Population and army sizes

I'm confused, and have been for a while, about population levels in Elemental and army sizes. Ever since the game was announced, up until relatively recently, we were told that we would see battles in Elemental between armies numbering in the thousands each. I've never seen a developer in the forums say otherwise, but everything we have about the game, as well as some statements by devs, make it seem like that is no longer even remotely the case.

First, based on the currently populations we see in our cities, such large armies wouldn't be possible without absolutely huge numbers of cities. Second, maintenance costs are prohibitively high, so that I can't imagine the cost to fielding an army of 1,000 troops. Maybe on a large map someone could amass an army of 1,000 basic peasants, but I remain unconvinced that even that would be practical or even possible. Third, Brad has mentioned that the max number of individual soldiers per group will be 20 and that the maximum number of groups per army will be 10. Depending on how the sovereign, champions and other special units are factored in that gives a maximum army size of up to 200 individual soldiers; less, it seems, if you want to include special units (sov, champions, dragons, etc).

And while I'm at it, I haven't heard a thing about -or seen any evidence so far of - many-sided battles, not for months.

Is there any chance at all that we could get some confirmation of what we should expect in these areas? I know for sure that I'm not the only one who fell in love with the idea huge armies (and therefore populations) and Battle of the Five Armies-like experiences, and I would like to know where to set my expectations. If these features have been thrown out, then I think the longer we have to get over the loss the more we can enjoy the actual game once it's released.

If huge armies are out, then how can you get across the sheer magnitude of a Dragon's power if the opposition can't even field massive numbers to try to swarm it to death, without reducing Dragons to just really strong? If I have 190 units and a dragon, how could anyone else counter that unless with their own 190 units and a dragon (or comparable super-being)? Seems like it would just lead to Stack of Doom mark II...

Please, give us some idea of what we should expect!

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Frogboy said in the new dev journal for beta 3 that they decided the max unit size (for now) would be 20 solders. With the cap of 10 units in an army that leads to 200 on 200 max battles.

edit: Link

https://forums.stardock.com/385885/page/9/#2668073

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Yes, that's what I said in my original post. But he said the max of 10 units per army somewhere else. After the devs spent months telling us about the massive tactical battles, I'm reticent to read too far into tidbits of information provided in various different places. These tidbits combined with silence about those features make it sound like they've been tossed out, but after spending so long building up excitement about them I feel like, if they are going to get rid of them, they could at least tell us straight up

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I'm a real blegh on the current implications for warfare and empire building. Small piddling armies, small piddling empires.

Without vast armies, you really can't do proper combat. It takes one abstraction piled on another to mimic simple concepts like casualties reducing morale. If you don't do morale, you can't do big battles either. They just take too damn long without a routing mechanism. No good formation system either. You need both numbers and a real morale system to have good formation use. Ranged units will suck too, they can't just be dps without borking the balance. The biggest impact was always psychological, having the sky go black right before a third of the unit gets cut down as it's taking a charge. If you can't do it, they're either too weak to use in small armies, or too strong to use anything but them in large ones. You always end up with a pivot point where they become numerically unassailable. Either that or you design a bunch of homo counters to rps the game to shit and make thinking irrelevant to begin with.

These irritating building setups aren't helping the mood either. Why can you build one of a particular building? Because someone designs it that way. No specialization, no customization, no options at all. Its monotony. Pop down house after house, and then watch your empire of nondescript cities of blah pop out ten man armies. It's the opposite of open, a horrific, rigid system. Maybe it would look better with tactical combat in, but even a perfect combat system wont make the build setup look anything but fagtastic.

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Calm down guys. Its still in beta, anything and everything can change drastically at this point. The beta is not even suppose to be fun yet.

Wait until the tactical combat is released into the beta before claiming the end of the world about it.

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Tactical combat wont change small and restrictive empire. Beta, yes, but then the whole point of a beta is to test it out and react accordingly.

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