Unit Size by Faction

from Elemental Forums

I think it'd be neat if Unit Sizes varied by Faction.  Certainly some factions could be similar or, more likely, identical.  But I think the concept would be nice.

Additionally, it'd be interesting if Unit Sizes had a range of values, rather than a single value.  This would allow two things:

  1. Collections of units merged together could receive non-production-related bonuses.  The XML file already has the structures in place to allow this, but having a range of sizes would allow this to work logically.
  2. It could conceivably support the idea of variable recruiting.  Thus, if I recruit a "Warband of Fearless Reavers", I might get 50, or I might get 150 of my Fearless Reavers.  I don't know until they show up.

Just my 2c, of course.

13,871 views 12 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

Perhaps influenced by such things as size of the community, food on hand, health of the economy, recent victories or defeats....?

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

Thus, if I recruit a "Warband of Fearless Reavers", I might get 50, or I might get 150 of my Fearless Reavers.  I don't know until they show up.
End of quote

Sadly I don't think Elemental's unit sizes will be anything near that big. I wish they were though. That would give a much more epic feel to the battles.

The Political Machine 2024
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

You could go the Heroes of Might and Magic approach though... Have your 250 Dread Knights represented by a single Dread Knight on the screen and have messages like "23 Dread Knights slain by Archers".

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

I would rather avoid having one unit represent multiple soldiers. As to one cohesive regiment or company, I think 5-10 units is plenty. I also think it would be nice to, early on, recruit only one at a time, whatever, although later on when you have the proper requirements, able to recruit all 10 at one time.

although it would be nice to have larger unit sizes, really the max we need to get would be 50, imo, and that would be for something quite massive, like skeletal horde, or somthing. (maybe angry mob? goblin raiders?)

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Tasunke, reply 5
As to one cohesive regiment or company, I think 5-10 units is plenty. I also think it would be nice to, early on, recruit only one at a time, whatever, although later on when you have the proper requirements, able to recruit all 10 at one time.
End of Tasunke's quote

That's actually how it works now. In the Beta when you make units you can increase the count and make all 10 at once. It takes ten times as long though. When you're starting off you'll most likely only be training one guy at a time as that's all you can afford.

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

veeery nice then ^_^

 

I would like to see later technologies however ... like "mass conscription" or "pride of the empire" that reduce troop training by 50% or 80% for training en-masse

Reply #8 from Elemental Forums Top

Shouldn't that be the kind of thing you get from building Super Projects/Wonders though? Seems a bit strange to offer it to everyone.

Reply #9 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Raven, reply 2

quoting post Thus, if I recruit a "Warband of Fearless Reavers", I might get 50, or I might get 150 of my Fearless Reavers.  I don't know until they show up.
Sadly I don't think Elemental's unit sizes will be anything near that big. I wish they were though. That would give a much more epic feel to the battles.
End of Raven's quote

 

 

Quoting from a dev journal:

If anyone has ever seen Fellowship of the Ring where Sauron is whacking out tons of elves and men around, that's the look we're going for.

Though, in Elemental, the creatures are much more powerful than a lone Maiar up agonst a bunch of punks. Dragons in Elemental are incredibly powerful and each of the channelers are equivalent (by late game) to Valar. Enough Tolkien geedkom. ;)

 

Assuming they have not changed their minds, the devs have promised Tolkien level epic battles. I am interested to see if this is indeed going to be replaced with the sort of miniature battles you see in MoM. The other options I see would be for each unit to represent an abstract (ala Civ 4) or for each unit to represent a specific number of troops (ala Heroes of Might and Magic).

Reply #10 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Yestin, reply 9

Assuming they have not changed their minds, the devs have promised Tolkien level epic battles. I am interested to see if this is indeed going to be replaced with the sort of miniature battles you see in MoM. The other options I see would be for each unit to represent an abstract (ala Civ 4) or for each unit to represent a specific number of troops (ala Heroes of Might and Magic).
End of Yestin's quote

I think when they describe the Tolkien'esq level epic battles they are talking about "How Powerful" your character is. If they go with the battle system we've all seen the screen shot from (shown below), we WON'T HAVE Huge Epic battles with hundreds of units on screen at once. I really wish we would, but that would mean going to a more "Total War" type battle system (which I would Love). If they did that though it would take them another Six Months to write the battle AI to be able to do it properly.

Note: The screen shot I'm talking about has the army fighting the dragon Heroes of MM style. It's impressive yes, but it's not "Hundreds of Units" Impressive in my book. I seriously think they need to "Step Up Their Game" in the battle department.

dragon battle

Reply #11 from Elemental Forums Top

I agree that I would rather see larger battles, and hopefully the power-level of potential enemies means you can recruit/conscript enough common, every-man dakka in order to fight said opponents.

Fighting a Dragon? you will need 20 trebuchet batteries, 1500 archers, and some high level casters. perhaps another 1000 footmen for good measure.

Reply #12 from Elemental Forums Top

RavenX - Take a look at the Unit Types XML file.  %PROGRAMFILES%\Stardock Games\Elemental\data\%locale%\CoreUnitGroupingType.xml.  It currently goes up to 1000.  There may be some engine limitation, but if so it's probably not an even thousand.

Now that I think of it, it has a <PREREQ> tag.  If the engine can accept a <FACTION> tab, or accept a faction name in the <TARGET> tag, it would at least be moddable to have unit types by faction.  I guess I just think it'd be cool to have it in the Canon ruleset.