First of all, thank you for your candid reply. It helps to consider ways to eventually improve it. Size Matters is a side project and has ended up becoming a very core part of what I've modded here, which means it was an idea seed I played with but once planted it became a tree or vine very quickly. AKA, I'm trying to get other things done while chipping away at improving it but it can be a demanding little guy on my modding time. Point is, I try to resist putting too much time in to improve some of the more miscellaneous interface issues that might make it a little easier for a player but are nightmares of project concepts for me to engage in. Looks like some of my resistance to that has been your primary complaint. At some point I'll try to smooth some of this stuff over.
To reply directly to your comments:
1. This mod adds quite a lot more unnecessary operation over the game, but did not provide a solution at all. For example, you have to "group" your units to gain a "larger" version of it, but this is done by placing all the units on the same tile, then click "group" then select all the ones that you wanna "group". You can group these units again and again, until you got to a good "level". So a level 3 unit, needs to group 9 more units from the beginning. I have to click each of them from production line, then group/group/group/group, besides, this "group" button sometimes does not appear for the newly placed units, I have to click the "split" then "group". And the amazing news is AI sometimes create a level 4 unit, which makes me almost unable to beat it, a level 4 unit means I have to group all 27 units, imaging how much work I have to do to create it. Did I say you can group only 3 units a time?
As another has stated, you can only merge or split as many times up or down as the era count you're in. Thus it's pretty basic in prehistoric and gets more open ended as the mod goes as to how far you can go with it.
When merging you want to make sure all the units that would merge are not grouped with other units in selection groups. Select the 'lead' unit of the merge (the one that if he has any free promos will be maintained by the merged unit.) Then you'll be prompted to select the next two units to join with.
Yes, this can become some tedium but I've found interesting ways to organize myself to make it not so hard. I'm not entirely sure how one would make this any easier in terms of interface... a group to the maximum potential button? That could really end up causing you to make some serious goofs in your own intentions if you knew there were present units on the tile you DIDN'T want sucked up into that kind of merge storm. But it could be interesting. If I'm trying to build up a massive unit I'm usually merging as I produce them rather than trying to keep track of the count in powers of 3 before merging.
And yeah, it's intended that it gets to a point where you, the player, must determine if you have enough for your needs or not. Mis-judging between being overly built up or under built up is easy and that's the challenge this presents. It makes it very difficult for one singular city to ever keep up with training enough for your needs and in so doing, it makes it so that some of the benefits you may stack there in XP training bonuses MUST be diffused by other units from elsewhere.
The AI will tend to try to send to serious war units that are as merged as the limit allows. And that makes them incredibly dangerous. Defending cities on SM is a whole new ballgame that requires you have some more mobile built up defense forces because it becomes impossible to staff enough in every city to ensure adequate protection.
Yeah, it's supposed to be a new set of tremendous challenges. At the moment, players can be thankfull the AI is quite rudimentary and you can often find ways to undermine them as a result. Just wait til it the AI becomes fully addressed though. Most players here feel C2C, as a whole, is not challenging enough and some have even complained that they have found how to exploit size matters to the point that it's making the game far too easy for them. But once the AI is fully refined for Size Matters, it's going to be a hell of a challenge. PVP would be amazingly deep here.
2. This mod makes the tech advance less useful in combat. When I get tech advance, I can produce knight with 10HP, AI can only produce horserider with 6HP, but I found AI got a lv4 horse rider, which has 12HP, and I bear no chance to beat it at all if I do not group my knight. And, I can not directly produce a lv2 knight, but I have to produce 3 of them, then put them on the same tile, then click the sometime-may-work button "group".
This is true. And intentional. SM was intended to give the swarm of spear chucking natives a better chance over the invaders with gunpowder. Numbers can trump quality but quality can also trump numbers. In size matters, whatever makes a unit strong can almost always be undermined. Tech is not as valuable as it is in the core as it's impact is somewhat diffused, but it can still mean a LOT. It can, as noted, also mean how many times a unit can be merged, thus can have a huge impact on the maximum power. Currently merged units upgrading still maintain the same number of merge shifts upwards as well.
The fact that the merge only sometimes seems to work is because the unit must be capable of merging for it to show up as possible. Units must be uninjured and have not moved to merge. They must not be loaded when they merge. They may not be grouped. There are numerous reasons a unit is not allowed to merge but those are the top reasons to look at if you're getting thrown by an expectation that you should be able to and aren't being allowed to.
3. This made a combat way much more complicated. When I try to kill an enemy axeman, Hp3 axeman vs Hp6 horse rider, no fancy at all. Then AI splitted this axeman, for one turn, my horserider can only kill one, then the other two "minor" axeman became rats running around, then I have to chase and kill all of them. Hopefully, AI is not disgusting enough to slip this axeman again.
lol... that's ultimately the point of the option is to deepen and complicate combat, giving more dimension to it. If THAT, in and of itself, is a complaint that would have you opt against Size Matters, then in your rejection I see a form of a victory. This is one reason I wanted to ask for feedback. This is not an option for everyone, only those who currently feel that the core civ combat engine is far too simplistic and breaks immersion by not allowing for one to get a concept of certain measurements regarding units.
Remember how I said there's a counter for everything? There are some very valuable units in the game that can attack until either they or all opponents in the tile they are attacking are dead. Some in the late game will continue to attack until they have been injured (onslaught ability). This, along with blitz capability, is pretty much your counter to the 'split to scatter the defenses and tie up the attacker by taking advantage of it's attack limit per round' strategy. But it IS a strategy that the option presents and it's nice the AI taught you how that works isn't it? Now that you know you can take advantage of it yourself.
You cannot immediately create very large units. Per era you get one larger group type you can create. And if you want to create really large group types, you can always use ALT-click on the unit type (I think that only works in city view), that means creating this unit type over and over again.
Other than that, there are a few promotions that might interest you - especially the bottleneck promotion is absolutely great against large groups. You get an additional advantage per group size. Of course, there is the opposite promotion available for large groups (swarm), but taking these promotions might make the large (and expensive) group vulnerable against other large groups.
On the other hand, even small group sizes have their uses (other than the bottleneck promotions): For starters, it takes the enemy longer to "mop up", so this can be useful for delaying the enemy, especially if the enemy doesn't have a "blitz" unit (a unit that can attack several times per turn). And in peacetime, you can cover a large area that you can deny to other nations (if you have a "fixed border" civic where you can claim tiles that don't belong to anyone).
oooh... split to gain wide swaths of landclaiming... neat strategy I'd not personally yet envisioned. The option still reveals yet more to even its creator. Thanks for that footnote tmv! I may have to teach the AI that one someday.
The most important thing I think I need to teach the AI at the moment is to identify unusual OP threats they've encountered, produce a unit or group of units that can counter it, then hunt that OP threat down with the specific counters its produced.
Is there any way of distinguishing a merged unit from others when selecting units? (i.e. if there was a merged group of archers on a tile and a unmerged one can I quickly tell them apart?
I have had it in mind lately to see if I can make the number of displayed units reflect the group volume rating. I'll have to look into that. The promos usually give me an indication but they are so small it's hard to count the tines.
I noticed that when I merge three units into one my maintenance cost reduces- is that intentional? Does it make sense? Not sure
The answer you received is correct. It does go down a little compared to all the units being managed and maintained separately due to some efficiency in support chains and management structure with a larger group.
Playing a lot of Hearts of Iron at the moment- it's excellent (III not IV yet) and the whole "combined arms" and creating a division really would be an interesting thing to see in Civ but probably not possible....
I'd like to eventually do hybrid unit types for an option similar to but compatible with size matters that allows you to select 3 types of units and blend them into one hybrid type. Hybrid types would be untrainable but purely the result of mixing unit types in merges. The amount of effort involved in design would be intense but if I can get the graphic art to make a hybrid of existing types easilly enough than it shouldn't be a challenge on that end for development. The challenge would be the raw number of potential hybrid types that would need to be defined.
