Unlimited Men On Battlefield??

**RespectSacrifice** · June 18, 2009, 04:43 AM

Hey guys...

I remember back with Medieval 2, that we would get that special popup before any campaign battle with over approximately 3,500 men or so, regardless of what rig we were on. Unless we went and modified a line of code, the game would not allow all units to join a battle as reinforcements, but were instead removed from the stack and placed aside (basically). The line of code was "Unlimited Men On Battlefield" and it was to be changed from a 0 to a 1.

Is there anything like this necessary with Empire? Or will the campaign not limit the size of one's battles, regardless of graphics settings, unit sizes, etc. I just want my battles to be complete, with all units participating, regardless of how many men that equals. I have the hardware, I don't want to be restricted. Not on land OR naval battles.

Thanks. Just wanted to know about this as it crossed my mind and I don't want to get into a campaign and find myself running into this issue at some point.

**Deathofjams** · June 18, 2009, 04:51 AM

You can, through tweaking, get as many men as you want on the battlefield by increasing unit scale modifiers. However, you will always be limited to controlling just twenty units, and if a second army is reinforcing you it will come on unit by unit as your original army routs (an unfortunate step back from Kingdoms).

**RespectSacrifice** · June 18, 2009, 04:55 AM

Originally Posted by Deathofjams

You can, through tweaking, get as many men as you want on the battlefield by increasing unit scale modifiers. However, you will always be limited to controlling just twenty units, and if a second army is reinforcing you it will come on unit by unit as your original army routs (an unfortunate step back from Kingdoms).

Thanks for the response.

That's actually fine with me - as long as they come on unit by unit and are not placed into a separate stack basically.

So that's how it is - if I have, say 2 stacks comprised of about 38 units total, 20 will start the battle and 18 will join the battle as each of the original 20 start to route/withdraw?

**Deathofjams** · June 18, 2009, 04:56 AM

Originally Posted by RespectSacrifice

So that's how it is - if I have, say 2 stacks comprised of about 38 units total, 20 will start the battle and 18 will join the battle as each of the original 20 start to route/withdraw?

Precisely. Just how it was in Medieval 2 if you chose not to let the AI control you army.

**RespectSacrifice** · June 18, 2009, 05:02 AM

Cool...thanks.

Yeah I just wanted to see how it worked before I got involved in a campaign.

Appreciated.

**Rotaugen2009** · June 18, 2009, 09:20 AM

Before this thread gets closed due to the original question being answered, I have one of my own related to it. For the people who have modded unit sizes, what is the largest number of men you have seen on the battlefield at the same time? I'm curious if anyone had the guys stretched horizon to horizon and 20 ranks deep, and how well that ended up running. Given the pathfinding gets worse as unit size goes up, I can imagine it was crazy.

**TheFirstONeill** · June 18, 2009, 11:24 AM

moved to mods work shop

**Mooncabbage** · June 18, 2009, 11:52 PM

I've had about of 17,000 men on screen, although it does tend to lag a little, even with my beastly rig and rather low settings, but then I hadn't tried to optomise it at all, and it was on a 4v4 map. Most of the problems I think are with pathing cycles and ram. There are lots of things you could do to make the game draw less resources though (less detailed effects, turn off tracers, use single rank volley fire instead of 3 rank fire, less detailed models, etc).

Also the 20 unit limit is NOT a hard limit anymore, people proved in the demo and since that it is possible for an army to control more than 20 units in scenario battles. I imagine (perhaps optomistically) that it will only be a matter of time before someone finds a way to extend these benefits to the campaign or multiplayer battles, perhaps through some nifty little script and ui tweek

**roy34543** · June 19, 2009, 12:05 AM

Before this thread gets closed due to the original question being answered, I have one of my own related to it. For the people who have modded unit sizes, what is the largest number of men you have seen on the battlefield at the same time? I'm curious if anyone had the guys stretched horizon to horizon and 20 ranks deep, and how well that ended up running. Given the pathfinding gets worse as unit size goes up, I can imagine it was crazy.

from what i understand theres no hardcoded limit, you can set men to be as big a group as you want. Though im guessing lag is eventually overwhelming.

**Mooncabbage** · June 20, 2009, 01:06 AM

Apparently there are some changes to the way hiding works in this patch, so I wonder if it might be possible to make units invisible over a certain range, in a sort of, Fog of War simulation, saving framerate in the mean time.

**priam11** · June 27, 2009, 11:22 AM

I would be curious to know how things would run with the latest patch. I for one, are very happy with the tweaks that were made. I have noticed much better performance across the board. I can run 10, 000 with no problems (250 man units).

I just find the battlefield map gets very small, very quickly.