Huge Unit Size

[Bearhugger]

Right now it's not possible to play with huge unit size. Cities get depopulated fast.
Isn't there a way to include an option in the new version where training units doesn't draw population or less population?

I really want to play with huge unit size...

[Lobo Solitario]

As far as I'm aware, there's no way to change the amount of population used per unit - it's hard-coded. If you want to play exclusively on Huge, you could try adding population growth bonuses to the government buildings. It would take some fiddling, but I'm sure you could reach a decent balance eventually.

[Scutarii]

I don't find the depopulation on huge to be that bad at all... Unless you're in the backwater towns in N. Africa, or some of TSE's starting towns in the far east. Just restrict your recruiting to the larger cities... You could raise the growth bonuses from the government buildings, or raise base growth levels, I suppose.

[Sextus Molestus]

I agree with Scutarii - it's not that bad, you just have to get used to it from vanilla. Now you actually have to plan where you're going to recruit your armies from, and, if a city you're taking is depopulated, how you will get a garrison there, but all in all, it's not so bad. And it can be a vital asset at times.

For instance, in my Roman campaign, I was at war with the Germans for a very long time. I wanted to fulfill the victory conditions, no more, no less, and therefore had no aspirations to take any of their northern settlements. However, they refused ceasefires, and kept sending army after army down at me. What did I do? I grabbed some makeshift mercenary armies, waltzed into their poorly defended homelands, sacked city after city, exterminating everyone and destroying all buildings possible, and left to go to a new city. When they took the cities back from me (I let them), they weren't able to recruit many troops at all, and repopulation took a while. They are now my protectorate.

[HanatielHawk]

What you can also do is create peasants in a very populated city, send those peasants on a tour to a city which has very low population during slow-grow or war, and disband them when they're in the village. The 240 peasants will now be added to your population with 240.
Let populated cities make like 2 army's of peasants and ehhh... 240x20=4800 per full flag army so 2 of them is 9600 peasants. And send them back to your slow growing cities.

[Spartan198]

What you can also do is create peasants in a very populated city, send those peasants on a tour to a city which has very low population during slow-grow or war, and disband them when they're in the village. The 240 peasants will now be added to your population with 240.
Let populated cities make like 2 army's of peasants and ehhh... 240x20=4800 per full flag army so 2 of them is 9600 peasants. And send them back to your slow growing cities.

Only problem with that is that peasants aren't a recruitable unit in XGM.

[Subrosa Florens]

There is usually a plus-sized unit at first tier for every faction though, like Doryphori. What I often do is hire mercenaries and then disband them right away to get a settlement's population up. It is expensive, but it works.

You can also practice selective enslavement. Before you assault a city, move your governors out of all of your large cities, leaving them only in the ones you want to grow. Then attack and enslave. Half the slaves go to your capital, then other half go to your cities with governors. If you leave only one city with a general within, this can catapult it several tiers (but can make keeping order a nightmare in the turns afterward).

If you really want to be sneaky, move your capital to your smallest city, then enslave. Then move it back to where it was before.

[Scutarii]

He doesn't specify, so I assumed he was talking about his own towns... But if he's talking about the AI, then the only solution is to make a script for the AI that adds population whenever the AI recruits a unit (EB has this in their background script).

[LucretiusTC]

I prefer those default settings for XGM (large unit size 80), because they also give nice round numbers that are easy to remember: 50 (cavalry), 80 (archers & slingers), 100 (heavy and light infantry) and 120 (town watches & phalanx units). After the battle is easy to combine e.g. infantry units and send some of them for retraining. I think large unit size is also good for pathfinding on the battlefield and then the AI won´t make those towns and villages too empty.

In some cases I have practiced quite active immigration policy. For instance if I have needed extra population for Corsica in my Roman campaign, I have recruited Vigiles from Rome, Arretium, Ariminum and Genoa and sent them to Aleria (4 x 120 = 480 townwatches) and disbanded there. I have used that tactics especially if I have needed to reach the certain population limit (e.g. 2000) before I could build anything new and useful there.

Luc.

[Bearhugger]

hmm. yes.
Couldn't it also be possible to set a unit size to 1
but in truth have it size 240.
So unit is size 240 but takes only 1 population to build...

[Spartan198]

I don't think much (if anything at all) can be done in regards to how much of the population recruiting a unit depletes.