Unit Sizes and speculation

[ratbarf]

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

Even at Rome Level Graphics that would kill most computers. At the lowest levels I can put on 15 000 total in a segie map (with units at higehst and detail at lowest.) Mind you it was bitchin to play. (2000 romans vs 13 5030 Gauls besieging rome never gets old.) But at even medium detial level it chopped up the fps so bad it was like watching streamed dvds on dial-up. (At lowest though it ran quite smoothly)

[ninjahboy]

even so my demands are more reasonable than others :P

[Jeroen Hill]

When Napoleon restructered his army he would have 5 to 7 corps. Each corps could have a size between 10K to 50K personel. On average a french corps had 20K to 30K.

Corps were divided in divisions, who would be the effective fighting units. 4000 to 6000 personel, either infantry(plus artillery) or cavalry. A division usually had 2 to 3 brigades and each brigade had 2 regiments. A division also had 1 artillery brigade with 18 to 24 guns.

A french line regiment at max strength had 840 men, due to M.I.A., killed, wounded and deserters, average strength was 400 to 600 men.

Ok now corps' in an army functioned as mini armies. Basicly what I think CA is gonna do is let player armies, as we know them from MTW2 etc, present a corps. So 1 miniature on the map presents a corps. Multiple corps make an army. In real life corps' did engage on their own as well. Everybody knows the big army battles, Waterloo, Austerlitz etc. But there have been numerious fights with just corps vs corps.

Cause tbh, I doubt a full scale battle with several corps wont work, its just too big.

What I am curious about is how they're gonna implement the army structures below a corps. Divisions and brigades. A regiment is a unitcard I guess.

If you want to do some reading about Napoleon's army structures, unit types and formations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Grande_Arm%C3%A9e is an excellent reading.

Cheers,

[Incongruous]

Most of the game is played out before the changes to command structure.

[Censor]

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.

Excellent point. As the number of individual men within a unit increases, the maneuverability of that unit falls dramatically. Too many men in the unit and the best you can do is line them up and hope for the best. However, too many units and the battle becomes virtually impossible to manage for all but the best RTS players, and the game becomes a race of fingers rather than a contest of tactical skill.

I'm hoping they'll be brave and totally revolutionize gameplay, perhaps by giving each individual unit more autonomy so we can have larger, more complex battles without a huge increase in micromanagement.

[magpie]

Hi,I would like to see the player being in control of reinforcements entering the battlefield rather than the AI which from past experience of TW games has been less than usefull.Your favourite governor or general is usually killed when AI is in control.Regarding unit size make it optional if your comp can handle it i would like to see 10000+ armies available and hopefully a much larger battle map to manouver over.I think most of us would like to see the 20 unit size increased gives more options and for the modders a bit more freedom from hardcoded limits would be nice,after all we still have to buy the game before we improve it.regards magpie.

[ninjahboy]

im not asking for realistic 30K armies, 10K each side is about nice i think

[Galapagos]

I would like 15000-20000 per side.They should increase the units number and the unit size.I would like fighting big battles because i usually don't micromanage my troops(i don't see the point of it since the AI is rubbish).I would like seeing big armies clashing head on and forming a nice line of battle,then you could use some of your cavalry to obtain some tactical advantages ,maybe breaking the enemies line etc.

[geala]

It is impossible and nonessential to have as many men on the field as in the real wars. And it is not necessary to have 100 or more units; although so much units would be nice they would be very difficult to control.

Before the French revolution, for example in the Seven-Years-War, the armies counted from 20000 to 70000 on each side, 30000 to 40000 as a typical number. (Btw, at Waterloo Napoleon had 74000 soldiers, 33000 were with Grouchy, Wellington had 67700 Germans, British, Dutch and Belgians and from the Prussians 2 corps of about 30000 attacked while a third corps battled with Grouchy. But Waterloo was an exceptional battle.) Regiments, divisions or corps were not so important, they existed but mainly for organisation or as a bigger command structure in battles.

The actual fighting unit was the bataillon (sry for the non-English diction, it's batallion I think) or the escadron/squadron. Numbers of men were about 750 to 1000 per bataillon (a regiment had normally 2 or 3 bat.) and about 150 per escadron (about 5 formed a cavalry regiment). Of course there were differences around Europe. Tactical moves on the battlefield were managed by single bataillons/escadrons, much more often however by a multitude of these units together. It would be senseless to let an E:TW unit be a company (although such a unit with 120 to 160 men would have a correct number in the game), because companies only very seldomly had some meaning in the field. So one unit should be a bataillon. A regiment would be also possible, although the numbers would then really differ a lot from reality. As the real numbers could not be depicted in either case, perhaps 200 on large and 400 on huge settings for infantry and 40 and 80 for cavalry would be convenient.

18th c. warfare is all about moral and formation, so we need a certain number of controllable units. Perhaps 30 or 40 with much better formation orders than that now available in TW games would be nice in battle.

[Galapagos]

Well i would like to see the option "Very,Very,Very.......,Very Huge" with 1000 men per unit.But i guess this is only a dream.

[Dhampir]

It would be perfectly acceptable, historically speaking, for individual units to be roughly equivalent to a company (depending on when and where somewhere around 100-150ish)- just as they are on the "huge" unit settings for RTW and M2TW, iirc.

I would not expect massive battles with tens of thousands of soldiers per side- you'd need to go a decade in to the future to find a computer that would get decent frame rates. But a few thousand per side would be appropriate.

geala is correct that the fighting unit was the battalion, but battalion tactics were based around the company and brigade/regiment tactics around the battalion and so on (some countries used a regimental level of command, some didn't) and so on up. But it all boils down to what the company does dictating in process what the rest do.

As for regimental regalia- you can handle that like CA did for Spartan Hoplites- have a hidden resource for a city and that city recruits units that wear a certain regiment's uniform. Just as most regiments were localized. And since many regiments had as many battalions as they had troops, there is no problem with having fifty companies in your armies wearing the uniform of, say the 4th Foot, because there very well could have been at any given time.

On the battlemap, it wouldn't matter what uniforms your troops were wearing since tactics were based on the company level and an ad-hoc battalion formed from ten companies from ten different regiments would perform drill exactly the same as ten companies from the same battalion of the same regiment. And since each company in real life would have different levels of experience and whatnot, it would work out fine. If you put an inexperienced company on your flank and they rout, you're making a mistake a real officer would probably only make once.

[geala]

Dhampir, could you give some examples when individual companies played some role on the battlefield? Of course batallions consisted of companies, but that had no big tactical meaning. The batallion normally did not advance in company order.

Some situations when companies would perhaps be fine were carrees. Batallion carrees were strongly recommended (at least in the later Prussian army) and you could build it with one of the 4 companies on either side. And in Prussia the grenadier companies formed special ad-hoc batallions in case of war, which would be only possible with company-level TW units.

But if we have a TW unit as a company, we have perhaps 20 or 30 or 40 companies on the battlefield. That would equal 8 to 10 batallions in the case of 40 infantry companies, not so impressive. Even if you think of small scale battles in Europe, the feeling would be a bit strange. At Chotusitz 1742 for example, where the Prussians had only 23500 soldiers, there were 35 batallions and 70 escadrons. If a unit were a company we should really have 100 TW units in the UI and that would not be enough.

The biggest problem I see with the tradition. Many soldiers think of themself as part of batallions, perhaps regiments, but not companies. It would have no great meaning if I could raise and name a certain company. It would have a meaning if I had f.e. III./IR 15, the batallion which stormed the cemetery at Leuthen.

I have to concede that warfare in the will-be colonies often had another scale and companies would be sufficient. But for battles in Europe it would be a problem.

[Rodion Romanovich]

I think the strategy map should have real numbers for batallions etc, and that the battlemap unit sizes is a scaled version of that. So if you can max show units of size 100 for a unit intended to represent a batallion of 1000 men, 1 lost man on the battlemap = 100 lost on the strategy map, with some randomness being applied so losses aren't always exact, even hundreds.

[Rhyfelwyr]

I want battles of around 50,000 men each side with MTW graphics!

[ratbarf]

An iteresting thing would be if you could have a kind of subdivision in the Unit Interface. Similar to how the group function worked in RTW and M2TW.

That way on the top of the list would be the Regiment. Say two or three. And you could give extremely generalised commands at this level, such as "take that hill" or "Secure our flank."

Then you would have Battalion level which would give more specific commands, such as taking a battalion to hold an area or attack at this point or this other battalion.

Then finally once the Battalion group button had been pressed the companies of the battlion woudl show up on the unit interface. This would allow for extreme micro managing for say charges and such.

This would give you three regiments with each regiment having three battalions and each battalion having 6-8 companies. Giving us a good way to control such large numbers using allies that (hopefully) actually work decently. Allowing us to effectively control 9000 men or so.

[Dhampir]

Dhampir, could you give some examples when individual companies played some role on the battlefield?

The entire 7 Years War in North America is the most obvious answer.

Of course batallions consisted of companies, but that had no big tactical meaning. The batallion normally did not advance in company order.

The drill which the battalion uses is based on the company level. When you move from a column- any kind of column- to a line- any kind of line- you don't move as a battalion but rather as individual companies.

I am not saying that Frederick had fifty companies marching around alone- merely that the entire tactical basis of warfare for the period was based around the company.

edit-

I have to concede that warfare in the will-be colonies often had another scale and companies would be sufficient. But for battles in Europe it would be a problem.

Missed this...

Indeed. But you reduce the tactics to the smallest denominator. Everywhere you go, drill is based around the company. I have a fairly extensive collection of manuals from Prussia, Russia (I don't read Russian but I had a professor scribble rough translations in the margins), France, Britain and the US. And while sometimes their deployments look different- they are all very much grounded on the company level.

-----

From a practical view, there is no way you're going to have more than a few thousand troops on each side on the map, so battalion-level recruitment is not in the cards.

[Charge]

Big battles MUST be in Rome, havent seen reason for this in Empire.

[geala]

The company was surely the nucleus of the armies. It was the smallest unit with a permanent administration "staff". The captain (Hauptmann) as the leader was the highest officer below the staff officers, known to his men and had direct contact with the non-commisioned officers who did the most for the deployment of the soldiers. So it is no wonder that many tactical advises dealt with the company. But on the battlefield the company had no meaning as an autonomous fighting body (exaggerated but true for most battles). Would you be pleased to give a company the command to attack another company? Other than in small scale warfare (colonial wars) that would create a certain disappointment within me.
But let's wait and see, CA will solve the problem.

[B-DogKY]

(Btw, at Waterloo Napoleon had 74000 soldiers, 33000 were with Grouchy, Wellington had 67700 Germans, British, Dutch and Belgians and from the Prussians 2 corps of about 30000 attacked while a third corps battled with Grouchy. But Waterloo was an exceptional battle.)

How about the Battle of Leipzig 16-19 October 1813? This battle took 3 days (obviously) and involved approximately half a million troops. Waterloo not quite so exceptional, yeah?

[geala]

Leipzig was not a battle, but some battles. Of course there were some battles later and earlier (look at some posts in this thread) with more troops involved. Waterloo was exceptional because of the mass of troops in a small area (most troops per square metre ever in history due to some books about the battle; I have not prooved this) and the ratio of casualties. And it was decisive like only few other battles, wasn't it.

[B-DogKY]

Leipzig was not a battle, but some battles.

That's a bit silly. I suppose the battle of Gettysburg (american civil war) was really 3 battles of Gettysburg, just all fought in the same place? Like Leipzig, Gettysburg was kinda fought in parts, with divisions arriving piecemeal, and very little action until late the second day...