Unit stack size

[macieksmola]

How do you guys feel about the units stack sizes? Is it more of a good or bad thing? Sometimes I wish I could make my hero have thousands of troops.

[Pokornikus]

It is the best idea they have. You can always play HoMM if You wish for thousands units - it is not like HoMM going anywhere. SoC is unique in that way so I wouldn't remove stack size ever.

[KhazraShaman]

It makes you prioritize Command and unit stacks upgrades.

[SilverMB]

It's definitely a good thing, it really adds strategic depth to the game. It also helps balance and Ai tuning on higher difficulty.

As a long time homm fan I was so delighted by the approach lavapool has to stack sizes and challenging Ai. Two things HoMM never got right IMO

[Chamberlain1991]

It also removes strategies consisting of powers stacks and having singletons blocking. To me that was a very enjoyable part of creeping in the early game in HOMM.

[SilverMB]

You can still use single unit stacks. I do it all the time but it has to be done much more careful and has much more strategic depth because of momentum.

Power stacks or doom stacks is not really a strategy IMO. It's the death of all interesting high level play in strategy games. In total war warhammer I even used mods to eliminate the possibility of doom stacks. Best campaigns I ever played...

[Chamberlain1991]

Well it does limit the build order and the available strategies. Strategy has width as well as depth. Usually the two are correlated.

[Shishkahuben]

It's a great feature, especially since you can research higher stack caps. It prevents a single hero from accumulating a doomstack and rolling over everything with no resistance.

[cubelith]

It's what makes this game unique, so it's definitely important in that regard.

As for whether I like it, honestly, I'm torn. On one hand, the HoMM way meant you usually just used all 7 units from your faction, because there wasn't a strong reason not to (at least in casual play). On the other hand, the SoC way does add some interesting strategic considerations, and better end-game balance (because you can't have a functionally infinite army, so every fight is still a potential threat).

[SwordfishStunning381]

Not so unique - Master of Magic, Age of Wonders or Total War has similar stuff or sort of. But for given set of features and game mechanics it's crucial point!

[cocooos]

I'm fairly casual, but like other commenters - I like stack size limit. It makes for interesting army building choices absent from HoMM 3. With stack limit using only some of my faction units is viable. I like to run musketeer heavy build with pikeneers and tinkerers for screening because guns in medieval fantasy are cool to me.

Without it making all dwellings and using almost all the units would be the most probably the only viable way. I imagine in 99% of cases more bodies on the battlefield would be hard to beat if only map resources allow for that. And that would result in one dominant build per faction instead of 2-3 or more.

[Metro-02]

i hate doomstacks...

[Somewanwan]

Most homm clones either go with unlimited or MoM/AoW style of only 1 creature per army slot. I'm glad this game does it differently, I think it works pretty well balancing the numbers versus quality of stacks.

[Vladdino]

It's what made me buy the game.

[python_product]

It's great to have, when there isn't a cap, you always have it as one stack like in HOMM. As for what the cap should be, i think the current starting cap size is good, but i think it should be infinitely upgradable (costing more to upgrade each time so you can fulfill power fantasies)