I see your fear, very similar to the Stack of Doom from civilization. Would be nice to have, like the logistics of GalCiv 2. Maybe there could also be a maintenance cost/strength reduction of units in huge stacks? Huge epic battles are nice, but there should be a use for smaller, more tactical armies.

I strongly agree with the thoughts expressed in this thread.   to each

Basically, one epic battle wins you the game or finishes you off ie. Stacks of Doom = a little bit boring.  I think a good solution would be you could only have a certain "customizable" number of "units" on the one square - ie. single unit is considered to be a standalone unit, *OR* "squad" or whatever size of group you have capacity for via Warfare Research.  So once you have a certain number of units on a square - no other of your units would be able to move onto that square and you can't split any of your multiple fighter units to take up more "groups".  And for ease of use and to prevent bugs, units from different human or AI players (major or minor) could not share the same square at any time (unless there are "for example" units from allied sides that are "inside" a town or city).

What do you think of this idea?  The number of units could be customizable (either in the game, or at least mods would be able to change the number).  The AI would follow the same "number of unit limit", and even better if the AI could be configured to automatically adjust its data-driven tactics so that it can successfully use the unit limit on one square to its advantage.

Best regards,
Steven. 

For the record, I hope there is NOT a limit on stack size.

Tactical Battles

^

^- this is why

Speaking of which, I wonder how easily real time (or continuous turn) battles can be modded in ....

I like these ideas very much. Why did I not think of GalCiv myself?

But I suppose this serves the purpose too, though Id love to see the number not totally fixed.

I agree with the OP. I'm finding the huge army problem something I don't really like at the moment. I'm tending to find I only build one huge army, with lots of trash units to protect my squishy casters, and then use the teleport spell if anything threatens my cities.

The first problem I see is that leveled up heroes represent a large investment, so I am never going to put them in a vulnerable position in a small army. I will always want them with a big army that always wins, so that not only do they never die, they also always get masses of XP every battle.

I guess there are a few solutions to this - make heroes harder to kill, or easier to resurrect (say with a res fountain where you can pay gold to bring them back) or give them bonuses for being away from the main stack (such as studies/guilds which can level up or give other benefits to just a single hero stationed there). If you can give the player incentives to want to have heroes in a separate stack, such as xp or some combat bonus, and take away the risk factors, I think they will be more willing to create more than one army just for the advantage to their heros.

The second problem is I think the teleport spell is way too powerful at this point. The main disadvantage with a large stack is that it should be slow and therefore only capable of defending or attacking in a small area. With teleport I can basically move my main army stack instantly for a very small amount of mana. I found I was even using this spell to fast travel caravans and pioneers when there was nothing to kill. So there is never any point in splitting armies to defend areas or seek quests, or even balancing fast vs strong units, because my sovereign bascially has infinite move speed within the kingdom. I also chose the "organised" talent for my sovereign, so that all those slow foots soldiers got movement speed 6. Why would I therefore not make any unit travel with my sovereign?

Great, so now we end up with 10 non-Epic battles in one game turn rather than one big one.  If it's a winning strategy to stack all of your units into one stack, then with a system of limited stack size, it will still be a winning strategy to cluster your 10 limited stacks together in a blob.  Anyone who has ever played the Total War games and cruised around their forums will know the term for this.  It's called the "blob." 

So congraturaltions, now we've made the game battles decidedly non-Epic and depending on game dynamics, very broken.  For instance, let's say two Kingdoms march out to fight one another.  They bring all of their soldiers (and because of stack limits, these soldiers are broken into 10 different stacks each).  The player who goes first will swarm their opposing sovereign's stack first, bypassing the sovereign's other soldier stacks.  End result?  Very wonky stack deployment with the human playing "gaming" the system to swarm the opponent's sovereign first.  Good grief...  

Honestly, I don't see the wisdom of hard coded stack limits other than fact that it will give the human player's computer some breathing room.  Otherwise, it's just a short sighted means of addressing the stack-of-doom issue and as a consequence, just compounds the problem.

There is a limit of 10 currently which you can increase with logistics.

Maybe it would be good if armies of a different sizes or composition exerted a zone of control.  So when moving adjacent or near to an enemy army of sufficient size (so small expendable stacks can't block a rolling juggernaught) -  where the ZOC is based on the power of the army and whether it has a Sovereign in it - all you units/unit groups on that square lose all movement points except except 0.1 (except when you would have exactly 0.0 after taking away the movement cost of moving near/next to the enemy) so all you can do is attack the stack next to you, or move to another square.  But you would not be able to conveniently be able to avoid all the enemy's armies and strike down the Sovereign.  Because even those this is a turn-based game, it is meant to be roughly equivalent to a real-life fantasy battle, and would you seriously leave your leader without defences when you saw enemy troops riding for him?  This would also place more importance on tactical positioning, and by not automatically cancelling most movement points for just single units or very small armies, you avoid the problem of people putting just a few troops everywhere to negate all the offensive potential of all other enemy armies.

So, what do you think of this idea?

Best regards,
Steven.