I'd just like to point out that it's kind of counterproductive to state so definitively pure speculation as if it's fact. We've only been privileged to mere glimpses of what essence will be and how it will be used, and none of those glimpses have mentioned anything about military units (besides heroes), and whether or not we'll even be able to imbue them with essence, let alone choose how much to use.

There are lots of people on these boards who haven't been around for all that long, and if people who have been around start throwing around speculation as if it's fact then we're going to have lots of mislead readers.

It appears that I've gotten a much different impression of what essence will be. I'll be really disappointed if essence becomes relegated to some military quality-related currency, and if we can't make elite units without sinking essence into them. That said, if you *do* decide to imbue your elite Monstrous Bear Cavalry with some essence, you should end up with an even more powerful unit. But to call essence the 'currency' of military training or for it to be at all a regular component of it I think would belittle it... I want imbuing non-hero military units with essence to be a major decision, even for those channelers who spread out most of their essence (after all, investing essence into a military unit with relatively little survivability compared to heroes, or investing it in a settlement, etc should be a risky proposition).

There was some talk a while back about how "special" units would require some sort of mana expenditure. You can't simply make "paladins", you have to design a unit and then imbue it with some sort of power to make it special. Its safe to assume that the pinnacle of "elite" troops would all have some sort of magic investment. It doesn't matter what form that invesment takes, it could be magic weapons, magic buff spells or what have you.

The power we use to fund that investment comes from a finite source. This is what makes it an investment versus an expendature. Everything we have heard to date about "essense" and all that details how players will invest or hoard this power as they see fit. If you spend all of your power making a titanic killer stack, there is nothing stopping me from gathering up an equal amount of power and casting magic spells that nuke your stack from orbit. In that way "essense" or whatever you want to call it should be self balancing. Power spent in one way can be countered by power spent in another.

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At this point its hard to argue for one side or the other. We just don't have enough info.

Thats why you move them in a large group to near the area of operations then you split them up into smaller stacks. So you would have five stacks of 10 units rather than 1 stack of 50. Plus, this gives you more tactical freedom.

I took a slightly different meaning from what the developers have said about magical items and units. From what I gathered, to create a minor magical item(i.e. +1 sword) for troops(even elite troops) would only cost manna which is a renewable resource. However, to create a major item, for a hero, would either cost a lot of manna or some essence and to give a hero the ability to cast spells they would need some of your essence.

From the previous discussions essence isn't exactly magic but the ability for items and living things to interact effectively with and use magic. This makes sense b/c as you imbue things with your essence your ability to use magic directly in battle decreases.

Did any of the devs ever mention that special units would require some sort of mana expenditure? I have never seen such a statement... I've seen lots of speculation and hoping on our part about that, but to my knowledge (and I'm kind of obsessed with checking these forums :P) there has been zero confirmation. Additionally, based on what we've been told so far, it looks like essence and mana are going to be two separate things, with essence being the much more valuable one. If that impression is right, then there is a huge difference between troops that require a mana expenditure vs. troops that require an essence expenditure.

I think that in general, essence will (or should) be something you invest in things that you intend to be permanent fixtures of your kingdom - like your channeler, heroes, settlements, items, miscellaneous bonuses to your kingdom, etc; while mana would be used for things like strengthening your military, casting spells, the kinds of things that are either one-time uses, constant upkeep or things that don't tend to last long (like individual soldiers).

Well quite frankly, we don't know how finite or infinite essence will be. It may be something that increases with time, meaning that it would be no more finite than mana, or gold (but it would probably be scarcer). And you should look up 'investment' because your sentence using it doesn't really make sense  ... An investment is merely an expenditure of resources to make a profit, or more generally, an appreciation in value. Whether you spend gold to train troops, or mana or essence, it is still (usually) an investment - you spend some resources to recieve a 'finished product' that is more valuable to you than the initial resources.

The rest of your paragraph, I agree with you. And actually, it just made me think a little harder about the subject. The example given a while back about use of essence was that one player could choose to dilute his channeler's essence into several settlements, kickstarting expansion and allowing for higher military/tech production, while another channeler might horde essence; and a conflict between the two would be balanced - large, advanced military with a weak channeler vs. small army but powerful channeler. In either case the investment of essence goes into something permanent - the channeler is obviously permanent because if you lose your channeler you lose the game; but even the investment into settlements is pretty permanent - even if some of your settlements are conquered, or razed, you could still take them back and rebuild - the land would still be habitable thanks to your past expenditure of essence to make it so.

But then, let's say you can invest essence directly into military units, resulting in really powerful soldiers. The major difference with this scenario is that the investment would not be into something permanent. In large-scale battles, you will almost always lose some troops in every battle, even if you have a huge advantage. This means that over time, your investment will be whittled away until all that essence is gone for good. To me, this would mean a third scenario to frogboy's above: a small army (about the same size as the essence horder's) of very powerful units, even more powerful than the army of the essence disperser's large, advanced military. In this situation, it doesn't balance out as simply; but rather, the player with the essence-imbued military obtains a short-term advantage in return for a long-term disadvantage.

That was kind of my point. We don't have enough information to go about making it seem like we know things we don't know. We can argue and discuss and hope all we want about what we want the game to be, but it just rubbed me wrong that you stated something that's never been even remotely confirmed as if it were.

Well, as far as I know not even AoW let you cast a giant fireball on the strategic map at an army. It did however let you cast things like storms and magic vorteces and stuff. And they didn't annihilate entire armies. All the damaging map spells I ever saw in that game did random minor damage to units in the affected tile. Even at the scale of Elemental that seems perfectly reasonable to me. Summoning a violent storm or unpredictable magic vortex that kills some, wounds some, slows the rest. They can even be more effective than most spells you'd use in tactical combat, because you don't have to worry about hurting your own forces. Summoning a tornado and letting it run rampant while your army is engaged with the enemy might not be the greatest idea, but doing so when your nearest forces are a dozen kilometers away isn't very risky.

In my opinion the game would be incomplete without map damaging spells. Why should my channeler have to wait until my forces engage the enemy waltzing through my territory before letting loose some offensive spells? And if my channeler is powerful enough to blast an entire army off the map with a giant fireball during tactical combat, it would be fun to be able to do so on the strategic map, too

Pigeon, stop saying words!

Jeebus you're one to talk .... I mean literally, you're clearly one to talk Luckmann

I'm sorry I'm sick and can hardly get out of bed. I'm so bored and grumpy

Whatever you have is certainly not effecting your fingers. I hope you get better sooner rather than later...

One way of doing stack of doom limits.

Require stacks to have generals, which have command ratings.  Generals cost gold, and you can only have so many talented generals.  High-end units can take multiple unit slots.  Generals have special abilities which go to their troops.

Generals can also become insubordinate and rebel.

That is one of two factors we could use.

The first as you mentioned is command. Armies need leadership, without it they simply degrade into a mob. The amount of troops you can keep together in an effective fighting force is limited by your ability to lead it. In the beginning you will probably lead your armies in person but later on you might be able to train or hire skilled generals.

The second is logistics. Armies must be fed and watered and all that food and water has to be transported to them.

So it seems that one of the main advantages of small elite armies is that they are disciplined and easy to commande. They are also easy to feed.

But small elites should have downsides as well.  Assassins, mass numbers.

With command, i am thinking something like the Kohan regiment system, but much more complicated.

I believe that the four soldiers per unit are just an abstraction. In CivIV a unit was represented as three people, if I remember correctly. I don't think that that is meant to say you are defending a city with three people or founding a new city was just three people. It is just a graphical representation of a unit.

An actual settler unit would probably include a few hundred people. It doesn't make sense to render hundreds of people on the world map, even if technically possible, because they would have to be too small to see anything.

In the same way, the 36 soldiers represent a much larger army.

Well yes, a whole unit of setlers in MoM is represented by a single wagon with tons of health that makes it durable enough to run away.

But most units of soldiers were only abstracted in the logistic sense. What you see on the table is what you get. A unit of paladins missing one member is a unit of paladins with one casualty. That one missing paladin doesn't signify a 25% reduction in strength, it just means you started with 4 and now one of them is dead.

AoW was kind of confusing because every single unit was a single figure. Since an archer is only one guy on the table and he can only shoot one target at a time its a safe assumption that he is alone.

Civ4 on the other hand was abstracted out the wazoo. The visual representations of units were just window dressing, the actual unit stats controlled how they fought. This leads to a lot of strange fights, such as war elephants defeating battle tanks.

So...

was the OP's complaint actually about large stacks of units or the fact that the AI was bad and couldn't handle them?? 

Hey, I got two pity karma for being sick!

*hatches devious plot*

I agree not only the cost of a unit but most units should have a gold upkeep.  Also the powerful and special units should have other special types of upkeep where if the upkeep is not provided the unit will choose a random state of behavior: https://forums.elementalgame.com/337474.     

comenow, I can't imagine you worked that hard to become sick.

Heroes of Might and magic did that too, except with a little number in the corner (its like, "hey!  500 peasents can't fit on that hex tile, don't lie to me game"  )

What do you consider "a time" in a turn based game?   Is a single archer really only able to shoot 1 arrow in the amount if time it takes for an army to walk whatever their move distance is?  You have to suspend disbeif and such.  imagination can let you do anything!   Besides, often when at a distance of more than like 20 meters, archers did volleys that could potentially rain on several targets, I think thats a bit messy for a game like this, so you just have to let such things slide.  I don't need real life in my escapism.

Still, given that archers get the exact same "shoot arrow" power as heroes they are most likely single units.

No, most likely it would have just been a pain to implement archers in any other way than that, and so that's the way they did it. In AoW I've successfully sieged cities with just a couple archers and swordsmen. Quite frankly, 3 or 4 armed individuals wouldn't have a chance of conquering a city with a population of several hundred or more, even if the entire population were unarmed. To me, that says that the visual display of military units is abstracted - and so is their functionality.

But then so is the display of civilian populations. The last game I can think of that displayed citizens in the crossfire was X-Com.

Adding realistic arrow flight mechanics is nothing near jumping the shark. The total war games model them nicely, but you pay for that dynamic with abstractions in other areas.

I vote that 1 arrow from a hero is more accurate than 20 arrows from random bums.  I mean, they are heroes.   They are the kinds of people that put pebbles through the skulls of giants with 1 shot, when a whole army couldn't do it.

If logistics are realistically employed, all you need to counter the killer stack is a proper morale system.  When everyone is running away from something, standing your ground is much harder.  A massive army of the best troops is so many dead bodies if they break because everyone else breaks.  Break one unit, and the battle could be over.

Careful use and positioning will then be more important than sheer power, the killer stack of doom could end up costing you the game when a badass wipes the floor with your flank and starts a route.

All the force in the world is useless if you can't bring it to bare.

There's two meanings for "killer stack" here.

There's the AoW2 style killer stack, where each stack is limited to 8 units and you can only bring a certain number into combat (depending on how close together they are). In this case once you tech up enough, it makes no sense at all to make weaker units. Why make 8 Archers when you can make 8 Dread Reapers instead? One of those stacks has absolutely no chance against the other.

That's the real problem with this style. Since every unit counts as 1 unit, and the limit is 8 units, top tier units are always better. If you factored in costs it'd be more like 8 Dread Reapers vs 40 Archers, which isn't quite so bad.

The other style is the Civ 4 "put a zillion units into one stack" style. Civ doesn't let you battle the entire armies together at once, but I still like how it turns out better then the AoW2 style. Sure you can build some expensive Knights/Catapults, but I built twice as many cheaper Macemen/Pikemen/Longbowmen. Swarm tactics can work in this case, but the few elite units style also works.

However they do it, what I'd like to see them avoid is arbitrary size limits that punish non-elite units. In my AoW2 example, if Dread Reapers took up 4 "supply" (to match their cost), you'd see stacks that were closer to being even no matter which method you choose to take. But a limit of 8 where a peasant using a pitchfork and an all powerful super unit both count as 1 just makes anything but the super unit a waste of time.

Sorry I was confusing, both...  As Tridus points out having a limited stack size with no other controls meant getting the best unit, best items and creating a stack that was unstoppable was the only strategy.  This makes for predictable, uninspired game play.  The AI also was not maximizing its stack power and would have many weaker stacks rather than one killer stack.  So no matter how much it was outproducing you, you would win with your killer stack.

Lots of possible solutions to this "problem", here is a summary from the thread in no particular order:

1. Leadership Limits/Morale
   
2. Supply/Logistics
3. Having important defensive positions that require having dispersed stacks. 
   
4. Attack power limits - this wasn't in the thread but I've seen some wargames use this to prevent killer stacks ruining the feel of the game.  The limits get increased the more directions from which you attack, thus encouraging the use of small stacks rather than large ones.  A game I'm playing now like that is Advanced Tactics from Matrix Games
5. Global spells with splash damage
6. Avoid artificial stack limits (like the 8 units from MOM)
7. Increased cost for large, strong units.  Thinking about this, it could be a way to simulate supply by having increased upkeep costs for large powerful stack.