Would you mind having poorer Graphics for larger battles?

My biggest problem with this game (and I can already tell from the screenshots that they aren't going to resolve the issue.) is that the battles are minuscule in comparison to the real thing. Major European battles in the time frame of ETW and NTW were involved armies with 10s if not 100s of thousands of men. Sure, there were small skirmishes involving hundreds, and the America's never really saw any truly massive battles until much later, but battles like Leipzig, Austerlitz, or Waterloo are simply not done justice by the total war games.

that is why they took the hardcode for unit sizes out of the game,so you can change them to your liking.I field battalion sized units(500 hundred men per unit)and regularly have battles of around 10 to 15 thousand men total.while still ot to the scale you are looking for it really makes a difference on the field in the game.

NTW will not be capable of doing any of the realism you are hoping for any way, this is a pointless discussion.

Here are the problems:

1. Battle area- just too small to do anything but a large skirmish justice.
2. Scalability- very few computers would be able to handle 1:1 battles, so some form of scaling is required. If you take the average paper strength of a battalion to be 1,000 men and NTW allows units of 200 men then you have a max scale of 1:5, so battles of 10,000 figures on screen equate to 50,000 men- hardly enough to do more than a large division per side battle.
3. The 20 'unit' limit- nowhere near enough for an army, but might just be ok for a division.
4. The system can't handle line formations beyond a certain size.

Now if the hardcode limits on unit size have been lifted then you can get the ratio of figures to men down more, but you're still hamstrung by battle area and the 20 units limit.

"We" don't need 100k troops on the screen. Anyway no general commands 100k men. we as the army commander "just need a proper interface to issue orders to other generals so they can command their groups etc.

100k army's are just not manageable by one person being it Napoleon or a Pc gamer, at list not in real time and definitely not with the detail portrayed in Total War. Pausing each 5 sec is just no fun, not to mention incompatible with multiplayer.

As commander you could only order the troops around you 10k at most? and have to issue orders by message's to the rest of the army.

So CA can keep the present tactical scale Battle, and had a new map -a 2d chart where the entire army's are plotted and orders can be issued to different corps outside the tactical battle - the strategical scoop of the game is multiply by 2...or x10

IF they ever make a competent AI, in the far future(5-10 years) i would like to see that you would be able to form seperate front of the battle, say give the left flank,right flank or center to the AI to control so you can control other parts, this way you can control large battles. Of course its very hard to make such an AI but it would be awesome in the future.

Maybe in ten years we may have a Total War game were it is possible to have hundreds of thousands of men on screen, unfortunately the technology doesn't exist at the moment. Maybe CA will be bankrupt by then though. Oh well.

Guys, you're talking about a game that is most definitely not a Total War game. That's just not how it works. As has been mentioned, recreating history is not the purpose of the series. There are different games for what you seem to be looking for.

Okay I'd prefer 10o ultra detailed men to 10,000 low detailed men just to have "accurately numbered" battles.
My machine is pretty powerful and it can handle about 7,000 men in ultra with no significant fps drop...

Always liked the Napoleon era, With the talk of a 10000 limit, It will be the same formula 20 unit max.
The problem is that and its not just CA, Computer Teq has moved beyond present day game house programmer skills. The old guard dont have them hence CA/paradox ect are looking for new people so your games can be coded to suit multi core /multi thread CPU'S. If that can be achieved, Then you will see the grand battles ect, just my opinion! magpie.

To the people who are saying that the generals in these battles never commanded ~100,000 men, that's not even close to being true. To the people saying they wouldn't sacrifice unit detail I think that's valid, but I think theres a balance to be had. My problem is that going back to shogun the ~2000 men or 40 units on the field limit hasn't changed very much at all unless you give total control of the other armies to the ai, which sucks and has always sucked.

I'd be perfectly willing to discard individually modeled mustaches in exchange for an extra couple thousand men under my command with each iteration of the game.

Moreover, that becomes even more true in games like Napoleon. The tactics of war in the late 18th early 19th century fundamentally changed such that soldiers in the army just became another man with a gun. My ability to see a single man in a line of battle that ought to stretch miles is irrelevant.

I'm not griping about the "unrealistic" nature of the game. Obviously these games are a-historical. But everything about them is supposed to be "historicalish" if i can coin a phrase. The scale of battle *was* the great historical change of this era. The inability to turn that into a game fundamentally breaks the series away from what its purpose was.

As it is, i'll probably just be auto-resolving.

There is nothing wrong with the battle sizes jees. Most RTS games based around this era don't get near to historical battle sizes, most that do lie by making 1 soldier represent many so the army is larger than it is on the screen but it is still large. I think the battle sizes on here are just fine. Most people's computers would die if they are any larger anyways. The fact you can have thousands of little soldiers running around on the map with the graphics used on Empire Total War I think is just great.

If ETW and NTW were actually 1:1 in scale and you could field 100,000 guys at a time, you people would just be on here griping about how your computer can't handle it.

tech limitations. plus 10,000 is more than enough to represent a section of the battle without making the game unmanageable.

as to how ca is going to implement that. lets just say i do not have high hopes.

Originally Posted by johncage

tech limitations. plus 10,000 is more than enough to represent a section of the battle without making the game unmanageable.

as to how ca is going to implement that. lets just say i do not have high hopes.

I prefer the 2-3 thousand you see on ETW over 10,000 still.

that is why histwar has relatively poor graphics, they traded graphics for being able to have truly grand battles on an epic scale.

Originally Posted by dmcheatw

that is why histwar has relatively poor graphics, they traded graphics for being able to have truly grand battles on an epic scale.

histwar can have 50000 units, not a bad trade off compared to TWs 8000 or so max.

What if a new way to render massive amounts of soldiers was invented...

Originally Posted by A1_Unit

What if a new way to render massive amounts of soldiers was invented...

yes, it's called lod detail. which is why etw has so many sprites zooming around the battlefield.

Originally Posted by CptBuck

My biggest problem with this game (and I can already tell from the screenshots that they aren't going to resolve the issue.) is that the battles are minuscule in comparison to the real thing. Major European battles in the time frame of ETW and NTW were involved armies with 10s if not 100s of thousands of men. Sure, there were small skirmishes involving hundreds, and the America's never really saw any truly massive battles until much later, but battles like Leipzig, Austerlitz, or Waterloo are simply not done justice by the total war games.

It's been established already, there are no computers currently commercially available which can handle hundreds of thousands of troops of fully-rendered without collapsing into a singularity.

Furthermore, just trying to command so many troops at would be a nightmare. You'd be zoomed out so much just to see your army that you wouldn't get to enjoy the visuals, or you'd be forever scrolling all over the place.

It's already hectic to manage a full stack and I often forget some troops are taking damage.