Wishlist: Dom 4 troop plans - an idea

[zlefin]

as part of my ongoing planning of Dom IV, which may not ever come but is fun to plan for anyways, i've thought of something to help with troop balance. This is not for early game vs late gmae, but for all those low-end troops which tend to be very weak.
make troops cost Population, and make a lower gold cost for low end troops. So militia can be quickly armed at low cost by levies, but it has a population draining effect, while it needn't be too big an effect, it certainly matters if you hire lots of cheap troops, but it would allow them to be gold-effective to hire (at least in the shotr-term, long term income issues would be different)
Thoughts?
Zlefin

[Darkwind]

What about, say, R'lyeh's lobo guards and illithids? You can build tons of them, but they're not taken from the taxed and working population. I'm not sure it would work--plus, the number of militia you could levy would still be limited by your resources. I think it's really only thematic for militia, the other units are generally monsters, mages or soldiers.

[Fate]

In addition there is not currently a logical troops/population ratio. 1000 population is in no way comparable to 1000 soldiers (not mention how a province is 50 or, I believe, 0 population can have as much as 125 PD).

[Gandalf Parker]

It doesnt have to apply to all the nations. It can be a balancing feature for some over others. I could see it being useful to the game as a pro/con for some nations.

In a way, isnt that already in the game for some?
Its a version of Ermors turning population into undead. Or Mictlans gathering slave troops.

[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.