i suppose you are right, it would be easy to just add it all up and average it though. 

Reminds me of Lords of Magic where you could have your champions stay in a recruitment building and "train" the people there, allowing you to recruit units at a higher level. The deference here is you must disband, rather than having them sit around.

you know it's funny you mention the problem of different weapons, i assumed you would have to be combining the same troop type. I wouldn't have worried about mixing apples and oranges. I like your suggestion for the xp, i would have thrown out the baby with the bath water.

I would not have a militia be generated by these training troops, I would consider that the risk of taking the time to train the troops into a new cohesive unit. Don't lose the town/ outpost where they are training. It's more about recycling the xp and the time you originally invested into training the original troops. I imagine the retraining time to be the difference of the time it takes to train 4 individual soldiers compared to the time it takes to train a pack of four soldiers, then add a turn or two.

edit * changed my bold into an underline i didn't see the bold that well.*

and that's as simple as i can imagine it to be - hence no militia rule that you suggested ( that just makes my head hurt) Don't get me wrong, in real life those soldier's would take up arms to defend that town i'm sure - but in a tun based game they would have to count as being in the factory and not available for the fight, what happens then if some of your 4 soldiers die, then the construction queue crashes.

surely not too difficult to just limit it to identical copies of the same unit? galciv 2 did it like this with fleets.

but a good stop gap solution would be to give everyone squads for free at the start of the game. everyone always tells me to reasearch this first because it's "essential." to my mind there should be no essential techs. if everyone had squads from the start and was forced to use them for troops there'd be:

- less need to retrain units when you got new techs (because there'd be fewer to get)

- faster battles because there'd be fewer units on the map (i don't know why, but the ai doesn't seem to use many squads)

- more space on the battlefield for the same reason

- more "epic" look

- ai settlements would be better defended because the minimum unit strength would be higher

- slightly less need to focus on the warfare tree

of course, the numbers might need tweaking to make  this balanced. especially to make heroes competetive against squads. but arguably this needs to happen anyway.

2 is still twice as powerful as one though. better to start with 4, then 6, then 8. or something. personally i think that more "obligatory" warfare techs is a bad idea. people already focus on it too much anyway.

True, but you can say the same thing about 4 & 8 man squads: a 4 man squad is 4x more powerful than a single .. but still it's only twice as powerful as a 2-man squad, giving some leverage there. It should not by an "auto" win for a 2 to 1 odds (assuming squads are similarly armed). even at 4 to 1 the single should have a very minute chance of winning, say 3%. "Obligatory" techs would not be so obligatory if 3man squads had a reasonable chance against 4man squads (as it should be), or 5 vs 7 for example, thus some players may opt to research up to 3man & then research something else whereas others would go to 4 before researching magic, for example. There's also a cost factor here, a 3man squad would be a little cheaper than a 4man squad, which would tie more nicely to an empire's resource availability & gold revanue. The cost difference between single guys and 4 or 8 men squads is *huge*.

The real problem with the combat system is simply the way it works: moving first as the attacker is wayyyyy too powerful. I always kill 90% of opponents on the first round of combat: between spells, archers, summoned monsters with boulder blast & fireball. The human player is unbeatable. The turn-based combat system in this game is broken. There needs to be either a radical change (such that the attacker cannot attack all at once), or a RT tactical system needs to be implemented which is resolved on "auto" & players have no control. I'd rather have that than the broken, un-loseable tactical combat system we now have.

I had this battle last night that was unbelievable. I declared war on both resoln & umbar who bordered each other. There was this massive group of resoln on the border which also happened to be next to a mountain chain. I moved one of my uber groups on a hill-road and attacked the massive resoln group on my 1.5 mp. At first I thought there was a game bug, because I attacked and there was another group, attacked again, another group .. I literally went through 30 minutes of combat wiping out a couple dozen resoln groups that were stacked up against the border of umbar & the mountains. I realized that what must've happenend was that these resoln groups had gotten "stuck" somehow and could not move. It was unbeleivable. There was a huge patch of very nice uncolonzed land with gold, crystal, food resources, ancient temples on the other side of the mountains, etc.. So all these guys (which included pioneers) were unable to move past the mountains & border of resoln because they got "stuck" somehow and the AI was not intelligent enough to circumvent such a basic obstacle as a terrain/border block. In my last game the sovereign of yithril got "stuck" in a 2-square area between my zone of influence and tarnith's. It was "stuck" there for more than twenty turns (didn't cast teleport, which I made note of). Eventually they "disappeared" when the zone of influence grew and the 2-square pocket disappeared.

Guess what I'm trying to say here is that this is a much higher priority from my POV than diddling with squad/types .. I mean getting the AI to actually "use" its resources in a halfway intelligent way. As I noted, this is not the first time I've seen the AI get itself "stuck". I've been able to manually cause the AI to do this with strategic positioning of a few single man scouts. You can block up a whole AI pioneer platoon with a couple of well placed scouts. The AI just keep builiding them & they go to the same square. You can literally block up dozens of AI pioneers this way & the AI town just keeps churning them out over & over turn after turn. It's funny in a way but also sad seeing such ineptness in a game AI. 

The way to win every battle in this game is simple: attack first. That's all you got to do. All you need in a group is a mage or two, an archer or two, and three or four summoned units preferably earth giants with boulder throw, and one maceman group. Don't even need an uber stack, as long as you attack first you've won. You need to make sure the opponent doesn't attack you first, which is easily done by having "wingman" groups. Two strong groups is actually better than one uber group IMO.

this kind of tweak was never meant to fundamentally change the game, there are big tweaks that take a long time, such as ai, and little ones that take a short time to make, such as tweaking the way one tech works. It is just supposed to be a simple change to enable the crossover into bigger unit sizes less painful. small units take less resources and are faster to build than big ones. its easy to make single units that you can group together at your leisure when you want to go to war and take advantage of the defensive tech that raises unit hp  and minimizes the wages you pay out to your units.

     However, after having the experience of my high hp, high armour troupe  die to catapult fire  (60+ armour dieing to 25 attack  ) I am at a loss to how to fix that...