Sorry, haven't been able to post as my hometown got obliterated by Hurricane Sandy (yay). Well I am exaggerating a little bit (well just a little bit) Had to evacuate, reminded me of a zombie movie.

So once things are normal I can work on this again. Also, the point of this thread is to discuss what could make the game more "immersive"

If you have any ideas how to make sieges better let me know, or lets discuss ideas.

no words of encouragement huh? Haven't checked in a couple of days and not one single post of encouragement, bah

I am watching this intently as I intend to use this with my armor/weapon mod and hopefully increase total number of armies.  That way you can have actual tactical battles with diverse armies.  Good luck with recovering from Sandy, I hear she was mean but maybe she was just misunderstood.  Cheers!

Thanks. Are you making an armor/weapon mod? Perhaps we can work together to combine the two then because I would rather not have to put the work into doing an armor/weapon rebalance although I was thinking about it. Also, if we coordinate, you can come up with values that are good for more units. Depending on how I decide to go with armies, weapons and armor will need to be rebalanced to take that into account.

Also, Sandy is the worst Hurricane to hit the east coast in probably more than 100 years. It is very serious over here. 

Sorry to hear that, it was only a jest to lighten the mood but I can understand if it fell flat.  We only got the outside edge here in western Ohio but it was pretty nasty weather just east of us.

I wasn't offended. My town wont have power, or water or gas for at least another week probably. I am staying in another location. I am also a teacher so I still have to go in and teach kids who will be coming back to school soon. 

Hopefully soon I will be able to use my own computer again. 

Anyway, if anyone has any ideas, any wishes or a concept to make FE more immersive and on a grander scale, please post here so that when I can get back to modding, I have some ideas on what to do.

I could probably even start doing some things sooner if I get the opportunity and again if you want to start planning for armor/weapon rebalance Halmal, let's discuss what kinds of armies we want. Are we considering units of 30,50,70,90 or 5,10,15,20 or some other kind of configuration. let me know.

I like the idea of larger numbers to be honest because it fits better but also total different types as well.  I do not know if it is hard coded to have only 9 units per army stack or if that is exceed-able or not but if you can make it 12 or 16 then you can have archers protected by infantry, with cavalry to flank and your sov/champ as a general/mage.  Granted you can do this now but barely to cover each piece, normal medieval/early-renaissance armies had lots of foot with archer support and a contingent of horse, since horses were expensive, to flank.

12 or 16 is possible, however, more starting positions need to be added to each tactical map which is time consuming because coordinates have to be added and tested and requires guesswork. Although, I have not tested it yet. As it is right now, you can make it so an army has more units in the stack but only 9 units will show up in battle when attacking and the extra units will automatically go to 1 hp or die without adding those extra positions. 

What I was talking about was the men per unit. Right now you can get 3 man units, 4 man units, etc. For immersion purposes, I want armies to be larger. So if I were to change it so you have 30 man units as one soldier unit, 40 man units as one soldier unit, etc. damage will be much higher because it is no longer 3, but 30. That means armor and weapons need to be rebalanced with this in mind, also sovereigns, champions and monsters need to be balanced with this in mind. This could be done in different ways. One way is with just increased HP for them without touching weapons and armor. There are other ways as well.

Oh I understand, I was just mentioning what I would like beyond that.  For total unit sizes I am not sure what meats the immersion barrier but you could base it upon roman unit sizes, I would have to look them up.  I remember cohorts and stuff like that but not the exact numbers.  This would give you a realistic size to pull for actual values on what constitutes a small medium large and very large group for use within an army.  I can either look that up for you when taking a break from studying and working on my mod or you can delve into it.

Alright so I decided to look up some information on formations for grins to see if I could find some realistic numbers for medieval times, and the answer is that there aren't any hard numbers per se.

The best I can say is you can the following types and fit what you are looking for I think.

Scout unit (3-Units)

Squad Unit (9-Units)

Rabble/Group - A better name would work but its what most large units were called (30 to 60 Units)

Battle Formation - Essentially a large collection of the former unit (600-1000 Units)

Not sure how to break this down with the current group types except with maybe like you already mentioned in your previous threads and chance the numbering per unit to 10 times each one for display purposes.  So you would have a scout unit of 30 men, a Squad Unit of 90 men, a Rabble of 300 and a Battle group of 6000.

More likely to fit with the game would be set them to them to only 3 types and make those specialized to fit with the total numbers realistically set.  

Knights were in smaller formations of the knight itself as well as his retainers.  Mages would likely fall into this category as well as their equipment is prohibitively expensive or they take a LOT to train.  This necessitates the smaller unit sizes.

Pike and Archers would fit in the middle ground as they generally took longer to train (archers) or had better gear (pike) versus the common rabble did.

Finally Foot / Peasant Infantry would be at the bottom wearing a gambeson (padded armor) or leathers with some chain mixed in at the later periods when it was more mass produced.  Basically fodder for the knight units until they had enough production to make better armor.

So based on this a small unit of 3 or 4 fits for the first tier.

A squad type of around 9 units fits for the next tier and would work for initial battle formations of knights and Mages

A group type of around 30 fits for the next army type tier.

Finally a last tier if its possible to add fits for a battle group / rabble / something of around 100.

I don't know if this is even possible to mix and match systems with the way you are trying to make everything 10 times larger but this is the best I can do without a lot more research.  This sort of coincided with the armor stuff I have been researching so I decided to give it a stab and give you the result to work with.

Use what you like and discard the rest.

Hmmm. Well pioneers are limited to 3 but that is because they created pioneer units and made it so they could only be built with 3 man groups. Hmm, it might be possible to do something like this with computer units since they do not design units but I don't know how it could work with designed units. I can't look at the files right now but if it were to work, we would have to make it so that units could not be designed, otherwise it would break it.

Post is now a sticky.

You made the post sticky?....
(I know, my childlike humour is... childlike ;))

~ K

First of all, I want to say that I approve of this mod, and will most likely use it if you ever make it.

In the world of FE, the world is after a catacalysm after a "golden age". We can assume that the population is quite large in the wastelands, and the rumors of safe havens such as cities will attract people around the world.

Just for reference, I was stationed in the Israeli side of the border with Egypt. At the time (a year ago), roughly every day a group of 40-60 immigrants from Africa (various countries) would cross the border. This is quiet risky for them, as the Egyptian soldiers would usually shoot them, they attract diseases and have to pay for transport and guidance.

In a world such as ours where most of the population has "a good life" in terms of security and survivability, only a few people move. If there is only a few havens, the amounts of people coming will only increase over time. In this aspect FE is done quiet well, though the worlds themselves are relatively small.

Regarding unit sizes, I wonder if it's possible to do this- groups of 100/200/300/400, 400 is shown as 20 units, and whenever 20 units fall the amount seen is reduced by 1. So with 100 dead, a group of 400 will look like a group of 300 which looks like a group with 15 standing people (a combination of both systems you described).

Okay, well I now am back home (after 2 weeks). I can start getting to work on this when I have some time.

As for unit sizes, you can do groups of 100, 200, 300, 400 but, as far as I know, you can't make it so that when 20 men die, the number is reduced by 1. The way it would work would be that it would show 20 men until you reached 19.

This is not difficult to do but the problem is balancing either weapons and armor or HP for champions, sovereigns and monsters. 

I am thinking of making units of 300,400,500,700 but still wondering how to implement it well, meaning changing HP for heroes and monsters or doing a whole weapon and armor rebalance.

The reason for this is that when you have about lets say, 7 units of soldiers in an army with 2 heroes, that could be anywhere from 2,100 soldiers to 4,900 soldiers which sounds about right for an army (think total war series)

I want to make soldiers much easier to recruit as well. Magic will also need to be rebalanced for this. So Champion, heroes and monster HP will be very high numbers. Magic will also do high number dmg but it should be balanced for the larger group sizes. 

One issue which needs to be really thought about though, is designed units. I don't think it is possible to have units you design require population. I know code to make units require pop but it requires editing each unit. I don't see how it could be done for designed units unless anyone has any ideas or maybe I am just missing something (havent been able to test so I am just speculating)

Not sure here as you would have to have access to the unit designer of which is currently unavailable.  Believe me if I could access the unit designer I would love to as I suspect that the upgrade gear code is built into it as well.

For magic spells there is already a function that could easily be added to deal with damage to large unit sizes versus large groups and small damage versus single units its the overpower function that certain monsters have.  This may make it easier to deal with the magic numbers instead of insane hp on everything.  Simple rule to follow, the larger the numbers the harder it is to balance usually.  

To balance this make it so the large damage weapons take longer to train which is in line with reality anyways.  Some weapons will find a niche spot, spears, that are sort of exemptions to the rule because of their extreme armor penetration skill.  So if this is the case expect most troops to do not much damage to creatures like 1 or 2 damage per unit but with 300 units you are still talking about 450 damage (not including accuracy vs dodge).  

How many times does a 300 unit archer core need to shoot a dragon before it kills it?  For a bear I would expect a 300 unit army to kill it in one shot.  But a dragon is supposed to kill armies of men/fallen before it falls.  Also something to consider when making unit sizes like this what about monster unit sizes like mites, darklings, bandits, and syndicate?

This is partly why I recommended some smaller unit sizes before you can research one really large one.  A 3 man, 9 man, 30 man, then say a 300 man would work perfectly in this regard without messing with most monsters.  You would then not have to re-balance the rest of the game versus such high increases in unit sizes except against troops which is pretty much what you would only use large unit sizes against anyways by the time you get them.  if you increase the number of units in an army stack to 12 then you can have 10 300 stacks and 2 champions and have a 3002 unit army or anything in between with specialty units in there for specific purposes.

The problem with increasing unit stacks is having to edit every single tactical map to include more starting positions otherwise you will not be able to use all 12 units in your stack and it will just auto kill the extra units. I have been hesitant to take this approach because it seems like it will be very time consuming, but I will think about it.

Perhaps there are values where I could make their damage be much less to monsters, champions etc.

You do have a point on the numbers but I will need to consider it more.

Not a problem, just thought I would point out something that needs to be identified.  Eventually when I am happy with the armor/weapons rework I might take a stab at the maps unless someone else gets to it first.  I remember someone saying that around a 25% increase in map size would make most people happy in not being to large an increase and stay within the feel of FE.  With the increase in map sizes it would be easy to just add in new / additional spots.

I was just thinking something. What about doing all damage by spells as a percentage instead>>> This is in case the overpower ability doesn't work.

I wonder if it is possible to do weapon damage as a range of percentages rather than just a range of numbers.

For example, I want spears to do from 5%-10% damage. Is this possible> This would solve all my problems if it is, than I can do any number of unit sizes as I want. Going to look into it.

Overpower works with weapons, hmm that gives me an idea.

Okay, I found a way to make things work the way I want without having to give units more hp, etc. I just need to edit weapons and some monsters. I can do any unit sizes I want now. 

I am thinking of doing groups of 10, and 20 for the early to mid game and 100, and 300 for mid to late game. What do you think?

I am going to begin creating the mod. Is there anything else that people would like to see changed, edited or added?

Can you give us an idea of the system requirements of your mod? I don't see us getting away with anything less than an i7 and at least last year's high end GPU.