A few thoughts and questions about 40 unit armies
Hi
A few weeks ago, it was "revealed" (mentioned briefly in an interview) that currently CA is planning to include the option of having 40 unit armies (the player would chose this before starting a campaign)
Obviously this is very nice - the CA devs have always pushed the "scale" thing very hard for Rome II, and it would indeed be strange to have a game focusing on scales and still not change the factor that determines scale the most. 40 unit battles are very different - they are quite a lot harder to manage effectively, they are more epic, and (a very important benefit) the player can experiment more with army composition. With a 20 unit army, there's a lot of "min-maxing" going on - you are always thinking "okay, this unit sounds cool...but can i really sacrifice a unit of heavy infantry/cavalry for it?" - with 40, the uniqueness of the special units make them much more attractive. Incendiary pigs? Sure!
So 40 unit armies would be a huge plus for Rome II and i don't think anyone on this forum would object to having the option to have them in the game.
However it raises a few questions:
1. Upkeep and recruitment cost
This is one problem - if you have 40 unit armies, you have to balance the game around it. With the new limited army system, we can assume that if there are 40 unit armies, the AI will always try to have 40 units in every army, to maximize effectiveness. But if units still cost the same to recruit and maintain, you'll effectively have to pay twice as much every time you make a new army. What this could lead to is a huge advantage for wealthy factions early on in the game as they would always outnumber their enemies. This would persist into the mid-game, where you would have fewer armies because you can't afford them - imagine the following scenario : you are playing as Rome, and have 20 regions. Let's say that the army cap if you have 20 regions is 6 armies. But if you have 40 units per army, you can (due to your economy, unless you've managed to become rich) only have 3. This would cause you to have to think very hard where you place your armies.
-Or- CA could just slash recruitment and upkeep cost in half, effectively making the game feel roughly the same with the only difference of having much larger battles.
2. Navy size limit
Simple question - does the 40 unit limit apply to fleets aswell? Some TW players don't like naval battles (and are not as good at them) as land battles. While CA is putting a much greater emphasis on navies in Rome II, some players might want to have 40 unit armies but not 40 unit fleets - remember that naval units are now often made up of 2 ships, so you could potentially have 80 ships to manage.
3. Reinforcements
How do you handle reinforcements? 40 unit -battles- are already confirmed in Rome II, meaning that if you have a 20 unit army and you have another 20 unit army reinforcing it, you'll now command one 40 unit army (the reinforcing army will not be on the battlefield as soon as the battle starts, they take about 20 seconds to enter). You can assign the AI to control some of your units. But if you have a 40 unit army and 40 unit reinforcements, do you allow for 80 unit battles then? You are then looking at 160 unit battles if you're attacking a reinforced enemy army - that would take an insanely good computer to handle. Forget about playing 160 unit battles without atleast 3 gigabyte VRAM, for example - few people have that much since VRAM from multiple cards in SLI/CF does not stack. Or do you just lock out the reinforcing army/navy from the battle, effectively removing them as a mechanic? Im sure CA would not do something like that considering all the work put into combined battles.
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Thoughts? Ideas?
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Originally Posted by ScaryGuy
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would be a lil insane for me
