[Idea]Massive Army Mod

The main difficulty is the unit and combat animations - everything else is trivial in comparison.

There's no point in saying there's 100 men in a squad if it still only looks like 4.

I think it'd be a relatively simple mod but I also think it would not nearly be as easy as it seems to be. Unexpected gameplay consequences would almost assuredly occur; on the upside and to your credit,  this sounds like something you're thinking about.

The most prominent thing as Tah said though is getting the engine to handle a number of units that'll be several orders of magnitude greater.

Well, there is a point, it "feels" like more, even if you only visually see 1 guy, if every single tooltip and onscreen promt and text says its 100, it feels like it matters more if he dies or not.

A good example is Civilization (again), well, the earlier ones. Even if you only saw 1 tank, you knew it was representing a batallion, it felt more impactful because of that subconcious "understanding" that there's more than meets the eye.

Or even grand strategy games like Hearts of Iron or Victoria / Europa Universalis.
Even though you're dealing with 1 "soldier", due to every single tooltip, statistic, and reference talking about it as 3000 soldiers, it feels like 3000.

I guess it all depends on how much you are willing to suspend your disbelief.

Risk anyone 1 wood block = 1 army, not 1 guy

I have started experimenting with this a bit. It is a simple thing to change the COST of each unit in CoreUnitGroupingTypes. So for example, you can change the Party size from 4 to 10 soldiers. I'm still playing with it a bit, there still seems to be some weirdness. I can't edit the Individual size properly. So if you try to change the base training time of an Individual soldier from 3  to 1, it doesn't seem to take effect. Not sure what file is overrding that. It works for the 3 other unit sizes. I was able to change the costs and even remove the tech requirements without any issue.

The problem comes when you actually build a unit. As a test, I changed the size of Companies to 50 soldiers. The costs of the unit worked out correctly, and it took 50 citizens to recruit the unit. However, it ends up as the same smaller size once created, both on the strategic map and in combat.

I'm going to keep playing with this. If anyone else has already experimented with this and figured it out, let me know.

Hmm...I'll have to break out notepad++ and search for that term in the xml to see if it exists in multiple places. I've noticed "overriding" with some very minor stuff.

For example, I want the background music to cycle every 20 turns. I open up the xml find the "forcemusicstart" (or something like that) and it's set to 25 (I'm guessing turns). So....why does it cycle only every 50 turns? And there's no other mention of anything related to music other than the definition of the themes in xml.

So I, like you, wonder where this overriding is taking place.

Another problem is actually losing 50 people. That can basically strip even a level 3 city in no time. Pretty much confirms something will have to be done about population growth (and thus city level up as well).

I'm guessing the graphics are probably defined somewhere? Maybe a place where it says "make 4 models for a party", etc?

Let me know if you find anything, I'll keep looking and experimenting as well.

As for the balance, I intend to upsize everything to go with the larger units. I'm going to see if there is a way for a pioneer to cost, say, 100 citizens and then found a new city with 100 citizens. I also plan to allow for faster growth of larger cities.

I can't find any other instances of BaseTurnsToTrain. Only in the CoreUnitGroupingTypes.xml (there's another in the Only-MP subdirectory, but that probably isn't any issue).

I could have SWORN I've seen in XML the positioning of units inside a group. It's annoying me that I can't find it now. It was essentially a list of how the units would be placed inside the unit on tactical map. I CLEARLY remember options that were commented out, like shield wall formation, and some sort of circular formation. And I'm 100% certain I'm NOT confusing it with a mod.

I'll be keeping a very close on eye on this thread as this is a bridge we'll have to cross for the Dragonlance Mod. On a side note, I was going to start a discussion here in the Mods section about what kinds of unit scale people would want to see and use as a stand alone "Unit Sizes Mod" for anyone to incorporate into their Mods. How does this sound as new unit size scale?

This is my proposed progression of unit sizes:

10

20

35

50

OR...

10

25

75

100

Does that sound like too much? Not enough? Just right? Here's the standards the real life military uses.

Fireteam : 4

Squad: 8 - 13

Platoon: 26 - 55

Company: 80 - 225

Battalion: 300 - 1,300

Regiment/Brigade: 3,000 - 5,000

Division: 10,000 - 15,000

Corps: 20,000 - 45,000

Field Army: 80,000 - 200,000

Army Group: 400,000 - 1,000,000

Army Region: 1,000,000 - 3,000,000

Army Theater: 3,000,000 - 10,000,000

Now, those are, for the most part, HUGE numbers. Numbers so big I don't think we'd want to see them in game and honestly the game isn't designed to support those kinds of numbers. Right now in game the size groupings are like this:

Individual - 1

Group - 3

Team - 6

Raid - 12

We should replace those with these:

Squad - #?

Platoon - #?

Company - #?

Army - #?

All that's left is to decide what numbers we should plug in there, and to figure out how to space them properly.

I really, REALLY, hope so. Do me a favor and PLLEEAAASSSEEE let me know. That's the Major Thing stopping me right now from trying to implement larger scales. It's the ONLY thing holding me back really. That and I can't seem to get ahold of Dhuran, and as such need help with some of the more complex XML code I don't know. I know there's a lot of XML commands I simply don't know or don't know how to use. If I did this would be a lot easier and I'd be able to get a lot more done in less time.

Well, I like being able to create individual units.  They are useful for scouting, playing a diplomat, role-play, etc. 

So maybe something like this?

Individual - 1
Platoon - 25
Company - 75
Battalion - 100 

I don't think the top level should be called an "army".  An army usually means all of your units combined as a whole.

The reason I never bothered doing anything with that positioning file was because I realized even though I could make new groupings, the buttons for building a specific formation were hardcoded in the interface anyway.

It is strange, though, that they'd remove a file like that from modder's grasp.

Or maybe I'm just completely delusional.

Hmm, that's true. I also tend to call a whole stack a "Army" regardless of it's size.

Wow....I seriously hope that's Not hard coded since So Many of Us went nuts making sure Frogboy said it would be moddable.

Well that works too.  I just mean that "army" is really an abstract word that gets thrown around for a lot of things.  It probably doesn't need to be hard-coded as a type of unit size.

I'm actually looking at making unit sizes race dependent...haven't talked about it much yet, but I'm working on a 'generic' fantasy mod, not a recreation of any other source (MoM, AoW, etc) but something that I am designing ground up that will be designed to work with Elemental and play to the strengths of the engine.

Anyways, in my mod so far, I'm trying to have, for example, Elf units go in a 1 / 2 / 5 / 25 unit setup, Human units go in  a 1 / 4 / 10 / 50, and Orc units go in a 1 / 6 / 15 / 75 setup. Still trying to figure out if this will be 100% possible, and I'm still playing with the exact numbers. The idea though is that 'elite' races will have smaller units while 'horde' races will have larger units.

That's not a bad idea at all there man. Keep me posted on how that goes if you have time

 Yes, this is possible. Make sure to set in your raceconfig file the <RaceClassification>Whateverracename</RaceClassification> and also in RaceType.xml. Then you can use

<Prereq>

    <Type>Race</Type>

   <Race>Whateverracename</Race>

</Prereq>

in the coreunitgroupings xml.

Right now, this is the configuration thats doable. Well, we can change the numbers around, but we can't change the individual unit. So, I think having the one individual is good, like GaelicVigil said. Right now, it does display the individual units when you change the size, but I think it will only go up to 12 (the max in the game for unitgroups). I could be wrong about that though, I havent tested it.

Sounds cool.  Although, doesn't every equipment piece cost the same per civilization?  Unless equipment is changed as well, wouldn't you just be nerfing some races?  You've probably thought of that though if you're building a generic fantasy mod.

You can make equipment race / faction specific, which is what I am doing in my mod. So the Orcs have their own equipment and tech tree, the Elves have a different set, etc. Plus I plan to make each race's base stats different. So an Orc might be able to take damage and have a higher HP, but be less effective defending and have a lower base defense. Meanwhile an Elf might be more fragile and lower defense, but could have better defense.

i can see it now .

a army of 50000 - they move up ...one man steps forward and hits for gazzilion damage.

It's the CoreFormations.xml file (installdir\data\English\Core World\). This file controls how your stacks are spread in combat.