I keep thinking about how cool it would be to see a MASSIVE battle like 1000s of soldiers in AOE4, maybe even simulating real battles like the Battle of Agincourt. There are some mods that could be used like Totally Accurate Empires to make things more realistic.
With mods, is it possible to raise population caps enough and then maybe run a deferred rendering thing to simulate a huge battle?
the answer is, probably yes, since the game nowadays properly splits the cpu load on multiple cores fairly evenly its able to run at least 2000 or so units per player if you mod the pop cap that high up (there are few mods that do that i think), i should warn you tho, most mods, maybe even all, break the moment devs put out any kind of patch, modding system for aoe4 is suboptimal if i put it lightly, but 1000 pop mods did actually exist, just can’t find one atm that works, and a ton of modders quit after relic showed 0 care for modders
also once you push pop limit as high as 1000, or more, the only limit is cpu horsepower, you also need to either mod the camera yourself or use the official free cam mod in order to be able to zoom out enough to actually manage the units, aoe4 by default has the camera zoom out way too close for imo even its default 200 pop
It is possible, but it would not be fun / not work properly IMO
AoE4, and whole AoE serries is directly designated arround 200 pop per player, original AoE 1 was designated arround 50 pop.
For huge battles like 1000s of soldiers are Total War games, which is directly designated for that with squad control
Even with the base population limit of 200 we see up to 1600 units in a 4v4. When that’s happening the game starts to experience minor pathing issues at times.
In modded custom games, where the population has extreme limits of >500 per player, unit pathing starts to get really glitchy. Sometimes taking upwards of 20 seconds to respond to commands due to the lag, or all units start to freeze in place. With multiple thousands of units the game may even crash.
So it’s possible to get the units out there and see them fight, but as you add more the game becomes more unstable. Gameplay wise, fights can look kind of awkward when there are 600+ units fighting onscreen. They start to clump together and run around each other trying to reach the enemy.
Other games, like the Total War series (which does what you’re asking for fantastically), are better suited for this… but don’t let that keep you from enjoying the mods this community has to offer!
Yes, even if you have the PC to run it, AoE doesn’t work well with hundreds of units and glitches a lot or gives you game crashes…