Units, Upgrade tree, Combat, Healing and Equipment

Awesome, maybe you could look through my dataset above and give me numbers for the composition of Alexander's army, i.e. the unit types of Phalangites, Peltasts, etc. Maybe I've missed some unit types that should be in those battles?

I agree that ranged weapons seems to be the norm, especially since the "first" cave painting of battle (12,000-10,000 BC) at Jebel Sahaba shows 2 groups of Archers going at it*. In the Old Kingdom (c.2700) of Egypt they did have wicker shields at least, but before inventing shields, I agree that melee weapons would generally be a last resort.

The Stone age part of this discussion probably fits better in the "Tribe" thread but I'll answer here for the time being. Using 20th century "Stone age" tribes as a proxy for prehistoric hunter-gatherers can be quite misleading.
For example, modern tribes are probably more violent than their historic counterparts, due to them being confounded by the "civilized" peoples, to living in smaller areas with scarcer resources. It is impossible to disregard the fact that they will have had contact with the outside world over time, meaning they will likely have had outside influence when it comes to tech.

*Edit: I mixed up the actual battle site of Jebel Sahaba with the cave painting of archers in Cingle de la Mola (7000-4000 BCE). Jebel Sahaba shows that sharp spearheads or arrowheads were used. But it is not concrete evidence of battles with archers.

 

I saw a paper that concluded that in an area of (I think the middle east?) 10 000 years ago, 1 in 10 bodies found had lethal wounds caused by man-made weapons, which the researchers interpret as either tribal conflict or murder. I think the ancient past was a lot more violent than some people want to believe.

It's very interesting that ancient warfare would have been all short-ranged throwing weapons. When did the transition occur from slings, javelins and rocks to non-throwing spears? Is it related to the introduction of shields or armor?

Also, is Egypt a good analog for the development of shield technology? I know that wood was very scarce in Sumer (grasses and mud were abundant though) so I wonder if the development and spread of shields was hindered by a lack of cheap and durable resources.

 

Excuse my misuse of terms. There's a distinction to be made between pre-historic or Simple hunter/gatherers and more Complex hunter/gatherers as well as tribes who started sedentary agriculture. As I understand it, the archaeological record shows an increase in violence following the agricultural revolution, c.10,000 BC, while you find little evidence of inter-personal violence before that time. I've listened to some talks by the anthropologist Brian Ferguson who has written some books on the subject of prehistoric warfare and he makes some interesting points about this.

You are quite right regarding the smallest historical divisions. The problem is that an army of 40,000 represented by units of 200-300 soldiers each, would require about 200-133 units, which most people's hardware couldn't handle. I guess you could build all the units and then combine them through some sort of Corps mechanic, but it's still going to be a tedious amount of clicking, to merge all those 133 units. Of course, not every unit type should necessarily consist of the same numbers. Chariots and cavalry units should require less personnel due to them not being as numerous as infantry. Smaller numbers for these also makes sense given their mobility and variety of tactical roles: scouting, skirmishing, flanking etc.

I guess one solution could be to remove the requirement of a minimum number of personnel and instead set a maximum personnel size, altered by social policies/military organisation/tech and so on. Basically, if you build a unit of Cavalry and you only have say 40 horses (or 40 trained riders/personnel) then your unit will appear with a low health (due to being only 40 riders). Thus you could field an army of many small (low-personnel) units, but they would of course suffer reduced strength/health due to this. A under-strength unit recruited could be replenished like other units, whenever resources/personnel become available and supply lines are active.

Another solution would be to do something like dunkleosteus suggests. An automatic grouping/combination of units that move into the same tile. It could be one unit, combining the data of the various units (archers, cavalry, spearmen) on the tile. This automatic combination could possibly take the form of a temporary unit, whose stats are dependent on the units in that tile, offering bonuses with regards to composition/social policies/tactics. Whenever a unit moves in/out of the tile, or a unit is destroyed/disbanded, the temporary "combined" unit would alter its stats accordingly. This solution doesn't really solve the problem of having to move big stacks of many units, but I guess it could be used for combat resolution.

A third solution would be to more or less tie the number of personnel in units directly to a certain percentage of the producing city's/Civ's population, meaning that the number of units on the map would remain the same even as population increases. But the personnel in each unit could vary a lot. For this to work, you'd really need to remove the minimum personnel requirements for producing units (as mentioned above). Otherwise you could theoretically end up in situations where you can't produce units at all, because your personnel requirements would be increasing faster than your personnel supply, due to population growth.

 

I like the idea of the number representing a maximum, rather than a minimum.

As for using temporary grouped units, I wanted this to represent mobility. When two armies engage, size should be important. If units all occupy different tiles, a number advantage means little during combat resolution. Any advantage gained by expanding your frontline would be lost if you only fought in equally sized subdivisions of your army. However, I don't think this should be irreversible, as it is in Civ 6. You should be able to amalgamate individual units and then separate them later.

It would also be interesting if units could be transferred to adjacent "armies" with little movement penalty. This might be hard for the AI, but it would allow players to optimize their army composition based on the danger posed by another army or other action they plan to take.

If units can be generated with less health, that raises the question of how units are formed: instead of spending a number of turns to build units, what if units would spawn instantly at very little health and then increase in health over the build period until they are at the maximum allowed?

 

How do we handle sizes for specific units? Elephants have been used a few times in history but always in very, very small numbers (40-50?)

Wikipedia isn't a great source, but from the page Chariot Tactics, "Slingers and javeliners, who could counterattack and protect the other troops, had no armor protection or shield discipline. They were skirmishers, keeping out of enemy range. But the moving chariots showering them with arrows were difficult to hit so they were rendered helpless against these."

It seems interesting if chariots are a hard early-game counter to ranged units. I know historically chariots were very thoroughly used but in Civ, I rarely see a reason to build them. Partly this is because horseman are easy enough to get and partly because they feel very weak.

"Chariots, carts and wagons still had the disadvantage of using more than one horse per transported soldier. Riders achieved supremacy through greater manoeuvreability than chariots in the 1st millennium BCE, as soon as the domesticated horse had been bred large enough to carry an armed man."

If ranged units and infantry are in the same tile, would it be possible for a chariot to actively target the weaker ranged unit due to increased maneuverability?

 

Okay, the Quick and Dirty Guide to the Macedonian Army:
The army consisted of two basic parts: native Macedonians/traditional Allies and Everybody Else. By the time Alexander invaded Persia, Everybody Else included Cretan archers, Thracian infantry and cavalry, and Greek infantry.
The Macedonian Core consisted of:
Infantry:
1. Pezhetairoi ("Foot Companions") - the pike Phalanx, originally in 6 regional Taxeis of about 1600 men each. These were all at Gaugamela, but by then had been reinforced to just short of 2000 men each.
2. Hypaspists ("Shield Bearers") - armed with shorter spears and larger shields than the phalanx, to operate as a faster-moving, looser 'link'
between the phalanx and the heavy cavalry, organized into 3 Chiliarchia of 1000 men each.
3. "Light" Infantry: a combination of Macedonian and 'foreign':
2 500 man units of archers, at Gaugamela one is called "Macedonian" and one "Cretan"
1000 Agrianes - from a tribe neighboring and allied to Macedon, considered 'elite light' - javelin-armed infantry for skirmishing and annoying the enemy.
Cavalry:
1. Hetairoi ("The Companions") - the heavy cavalry, in 7 ilia, or squadrons, of 210 men each and 1 Agema ("Spearhead") squadron of 300 men. These all fought in a wedge formation with armor, machete-like slashing swords and heavy lances - which were thrust, not couched like the Medieval knights.
2. Thessalians - Allied heavy cavalry in 10 200-man ilia, who fought in diamond-shaped formations which allowed them to quickly shift from forward to lateral movement, charge or skirmish. They were armored like the Hetairoi, but seem to have used javelins and swords, not lances.
3. Prodromoi ("Those who go ahead") light cavalry, but also called Sarissaphorai - Lancers. 600 in 3 200 man ilia. They regularly got the better of enemy light cavalry armed with javelins or bows, because they were willing to charge in, giving their enemies only seconds to shoot before being skewered.
The Allied Troops, by the time of Gaugamela:
Greek Infantry - mostly 'Hoplites', but not the heavily-armored early-Classical type: they carried a longer heavy oval shield called a Theuros ("Door") and little or no body armor. Still fought with heavy spears in close formation, though. There were at least 6000 of them at Gaugamela
Thracian Infantry - mostly Peltasts ("Targets" - from the smaller, more mobile shields they carried compared to Hoplites), at Gaugamela about 9000 of them, armed with a combination of long spears and javelins.
Illyrian/Thracian Cavalry - there were about 2000 of these, all light unarmored javelin-armored, in 2 Chiliarchia of 1000 each.

Don't forget that after Gaugamela Alexander's Army changed dramatically: he got Macedonian reinforcements that allowed him to form 7 2000-man Taxeis of the phalanx, hired or recruited 2 - 4000 Scythian horse archers and Steppe/Afghan javelin-armed light cavalry, and eventually before his death recruited enough Persians into the Companion Cavalry to form 8 500-man Hipparchia - more than doubling the size of the Hetairoi. In India he also incorporated at least 10,000 local troops, including elephants and chariots - but never used either pachyderms or chariots in battle himself.

This is particularly true of the Yanamano of South America, who were (when I was in school) considered the absolute 'Prototype' of the viciously warlike 'stone age' tribe. Only later did more careful study discover that they were, by the 20th century when 'discovered', actually the remnant of an agricultural community driven into the jungle and decimated by European colonists 3 centuries earlier and so not typical of any 'natural' stone age culture at all.
More careful studies of the hunter-gatherer groups of New Guinea show that while pitched bloody battles are almost nonexistent, because no one can afford to lose lots of prime hunters all at once, ANY non-tribesman straying into your territory without permission is a Target - anthropologists and such had to be 'escorted' from tribal area to tribal area to avoid being slaughtered out of hand by mistake for straying into the wrong territory. The 'gathered/hunted' food resources are jealously guarded against all comers.

 

Shields are early. In fact, there is an illustration from Pre-Dynastic Egypt showing a 'warrior' carrying a large oval shield of animal hide stretched over a frame (wicker?) and carrying a long stone-tipped spear. While we can't say which came first (melee weapon or spear) it's pretty certain that very, very early they were being used together. Other weapons shown in the same Very Early Egyptian context, by the way, are maces, flint knives, throwing sticks, and stave bows with what appear to be reed arrows (so, pretty weak archery early on).
By late Old and Middle Kingdom Egypt there are depictions of spearmen with large semi-rectangular shields made of wood covered with stretched hide, and miniatures found in Asyut show similar figures marching in formation, so we can assume that drill and formation, for at least the close-combat spearmen, had been developed by then.
The earliest spearmen shown in Sumer and Akkad that I am aware of (2600 BCE or so), coupled with spear-points found in excavations from the period, indicate large square shields covering a man from foot to jaw, carried by one man with both hands while his companion uses a long 'semi-pike' spear in both hands that has a a cast bronze spearpoint - this indicates both close drill to keep the 'pairs' of shieldman-spearman together and some organization of the 'spear/pike phalanx' to make it maneuverable.

Leather or animal hide shields make very good protection, and show up in groups dedicated to close combat, like the Zulus, Mycenean Greeks, and Dark Age Britons. In fact, Bison-hide shields carried by the Native American plains tribes were, according to the testimony of several US Army officers' memoirs, bullet-proof - but then, the chest hide of the Bison is almost 25 mm thick! Layered ordinary cattle hide or leather was also used frequently up through Dark Age Europe, and may have been used earlier, during Ancient/Classical Eras and in places where, unfortunately, depictions don't show the layers and actual examples don't survive to be studied.

 

Indian, Burman, Khmer and other southeast Asian armies from at least Classical to Medieval times used elephants in huge numbers. In the better-known West, here are some of the numbers and battles I have for Elephant Participation:

Hydaspes 326 BCE (Porus versus Alexander) 85 - 200 elephants with Porus, all killed in the battle (with considerable difficulty)
Pisidia 320 BCE (Antigonos the One-Eyed versus Alketas ) Antigonos fielded about 70 elephants, and won
Paraitakene 317 BCE (Eumenes versus Antigonos) Eumenes had 125 elephants straight from India, Antigonos had 64 elephants. Battle was a draw (Antigonos claimed the battlefield, but lost more men)
Gabiene 316 BCE (Eumenes versus Antigonos again, with practically the same armies) Eurmenes had 114 elephants, Antigonos 65. Antigonos won.
Gaza 312 BCE (Ptolemy I versus Demetrios) Demetrios had 43 elephants, but Ptolemy had prepared metal, spiked 'elephant traps' and won.
Ipsos 301 BCE (Antigonos versus a coalition of Seleucis and Lysimachus) Antigonos had 75 elephants, the Coalition 400(!). The Coalition used the long line of elephants to keep the enemy cavalry from getting back onto the battlefield after a rash pursuit, while they smashed the enemy infantry and killed Antigonos.
Heraclea 280 BCE (Pyrrhos of Epeiros versus the Roman Publius V. Laevinus) Pyrrhos had 20 elephants, whose charge broke the Roman cavalry and brought a hard victory.
Asculum 279 BCE (Pyrrhos versus the Roman Publius Dentus Mus) Pyrrhos had 19 elephants, the Romans brought 300 special 'anti-elephant wagons' with spiked beams and flame weapons. The wagons were shot to pieces by light infantry and the elephants broke through the Roman line and forced them to retreat.
Beneventum 275 BCE (Pyrrhos versus the Roman Manius Curius). After tough fighting, the Romans charged the elephants with incendiary javelins, panicked them, and drove them back through Pyrrhos' infantry, which was routed.
The "Elephant Victory" 273 BCE (Antiochos I versus the Galatians) Antiochos had 16 elephants. The Galatians with scythed and light chariots and cavalry, none of whom were used to elephants. At the first sight of advancing elephants, the chariot horses bolted back through their own infantry, trampling or scything them down, followed by the elephants' trampling. It was a rout.

- and we haven't even gotten to the Carthaginians or Hannibal's Alpine Elephants yet... Bottom line, elephants were used a lot and very effectively, in numbers from a handful to hundreds, even by people like the Successor (Diadochi) states of Asia Minor that had to import them from North Africa or India at great expense and effort.

That depends on the chariots being used. Against Egyptian-type light archery chariots, light troops were slower and could be shot to pieces without being able to effectively run or dodge. Against heavier (Civ VI-type) melee chariots (Hittite, Chinese) light troops with javelins had very little trouble - at Gaugamela Alexander's Agrianes javelinmen massacred 100 scythed chariots by simply throwing a javelin through one of the chariot horses, stopping the vehicle, and then hauling the charioteer out of the chariot and chopping him to bits. (The Agrianes were Headhunting trophy collectors- it makes a pretty grisly picture)

Rock-Paper-Scissors Time in the ancient Near East: archery chariots were extremely effective against light troops, could wear down close-packed spearmen, but dared not charge or get too close. Heavy melee chariots, even with scythes, were only effective against close-packed spearmen if they got unpacked or tried to retreat - then the spearmen got out to pieces, literally.
ALL Chariots were horribly vulnerable to cavalry of any kind. The individual on a horse was as fast or faster than the chariot, not completely limited to flat open ground, and more maneuverable. Once a horseman with a javelin, bow, sword or spear was behind the chariot, it stopped being a battle and became a massacre of unprotected charioteers.

Actually, the Egyptian archery chariots had two horses and two men - an archer and a driver. The heavy Hittite melee chariots actually put up to three men in a 2-horse chariot, and even put (sometimes) scale or fabric armor on the horses (they must have been a LOT slower than their Egyptian enemies!). Later, in Classical times, when chariots could have up to 4 horses, is when you get less 'efficiency' with only 1 - 3 men per chariot. But by then, as occurred at Gaugamela, any chariot on the battlefield was pretty much only a target.

And yes, in their heyday, chariots were very effective against lighter troops in the open, but, one assumes that the missile troops would take cover behind/among the spearmen for protection against the chariot archery or charge. We know of several occasions when, faced by encircling masses of chariots or cavalry, spearmen formed a 'square' bristling with spears on all sides, and later during better-documented Medieval and Renaissance battles - even up to the Napoleonic Wars - light troops took refuge in Heavy Infantry squares or formations.
In other words, and as usual in military history, you need a combination of Archery Chariots, Melee Chariots, Shooting light infantry, and Heavy Infantry to win against al comers - a single troop-type, no matter how good, won't always cut it. Rock-Paper-Scissors-Machinegun-Napalm.

 

Thank you, I'm sure that we can find uses for it. The data could be useful when it comes to deciding the size of armies (personnel, number of units), calculating combat results, balancing of game effects, strength and cost of units, production time etc.

I agree that a permanent combination of different unit types (Army A, B, C) would take a great deal of flavour out of the game. Of course the scale of the world map is a deciding factor, if the tiles represent less area then spreading our units makes more sense.

Does the A.I. (except barbs) actively suicide attack with their wounded units? If so I hope they fix that in a patch soon, or that it could be amended once we get DLL access.

One solution (that makes sense in my head) is that you could remove the personnel requirement for all or just some simple/basic/light/standard units. Instead the personnel needed can be withdrawn directly from the City's population. The downside would be that these soldiers would lack training, and thus promotions/military organisation etc.

I think the best way is to instead treat personnel as a valuable resource of "trained soldiers". So the city that is producing the unit will use its supply of personnel first and foremost. But when supply runs out, there's only raw recruits to come by, meaning that a unit could be made up out of both experienced/drilled personnel, and peasants/raw recruits

A Civ that wants a professional army can't recruit too many units in a row (without Encampment and training buildings) and so they have to keep an eye on their supply.
But a Civ (or A.I) that wants a large army can just recruit without paying attention to their supply, but the Civ will quickly end up with units that have >50% recruits, who will be easily defeated by skilled counterparts.

2-4 values added to each unit representing the numbers of trained/experienced soldiers would be needed to keep track of this. I will call these personnel Veterans for simplicity's sake.

The untrained, raw recruits would gain experience and be converted into veterans (and thereby increase their combat effectiveness), if they either 1. Fight in battles or
2. Slowly get trained/drilled by other soldiers in the same unit.

The more time that passes, the more the share of veterans would increase. And the more of these you get, the faster they will train the remaining unskilled/untrained soldiers. So a unit with 70% veterans will quickly reach 100%, compared to a unit of of 5% veterans, in which the training will take an exponentially longer time.

Veterans (trained using personnel) will increase the units strength (promotion buff?), keep morale and discipline higher, meaning that they won't break (retreat) or give up as easily (being captured alive).

If it will be possible to recruit units directly from population, then you could require upper class/nobles to recruit heavy cavalry. For the medieval era at least, the amount of trained personnel supplied would depend partly on the amount of castles you have (vassals) and so the personnel could be generated from population in the tile of the castle improvement.

 

Larger units existed, obviously, ever since the Ancient Era. The problem is, especially in the Ancient Era, that almost all the terminology used for them is specific to individual states or cultures. Reason was simple: most early 'civilizations' couldn't field hat many warriors all in one place. As mentioned, one of the Sumer-era city states had an 'army' that totaled less than 700 men. What kept a few larger states (Sumer, Babylon, Egypt) from dominating the World, as opposed to merely their neighbors, was the sheer impossibility of projecting their fighting power any distance. Not only do supples have to be stored and carried to where the troops are, they have to be gathered, counted, organized, and all the apparatus to store and carry them and distribute them to the troops has to be organized, led, and maintained. All this is very difficult when you have no apparatus to train administrators - and in fact the words and concepts of 'bureaucracy' and 'record-keeping' are still brand new. Even late, in the Classical Era, the Army of Athens was 10,000 men at Marathon, and Marathon was about as far as they could get without needing more 'supply' organization than they had. Later, the 'Imperial' Athenian military with the largest fleet in the eastern Mediterranean and the resources of several other tributary city-states could still only 'project' an army as far as Syracuse in Sicily, and then only barely and with a result that was thoroughly disastrous. The larger Persian Empire only got an army into Greece by organizing every ship from Asia Minor to Egypt to supply it AND intimidating all the city-states of northern Greece to help - and the whole expedition also ended in disaster at Salamis and Plataea. Attempts to project Persian Power into the steppes of southern Asia or India were either one-shot Expeditionary Forces or never even attempted.
I suggest that larger 'units' or Formations, with a few exceptions (China, Rome) will have to use 'generic' titles for much of the early game.

Definitely units will not all be the same size. Almost universally, mounted units of either cavalry or chariots were smaller than infantry units, because each mounted unit was far more expensive to raise, maintain and supply: horses on average eat 5 - 10 times more each day than people do, by weight, and if you expect them to be useful, they have to be trained and cared for over a fairly long time when they are not fighting.
There is also a near-universal Truth: to actually be able to maneuver cavalry effectively, the largest single unit that maneuvers together in formation all the time cannot be larger than 150 - 200 men. A line of horsemen longer than about 50 - 75 horses takes a lot of training together to be able to wheel, turn, or advance without becoming a confused Herd. Larger units either dispense with formations completely (steppe nomad horse archers, for instance) of require Years of peacetime training (and expense) to be effective. In Europe, between 1675 and 1750 there was not one cavalry unit in any army other than Sweden that could charge more than 100 meters faster than a trot without disorganizing itself until Friedrich II of Prussia insisted that his cavalry train in peacetime to charge in an orderly line for greatest impact, for at least 1000 meters ending at a full run to contact. That also means, once that sort of thing is standard, that there is no such thing as 'Conscript Cavalry' - quickly raised horsemen and horses are completely worthless as a military unit util they have trained long and extensively as a group.

These suggestions, unfortunately, lead to 'generic' masses of varied troops which simply does not match the reality of an 'Civilized' Army. Everybody back to early Dynastic Egypt (Sidebar: papyrus lasts Forever in a dry, dark environment, so they have recovered literally thousands of pages of ancient Egyptian documents buried under the Sahara sands. Consequently, we know a Lot about really old Egyptian administration, including military units and organizations) troops (including conscripts recruited by Nome, or County in Old Kingdom Egypt) were formed into units which had an 'authorized' strength in men and weapons. The variations come when men and weapons are short, or men fall sick, get shot, wander back home, etc. but there is almost always a Standard Unit Size on the books somewhere, composed of X numbers of smaller units.

Sigh. I will start compiling a list of Larger Units by Civilization, starting with the Civs in Civ VI now. And yes, I have (probably - Kongo is the only one I'm not sure of) the information - within 10 feet of this computer I have over 2000 books on military history in 7 languages, and a great many of them touch on Military Organization going back to 3000 BCE.

This will take a while...

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

 

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.

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!

- 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.

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.

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.

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...

 

Will it be possible to rearrange my military by transferring personnel and materiel between units?
Say I have a damaged Pikemen unit and an old fully-operational Warrior unit - I may wish to move as much of the personnel and materiel as possible from the Warrior to the Pikeman.
Sure it is not a shortcut for producing advanced units - you still need to produce the unit itself in your cities and Encampments, and then rearrange it as much as you wish.

Thinking about it, it kind of makes a separation between creating units and creating soldiers.
Opening a path to a larger concept - your military as an organisation.
You may technically produce units with zero personnel and materiel, and each time gain those either from cities or from other units, so that the process of production only means creating another organisational unit in your military.
The total number of enlisted soldiers (in all units) will be written somewhere above as a resource, and you may make huge multi-unit transactions in one click (of course may take time to come into effect).
It may require, however, creating another screen (military organisation screen, which, in turn, opens my mind in to other various new ideas).
I'm sailing with thoughts, you may take whichever you find best and reshape them.

In case I went too far with the 2nd paragraph here, than back to the first one and the original idea -
If such a mechanism is implemented, of allowing units to transfer their resources, it may be a possible replacement for the upgrade method. Instead of upgrading with a flick of Gold (which isn't logical according to this mod's philosophy anyway), you'll have to produce at least the new unit's basics in the Encampment, and then fill it with the required personnel and materiel from neighbouring units (or cities, and neighbourhoods). This way, a producing of "empty" units may be much quicker (and less consuming), and will allow you to completely remove the current "magical" Gold based upgrade system

*First time reading and posting here, I'm not quite sure if this is the place for suggestions. If not, I'd be glad if you inform me where it is.
**Have never tried this mod, only read about it in this subforum, so some of my ideas may be actually irrelevant / already existing. Hope it's fine though

 

What you're looking for is pretty much implemented. Units automatically upgrade as they capture or get resupplied with better equipment. Excessive equipment is transferred to your cities (if you're within supply range), and can thereafter be used for recruitment etc.

Of course you could also add the feature of resupplying equipment/personnel/materiel between units (e.g. Baggage train unit), but that would add even more code (which is dragging down performance atm). Having an automatic system is required to get the A.I. to work with it.

 

Sorry, I didn't notice the developments posted after page 1 on the development thread, I though of it as a feature thread..
And I also played the earlier of the two downloads available, so I'm probably missing a lot still.