Uniform infantry unit sizes?

[Dunadd]

I've never understood why some infantry units are larger than others. Why should a phalanx have 120 men while a Roman unit has 80? Why should German units have 120 men when equivalent Gallic ones have 80 in many mods?

Would EBII perhaps be able to make all infantry units the same size as each other so you don't end up with a massive discrepancy in numbers between e.g a Roman army and a Macedonian army which have the same number of units in them? Legionaries are not all 'elite' units, nor can they outfight a phalanx one on one in any RTW mod.

[medievaldude]

(Note:not to be a spammer but i love this mod) Anyways not ot be too Hard or historic lets take it into a generic point of view.
Different places of the world had different populations and ethnics which make up the regions and nations. It wouldn't hard to answer for the Greeks.
The Greeks had many to populate the many city states or successor States and kingdoms at the time.
Age to can be a limit, we know for a fact of how Greeks military views like Athenians their Hoplites were out of duty at 60.
Lacedaemonians were full time soldiers.

i know im not historic guy but i know some.........

[Ixor_Drakar]

Im sure it depended on how the particular people organized their military. All nations have their own way of going about things.

[Dunadd]

That's all very true, but if you look at the actual historical differences we know about, if anything Roman units should be larger than German or Macedonian units, because we now Republican Rome had the highest manpower among its contemporaries - and frequently won wars because of that, even after losing tens of thousands of men in repeated lost battles (Second Punic War) or in storms (First Punic War).

The Greeks and the Successor states most definitely did not have higher military manpower than the Romans. The Romans had by far more, at first due to annual drafts of troops plus emergency ones in war and their incorporation of defeated states in Italy as "allies" into this system - and later (after the Marian reforms) due to having vast professional full time armies.

So by your logic Roman units should be bigger than Macedonian ones - while in EB and many other mods (and the original RTW) the opposite is the case.

It also has to have game-balance and making phalanx units bigger than non-phalanx units destroys game balance, because phalanxes are already over-powered relative to other close combat infantry.

So whether you look at it from a historical or a game balance point of view, making non-Phalanx and Phalanx infantry units the same size (rather than making phalanxes larger) would be a step in the right direction.

[Ixor_Drakar]

Well if you want to be historically accurate then each roman unit in game which if I am not mistaken represents a Century then they would be made up of 80 men.

[martin-bs]

I don't think that the historical is the bottom line here. No army of that era had a limit to up to 22 units anyway. However I do agree with Dunadd. It felt weird in some cases when some unit types were bigger than the others, especially when fighting civs with a majority of huge unit sizes. If the EB team is going to set a global unit limit for the elite troops (as the rumors go), then I do not see the need of having them undersized. And one more thing about the Romans... weren't they a bit too powerful in EB I.

[Dunadd]

Ixor Drakkar wrote

Well if you want to be historically accurate then each roman unit in game which if I am not mistaken represents a Century then they would be made up of 80 men.

That would be a valid point IF Rome Total War or any of it's mods were portraying armies on one to one scale (which they're not - a typical Roman consular army had over 20,000 troops in it - a RTW or EB full stack has under 2,000 - less than a tenth of the number; a single Phalanx unit alone had 4,096 men in it - RTW successor armies have under 4,000 in an entire army including cavalry, skirmishers etc) and IF there were no limit on the number of units a player can have in a full stack or army (but of course there is a limit, which means allowing some faction's core units to have 120 men in them and some factions core units to have only 80 seriously unbalances the factions)

So, in actual RTW and mods for it, that's irrelevant - RTW doesnt have one to one scale or unlimited numbers of units in an army.

[Aleksander the Average]

the difference could also be used wisely to balance the game. factions like spqr who are at an advantage in the campaign get smaller unit sizes, while factions who don't always do so well like KH get bigger unit sizes.

just a suggestion. i don't know much.

[Anubis88]

the difference could also be used wisely to balance the game. factions like spqr who are at an advantage in the campaign get smaller unit sizes, while factions who don't always do so well like KH get bigger unit sizes.

just a suggestion. i don't know much.

That way you would stop the Romans whom created an empire, and enhanced the Greeks who were in their decline

If anything, the Romans should get the most numerous units due to their amazing manpower.

[fumle]

anyways if you are displeased with the numbers then just change it yourself, its very easy. i myself was displeased at the unitnumbers in SS RR/RC so i changed it so allmost all units have 250 men, wich is quite awesome.
if you want, i can allways make it for you, i takes a days work or so, but then it will be with Fumles crazy unbalance-.- if you not spefici exactly wich units you want X big and what you want Y big...

/Fumle

[Aleksander the Average]

the units that are packed closer together are usually greater in number. maybe it has to do with the formation.

or perhaps CA wanted to use the numbers of a roman century.

i don't get the 120 for larger units on medium though, as a syntagma was usually 260 or something.

edit: i find the balances work out well though

[Anubis88]

Obviously you are playing with Medium unit sizes... On huge the units like phalanxes have 240 men + officers.

[Cyclops]

I think the unit ausizes also reflect a units manoeuverability: 240 man units lumber, vs nippy 80 man units. Of course the downside is macedonian armies can easily outnumber romans. Maybe the elites need to be much tinier?

I think thats why phalanxes were made 240 men strong: to give the sense that they were relatively ruigid, whereas a line of germans was more like a congerie opf man-blobs with less coherence.

I often wondered why some/many barbarian units didn't use the vanmilla peasant mob formation to represent less cohesion but I guess so called Barbarian factions often had quite disciplined military traditions.

[mamik_yev_konak]

For those on the same frequency, it's hella fun browsing through the forums. The Romanticization of ancient peoples and armies always brings a good laugh. As for unit sizes, it frankly doesn't matter, at least with regards to historicity. It affects gameplay, but not much else. This is because the unit is a video game idea, not a military idea (I'm referring to the usage of unit as observed in these forums, not the military unit). Pieces of infantry or cavalry varied among peoples. One people might have had a smallest independent infantry piece that consisted of ten men, while another might have been 100 large, while yet a third might have been in the thousands. Such wide variations cannot be accounted for in the engine one-to-one, even proportionally.

Case:
Faction A fields 3 "units", and their people field the smallest piece, 1000 strong each. That's 3000 men.
Faction B fields 3000 men as well, but their smallest piece consists of 100 men. That's 30 units.

Clearly, although the number of men on each side is the same, this results in 3 pieces versus 30 pieces. Such variations in the number of pieces, or units, cannot be represented in the Total War engine (Rome, in this case) unless there is some degree of normalization, which has already been the case, in "vanilla" as well as in mods. That difference you see between a unit of 80 and a unit of 120 is nothing compared to the difference I mentioned in Case study. The engine uses a system of 20, double decimal. It can't represent the 30 men (only 2/3 of the whole army, with the rest as another "stack"), while the 3 unit army gets placed into one stack. So due to the engine's use of pieces rather than actual quantities of men, we see the need arise for normalization and a retraction from historical sizes of military pieces.

Note: The word piece sounds fine. Feel free to replace it with whatever term you desire: company, contingent, unit, etc.

[Destraex]

I think you will find that unit sizes in game to represent both how flexible a unit was aswell as how small\rare it may have been. For instance the romans fought in smaller flexible units, while a phalanx was a solid wall thats hard to turn. To represent this the phalanx is larger and harder to move as well as presenting a wide front. The Roman unit while needing to be large enough to be comparable to other heavy units in the game should be smaller to represent the maneovers that the roman army can pull off and the tactics they employed. As for the German units being larger and the gauls ones smaller, the Germans were more of a barbarian mass with less tech than the southern gauls. the gauls were richer but less warlike and were said to suffer a sort of complex when facing the germans just as the romans would have facing gauls. Thus while the gauls would be better equipped potentially those better equipped units would cost more and be smaller in comparison to the german masses.
So really their are reasons and balances and I do like that unit sizes vary. Otherwise it would be like having 500 german gothic knights facing 500 peasants. Hardly realistic numbers, even though the knights would still win.

[Dunadd]

I think you will find that unit sizes in game to represent both how flexible a unit was aswell as how small\rare it may have been. For instance the romans fought in smaller flexible units, while a phalanx was a solid wall thats hard to turn. To represent this the phalanx is larger and harder to move as well as presenting a wide front. The Roman unit while needing to be large enough to be comparable to other heavy units in the game should be smaller to represent the maneovers that the roman army can pull off and the tactics they employed.

There's no way principes or hastati were small or rare units - they were common and big.

A unit can be easier to manouvre just by modding the spacing between troops in the EDU file - a much better way to represent it than making some factions core infantry units have 50% more men than others - leading to vast imbalances in army size with full stacks.

As for the German units being larger and the gauls ones smaller, the Germans were more of a barbarian mass with less tech than the southern gauls. the gauls were richer but less warlike and were said to suffer a sort of complex when facing the germans just as the romans would have facing gauls. Thus while the gauls would be better equipped potentially those better equipped units would cost more and be smaller in comparison to the german masses.

The way to represent this is not with unit size but with morale and charge bonuses.

So really their are reasons and balances and I do like that unit sizes vary. Otherwise it would be like having 500 german gothic knights facing 500 peasants. Hardly realistic numbers, even though the knights would still win.

No, it's nothing like that - because the STRONGER unit - the Phalanx (equivalent to the knights in your example) currently has 50% more troops in it than a hoplite or principes or hastati unit, which is the weaker one (equivalent to the peasants in your example).

It's also nothing like your analogy because the gap in stats between legionaries or hoplites and phalangites isn't anything like as great as the one between peasants and knights. They are both core units, both of similar levels of training and morale and with similar equipment and armour levels.

[Optimus Marcus Ulpius Traianus]

I understood why the legion cohorts where smaller than say gaul or german units because in battles they usually had less men it also helps with game balance ie allows armies with elite troops to be beaten more easily by a large army. Still it always confused me that phalanx had more men as greeks didn't usually have a numerical advantage ie city states couldn't raise massive armies.

[Lucio Domicio Aureliano]

I believe the phalanks are well balanced [except for the impossible death spin, if i am correct this has been corrected (or will) in EB2; when flanked or attacked by the rear, phalanks will immediately drop their spears] after all we cant forget that it was indeed very harsh to break a phalanks with a frontal attack. In fact, when romans fought the phalanks they usually made some tactical retreats in order to be able to exploit the gaps of the advancing phalanks.
Perhaps one could lower the lethality of the phalanks units since they were most used to pin down the enemy (or so i believe) for the cavalary to flank it.

Thx