Help with Modding Phalanxes

[Hellenikon]

Reducing the width between phalangites in the ranks, and making the formation tighter through the unit density value, helps a lot to make the sarissa wall capable of keeping opponents at distance.

Here are the values i used if you want to test it

soldier                 Phalangitai, 96, 0, 1.7, 0.2
officer                 officer_hellenic_guard
officer                 officer_hellenic_standardbearer
attributes              sea_faring, hide_forest, frighten_mounted, can_withdraw, pike, rehire_makedones
move_speed_mod          0.7
formation               0.5, 0.9, 1.8, 1.8, 10, square, phalanx

[QuintusSertorius]

0.25 is the standard radius in the current dev build EDU. We haven't tinkered with formation though, you'll get clipping and it doesn't look very realistic if they're too close together.

[Hellenikon]

I agree, having them at 0.5 width creates a lot of clipping. I have found a value of 0.7 (down from the original 0.9 width) improves the sarissa wall and barely has any clipping between shields. However i am unsure if the shields being so close to each other, almost like a hoplite phalanx, is historically accurate.

That combined with using a 0.2 radious also helped a good deal, i tested using 0.25 for a bit and it was pretty much the same effect.

I noticed you mentioned that in the current dev build you increased the mass and tweaked the javelin infantry, would it be possible to share these tweaks so we can test them out? I'm particularly interested in seeing how different values help out the phalanx: squishing the soldier's width, increasing soldier mass, reducing unit radious. The first one for example is effective but you end up with unrealistic looking units.

I should also mention that in my tests, the AI is completely incapable of using phalangites to any effect, due to all the micromanagement they require. What i mean is that any player engaging AI phalanxes will likely get past the sarissa wall without any difficulty, due to how the ai mishandles them (ex. giving attack orders all around).

[QuintusSertorius]

I can't share the tweaks to the dev build; I don't have 2.3 installed, and there are a host of individual unit changes. One of the things I swore off was maintaining a parallel build, so there's no way to recreate a 2.3-equivalent version of the EDU. Every unit has a radius where it didn't before, and many have had their mass altered.