Large scale battles and engine limitations

I seriously hope so too.  Forget "hundreds and thousands", I want hundreds of thousands!

But seriously, I hope we can have some huge armies.

how exactly would a battle with hundreds of thousands of units work in a turn-based game? 

You are controlling groups of units. Not one by one.

Modding wise, it's trivial since the only thing holding back the number of units is gold which is settable in a text file. I play around with it all the time.

Brad, that makes me breath a swift sigh of relief. Because though it was unfounded, but going off of what currently exists in the beta. It really makes one wish for real armies. Of hundreds of units, maybe with some multiple unit training, or if there were different "Eras" of the game. Where say it was periods of time.

So in the Dark Ages, it would be smaller numbers of troops. And then when tech/magic/city population hits a good recovered level, the game changes ages. And the size of general units increase, so that training 1 unit, translates into training 10 soldiers, and so on.

With different era's/ages, whatevers, helping create a smooth realistic transition for the players to see, and feel. As a way to have the game sort of have the initial stage, smaller units, and more and more units get made, and so on, until say some far distant high magic era, armies are actually thousands of troops, with actual real monsters being a challenge equivalent to their Age units, I'm thinking.

That is strange, I have though that city population was a limiting factor, especially when trying to field hundreds of soldiers

I'm seriously disappointed if the scale of the battles is just gonna go back to the HOMM era of a picture of a unit with a number underneath dictating how many there are. Or these great nations are only fielding armies in the low hundreds. I guess in my mind I was picturing total war scale battles but on a turn based field, I suppose without the psuedo real-time aspect they aren't going to be very exciting.

All theories of course, since there is precious little information on the battle system now outside of going turn based and the scale we see in the beta itself. Disheartening to say the least.

If Frogboy doesn't change his mind (it doesn't look like it), I say we mod in WEGO asap!  10,000 vs. 10,000 here we come!

But really, I demand 1,000+ armies, and each individual person actually be shown!

Please?

It is good and awesome to hear.

One of the reasons why I didn't like AoW series is the little nasty worm in my head who burned my mind away with the simple question: "You've got several dragons on your side and world-changing magic. Is it really difficult to hire 5000 slingers? And why this dragon is killed by those 10 archers? Are those guys so cool or this dragon so pathetic?" A lot of games have some level of abstraction, but hey... present computers can give you much more than that.

Yeah, you really looked into my nightmares. Sometimes eye candy really does matter. Total War is buggy, it's got poor AI and balance. It is even not remotely realistic and battles in it are too small to be representations of the real battles. But it got that thing right. AoW, HoMM, Disciples, King's Bounty - they didn't have the feeling of the epic struggle. They were cool and enjoyable games. They've got tactics, unique feel and nice graphic style. But they didn't give you the nice feeling of epic struggle.

This. While you can have lots of soldiers, and you might even see lots of soldiers (IIRC my companies were showing all four people, not just one guy with a number count), in reality it'll be uncontrollable unless they're in groups of X, like the companies we have now only scaled up (Regiments or Brigades).

The idea for a Battle of the Five Armies type scenario was back when it was continuous turns (aka realtime). With turn based limits, I don't think you'll see anything so grand due to the eternity it'd take to play a fight like that.

A fight of ten thousand troops isn't the same when it's really ten units, each of which is one thousand that act like a single unit.

Depends on close in you want to zoom.  We don't represent 1000 units with 1 guy. I'm not sure where that thought even came from. We don't even represent 5 guys with 1 guy.  

Another avatar change?!?   This is getting ridiculus!

But really, if you control squads, it will be too abstracted (of course, I consider anything more abstracted than Dwarf Fortress too abstracted ), and if you control indivual people...

To the modding!  WEGO for all!

Excellent!  Shouldn't be a problem with the 64-bit version then.

Visually perhaps not, you may have 5,000 tiny little guys on a square but they'll still act as a single unit on the battlefield. I suppose the real question here is the size of the maps, and the limitations on numbers of unit groupings you can have. If both sides can have 50 unique batallions on the field at once and have the battle play oout on that grand scale, then our fears will be unfounded. But if it ends up like HOMM on a small field with a very limited selection of unit groupings available, it's going to kind of fall flat as far as epic goes.

As far as the turn based combat itself, we really need more specifics on functionality but based on experience in other games of a similar nature, I'm concerned.

Edit: I don't want to seem like I'm attacking the functionality of an unreleased section of the game, it's just that the number of units that end up in the beta armies combined with the dropping of real-time has a few people concerned about what the combat side of the game is going to look like, now more than ever.

I knew that it will work like this [it was mentioned a while ago], but I guess that a powerful system will be needed in order to display all of those units without having serious lag...but I am just guessing. We shall see [Beta3! ]

I'd like to see the battles exactly like those in Dom3 but under our turn-based control:

- before the battle, you can arrange your troops in formations as you want (divide your horsemen in 2 groups and place them on extreme left and right if that's what you want; make 3 groups of archers; put together your 3 companies of knights to make one batalion;...) and place them on the battlefield without knowing the adverse disposition

- during the battle, formations can't be changed and they place themselves on squares according to the numbers of troops and their relative size. Ex: in a square, you can put 50 peasants or 10 horsemen or 5 ogre or 1 dragon/big monster.

- you can give orders to single units or formations at the beginning of each battle turn

So, yes, if you put 5'000 tiny little guys together (to make one legion i.e.), they'll act almost as one (though each one fights individual and one after the other) because that's how it was. Watch Braveheart: there are guys with big flags besides the commander and, when they wave one, that means "Archers, fire!" or "Infantry, attack!". A formation can take many squares but they 'act as a single unit' in that all its components should obey to attack the same target (except when defending themselves if attacked. F***ing good battle mechanisms in Dom3!!) or go in the same direction or take the same stance.

if it works like that, that should alleviate your concern that 5'000 guys in one square can all attack one dragon on the next square: we would have those 5'000 guys divided into 100 squares (! Yes!! 50x100!!) and, as only 8 squares can border the dragon's square, only 400 of your 5'000 guys could attack at the same time but they must come, then surround it and then they prevent other units (say, your cavalry) to have a try against it while they are there.

First, I have to congrat Frogboy to his great decision to make a pure tactical turnbased combat. It got me interested in this game again. I cannot stand RTS style games anymore.

Second I would suggest that one figure is one "unit" (eg. 100 man) most of the time. Except are mighty single figures like dragons or demons, which could also be named and count as 1 figure. So you recruit whole units and even if the graphic shows a single person, its in reality of the game 100 persons of the same type. (eg. you see 1 slinger, but in truth its a unit with 100)

An even better visual solution for this would be to depict a unit not as a single person, but rather as a unit (phalanx, wedge) or whatever. Dragons, heroes or other single mighty entities could be depicted as single person icon of course.

Also interesting would be if units have several "stances" and abilites in tactical combat mode. So eg. they can change from a "travel" formation which favors movement and a "shield wall" formation (for heavy infantry with shields) or for cavalry the "shock attack" ability. (which gives the unit more impact if it "charge a certain amount of squares before engaging the enemy) Or for the fantasy units, you could have a "swoop attack" abilty for harpies, griffons or dragons which allows the unit make attacks on the fly and then move on.

All this formations could have different animation graphics (for example shield wall shows the icon to put shields up and if you choose "shock attack" the graphics engine re-arranges the cavalry unit icon into a triangular wedge) The advantage of such formations would not only be eye pleasing, it would also bring additional tactical depht into the combat if designed well. Many good wargames, especially from medieval or antique times have such little subsystems. just an idea.

I like the way dominions handles the units per square thing myself, as well as how it plays out combat wise. However, I'd still like to see maps more like say, a warhammer tabletop map or another game that is essentially just tactical combat. So when you play a battle with thousands of troops on both sides it actually takes place on a battlefield fitting an engagement of that size still allowing for plenty of flanking, feints, etc etc

Visually what I'd hate to see is a unit on the map being = to 100 guys or whatever, and Frogboy says that's not the case so I'm not really concerned about that. I'm concerned about a limitation of unit groupings, map size, and how the combat itself will play out. Also slightly worried about the army scales right now and how difficult it would be to amass an army of 1,000 troops, let alone 10,000. I'd like to assume that it's the way it is just because of the beta phase we're in but I'm afraid that's not the case.