Wishlist: Dom 4 troop plans - an idea

[Agema]

Mm, some nations tend to have large armies of relatively weak and short-lived units, whereas others smaller armies of longer lived units. The former could be quite badly hurt by this unless it is selectively applied because of long-term income damage. It might also make death scales very risky for them, and make growth scales more important.

Furthermore, with reduced gold cost, even if population is reduced (and thus income damaged long term) potentially those nations could become rush nations because they can get hold of so many troops so quickly. Quantity can overcome just as quality can. I'd agree with Gandalf Parker that it would be best implemented on some nations as a balance for the player to consider.

That said, I doubt I've ever had more than 1000 recruited units alive during any one turn in any game I've ever played (although I've not played a chaff-high nation that has survived to endgame like maenad-spawning Pangaea), and probably no more than 5000 in the course of my nation's lifespan. When you consider a capital has a start population of about 30,000, I don't know that troop recruitment will affect that much anyway.

[JimMorrison]

I think, regardless of the specifics, it comes down to a whole lot of bother, with no effective way to get it to actually increase "realism".

Troops from population worked decently in Total War, for example, because growth rates were arbitrarily large, looking at it from the perspective that most people didn't live in the city/castle, so as you increase quality of life, random peasants crawl out of the woodwork and move to the population center. Here it is assumed that the "pop" is just a wholly arbitrary representation of the total productive workforce of the population - and since most cultures never recruited from the industrial/commercial base, but rather used either nobles (who don't "work", in the traditional sense), or the downtrodden underclasses (who are under or unemployed), then the whole thing becomes a bit silly.

In other words, in order for this to operate meaningfully, different cultural models must interact with the population differently, and a system needs to be put into place to account for more realistic representations of populations (as well as the size of the army). Considering that large armies in ancient times could consist of 100,000+ men, yet the largest armies in Dom3 typically peak out at about 1000 men, a 100:1 scale seems useful, in which case the listed population figures should probably be increased about 30fold.