Max Number Of Units

[Loren]

Lingchih said:
Yes, it was about 65000 units that broke it. It would be hard to replicate that in anything short of a mega-game though.

I was playing around in SP and just hit it. Admittedly I have an army of summons that could smash the world but I'm not even #1 in any graph except research.

I'm playing Hinnom but there aren't any Hinnom units left other than the Lords of Civilization. I had been doing some studying of how the game worked and didn't pay too much attention to the forced building up. I just piled the ones that aren't summoners themselves (I'm running a nearly pure blood economy at this point, I have hundreds of vampire lords holding my clams and summoning more vampires.) on the chokepoints and ignored the AI.

Once my tests were over I decided to see if I could take the world with a battle line that simply marched across it. Oops, I can't--I can't make any more units. My abomination factory is turning out zero instead of about 40/turn.

[Gandalf Parker]

When the number of provinces was increased to 1500 we hit lots of caps.
Granted, not too many people seem to play that except me.

[Saulot]

Heh. 150 provinces is enough for me.

Out of curiosity Gandalf, how long does it take you to play through a game like that, and how far along in terms of victory do you quit?

[Gandalf Parker]

Ive actually played some longer than a year.

But usually it gets too much for me when I have a third of the map. But I like playing games with some real wilderness and growth between the nations.

[nordlys]

I played LA Ermor in SP on largest vanilla map, and hit the limit a dozen of turns ago. Had to scrap a few thousands of skeletons by sending armies into battles with leaders set to retreat.

I *WISH* there would be a simpler way to disband units.

[Tifone]

I think it's just in the spirit of the game not to let you just send your warriors home makes sense to me but just can't explain how ^_^

Just sending them to a suicide battle seems somehow VERY simple to me anyway - and much fun also the only drawback is enemy units getting some exp, but I can live with it ^_^

[Gandalf Parker]

For RPG I like to "retire" my injured soldiers to local defense. But Im aware that in spreadsheet thinking that would be a big waste of support gold so its not really a good mp thing to do. But the tactic has brought up suggestions in the past that I liked of having a disband command that could turn troops into PD points.

[Loren]

Gandalf Parker said:
For RPG I like to "retire" my injured soldiers to local defense. But Im aware that in spreadsheet thinking that would be a big waste of support gold so its not really a good mp thing to do. But the tactic has brought up suggestions in the past that I liked of having a disband command that could turn troops into PD points.

A *VERY* good way to handle it I think.

[nordlys]

Tifone said:
Just sending them to a suicide battle seems somehow VERY simple to me anyway - and much fun also

Not that simple when you have several hundreds of mound kings with full soulless/longdead/ghoul entourages to waste, and only a couple among 50+ neighbouring enemy provinces have any armies of note, due to Foul Air and Burden of Time Add the fact the army setup screen lags to a crawl when there are more than a dozen commanders in province, and getting rid of excess chaff becomes very painful.

(not like there is much interest to continue playing this session at such point, if only to see the rest of summons/artifacts/sites in action)

[MaxWilson]

I've pondered the possibility of trying to mod in a #researchlevel 0 no-gem-cost "Disband" spell that automatically kills all units in a given (friendly) province, but I'm not sure there's a way to restrict it to friendly provinces. I haven't dug deep into spell modding, so I don't know whether a spell's targetability is coupled to its effect or not (think remote summoning spells like Call of the Winds vs. local summoning spells like Summon Umbral--are those different spell effects or just a different damage (target unit)?). If so, you could have it kill all units in the caster's province (e.g. 9999 fire damage, give a ring of fire resistance to the caster if you want him to survive). It's a friendly province by definition, so there won't be any enemies to kill unless perhaps one has teleported in during the magic phase. Or unless he's stealthy, which could be a problem. Hmmm.

-Max