I am working on a mod for CW2 that significantly alters the unit compositions. Specifically, almost all of the units will be anywhere from 1-4 elements in size, and exceedingly few of the units will contain mixed arms. Infantry, cavalry, and artillery each have the own units.
Division creation works the same as before, of course, so you can have the same division makeup as you had before. But now your building blocks for that division are different. Since the building blocks, the base units, now have a maximum size of 4 elements this presents a question of how to divide up the elements available to each state. Let's say New York has 176 infantry and 30 cavalry regiments, plus 84 artillery batteries. I don't want the player or AI to have to worry about handling 176 individual infantry regiments. I want to divide those regiments into 1, 2, 3, and 4 element units, and the same way with the cavalry and artillery.
The divvying up part of it is pretty easy. What I have to decide on, and what I'd like to get your input on, is the naming of the elements. There are some states where the regiments were moved in and out of brigades fairly often. If I pick four names to be in the pool for a 4-element unit, that's the composition of that unit from then on, barring individual element destruction. If I try to get *really* close to historical accuracy with the naming scheme, that limits my ability to make the unit compositions player-friendly. I have to spawn more brigades for the player so that they match the brigade compositions in real life. This is very time consuming. For each regiment I have to map out when it was mustered in and out (that's done), if and when it was brigaded, with what regiments and how long. To find a brigade that served in the same setup from start to finish is proving to be troublesome; there aren't that many. It means more single element units, and that means the stack panel becomes a headache. To make some of these brigades I have to spawn them for the player, because there's very little options for having them built correctly using the recruit panel.
This is the version I've been working on up until now. This ultimately gives the player less control over the units they build and I think that kind of defeats the point of creating this mod. However, I am willing to do it if more people would be interested in that kind of setup.
Alternately, I can pull out some of the more notable regimental names (e.g. Meagher's Irish brigade) and leave the rest as a pool for buildable units. The alternate scheme gives me more flexibility to create a set of building blocks that is player-friendly, and still have a reasonably accurate set of names to choose from. By this method, regimental names would be set up in the pool in the order they were mustered. It would lead to regiments serving in brigades they never did in real life, but they'd still end up in a game unit with other regiments from the same state that were mustered about the same time. Since the unit sizes are smaller than before, mixed state brigades could be as common or as rare as you liked. It's simpler and faster for me to design this alternate method.
If there's no feedback, I'll probably go with the second method. If it sounds like I'm wimping out, consider that I've already done research on this, off and on, for about five years.
Let me know what you think.