A Thought or two on this topic...
First off let me say that my overall view of games very nicely syncs with the originator of this topic hehe I also really look for the "realism" underlying the fantasy of a game.
That said I think the major reason that the ancients fielded such immense armies and the more modern such smaller ones (before industrialization) is simply that as time passed better and better armaments were developed requiring geater resources and time to manufacture leading to fewer full time soldiers. (note that in medieval armies quite often more than 60% of the force are milities (peasants with farm implements mostly) with a large but almost completely ineffective force of archers (no training worth mentioning and garbage for equipment) so all total maybe 30% of the whole force were effective fighting forces hehe. but that 30% were probably more effective than 100x thier number of the ancient types.
I think DOM 2 represents that fairly well in some ways... for example a nice ulm plate wearing infantry is 28 gold 24 resources but a peasant with a bow and some rags on is 7 gold 3 resources hehe... now you can recruit 4x as many of those archers as the infantry but I'd put my money on the infantry in a fight every time
**EDIT** that, of course, is barring magic
[ January 15, 2004, 17:05: Message edited by: DimmurWyrd ]