What is the Hard Coded Maximum Soldier Limit?

[Live2sculpt]

I feel embarrassed for not being able to locate this bit of info.

Please remind me; What is the maximum hard-coded limit for number of soldiers on the battlefield?

I'm not referring to Vanilla values. I'm talking about what the engine can do under excessive modding circumstances.

And the bonus question for those who might know; Do dead bodies still count in the same way as active figures towards that maximum number?

[Sirlion]

There is no such limit that I'm aware of. The game simply crashes if you use more than 50.000 men but its not hardcoded, you can do that. When I want to roleplay on campaign map I usually use realistic values for autoresolve such as 3.000 men in a "company" or even more. Just stay out of 3d real time fights.
By the way even if you can have say 30.000 men on the battlefield, and the game and your pc can handle that, the pathfinding system cannot. Therefore you will see anims with low framerate and very slow gameplay, units taking up to 10 secs to execute orders, struggling to find their place ecc.
this is also true if you have standard unit numbers but too many units on the battlefield.

[Steph]

It is also probably impacted by the number of different factions involved in the battle, especially with mods.
Don't forget that each faction has its own atlas, and so if you fight with an ally against an ennemy an ally it means 4 atlases in memory instead of two, even if the total number is the same.
And with mods like MoE, some factions use several atlases to provide more detailed and varied uniforms, and since they can allow recruitment of local units in each region, you can seriously overload the system.

So it's better to try to regroup your army by nationality: better to have an army with 20 bavarian allies, another with 20 Polish allies, and two others with 20 real French units, rather than 4 armies with 5 bavarian, 5 Polish and 10 French units.

[Live2sculpt]

Thanks guys. My objective is to tweak out large 3D battles using vanilla forces. But the multiple atlas issue is definitely food for thought, as my renewed interest in this topic stemmed from the discovery to unlock enemy AI reinforcements and Allied reinforcements to appear on a field at the start of a battle. Clearly that new trick would probably NOT combine well with 40 stack armies/ 400-500 man units, if the engine would still crash at over 50,000 men, and additional allies atlases would multiply problems more.

[Steph]

The atlas problem is not a very serious issue if you play vanilla units. With vanilla gameplay, a faction only recruit its own units (ie France will recruit French units in France, but also in Bavaria, Britain or Russia, and France cannot recruit any Bavarian). So it means that most of the time, an army is composed only if unit from the same faction, and so the same atlas (with the small exception of the few units that a protectorate can give you).
Even if allies are involved, you'd get what? 4 different factions? and so 4 atlases? And maybe some faction uses only half atlas, so it's only half the memory burden?

The real issue is if you are using mods which
- Allow recruiting local units from another faction. Each additional faction in an army means an additional atlas.
- Add more details units for the same faction, that could require several atlases.