I don't understand exactly what you're arguing for or against so I'm not sure how to respond, but I appreciate the excellent well-written summary. Of course Cavalry have been more difficult and expensive to train, use and maintain (except maybe for the Mongols). That's why I suggested that infantry who capture horses shouldn't be upgraded to cavalry, unless there's good reasons for it.
Sorry if I wasn't clear. What I was trying to convey is that the list of 'unit names' I put together from Gedeon's table were not the only 'Units' available, but that the larger the units get, the more specific they tend to get to a given State/Civilization: For instance, a Legion is always a military force of several thousand men, but having a Nubian Legion is just wrong - the unit and its terminology were specific to Rome.
Actually, Exceptions to the difficulty and expense of training will have to be provided for several types of 'natural' fighters. ALL the steppe nomads, including the already-in-game Scythians and of course including the Mongols, were mounted archers primarily, who spent their lives on horseback shooting neighbors or predators trying to steal/eat their cattle. They grew up learning basic 'light cavalry' skills from childhood, all you had to do to make them a military unit was add organization in larger units and discipline. Likewise, many early Civilizations took advantage of 'military skills' that people used as part of their way of life. For one example, wherever you have a sheep resource, you have people watching the sheep and driving away predators with thrown javelins (sometimes from horseback, as in Persia) or slings (as in Greece, Crete, and the Balkans). Which means, in game terms, the number of pastures/sheep resources gives you X number of 'natural' Light Infantry Skirmishers. - No training required, just organization of some kind and discipline so they actually follow orders every once in a while.
For another example applicable much later in the game, Civic and/or Social Policy can give you 'self-trained' combat skills. Rome and Greece both had, from the beginning of the city states, the Social Policy that only those who defended the state could have a say in running it (vote), and the way you defended the State was standing in ranks with a big Hoplon ('dinner plate') shield and a long spear. Consequently, every adult male who could afford a shield and spear (and later, helmet and armor) did so and trained himself (in Greek
Gymnasia, for instance) to use them. Only later did Rome provide formal Training Camps for the sword-fighting legions, while the Greek Phalanx of early Classical times was always composed of, simply, every Citizen of the City-State who could afford the weaponry. This kind of Social Policy Training also applied to medieval knights, Scots Highlanders until the middle of the 18th century, and the Austrian-hired Croat mountaineers who spent their lives fighting Ottoman raiders in the Balkans and so were some of the best light infantry in Europe before anyone was formally training any such thing.
About beauracracy, I believe there was plenty of record keeping in ancient times, particularly when it comes to food production in Egypt and Sumer. The irrigation networks on the banks of the Nile required or at least fostered state management, by scribes. The reason for planning and keeping records on agricultural land was to be able to increade yields and above all to tax landowners and farmers for their produce. This tax of food would be gathered in granaries and redistributed as the ruler saw fit. How much tax (food) you paid would determine your citizenship in some cases. In many CS of Greece and Rome, you were expected to bring a more or less specified set of equipment when the City's militia (e.g. hoplites) was to go to war. If you paid a tax high enough, you'd also be awarded more privileges like being eligible to run for various offices and vote in "Citizen" assemblies.
See above, I completely agree. Also, there is some speculation that record-keeping actually preceded formal 'written language'. That is, at first you wrote down symbols representing Numbers of Things, then had to add a symbol to indicate What the Things were, and so developed 'written words'. Interestingly, while recording Food production and storage would seem the obvious first records kept, many of the surviving records from the Bronze Age are of material wealth stored in the Palaces, particularly of military equipment and weapons - exactly the 'stockpiles' we're talking about for in-game Units!
I'd also think it would be cool to have large armies, but even though units fought in small tactical units, war in the ancient era were usually 2 armies facing off in pitched battles.
If you want to represent say an ancient Greek battleline, you could divide the army into its functional/strategical parts. Having a center, left and right "section" of hoplites. Even though each section is itself divided into tactical units of 200-300 men, you don't need to have them all be hundreds of (in-game Civ 6) units. You could if you wanted to, keep track of the individual sections within each unit.
At the same time you could still separate the units depending on their equipment and/or role: I.e. skirmishers (ranged units), infantry (close-combat, charging, defending), cavalry (disrupting enemy formations, charging exposed flanks/rear, scouting, distracting, skirmishing (chariots, horse archers, javelins etc) and so on.
- And here's the Rub. The Classical Greek city-states just didn't field armies that were all that big. Athens once it set up its Empire (Delian League) was the exception, but, for instance, even the heavily-militarized Sparta fielded only about 10,000 Spartiots and maybe few thousand Youths in Training as skirmishers, and less-than-enthusiastic Helots. That means Larger Units just didn't exist. Phalanx simply meant The Army, however big it was. At Marathon, the 10,000 or so Athenians simply formed up by
Deme - 'tribe', meaning each
Deme was not a military unit, but whatever number of men lived in that Deme and could afford Hoplite weaponry. The Athenian
Strategos - military leaders - fought in the ranks as ordinary Hoplites, which gives you some idea of how little actual 'command and control' they had - Zero once the spearing started.
Unfortunately, this instance is not unique: a lot of the earliest States just weren't big enough or sophisticated enough to field 'Armies' in a modern or even Medieval sense, so Larger Units may have to be, for game purposes, made up or 'borrowed' from another civilization.
If the scale of the map is to be that a tile is representing about 10000 km2, then you'd need to have all units in the same tile.
If you want to represent a battleline with 1-6 UPT you'd need to bunch the smaller sections/companies into units of more personnel.
If you want to accurately represent a battleline of say 12800 hoplites divided into groups of 128 men (wiki info), you'd need about 100 units (in-game).
If you want to spread them out (1UPT) you'd need to reduce the scale of each tile to a width of 10-8m. If you want them all in the same tile you'd need a width of at least 1024 m. Using Gedemon's ludicrous map size 200x100, this would equal an area of 20,000 km2 which is about 15% of the area of Modern Greece (131,957 km2).
The solution if you want to have a low and manageable amount of units but still retain a more or less realistic population/army size/map scale, is to bunch them together into bigger units, imo.
Again, I completely agree, the problem I see is to find out What larger units we can legitimately use, and what to call them for some civilizations in some Eras. It is only a potential problem before the late Renaissance Era: by the 1700s European Armies were all organized into battalions, regiments, brigades, and later divisions and corps, and every other state in the world followed that pattern as soon as they could - or got conquered.
When it comes to recruitment and conscription, in war you don't wait around to get perfect numbers. If you get 112 cavalrymen, instead of 150, you're not gonna leave them behind until they're "full-strength". Although recruitment also depends on the time scale: if a turn represents several years, you'd have time to muster the personnel needed.
In the War of the Spanish Succession (1702 - 1714 CE) a regular French cavalry regiment was 12 companies of 50 men each, which should form 4 squadrons of 150 men each, which was the Basic Tactical Formation on the battlefield. I've personally looked at over a dozen French Orders of Battle from the period, and have yet to find a single instance when a French cavalry regiment fielded more than 3 squadrons. Even if they left winter camp in April/May at full strength, the 'fall out' rate for men and horses and deficiencies in the recruitment of replacements during the winter was always enough to reduce the number of squadrons they could form. Since a squadron had to be at least 40 - 50 horse wide and 2 ranks deep minimum (to have enough effect in a charge) if the number of men in a squadron fell below 80 - 100, you aded another company - or more. By the end of the campaigning season in October/November, many regiments fielded only 1 Squadron, which contained all 12 companies in one 100 - 150 man Tactical Unit.
That, of course, only took place in one campaigning year. Over several years in a single turn, you run into another problem: usable military lifespan. If your Ancient Era turn is 30 - 40 years, then essentially you are recruiting an entirely new unit Every Turn, because most of the men in the unit at the start of the turn will be dead or retired from decrepitude of natural causes by the end of the turn. The working lifespan of a horse is even less than that of a man, so a mounted unit for much of the game will be recruiting an entire new set of horses every 1 - 5 turns, regardless of what the enemy does to them.
About supply lines: Sea routes and river routes should definitely reach much further than land routes. The more coastal cities you or friendly Civ's have, the further your supply lines could reach. The other way to acquire better supply lines is to conquer cities (agricultural land) along the way.
The difference between Water-borne (sea and river) and Land transportation/supply is Huge, and it is Huge from almost the beginning of the game. From wrecks and frescos they've been able to reconstruct a Minoan galley (1500 BCE, or late Ancient Era). It could carry up to 30 tons of cargo at 5 - 10 miles per hour (120 - 200+ miles a day) by sail, with an 8 man crew. A wagon or cart on land could carry 1 ton about 15-20 miles a day, if you had a road, and a caravan of mules, horses, or camels would need 300 - 600 animals and their handlers and carry 30 tons of goods about 20 miles a day - and eat up the equivalent tonnage they were carrying every 10 days or so.
For supply, before the steam engine and railroad, and later the internal combustion engine, the only way to transport Bulk Goods is by water - river or sea. There is no such thing as a useable supply line of Food between cities over land: no amount of carts, wagons or caravans can carry enough to make a difference without the draft animals eating up the equivalent of everything that they are carrying.
There's a reason every Mega-City (100,000 people or more) of other Ancient/Classical world was on a river or the coast or both: Babylon, Rome, Athens (which is walking distance from the coast), Alexandria, Byzantium, and virtually all the cities of India and China and Southeast Asia...