Number of units in a battle?

[Centurion16]

Hello everyone,

I've searched the forums briefly but I wasn't able to find any information on how many units the player will have under his command in a battle.

Until now we used to have a 20-unit limit per stack. I really want this to change, I think that TW games have evolved and increased in scale, and yet this feature remains unchanged.

One could say that having too many units would be chaotic to manage. Well, in reality it wasn't exactly easy to manage them either. With 20 units a player can, for instance, assault only 1 side of a city (and having a chance of winning). He will also have to allocate almost all his forces in order to win.

Having more units would not only scale-up the battles but it would allow players to have reserves, as well as having more forces for flanking/creating a new front to make the defender divide his forces etc. As of now, each and every unit is too important to lose, as there are so few.


Does anyone have any info if this going to change? And what are your thoughts? Should the unit limit increase or not?

Thanks


PS: How do I add a poll?

[voitek]

Until now we used to have a 20-unit limit per stack.

40 since FOTS was released

[Centurion16]

40 since FOTS was released

Oh...excuse me for my ignorance, FOTS was the first TW game for me to not buy/play. Well I guess that's great! Hopefully they will keep this unit limit for Rome 2 as well.

Well, technically, we already have more than 20 units in battles. Through some modding in both E:TW and N:TW, it was possible to set any number of units as the max limit for armies, ...

I am aware of that. However I thought that increasing the unit limit on a game optimized for 20, would cause AI issues/performance issues. I could be very wrong though, I'm no expert on such matters.


Thanks for replying everyone!

[Aanker]

Well, technically, we already have more than 20 units in battles. Through some modding in both E:TW and N:TW, it was possible to set any number of units as the max limit for armies, and with Fall of the Samurai, the vanilla limit was increased to 40.

My overall impression of 40 unit battles, combined with the speed of FotS combat, was that it was more difficult to manage but still possible thanks to the admittedly rather sleek UI. Setting up attacks and maneuvering was no problem at all (select a bunch of units and move), however keeping track on which individual units were in need of replacement/reinforcement or just putting the vast amount of troops to effective use in general was trickier.

I can imagine, though, that Rome II would be easier to handle, if only for the fact that it will be about getting into melee and winning the decisive engagement.

[ironbrigade]

Im ok with 80 units, nah 100, ok fine 200.

[Xerrop]

There are 40 units in FOTS?
Have not touched the expansion so far, but are they fully separated? Isn't this too chaotic on the battlefield with these high number?

[voitek]

Since FOTS was released you can have 40 units in vanilla too. You just have to have 2 full stacks standing nearby.

[a tw player]

40v40 battles are juicy on FOTS.

[Wodeson]

So 4 units is enough for a cohort of velites, hastati, principes and triarii.
40 units is enough for 1 manipular legion of 10 cohorts.
160 is enough for a small field army of 2 Roman and 2 Allied legions.
Throw in 10 turmae of Roman cavalry and another 30 turmae of Allied cavalry and call it 200.

[The Nameless One]

Like voitek said, CA retrofitted Shogun 2 (maybe ROTS as well?) to allow 40 v. 40 battles. You just need two full stacks near each other.

I don't see any reason why this would be excluded from Rome II, especially since its scale is much more grand than Shogun's.

[Adufka]

I'm sure in Rome 2 they will leave 40 unit as in FOTS...

[Lord Baal]

Yes, they increased the number of units in battle to 40, but forgot/chosen not to to scale up the number of units per stack accordingly...

[Sharpe]

I think 25-30 units would be more feasible, but increase the unit size to 500ish for infantry and respective sizes for other units. That way a single unit could be an entire division rather than two or three.

[oppaiO_O]

i think they should add a 40 unit stack instead of having two 20 unit stacks standing side by side this will increase it to 80 controllable units in game instead of 40 but i could see some problems my pc would have runing all of this(all already is with shogun and fots) would be an awesome feature though the unit cards are going to have to be really tiny....

[Paedric]

For instance with ships, you don’t have more, you’ve got more ships per unit. With land and sea, we’re not going to necessarily go above 40 units that we’ve got for Fall of the Samurai, right, you might have a number of ships, a number of navy units and a number of land units. It’s more about the larger scale environments and the fact you can do more with each unit rather than having loads more units, so we want to do more with scale without creating that management burden.

So basically 40 units max per stack, like FOTS.

[Greve Af Göteborg]

40 unit stacks would be nice, if we can control our reinforcement it would get even better.

[Lord Baal]

It would be nice to select your vanguard and your reinforcements prior to battle.