Hmm, I will look into the 9 unit per army maximum and see if there is anything that can be done. I will also show some screenshots of the 20 guys in a bit.
This is my new idea, I thought about it and would like to hear thoughts.
I was thinking of really altering the way the game is played in these ways:
For one, Units would be sizes of 5 - 10 - 15 - 20
This way in the early game when populations are low, 5 men groups makes sense and as time goes by and populations grow, larger groups will be available. I have also increased population by a factor of 10. I plan to change how population grows significantly so that the beginning game, pop will grow slowly and you won't see very large populations but as your city develops, they will grow very large (population wise, as in 10's of thousands of people in larger cities) This way empires feel more like empires.
Also, units will use population so that will be something to consider and I do want armies to be in the thousands of men. Not thousands of units obviously but thousands of men.
I want to make it very easy to recruit units, even ones with armor. The way I see it is, it does not take a whole season to train a handful of guys, no matter what armor they are using. Taking years to train 5 or 6 guys with armor is ridiculous. I want to make it so that units are trained very quickly and can get out there fighting in large battles. Champions and Sovereigns will get a slight boost in HP but doing the units 5-10-15-20 means I do not have to edit armor or weapons. I will just need to edit the hp of champions and some monsters. Since units are being trained quickly and will require population, population may become a real concern. I also want to make units require 3 population for each man in a unit, I will give my reasoning below.
The way I see it is this, even though you have a population of 1000, that doesn't mean you have 1000 people available as soldiers. So if I make each man cost 3 pop, it sort of simulates the idea of having less people available for recruitment and it will make pop more important. (I may make that number 3, still thinking about it) It isn't a perfect system but I think it will do a good job. This will also make it so I can still give benefits to those who use slaves and also to Tarth which is more likely to have female units.
Obviously anyone can make a female or male unit but I want to look at it in a more realistic way and in my opinion, most factions wont use female soldiers. I see Tarth as a sort of amazon type faction so they will. Tarth will only use 2 population instead of 3 when recruiting in a unit. Slave type factions will use no population for slave units and a normal 3 for other units that aren't slaves (I haven't used slave factions yet so not sure if all they can train is slaves or if they also have normal units, I think they have normal units too)
I am also considering giving units a gold cost. It should cost gold when recruiting units in my opinion so I am thinking that each man should cost 3 gold. A 5 man unit will cost 15 gold, a 10 man unit 30 gold, a 15 man unit 45 gold and a 20 man unit 60 gold. This makes gold a little more important and more realistic in my opinion.
Slaves will require no gold, also golems will require no gold and juggernauts too.
Training any unit should only be 1 or 2 turns in my opinion so giving it a gold cost and it costing population will make it more balanced and will give gold and population more importance, in my opinion. In the later game you will have cities with populations in the 10's of thousands so population wont be a big deal anymore (which is the way it should be) but it will still give you the immersion of actually recruiting people and may be a concern still for smaller cities (which may also make you want to recruit men from a larger city instead)
This adds more strategy and some extra choices.
Opinions?
---- Edit---- Also, the idea is that you will need multiple armies to take cities. Cities will be able to garrison many many units so a well defended city will be difficult to take without firepower.
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