I like the idea as it increases the base but gives a scale to appropriate sizes for armies and gives smaller group sizes for high training cost armors/weapons.  A group of 20 Armored knights and 100 archers and a couple groups of infantry of 300.  I love it.

I am making a Robust Redux of Master's Affliction. It will have a totally redesigned tile system. If this mod works out for the best, it would be nice to incorporate my massive scale cities with these awesome troop sizes.

Only 20 soldiers are ever able to be seen on screen at one time. This is hardcoded as far as I know. While I imagine this will be a drain on low end to some mid system, it should be okay on mid to high system, I think. Haven't really put it to the test yet.

The way it will work is that even though you may have a "100" soldier unit, only 20 are ever shown. However, the number will not decrease from 20 until the HP is low enough that there are only 19 men left.

It certainly could work with your mod Sean but some things would have to be edited, but ultimately would be the same.

Good to know. I still want to have an MA for weak computers, but since I add hundreds of monsters to the game, it's really not going to happen I guess. I will make sure this is MA compatible. Might just need to make it a standard feature to avoid bugs. If that's okay.

Well I have been interested in working with someone on a team for some time now. Not because I am not capable, I am capable of pretty much doing anything in the XML, it is just that I do not want to spend the time doing everything myself hah. People seem to want to do things on their own though.

Anyway, I can explain what needs to be done to make it work anytime.

Oh, and there are also some other things like changing turns to weeks and months, rather than seasons and years (which I think is much more immersive and makes more sense)

Also population sizes of cities, etc. Not sure if you are changing that at all. That is a simple change though.

It's a trade off. The more people you add to a project, the more cooks in the kitchen. I prefer to just work separate and take what we like from each other. It creates a maximum number of mods for people to choose from. As long as we all do that, it's essentially the same thing.

Well if you want, you can send me your work when you have something substantial and I can add in the different unit sizes and such or we can just discuss how it will be implemented. Weapon values are going to be easy to change. Going to need some thought and balancing put into costs though. With much larger unit sizes, resource costs are going to be an issue. This will need to be looked into and tested. 

Most of the stuff I do not care about. What I really care about is making the game feel more real. Spells, weapons, armor and monsters and all that isn't really something I have a comment about at this time. I don't really want to delve into that unless I have to. I was considering already possibly just merging the changes I like into the changes you made just so I didn't have to spend time doing all that hah, but I am not certain. I had some idea to make different cities have different kinds of walls (as I do not like only one kind of city having walls, it is just unrealistic in my opinion)

One good thing is though that if done right, it will be easy to create large units of lower tier weapons and armor but more difficult to create larger units of higher tier weapons and armor. So a group of knights may be only 20 men, which makes sense, but a group of leather clad spear-men or perhaps chain mail clad spear-men will be 100 or 300. 

Still working on this. It is taking time because a lot of stuff needs to be balanced and changed because of the very different group sizes. Also still thinking of ways to implement what I want. Need to rebalance all weapons and armor as well as spells. Perhaps at that point I will release a first concept for people to try if interested. There are a lot of things I would like to do with the mod and I may take some stuff from Sean if he doesn't mind. I like how he does champion level up choices and such. If I ever get to monsters, I will most likely make them harder then vanilla but not as difficult as in Sean's mod.

Take what you like. 

Thanks.

Random thank you note for keeping this stance, its a great gesture
Edit: It seems awfully random, I know, but I believe people  should be thanked for they're good deeds.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

I am about 25% done with rebalancing weapons. I then need to do armor and spells. Spells shouldn't be too difficult. I think Weapons are the most time consuming. After that, I may release a alpha of the mod. It will need a lot of testing to make sure balance and such is right. The game will play a lot different from what you are used to. So hopefully at that time I can get some help with testing.

Ew, helping out...

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Weapons are I have found the hardest element to almost everything in this game as they are difficult to balance what each weapon is good for.  Some are not good at all and are effectively discarded as son as upgrades show up where others are useful for the duration (staff for cheap units).

Hah, thanks kongdej. Help means playing and telling me what needs work. Yeah, weapons are hard to balance but I am doing a mix of things. I am not going too crazy with balance, I am mostly changing the numbers to reflect larger groups. Also, I am mixing in some ideas that Sean had with his weapons. It wont be perfect but I am hoping it will be fun, it will most likely need some work as some of the things I am trying to do are difficult because of certain factors.

Not sure if you saw my spear thread but that might help out on making spears unique if you add armor pierce to other weapons.  Basically its a revenge effect for spears versus anyone riding a mount.  The downside is it requires Heavenfall's extended tagset.  Not that that is much of a downside but it reflects pike more accurately that they dd a pike stand and if cavalry charged them they would be decimated.  They might kill the pike but would surely die in the process.

I wasn't planning to go that far with the balancing at least right now. That is something I can add on to later perhaps. I want to get something working before I start doing extra stuff but that is definitely something to consider, thanks.

I am about 50% done with weapons, armor is going to be easy to do I believe and I don't need to do much with spells. I was testing what I have done out a little and it is definitely going to be a different experience. You are not going to be able to always dominate with heroes anymore. Against 5 or 20 guys heroes will still do well but against 100 or 300, the heroes will have a difficult time unless really strong. You will definitely need supporting armies.

I am done with building all of the non magical armors for my armor mod.  Turns out an armor mod is MUCH more difficult for being accurate and well thought out.  Once I get it more polished I will upload what I have so far to look at for names and graphics.  It looks much more thought out than my first shake at the mod.

Well, when done, please let me know. I am not doing an overhaul like you are. I am just adjusting values to make up for the different number of soldiers etc. It is only meant to be temporary until, for example, your mod is done and then I can just adjust your mod to fit this one. Attack and defense values have to be adjusted to balance the much larger group sizes of 5, 20, 100 and 300. Otherwise a group of 300 will do an insane amount of dmg.

Agreed, but remember how long would it take to train a unit of 300 people with chain armor?  Or how long would it take to train a unit of 300 greatsword wielders.  This actually reflects reality pretty well.  You would not realistically train a massive unit with the best armor and arms as it would just cost to much, unless you are the US military and money is no option, otherwise you would never finish the unit in time to make a difference.  Up to you if you want to change the values after I finish.  I will keep plugging away, this semester is almost done and I will have more time to finish if I don't finish before then.

That isn't true. Chainmail, leather and such are not exactly advanced armors. It would NOT take a long time to train 300 people with chainmail and pikes or something. Look at Romance of the three kingdoms for example, set in the late 200's AD. In a months time, thousands could be recruited, and trained wearing leather or chainmail with pikes or other weapons.

There is one example which Cao Cao directly said himself, he trained an Elite force of the best handpicked men, 70,000 of them in 5-7 years, and these were the best of the best. So it should not take more then a couple of weeks to train 100-300 men with chainmail and a decent weapon and weeks will be considered turns in my mod. Yes, I want soldiers to be able to be recruited quickly. Blacksmiths could easily churn out the required weapons and suits of armor in that time in my opinion as well. 

Also remember, the soldiers you recruit, mostly start on lvl 1 until you get certain improvements, etc. So they are not elite trained forces, just recruits with armor and a weapon. 

I wanted to leave another post here and just give people an idea of what this mod is going to look like, as in how it is going to play because it is going to be considerably different from the vanilla game and other mods. Now I am labeling it a concept mod right now because I do not know if everything is going to work once it is done because I can't actually do any real testing until a good amount of stuff is complete, which should hopefully be sometime soon. However, this is what I believe it is going to be like and I hope others are excited about it because I am. I would like to see more support for this so I don't lose motivation hah.

The focus of this is on "immersion" or a more "realistic" approach to things. What that means is that each turn is going to be a week, and in the world of Elemental, 4 weeks is a month and 48 weeks is a year. Years won't be displayed though and you will just have to count every 12 months as a year. So I want things to keep that in mind. Building a normal building, meaning smaller constructions wont take a considerable amount of time as you can probably build most structures in a few weeks time in real life. However, larger constructions and especially world wonders will take much longer. In history, world wonders would often take many years to build, now of course that would be just ridiculous to have something require like 50 years to build (2400 turns) so I can't do that of course. However, they should take more than a year, perhaps between 1 and 2 years so between 48 and 96 turns for world wonders. Perhaps large constructions will take between 4 and 8 months depending so between 16 and 32 turns.

I will be taking a look at the Affliction mod and perhaps using Sean's changes to buildings and such but with some edits of my own depending on what he has done there. Obviously construction times will most likely have to be edited and I also want every town type to be able to build fortifications, etc. 

Units will take very little time to construct. I want lots of armies battling it out and I want it to be rather simple to raise an army assuming you have the resources to do so (meaning population, metal, crystals, etc.) I think it is silly to constrain anyone because of turn times to construct. Resources should be what constrains you. If you have the resources, though, you shouldn't be limited because it takes forever to recruit a few guys. Group sizes will be 5, 20, 100, and 300. Even a group of 300 should not require more than a few weeks to recruit. I want to make units require population to produce but that will most likely mean not using designed units because I do not think you can make units you design use population (without editing them in the XML which would require a new game anyway.) This is all very time consuming to do but I think this will be the best for immersion.

Heroes will be strong but will not be able to single-handedly destroy armies. A hero will have a tough time vs groups of 100 and 300 but will still be able to do considerable damage (this all depends on how well the balancing of weapons and armor goes). A hero casting spells and with a supporting army will be very powerful though I think. I will use Sean's changes to heroes and ability choices on level up and such since I liked how he did that a lot.

Cities will be difficult to take and will most likely require more than 1 army. Militia in towns will use upgraded armor and weapons. Catapults will be very useful in town attacks as they do splash damage and will do considerable damage to groups.

I want population to be huge and be an important factor to how many soldiers you have. Groups will require population (if I can get it to work right). So if you have a small civilization, it will be difficult to have multiple groups of 300 as that will eat up your population. However, Populations will be able to grow very large by end game. I want the early to mid game to have low populations but mid to late game to have larger and larger populations. I want the higher level towns to require lots of pop to get to them. A Metropolis type town should not be 1000 people but perhaps 20,000 or more since it is supposed to be a major city. This will better simulate a real empire even though an empire would naturally have many more towns but would only have a handful of major towns. I want to add like hamlet type world resource buildings to the surrounding lands, these will give bonuses to local growth. This will simulate how many people would most likely be living out in the rural areas rather than large cities. Need to think how this will work though.

Please let me know if you have any ideas or suggestions.

Sounds very interesting.

One thing to keep in mind is the upper limit on army sizes (9). The tactical maps don't support having more than 9 units in an army, so you'll either need to alter the tactical maps or stick to that limit.

Yeah, I knew that already heh. It was what we discussed in this thread:

"Trying to figure out how to make this work, please take a look."

The idea is not to have more than 9 units in an army. With larger group sizes, though, it won't matter as much for immersion. If you have a few 100 man groups and a few 300 man groups in the later game, you will have armies of a few thousand men. If you think back to games like total war, armies would be around 1000-3000 soldiers. What you will do instead is have lots of multiple armies. So it will be easy to construct a few large armies, which makes more sense. Sieges will require multiple armies surrounding the city to win because one army wont cut it with a well defended city (defending militia will upgrade weapons and armor and will be a good size so it wont be that simple)