Nerei wrote:I know that was an example what I want to stress is you really need to consider edge cases (2020 US and 36 ROC is probably the most extreme) as 36 ROC would have a hard time surviving and 2020 would basically be basically be unaltered unit spam.
Personally I would probably look at the nations total GDP (the game should have this already) as well as the total maintenance cost of all units owned (again the game should hopefully have this) and at least during peacetime have a spending limit so say the AI is limited to say using X% of the GDP for military spending where X is dependent on government.
For say a one party socialist state (e.g. the DPRK) the percentage far higher than a socialist democracy (e.g. Norway or Iceland).
Most nations in peacetime should pretty much be at this limit already at the start of the game and only go nuts producing units when at war (adding a modifier for when the AI feels threatened would be nice to have arms races but would probably be hard to implement).
GDP/capita compared to world average (again I assume the game already have this or finding it would be fairly easy) would make a good army composition modifier so basically a higher GDP/capital would increase the ratio of warships, aircraft and armoured vehicles.
You can also add a government modifier so say national socialist governments put higher priority on armour vehicles and aircraft.
Yes I would also add additional governments if for no other reason that flavour. Putting Norway in the same box as say Syria is just wrong. We can naturally argue about what is democratic but for practically sake I will just go with the democracy index that puts Norway at the very top while Syria is 166 out of 167 only beating the DPRK.
While I fully agree that a more in depth approach could produce better results, I would still argue that with the limited development time and resources for SR:GW, a simpler approach is probably more likely to make it into the game, aswell as more understandable for the player. And there pretty much is no simpler formula than "Your share of the worlds gdp is your share of the worlds unit cap"
Also, if you think about it, the economic might of a nation really is the main indicator how many soldiers that nation can support in the field, even democracies used all their economic might in World Wars, like USA in WW2.
If we want a realistic approach to unit caps, no cap is the only realistic one, since real countries can have as many units as they want (Like north korea)
But if we want to limit unit numbers for gameplay reasons, a understandable way that still comes close to modelling real strength distribution like basing it on gdp is best imo.
I know how broken the economy is, but usually my games end after about 10 years because one day ingame takes about a minute irl at that point. Improvements to the economy would be great, and I have started a suggestion thread here about the topic, but if I could choose one new feature for Great War, it would be unit limits for better game speed, because that is what really stops my games usually. I have stated in my post above why I think manpower is a bad parameter, and I very much worry about speed because WW1 saw absolutely massive numbers of foot infantry, so if we cant limit them the game might become unplayable even faster than ultimate on my mid tier pc.
