Land Advancement!

[ImperialRemnant11]

Best eaw mod, ever? I think so, seeing i actually PLAYED most of the eaw mods out there i know what i'm talking about! This mod is incredible, just amazing  I have never seen any thing that can come close to this mod in any way, so why not make it EVEN BETTER. YEah you hear me, how can you do that? Simple. Land.

like 9/10 mods don't give a damn about land combat, but Thrawn's revenge modded land all the way to the top, as to its now fun to play and not boring. But what upsets me with how realistic it is. When you watch the Star wars films, read the books what do you see? huge epic battles with thousands even millions of soldiers, and in eaw there is like only a hundred? Maybe two? On each team, we need to change that. Instead of making it a spam like in UEAW and other mods, lets just increase size of the units in both ways possible.

Vehicles get large scale boost,
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Infantry gets major platoon size increase, instead of a dozen or so, with each Platoon you buy, make it come with like 100 infantry units (or more  )
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Doing this, will blow me away, and i'm sure that it'll blow most of every one else away as well, some would say no, it'll lag too bad. But we play with major space battles don't we? They have unit increase? Why not land? Lets try it!


OR if you prefer, if its easier, just make the unit max from 9ish 10 to like 25.


Hope this helps and long live TR!

[Corey]

The only thing that'll blow is people's computers. Space actually doesn't have more units than land once you put it all together. Sure the pop cap on land is smaller, but the land units come with multiple per squad, whereas in space that's only the case with fighters. And then when you take into account the fact that land is already inherently more resource intensive than space, because it has to render the terrain, water, thousands of props, and then all of the animations for each unit (none of which are in space battles), you simply can't have battles that big. We can and may up the counts a small bit if we decide it actually makes the game more fun, but we can't do what you're suggesting. The engine simply wasn't made for that.

Also, if you increase the population cap, it'll break the GUI. There's only the 10 land slots for each planet, and that can't be changed. If you up the count, it gets all screwy.

[Zeron]

Land battles are quite a bit more resource intensive than space battles. Space battles obviously take place in space, and consist mainly of open space with a few props thrown in. Land battles are delicately crafted, containing many hundreds of props, and are a much larger drain on your system. Doing anything on the scale you're talking about would both cause lag, and require an enormous amount of work. Space maps have much less to start with so increasing the unit cap will not hurt the average persons system too much. And our maps are simply not built to handle those large sizes, and if we wanted to do that we would have to redo every single land map in the mod. No thanks. As well, the average land battle is already much longer than the average space battle. The time it takes to traverse and battle on a land map in exponentially larger than the time to do so on a space map. We're planning on some changes to make this faster pace and generally improve it a bit, but even then increasing the unit sizes like you suggest would turn land battles into a gigantic slog. That's just not fun.

[Henry X]

The only thing I think it needs (and this might have been addressed in 1.2) is to make all the units in ground combat scaled to canon.

With the engine having less to render for certain units (namely infantry), you could double the size of infantry companies.

[Corey]

Size has nothing to do with how much the engine has to render. It's polygon/vetice count and the number of different meshes (basic unit mesh, shadow mesh, etc) plus animations. A single infantry unit (as in, one soldier) is basically the same as a frigate or capital ship when everything is said and done.

[Lord Xizer]

I'd like to add another point here. Even supposing everything was increased like you say you would essentially have just increased what you had to keep up with without really improving game play. All this would do is complicate the whole thing unnecessarily. What EaW does is condense the battles down to manageable levels and the TR team has refined it to near perfection. I think the TR team has done a magnificent job on both land and space battles as well. They are also one of the few mods that actively listen to those who play the mod and take suggestions seriously, which I do appreciate. 
 

[Henry X]

Hmm, that's interesting because I know that the Absolute Corruption Mod uses companies of thirty-six troopers and there was next to no effect on performance.

[Corey]

The only effect scaling has on rendering is the mipmaps, which means virtually no difference in performance. You could scale the ACM stuff up and it wouldn't have any effect on performance. Companies of 36 infantry really isn't that much off of base EaW stats, and on lower end computers the lag would become a lot more obvious.