Unit Sizes and speculation

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

I'm wondering what the unit sizes will be for ground combat (funny that we'll have to start specifying between ground and naval combat). The armies of the time period were larger than those of the medieval period.

Medieval 2 reduced unit sizes presumably for performance, while Rome had larger units than Medieval 1. This is somewhat historically justifiable, as armies in the middle ages tended to be smaller than those of the time period in Rome, I think.

Will we see many more soldiers per unit in Empire? Or at least more than Medieval 1/2?

It would be nice to have very large units that were also individual. IE, 7th Line Infantry Regiment, etc. However, it would only really be worth it for really large unit sizes, I would think.

[Incongruous]

Yes It wuld be interesting to see if/how they would implement the regiments. Are there going to be different regiments with different colours and facings? That would be rather top nosh.
The ships too, having ships named differently would be nice aswell.

As for size, well remember this period was one of limited warfare, of indecisive battles, drawn out campaigns and man, many sieges. Armies were not as big as they would become by the time of the Revolution or Great/Napoleonic war. I expect that little adventure will be left for the xpan.

[pevergreen]

I'm hoping that you will be able to give them custom names.

Probably 80 for normal is my idea. Sea? hmmm 40-60.

[Trax]

Armies were not as big as they would become by the time of the Revolution or Great/Napoleonic war.

There are some notable exceptions:
Malplaquet - ca 200 000 men on the field
Oudenarde - also ca 200 000

[Monsieur Alphonse]

As for size, well remember this period was one of limited warfare, of indecisive battles, drawn out campaigns and man, many sieges. Armies were not as big as they would become by the time of the Revolution or Great/Napoleonic war. I expect that little adventure will be left for the xpan.

Since the time of the Revolution is included there should be a system that allows bigger armies.

An other more interesting point is: will CA include something like the division / army corps system which was developed in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and was used by all the participants in the Napoleonic wars?

[Cornwallis]

If your referring to the American Revolution the army size was a bit of a joke compared to ones in Europe. And in the French Revolution the armies did not increase notably.

[General_Someone]

i would also like to see larger units but the graphics detail in empire may limit the size

[Charge]

Better to remove unit cards limit (from 20 to 100 aproximately, but make it really hard to gather so much troops).
Unit sizes make from small to very huge, depend on cpu.

[NagatsukaShumi]

What I would like to see is manpower, to restrict the amount of troops you can hire on more than simply a finances based system, I always wanted MTWII's populations to actually represent the amount you could hire in a more structured way to make it more easy to run out of men rather than having unlimited access, money permitting.

[Charge]

NagatsukaShumi

What I would like to see is manpower, to restrict the amount of troops you can hire on more than simply a finances based system, I always wanted MTWII's populations to actually represent the amount you could hire in a more structured way to make it more easy to run out of men rather than having unlimited access, money permitting.

That can be done in m2tw in edb by setting 2 0 2 0. This i'll make in my mod.

[Bijo]

Unit Sizes and speculation

I will most likely maintain that of the previous installments, but I estimate the possibility that it could be larger since hardware is of course becoming more and more powerful and affordable.

[Fisherking]

I would think that the detail required for much of the Naval aspects of the game would require smaller units but have the possibility of fielding more of them.

That said I suppose there are ways around that and unit sizes of about 100 might be appropriate for infantry.

It will be interesting to see how Naval combat handles troopships or if they just count them as riding aboard the warships. Wouldn’t it be fun to take out an enemy’s army with a few frigates while his powerful war ships are trying to get into position!?

[pevergreen]

Frigate Rush...kekekeke

[ninjahboy]

the more guns the better imo :D
building on m2tw's "none clone armies" i would love to seee different regiments and some distiction in different squads and stuff with the marching bands etc :P

[Darkarbiter]

the more guns the better imo :D
building on m2tw's "none clone armies" i would love to seee different regiments and some distiction in different squads and stuff with the marching bands etc :P

I'm pretty sure when you actually look at this supposedly none clone armies most of the units only actually have 2 models/skins which is usually a slight change of colour somewhere, a different weopen or a funky hat.

Obviously they can build upon this e.g. what they said they did in LOTR intro
Every man chooses from
3 hats
3 main body models
4 Weopens (whether they are different or just different looking axes is up to the unit)
This would remove the clone army aspect even further.

[pevergreen]

Size of those files is small, code is easy. Why not have hundreds?

Why not modify your own army like Mark of Chaos.

[Rodion Romanovich]

Each model and texture takes GPU memory, if you get GPU memory overflow you start getting extreme performance degradation. I don't mind clone armies or units with 2 different textures/models for the men if that's what makes me able to play the game without a new, very expensive PC.

Besides I mostly play zoomed out anyway...

[pevergreen]

Ah there you go. My tech knowledge is shown

I like being zoomed in. Massive kill streaks and such.

[Rodion Romanovich]

Ok!

About the topic: I'd like CA to use the same strategy map numbers of men for all unit sizes, but only different numbers on the battlemap for performance reasons! Population decrease by recruitment for example shouldn't depend on unit size, which is purely a graphics setting! So for instance let us recruit 50,000 men for a field army, and let 50,000 men be removed from the city populations when we do this, even if on the battlemap we'll only have say 6,000-10,000! Then, population decrease by recruitment will actually have a huge impact! Also, please make a complex recruitment system including temporarily hired levies (and later also traditional conscripts) which are only available on defense or for shorter periods of time, to make offensive blitzkrieg more difficult and the last stands so much greater!

[Darkarbiter]

Each model and texture takes GPU memory, if you get GPU memory overflow you start getting extreme performance degradation. I don't mind clone armies or units with 2 different textures/models for the men if that's what makes me able to play the game without a new, very expensive PC.

Besides I mostly play zoomed out anyway...

Yes I am aware of that. I thought I read somewhere that directx10 has some improvements on "Identical objects" (the example they gave is grass) so assumeably ETW would be using quite a lot less graphical memory then the previous two games. Regardless stuff will be faster and bigger and better by then anyway (I'm sure you could turn it off easily anyway).

[Fisherking]

Wow, that almost touches on the problem of attrition from disease and desertion too.

We play these games and wonder why it didn't happen that way. Well it was because armies tended to melt away from those problems. You send 20,000 men some place and can only use 4000 to 6000 by the time they are put into the field. Long sea voyages and strange new climates took a huge toll on manpower.

Something I read once about the French forces sent during the American Revolution I also found interesting was they were said to have been 70% Scots and Irish who had joined up to fight the English...just a side note.

My guess is that unit size should be around 100 for normal infantry and 30 to 50 for Marine units and ships landing parties. Yes ships should be able to land large portions of their crews for infantry work, and be stronger at melee and weaker at musketry than typical infantry.

[ratbarf]

Man, if I could competently control 30 000 men with Rome Graphics I would be happy. That said you would need killer UI and the ability to let the AI handle some of the more minor details. (Like detecting when a cavalry charge is happening and forming into a square from a line. If we had to micromanage as much as we do in M2 and Rome than keep the total armies small. It would ruin the gameplay by making you constantly change the formations of your troops every other second to stop them from being wiped out.) One more thing, if they did put in plague and desertion to as large an extent as it really happened it would totaly screw up gameplay. You spend a million dollars on an army of crack infantry, cavalry, and artillery and then three quarters either run away, get sick and can't be used when you need them, or they die outright and its a total waste of money....

[scsscsfanfan]

I'd really prefer the unit size bigger, at least same as RTW.
CA, please don't hard code the unit size so small, let us chose ourselves, people has performance issue can have the option to make it smaller, people wants an epic, can make it bigger, just give us more options...

[ninjahboy]

imagine 20,000men on each side blasting away at eachother - thatll blow the socks off the piddly 3000 on each side :P (at a time that is)

[ratbarf]

You will want to be able to control them decently though, if the units are too large it lowers your ability to fine tune tactics but if they are too small they make micromanaging an bitch.

[Bijo]

How large were average battles in that time anyway? They could go by that and tweak as necessary.

The point about large and small units is valid, though: movement capability would be severely influenced. If battles on the tactical map would be very large it would appear more "strategical than tactical".

[ratbarf]

Well, the battle of the plains of abraham was I beleive about 3000 british vs 5000 french and about 750 native/militia skirmishers.

The battle of Waterloo was what 75 000 british and allies vs how many french? Anyways for you average battle I beleive the causualties would be larger than you average 1v1 with normal units on M2. So if that helps. Your welcome. If it doesn't oh well.

[ReiseReise]

Unit size is secondary to number of units. In the current system the role of the player is more of every officer simultaneously rather than the general. Increasing the number of units increases the number of officers the player must think as and be aware of. Beyond a certain point it becomes difficult to do and the player must play more as the role of the general, losing a large amount of the control over individual units that makes the game as fun as it is. Too many units and it basically becomes watching a movie with very few decisions to make.
The size of the units on the other hand does not have this effect besides making units slightly more difficult to maneuver. There is still the same number of officers the player must be. So unit size becomes mostly a graphics performance issue rather than profoundly affecting the feel of the game. This is precisely why the size of units is selectable while number of units on the field is not.
For these reasons, in order to keep the feel of the game, I imagine the size of an army will remain the same but maybe could be increased to around 30. As for size of units they will also have to remain the same 50-100 since it is limited by graphics and any increase in capabilities will be used on eye candy. Niche market games can afford to sacrifice graphics for realism but this is a mass market title, and they cannot afford to make a game with 4 year old graphics in order to have numerical realism.
I say 'numerical' realism because the fact is battles in the TW series will never be realistic, simply because they would not be fun. Losses of 20% during any time period was either a crushing defeat or a Phyrric victory, and lets face it, we want to fight to the last man, and let no enemy escape alive.

[scsscsfanfan]

I really hoped M2 unit size was around 200-300 max man per unit, sadly it's only half of that, I can't even mod it to make the size bigger.
My point is, simplly make it an option for us in the future, anyone can choose what they like, I'm not looking for a maga size of 1000 man per unit, but at least the size around RTW would be enough.

[ninjahboy]

i think 10,000 per side would be a good number