I don't think that troop presence works all too well. Players would just recruit small militia units to every region, or force courtiers, traders, etc. to have a unit.
Didn't I say mobile troops? If I didn't, I meant to. Inciting massive deployment of militia is definitely not a good thing.
No, we should think of actual battlefield advantages. There are two things that come to mind:
- Archers - the more enemy troops there are, the easier it is to hit somebody. If the enemy basically covers the entire field in front of you, it is pretty hard to not hit anyone by just firing into the crowd. So we could make archers more effective depending on the number of enemies they face. This would also promote mixed armies, and I don't see a downside. Because archer-heavy armies can easily be cut down using small cavalry forces deployed in skirmish formation (they still get a charge bonus, which should pretty much take care of any archers they charge into).
- Maneuverability - not really easy to implement on our 1D battlefield, but ignoring the implementation details, a small army attacking a large army would pretty much have the advantage of being able to choose where to hit, because a front line several thousand man strong is pretty much immobile, you can't switch units around, etc. - the gameplay effect could be that a considerably (less than half) army would automatically attack the weakest units of the larger army, forcing them into melee first. Again, not sure if this can even be coded in our current battle system, but a thought.
Cavalry in skirmish!? Even an army with a very heavy archer component would laugh at this if they get their box infantry to soak in the charge.
About maneuverability, I tend to disagree. A larger army can much more easily cut off, split, or surround a smaller army. The larger army can also much more easily deploy the weaker units to inaccessible places if such was their desire. And finally, spotting a unit's morale and training on the field, before they fight, would be next to impossible, and these are critical in determining a unit's strength. If you use the argument of maneuvrability (which I find flawed), it should at least target the least equipped, not the weakest. In either case, though, this just means that the nobles who can't afford better units will always have to recruit again and again, remaining poor. Casualties will always be greater for the common knights than the lords and other elite. I don't think this is a consequence that is desirable.
I'm not against the change to archers (perhaps add a chance to friendly/fire that scales according to the proportion of friendly to hostile troops on the front line?), but I don't see how it would change anything regarding to blob armies. All it would do is incite larger armies to rely on archers less, and more on infantry and cavalry.
Which just brings us back to the fundamental question: are blob armies so bad that we can't just accept that they are a necessary evil resulting from the game being based on 12 hour turns and that they have been the norm since probably always? Because it's not like splitting up the army is
never good. It's just
usually not as good.