[Agrajag]

Reply inside the quote and in bold

HoneyBadger said:
Agrajag, have you made it your mission in life to make my life more difficult?
No, but since I've already "upset" you twice, I promise that the next idea you come up with that I will like, will receive a full and comprehensive response praising each and every part of your idea

You're right, I guess I'd better explain it more thoroughly.

1: it doesn't have to be a totally random process, if you're going for big buff warriors, naturally they're going to be larger, the same generalizations can be made for smaller units, and ofcourse, most units are going to be "average" sized, and estimates of size can lead to exact numbers quite easily. Size levels don't translate into centimeters and kilograms, they're categories as in general, but defined, ranges. Sizes outside the "average"
for a race would be used only in special circumstances, like specific heroes for instance. This is what is meant by "general advice".
A nice explanation of the size system, I'm having trouble seeing how relevant it is, though :X
If the important part of this point is "it doesn't have to be a totally random process", then I think my suggestion of having HP= rnd()*(2*Size) - Size + BaseHP is it pretty nice way.
I suppose that having the range of HPs as you suggest and having it distribute normally with a standard deviation of Size would work as well (forgive me if I got the statistics expressions wrong, I've only learned statistics in Hebrew, and quite a while ago as well)

2: if it's got hp, it's reminiscent of D&D, it's pretty unavoidable, and I've played D&D for long enough to know that it's not really very reminiscent, you're thinking levels, not size categories, and I've put a cap on hp.
Yep, I was thinking of levels

3: mages are already quite powerful, and a simple ruling that mage commanders don't get double hp because with all the magical periphenalia they carry around, and with the stress caused by, and the concentration necessary for, combat magic, it negates the double hp commanders normally get, and solves that problem
Actually, what I'm saying is that it doesn't.
Even at half HP compared to other commanders, mages would still be more reliable, since their HP is almost meaningless
Given the choice between 15-150 HP's of units and 1 mage, I'd choose the mage almost every time. The only time I'd choose the units in this case is as meatshields for my mages.
This means that what you are suggesting will probably require some sort of magic rebalance, or atleast an increase in mages cost.

4: you're right, recruitment/training probably would in many to most circumstances weed out the weak, depending on the specific type of unit (obviously more in ultra-elite units than in province defense militia), which is why you'd want a variety of units in the game to take advantages of different levels of training/quality. This process could be used to explain and increase the usefulness of some otherwise pretty redundant units currently present in the game.
I'm not sure how this point supports your suggestion rather than counter it

5: I'm ok with hp as they are now, and already said so, this is just a little fun project for me, but some controlled randomness (knowing that a specific soldier is going to have between 7 and 9 hp or a dragon within 135-150) can be a good thing because then there's less complaining by people about how weak humans are in the game, because some humans would now be stronger than others, which is more realistic, and would make battles more realistic.
Which is more along the lines of the ammendment I suggested in my post

EDIT: must have gotten a bold mixed up somewhere.