I realize everyone loves new units. I for one am a complete sucker for graphical enhancements.
Considering certain units, however, why is it so important to make additional units when historically they represented such a SMALL force to begin with. Like Navy Seals for example.
because the only way to introduce different grahics (that I am aware of) is introducing new units.
Lets use the Romans for a second. The Legions were fairly huge amounts of men. So that would be the base. The "wings" or Alae, were composed of mixed units depending on the enemy they were to fight.
On MOST occasions the Alae were Auxillia of various types, but there were Alae of Horsemen as well.
Since the scale of Civ is so large, why aren't these additions given to the Legions as promotions of various sorts instead of using a whole unit.
I mean, if you wanted to build a unit of horsemen you could, but at a prohibitive cost. While a promotion would be less effective but far more realistic and less costly.
This method could be used in ANY era where a single troop type dominates.
Thinking along the lines of Hearts of Iron and the Brigade attachments kinda thing.
Whatcha think about that?
You cannot do mixed units (e.g. 2 legionaires + 1 horseman) based on promotions, so not matter what promotions you used, they would always remain 3 legionaries. Other than that, you could come up with additional promotions (not sure how flexible the promotion system actually is, i.e. what is possible and what is not).
I also do not consider one 'unit' to be a whole army / regiment, I usually move stacks around, sometimes on several nearby fields, sometimes on just one or two. I consider this aggregation of units to be the army, so depending on which units you built, your army could consist of many footmen and a few horsemen or the opposite. This isn't only a matter of promotions to me.
imo your promotion approach to this would achieve the same thing you currently get from creating armies out of many different unit types. The difference being that a) this is not reflected in the graphics b) as you said, the promotion approach would / should create units which are in some way superior to its original type (just as is true with the current promotions) but in many ways inferior to the 'real' unit .
So to me it boils down to 'simply' being an additional set of promotions with new effects. Personally I do not want to deviate too far from regular civ, so graphics are fine and everything else is only added reluctantly / carefully (and most of all, optionally). Promotions certainly fall into the latter part, it would probably also be difficult to find the right balance so the new promotions are neither inferior nor superior to the regular ones.
I am open to suggestions (assuming they can be unplugged, I haven't looked into promotions yet). What do others think of this idea ?