Please! No more stupid army mechanics
A small update:
In recent patches, the developers decided to make regular troops simply 5-10 times stronger and adjusted the number of militia with the minimum_levy_size parameter. I must admit, this is brilliant (not).
Now for the update:
I tried to somehow balance it so that the frontline would be preserved with the current changes and wouldn’t affect the balance. Currently, the militia should be slightly stronger than in the original version, but this is taking into account the important requirement that your regular troop corps be fully staffed. This means that while a small detachment is enough to defeat an enemy in vanilla, with this mod enabled, you’ll need more troops to do so—to better staff your frontline.
I really hope there won’t be any more "patches" like this, because it was truly torture.
I’d like to point out that there are several army mechanics in the game that are quite surreal.
For example:
Units of regular troops with 100 or 200 men have a front width of 1, exactly the same as 1000 militia. If the front limit is, say, 3, this means that 300–600 regulars will be fighting against 3000 militia. This is a very strange mechanic that turns regular troops into trash in the early eras.
The higher the “throughput” of a region in terms of food, the less food your troops consume. Conversely, if your army significantly exceeds the region’s supply limit, they start consuming more food, with no apparent cap. You can see modifiers of up to +1500% food consumption, which effectively means your units start eating 15 times more. (???)
Upkeep is paid from market resources and, apparently, if there are none, soldiers start to desert. I couldn’t fully test this, but everything points to it. In addition, it’s possible that the local market of the region where the fighting takes place is used. This is rather absurd. Even if the troops need weapons, they would always have spoils of war after battles, and if there are no battles, then maintenance should be minimal.
For now, these are all the mechanics that this mod COMPLETELY removes.
The most important thing you should know is that front width is now calculated from the number of troops. If a unit has 200 men, its front width will be 0.2; if it has 400, it will be 0.4. This matches militia one-to-one in terms of how many men they have and how much front width they occupy. I also added a modifier to morale damage, because after the mechanical changes units tended to fight to the death. I’ve brought this back roughly to the original level.
You will notice, just as I did, that battles have become much more logical and realistic.
PS: Also fixed “submersibility” in ships and optimized food consumption by the militia.
Version with all maintenance: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3608231108&searchtext=No+more+stupid+army+mechanics
