If we want to think carrots instead of sticks, we need to give advantages to small armies that are not intrinsic (i.e. mobility, etc.) - I really can't think of many that would not essentially be disadvantages to large armies (blobs). So basically, we're just calling it one way or the other.
I agree that disease is frustrating, which is why I've never added it to the game even though disease was probably the #1 reason for peasants to die as well as soldiers.
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.
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.
