To much of interest to reply to so I'll just doodle along.
I'm like you Carl in seeing game mechanics as attempts to as accurately capture "reality" as possible. I came to gaming through history, and history through gaming, and I have never left.
I found dom1 looking for an historical PBEM and stuck with it. Sure there are many compromises but I would argue much less than Medievil Total War which, for all its flash, is deeply flawed as a representation of feudal society - a topic all to itself. I found Shogun far more convincing on this level.
On the scale question I use a figure scale in my imagining. Most discussion uses the term unit to describe a single warior you recruit. Like you I find the numbers way to small otherwise and I think Pocus has it about right suggesting 100 for a standard unit. Sure there are problems with this but I find concerns over all 100 men having lost their legs far and away secondary to fundamental questions like how many dudes are at the battle. Is this a skirmish or a battle? Damn Games Workshop! Ooops - got off topic.
I do not believe it to be a good idea to try and mod Dom to enable players to get 1000's of units at a battle. To much micormanagement involved. Others, younger and/or more fanatical, may think different but the thought scares me. You need to recruit by regiment to do this.
Could the units thing be done better - hell yes! Try out Chariots for a game that does battles and armies fundamentally well. Far more realistic than the Total War series though not enough units involved - Slitherines next product based in ancient Greece will double the number of units on a table. Slitherine is headed up by one of the worlds top ranked ancients gamers and reflects a deep understanding of warfare (if not the period which is not his speciality). However the games scope is very narrow when compared to Dom.
The key advantage of both TW and Chariots apporoach against Dominons is that you recruit a unit with multiple warriors (at whatever the scale is) rather than one warrior at whatever scale. It just looks better and its alot less fiddly than the dom system of making larger units. I would like a unit in Dom to be a regiment. Sure regiments are not perfect but they are better.
Other than that, and lots of minor gripes, Dominons slaughters the competition - including Chariots, the TW series, etc. It is the best strategy game yet made for those with a love of deep involving and highly challenging games. The added ability to produce your own scenarios and nations (I'm working on Middle Earth) is wunderbar! This game rocks and no I don't work for Illwinter. Hell they just shafted a major chunk of my favourite race designs in the patch and I'm still saying this.
Cheers
Keir
[ January 15, 2004, 08:24: Message edited by: Keir Maxwell ]