huge unit sizes...

[hisn00bness]

Well I wanted to start a new campaign as the english; and considering I have a rather decent rig; I'm tempted to flick on huge unit sizes. I've played large up till now.

Now before I get hooked to this campaign; some questions immediately surface in my head; such as :

-does using huge sizes bring added value to the battlescenes besides the eye candy?

-does'nt it overpower cavalry charges even more (80 mailed knights getting a charge multiplier somehow seems a bit much) ?


What are your experiences/ opinions about Huge unit sizes?

[sapi]

I play with it and don't experience any major problems.

I've never done a direct comparison between scales, so I'm not sure about the cavalry issue.

One thing it does do, though, is make siege battles much easier for the defender, as it lets you cover an entire wall easily and multiplies the effect of the 'fight to the death' property in town squares.

[FactionHeir]

Only ever played on small with M2TW, but in RTW, larger unit sizes meant that cavalry was actually less effective as they'd kill less on the initial charge due to the spear units having more men and a deeper formation. Also artillery becomes less useful as you still only have 2 artillery pieces per unit (although you have more targets to aim at), especially for the more accurate artillery units.

I would also imagine it would be significantly more difficult to get your units to break from melee and reform. Its quite doable on small and normal, but with huge you will likely get a lot of stragglers.

[Patricius]

Having huge unit sizes in RTW meant having a lot of cities with very depleted populations. I liked having manpower as a strategic aspects, but the ai factions did sometimes overdo it, raising large rather weak forces, and leaving even large cities with only the minimum populations (c. 400?). I found also that units seemed to take longer to rout. Perhaps the only real distortion is that a force of high status general bodyguards as a stack could be disproportionately powerful.

[hisn00bness]

Well believe it or not; after playing around a bit and using some mailed knights and the hobilar light cav england gets in the opening stages.... my experience is that the enemy seems easier to route with a charge.

It might be that I just finished a campaign with the turks; where you don't get to rout the enemy army so often since the only things you'll REALLY be fighting are super beefed mongol and timurid cohorts; but if it's not, then I have a hypothesis :


Numbers go up; the ranks get deeper so proportionally to the entire unit the charge makes less casualties upon impact; but you still kikll numericallly more men with the charge than you would have done with large unit sizes.

The moral of a unit; which according to my two cents (and thus worthless) hypothesis) isn't upped porportionally to the unit size; registers a rather huge instant decease in the unit; and the unit subesuqently breaks where on mlarge it would've fought on.


Am I just being silly ? Does anyone know what formula the engine uses for morale calculations (i'm a zero at modding) ?

[Shahed]

In M2:TW huge unit sizes, cavalry kills less on impact. So I would say huge unit sizes disadvantage cavalry, while they advantage infantry.

[Bob the Insane]

Well with the population not being eaten into my the unit production I guess is should not make much difference on a strategic scale.

On the battlefield I prefer Normal because of archers... On RTW I took huge because it seemed appropriate for the ancient armies but in this game as in MTW I find archers become very unweldly on anything larger than Normal...

I also found int RTW (but put up with it) that siege assaults really dragged out because it took so much longer to get the huge units up inside the towers and up the ladders...

I also like the effect that individual knights taken on greater importance at smaller scales...

I will have to try a campaign with huge and see how it feels...