Quote Originally Posted by professorspatula
I play campaigns on large, although I think I started one not too long ago on medium. I like large battles I guess. However, one disadvantage of using bigger unit sizes aside from 2 turns to recruit on huge, is you can't get a good mix of units for garrison defence. Each unit takes up so much space, that often you can't fit anything more than some spearmen and peasants or whatever. And they also use up all the food, meaning your keeps won't last long in a siege. It's not a big deal I suppose, but its a minor annoyance.

In another thread, I remember asking if fort/keep/castle capacity remains unchanged from what it is in default size (240, 420 men, etc) but don't remember getting any response, so I'll ask that again here.

One potential solution to garrisoning is to make full use of broken units leftover after battles.

40 man units are no longer effective on the battlefield when up against units of 120 but you could pack six different troop types into the smallest size fort and get an effective, balanced defence out of them.

You could also deliberately 'under-stock' the garrison just by using fewer of them. Enough men to keep province tazes maxxed out but few enough to get a longer siege duration.

The only drawback is inadvertently dropping a cadre into a castle, forgetting you already have one of that type in there. Anything less than half size for both of them and they'll merge even if you didn't want them to.

I often have good governors-in-waiting (4-Acumen types) in broken unit remnants and have to take pains not to lose their stats by doing the merge the wrong way around (either the results are just plain inconsistent or it's because I constantly forget whether its the one you drop or the one which is dropped onto which determines the stats for the merged unit).

There is a trick whereby you can 'fabricate' a unit of reduced size by using one to 'top-up' a number of others which all suffered light battle casualties. For example, after a battle you have units with 196, 193, 187, 165, and one with 115. They're all bigger than half size and won't auto-merge. By dropping icons on one another within the stack menu-bar, you can shuffle troops between units. In this case, you'd end up with 200, 200, 200, 200 and a leftover with 56 men, ideal for making a garrison strong enough to hold a gateway for 20 minutes but not so large as to eat all the food in one year.

This kind of shuffling also means you can keep frontline units up to full fighting strength and only have to sent one unit on a time-consuming round trip deeper into friendly territory for the single-year retraining trick.