You are overlooking the fact how wars were fought back in the days. We are seeing more SFs and higher quality units than ever before. Back in the days RC stats weren't as high as now so CS was lower. Not to mention the number of men you could command with your petty income. Now with less people around, people can field larger units. AT was using the old system for most of its lifespan until few years before it closed down. Other islands got the changes that created the current power inflation on the other hand. The only realm on Dwilight that ever got over 30k was Astrum I think? LN might have done it at some point as well but I wasn't there to witness it so can't say much. Dwilight was different in the regard that it only allowed 1 character. AT on the other hand mostly allowed 2 characters.
As for Oligarch, let's not joke about Oligarch having more than just archers. You guys only had archers when the whole archer drawing out infantry happened. Why do you think I even told General of Sirion to do that in the first place? Only 2 people commanded infantry out of 12 nobles Oligarch had while the rest commanded archers. All your other infantry were militia units.
They already panic and flee when there is no infantry. If you are suggesting that archers need to stay behind infantry all the time you are making one of the most used marshal settings obsolete. I think the game should stick with archers staying on the field until infantry units start to slaughter them.
Infantry units are holding the walls just fine. That is why I used to add an infantry unit or to and put them in the rear while putting all my archers in the front to decimate infantry militia units. The mechanics haven't changed much over the years and people just didn't attack with only archers because archers were utterly garbage.
It is simple really. You just need few cavalry units to counter the whole archer tactic. If you don't have one like Oligarch, that then yeah you are probably forced to do that with infantry.
You can make infantry hold the walls all you want but at the end there are always ways to work around the newly added mechanics. If infantry units hold walls longer, I'd just put cavalry in the front along with archers and shoot the hell out of all your units since they won't leave the walls. When they finally do, my cavalry units will smash what little is left of your infantry.
Like I said, unless we get an option to fully control our unit behavior over 20 rounds - doubt any dev would want to grant people that option since that would be too complicated for most of our players - you will always have an issue with unit behaviors.
You need to see a bigger picture than one incident that broke your realm. You need to understand the whole archer only tactic wouldn't have happened if the city was siegable through different ways. If Oligarch could only put 5k militia units at most, why would they have bothered sending only archers to draw out infantry? It is a result of multiple factors not just people exploiting some broken behavioural pattern of dumb infantry code. It is not that simple. It happened due to multiple factors coming together.
1) Militias playing too big of a role in defense
2) Archers being too strong - To be honest I think archers should be really strong for the first couple rounds then lose their effectiveness as they run out of arrows or maybe we can get WIP Anaris suggested which will resolve most of these old issues
3) Oligarch lacking cavalry to stop archers
4) Sirion's reliance on archers (Their army was at 7:3 archer to infantry ratio at the time).
5) Sieging with infantry not as effective - sieging with siege engines is probably one of the dumbest way to take a city when siege engines are hard to comeby and you need x2 the infantry to effectively siege the walls.
I just hope we will get more tools to work with. Apparently the tools we have aren't really efficient at getting the job done.
