from arriving.

[Oaty]

Noone has come here to die for you does that not say anything about your honor

Tell the senate on them. When the game delays reenforcements it is because of the total troop count. Once you hit about 5000 men(both sides) on huge unit sizes all reenforcements get delayed. You have 2 chances here once you engage the enemy in melee the reenforcements show up or you are just plain screwed and have to win it on your own.

[slackker]

can some1 confirm this?
so the max amt of units per battle in campaign mode on any unit size is 5000?

[Sin Qua Non]

so if you went to the preferences.txt and made

UNLIMITED_MEN_ON_BATTLEFIELD:TRUE

would this negate the 5000 man limit, so you could get reinforcements past 5000?

[Uesugi Kenshin]

You guys are wrong about the max battler size in campaign mode. My computer has serious issues when there are over 6000 troops fighting at once, but I was able to play a giant battle where I had four of my max size Seluecid armies fighting against a max size Thracian army that was trying to lift my siege. The armies totalled well over 5000 troops all told and none of my reinforcements were delayed. Needless to say the Thracians were slaughtered, though it did take a long time due to the lag. And yes this was in campaign mode. It was at the city located slightly to the east of Byzantium.

[Oaty]

There is no max for the battlefield minus max unit size for 20 units. Technically you could have 4800 warband infantry in 1 army and the opponent having 4800 pikemen in there army, totaling 9602 men on the battlefield. Not very many comps are going to play that but I do'nt think there is nothing stopping that. But the game is programmed that if there is an army of 2400 men in an army 2400 in the enemy army and 2400 for reenforcements the reenforcements wo'nt come do to graphics/processing getting maxed out. It may vary from machine to machine where the cap is set at due to the game doing an analysis of your system. But from my experience it seems what would be huge battles is nullified when the cap is near met. Whe you are on the bordeline of performance the comp will throw in reenforcemnts right when the melee starts.

If ya really wanna see a performance drop. as soon as you have a bit of lag group all your units and put them on A.I. control. and you'll see snails moving around on the screen

[dedmoroz]

Noone has come here to die for you does that not say anything about your honor

Tell the senate on them. When the game delays reenforcements it is because of the total troop count. Once you hit about 5000 men(both sides) on huge unit sizes all reenforcements get delayed. You have 2 chances here once you engage the enemy in melee the reenforcements show up or you are just plain screwed and have to win it on your own.

i am playing on huge unit sizes. now when i think about this there were suppose to be around 6000 men on the battlefield so i guess you have the point here.

but then, this is sooo lame - it means my gaming experience will depend upon my system specs???

plz tell me how to cancel this - i have good system which can handle more than 5000 men

[Uesugi Kenshin]

Originally poasted by: Oaty:
There is no max for the battlefield minus max unit size for 20 units. Technically you could have 4800 warband infantry in 1 army and the opponent having 4800 pikemen in there army, totaling 9602 men on the battlefield. Not very many comps are going to play that but I do'nt think there is nothing stopping that. But the game is programmed that if there is an army of 2400 men in an army 2400 in the enemy army and 2400 for reenforcements the reenforcements wo'nt come do to graphics/processing getting maxed out. It may vary from machine to machine where the cap is set at due to the game doing an analysis of your system. But from my experience it seems what would be huge battles is nullified when the cap is near met. Whe you are on the bordeline of performance the comp will throw in reenforcemnts right when the melee starts.

If ya really wanna see a performance drop. as soon as you have a bit of lag group all your units and put them on A.I. control. and you'll see snails moving around on the screen

Where did you hear this? This may be possible but I have a low end system and my system was at such a crawl that it would not pause in triple speed, triple speed was the only time that you could see any action actually get done. I believe that Rome will allow battles as high as you can gather, try building a custom battle with max number of factions and armies full of peasants! What may be likely is that as other people said weather, distance and terrain may play a part. All of this and battle size may have certain values or something and it may then be randomized to see if your allies show up. But, I think that the army size probably does not play a part at all., because my computer can handle 6000 men with bad lag and this battle had worse lag so it had to have many more troops than that. I have played a 4 army battle that had just over 6000 men and the lag was less noticeable than in my Seluecid siege.

[Oaty]

Found out what my reccomendation is in custom battles. If I go over 6400 men I get a message saying that I'm going out of specs.

I'm going on observations here as I've had plenty of times where 3 armies would go up to a unit and attack. Now with 3 armies trying to meet up at once and never a delay in reenforcements. The 3 armies merging is usually because of rebels and I had to pull out of 3 or 4 different cities to suppress them and was only 1-3 units each but never totaling more than 20 units.

Reenforcements are never delayed if the total troop count is low and there are less than 20 units on the field.

So the only time I get reenforcements delayed is when it seems there will be a high troop count. Now it could be just odd luck or the fact so it needs a CA confirmation or the same observations from other players.

[Uesugi Kenshin]

Just as a note the maximum possible battle size is 28,800!

LaggOrrific!

[Siris]

If you get eight factions or armies at once, at 5,000 men a piece, its 40,000 bro.

[Sin Qua Non]

Without modding, the hypothetical maximum number of soldiers on the field is 29046.
That is 6 armies composed of 20 first legionary cohorts each, each cohort having 242 men (huge settings), adding 1 man in each army as the general.

(242*20+1)(6) = 29046

Unless MP allows duplicate factions to fight in the same battle (not sure about this), there can really only be the 4 roman armies that can reach the 4841 mark. There are a few 241 man units (silver shields, bronze shields, some warbands), that are the next largest units. The same deal as above gives us an actual maximum of 4821 per non roman army. So, with 4 maxed out Roman armies and 2 maxed out non-roman armies:

(242*20+1)(4)+(241*20+1)(2) = 29006 man actual maximum

29006 men with the framerate of a chess match, mind you.

[Uesugi Kenshin]

If you want to get echnical it would actually be 4 armies comprised of 1st legionairies and 4 of peasants!

[Sin Qua Non]

If you want to get echnical it would actually be 4 armies comprised of 1st legionairies and 4 of peasants!

Ah, so I thought too at first, until I saw that some factions have 241 man pike units before a commander is added. Some pike units get their own unit commander. I guess the 242 man roman unit includes a centurion and some other unit commander. Peasant units are 240 men before general. By using peasants, you end up with 20 fewer men per peasant army. And this isn't technical; it's anal.

I had an odd thing happen. I was attacked by a single stack, and I had 4 reinforcement stacks nearby. They were all the same distance from the fight, so I decided to see how long it would take each reinforcement to enter the battle. 1 came at the start with 3 delayed. Another came 5 minutes into it, then a third about 10 minutes later. The fourth never came! Total number of troops were under 2400. It seems like there may also be a random or unknown element included in the chances of arrival.

[Nestor]

from the manual:

"Reinforcement units won't necessarily arrive on the battlefield at the start of a battle. They can be delayed by intervening terrain, weather and sheer bad luck. You may also notice that cavalry and light forces arrive at a battle before heavier units"

I suppose the developers didn't just notice what's happening in the game as we do