[PhilD]

Originally posted by Wauthan:
Good idea Pocus. It's all about whom chooses the field of battle. Surely an C'Tis general would try to corner his oppponents in a murky swamp since his units got the edge. Then again undead would be even more scary since they would be immune to any fatigue increase. A further possibility for LI is to increase the size of the unit one step, to reflect an open formation. It's a bit of work but plausible enough for a mod. Might be a tad bit hard to figure out just what a "light" unit is considering the fantasy element though.

This looks like a good idea at first, and easily implemented (you have to catch all "light" units in the game and mod each one, but you can start small and see how it goes), but in fact it has a problem, because size is used for many things in the game.

One of them is supply usage. If you make LI Size 4 (which will in itself ensure that they deploy one per size 6 square) instead of Size 2 (the normal Human size, which results in tight formations of 3 per square), they will start eating 3 supplies each, which means, 3 times as much as they do now. If anything, HI should "eat" more, not less, than LI (to reflect additional supply usage, as well as the increased need for food for heavily armed/armored men and their abstract supply bearers).

Also, I believe size has an effect on arrow fire - as in, the battle engine decides which square an arrow hits, then which "sixth of a square" actually gets the arrow (this may be wrong, though). If this is the case, a single Size 4 unit would have as much probability of getting hit as 2 Size 2 units in the same square, effectively making a loose formation of LI an arrow magnet (they'd cover 3 times as much ground, with a 66% filling rate, which would mean stray arrows would hit more I believe).

In fact, this Last point might be avoidable by increasing the size to 4, but giving them a 50% Air Shield (if I understand the effect of Air Shield correctly, as in, it means 50% of missiles are lost on the unit). Is that possible? And can one change supply usage? [I just had a look at the "modding.pdf" document, and didn't find commands to give an air shield to a unit, or to change its supply usage]