Unit design really demonstrates a key part of the economic system

Wow, I haven't really played many games that let you customize units, sounds great.  I do have some questions:

Are units made up of mutiple troops, or are they treated as one soldier in combat (i.e. can you kill individual troops in the unit and do they each have an attack)?

How many troops are in a unit and can that change with technology or resources?

Hi Roman:

When you train a "unit" you decide how many soldiers will be in that unit. Different factions have different formation options but here's Altar's:

A unit can be either:

• An individual soldier
• A party of soldiers (4)
• A company of soldiers (10)
• A Battalion (50)
• Brigade (250)
• Legion (1000)

Are larger unit sizes only buildable in, say, large cities or places with the relevent barracks? Or are they simply prohibited by cost/research?

Can you combine different units? Or you can only do that if they have the same equipment? Maybe you simply cannot merge units at all? Is his hair an artifact?

Here's kind of how it works:

Researching:

In Elemental, Logistics matters even if it's abstracted.  You don't research a type of unit.  You care about things like logistics, training, equipment.

This is how you get access to different sizes of units:

Then you design your base unit (this is how I got "Fabio"):

As you can see here, at the start, he's pretty weak (but stylish). 

His equipment is a stick so there are no points in equipment.  There are, however, 4 base points for training.

It typically takes a town 1 turn to produce a given point (at the time I'm designing it, the game will provide an estimate based on the state of your towns).

Then you make your unit.  These guys come right out of your town.

So you can't just have a village of 100 or whatever people and build a legion of soldiers there. These people are coming out of your population.

And half your population are female so you can't use up all of them you can only use half of them UNLESS your faction has purchased the egalitarian option at the start of the game (then you can end up with females in your army).

Excellent, just what I wanted to know. Is the pop of Tiehab 65 or is that the manpool? If so then I guess you'd need a male-dominated economically robust settlement to make a Battalion!

You can combine units into an army that will fight together as one. In the cloth map beta, it's not terribly impressive.

In the actual game engine, it's considerably better even in pre-beta:

This is a single army which is made up of my sovereign, a princess, and a party of Fabios. Eventually, the Fabios will all look slightly different from one another (other than outfits).

So when you have armies running around the map, you'll be able to see, at a glance, what they've got. You can still click on them and get all kinds of details but you can also obviously tell if one group is a bunch of peasants (these clothes are a bit too fancy right now) with pitchforks and the other group are guys with armor and such that it's not going to end well.

Later on, as you research better weapons, armor, equipment, etc. You can upgrade  your guy.

Here's Fabio later on...

Sexism FTL?

Will be interesting to see the mechanics that go into it.  I'm hoping for a breeding rate trade off.

A very interesting post. I take it the standard (non-unique) units only have statistics and no special abilities, like in the GalCiv series?

Precisely. Lower birthrate but you can use all your population.

Hmmm amazones ftw?

If you have ever seen women at a closing out sale you know how fearsome they are, so can you build up a army only out of women? and give the enemy the latest popular shoes and then send those women to them and get rid of them ??

If unit design can be gender based, that is both awesome, and horrible at the same time.  Along with the witch reavers and blade dancers, we'll have man eating strippers or something.

>Insert obligatory wordplay pun here

So female soldiers planned for Gold then? I thought it was CariElf (sorry if I'm mistaken) who didn't see it possible for then. I know it supposes extra work doing more models and the associated stuff.

I don't know who witch reavers are, and blade dancers sound like Lineage II. I'd bet that Stardock won't use cows so it's up to the player do add all the "aberrations" that they are fond of (I enjoyed playing a female Blade Dancer in Lineage II but if I had known of the stupid revealing armours, I'd have thought about it twice ).

Oh! And good to know that we can combine different types of units!

No, it's NAKED Amazons Ftw

If they're anything like the enemies off of Dante's Inferno's "Lust" level that would be Awesome

"Unit design really demonstrates a key part of the economic system"

Wait a minute ... tick tock tick tock tick tock ..... *several hours later* tick tock ahhhhhhh

If it is the same with the rest of the economic, could you like stuff 200 more ppl into the farm to get more wheat or pumping some workers into the smith to get the army faster?(or to get more babys ... ya know)

Can I get one of those?

Hello Frogboy,

I´m impressed by the depth of the game, even when it just is the handling of tropp sizes. Great job - you develop directly into the way of kind of game I´m long wwaiting for (counting in years...... ;-))

Hmm, there's more cool new information in this thread than in the Dev Journals.

This would seem to offer up all sorts of routes a player could take in designing their military.

I like also the art of showing the units. Remeber me a bit of the good old "Magic the Gathering" cards. Nice move!

What is the targeted duration for building a legion of 1000 armored fabio when training 1 requires between 11 and 14 turns?

That is a good question. Also, I was wondering about the tactical battles. Let's say you attack a city with 1 Legion, 3 Brigades and 5 Battalions. I suppose we won't see 1000 [legion] + 3x250 [brigades] + 5x50 [battalions] units on the battle screen in the same time. [Even tho it would be epic. :D] So I suppose in this case 50 soldiers will be represented by 1 "unit" on the screen? [..or something like this. You got the picture.]

I'm really hoping they push the envelope with how many units can be shown on screen at once.

On a side note I was thinking about the time tables it would take to build massive amounts of troops as well. I hope they tweak those time tables shown. Maybe we'll be able to iron that out when we're concentrating on balancing things. It will be hard to have truly epic wars if it takes you a week of real life time playing one game before you can build a 1000 men. It will also depend on how long each "Turn" is in game. If each turn represents 6 months then those time tables seriously need adjusted. If each turn represents 1 week or 1 day then 17 turns to train 1 unit isn't too bad.

We'll probably need to wait until we have more info and it comes time to talk about specific balance issues. Not to worry though as that's a pretty important part of Beta Testing and I'm sure we'll spend a few months with a later build doing just that.

i love little things like this, stuff that gives your empire character. I hope theres more stuff like this.