Slitherine

Assuming in game resolution ...

If I have an excess of units for frontage of both terrain penalized and non-penalized units will the game choose the best units for the battle or do I need to assemble an army for combat that only contains optimal units?

Thanks!

I have 124 regions in my Rhodus faction's realm. Of these, 11 are forested or swamp. A stack with optimal units for the 113 regions doesn't need to drag around an extra army for those 11 regions. I would just make and use an army of units that are not penalized in rough terrain and use them only in those 11 regions. So, why would I put together a mixed stack and hope for the best? Just saying.

It depends. The units in the game have defined "Distance To Center" values for assaults and for battles in open terrain, forest/marsh, rough (hilly) terrain and mountains, which determines the priority with which they're deployed. Notably, this doesn't account for arid terrain, so I'm not sure the game accounts for desert acclimation.

Provincial units generally have their DTCs adjusted to account for special traits that make them especially fit for particular terrains, but factional units tend to just have the base value for their broad unit type even if they get special modifiers, so mixing, say, factional woodsmen with non-woodsmen provincials may lead to subotimal results.

What can really screw you over if you don't know the newbie traps in the unit deployment logic is the way the game chooses which units to deploy into the support positions. This appears to go purely by DTC, with units considered valid for support deployment if the game couldn't fit them into the frontline and they have any support capability at all. The support-capable units with the highest DTC tend to have the worst support values because high DTC is associated with being primarily a frontline, rather than support, unit, so the game often fills the support line with the worst supporters first instead of the best. Legions, cataphracts, and camelry are particularly bad offenders for this, and need to be carefully allocated to prevent them from sabotaging their army's support.

Soar where do you find these DTC values?

My army compositions are pretty simple but it would be nice to see these DTC values to see how I can improve the composition.

They're in the game folder under Data/Units.csv (best viewed with a spreadsheet editor - I use LibreOffice).

Cheers Soar.