Slitherine

The default for heavy infantry is 1500, for heavy cavalry 1000, light foot 500, etc.

Does the number of troops in a unit have any bearing on effectiveness. For instance, will a unit of 500 heavy infantry be at disadvantage to an otherwise identical one of 1500 men?

I suspect the answer is no, but I'd like to be sure. And if strength is irrelevant, then I can be careful to adjust unit sizes proportionally in my scenarios...

No the number has no effect on combat to avoid balancing issues.

Great. Thanks.

Then what is the impact of soldiers number??? if is the same lauch to the carnage 500 or 1500 numerical advantage is irrelevant???.

500 men will atuobreak sooner than 1500 men for starters.

As far as I understand, if the initial strength (at the start of the battle, defined in the scenario editor) of the two units is 500 and 1500, they will perform exactly the same (with respect to the percentage of casualties they produce and take, auto-rout, etc), given that everything is calculated as a percentage with respect to the initial strength.

See this post by keithmartinsmith: viewtopic.php?p=120860#120860

I see, thanks for the info, now need time to understand this strange concept i am not a table player

Am I to understand from all of this that unit strength has absolutely no significance in the game? This is disturbing. I took a look at the manual and could not find any mention of unit size. So, it makes no difference if 1500 attack 1500 or if 1500 attack 500 or if 1500 attack 50, the size difference has no effect on the game? How can this be?

Presumably because the size is taken into account with the initial scale anyway. Thus 1500 heavy infantry are balanced to 500 light infantry and to 1000 heavy cavalry (note by 'balanced' I don not mean 'are of equivalent value', merely that the game mechanics are designed for such a ratio.

Thus if one were to have 500 as the base for heavy infantry (the basic building block for late Republican Roman and also for Macedonian troops), heavy cavalry should have 300 (ish) and light infantry 150 (ish).

If correct, it actually allows one to model dense blocks of rather inefficient tropps by giving them greater numbers: their effective combat value will be less for their numbers. Equally, rather than give away too many elite ratings, one could simply give slightly better troops reduced unit size (say the historical 200 strength for Alexandrian Companion cavalry, as opposed to 300 if that was the 'base size' for your particular scenario).

So I think it's actually quite a nice feature if taken into account.

But as far as actual gameplay goes, its the uunits, not the numbers that matter. So stressing about it, so long as one knows, seems to me to be unecessary.