Inanely powerful indie oasis garrisons!

[Quasicide]

Good game but it really needs some polish. While playing as Judea I decided to capture some desert oasis territories...

Imagine discovering that THOUSANDS of trained medium infantry were defending each oasis!

We are talking 1 population, no building but an oasis territories.Yet, they all had the same absurdly high garrison strength. Not to mention, these warriors don't match the fighting style or type of desert nomads at all.

To top it off, if you try to auto-resolve the battles, the system nickel and dimes you to death with attrition. Yet, if you try to fight the battles out in FOG2, the game breaks and decides the oasis garrison should be twice as powerful.

For whatever reason, the developers decided that 6 garrison units should be the minimum for everywhere in the world. But that senseless rule just falls apart in places like Arabia.

Such territories should not be fielding thousands and thousands of medium infantry. It is just unrealistic and bizarre.

[Girth Johnson]

If independents get attacked and themselves win, their forces leave the garrison and become a proper army. Next time they're attacked, someone is attacking their army and the garrison that replaced it - and their forces get progressive stronger. It happens more on lower difficulty settings as the smaller ai nations can't overwhelm them.

[PocusFR]

The Settled Oasis add 3 weak garrisons to the garrison generated by the population. They should be thematic to the nation owning the region (if not, that's a bug!). Each population in average produces half a weak garrison.
The in-game battle system is not the 'auto-resolve' of FOG II, it should stand on its own, and will favor armies where units are fit for the terrain, with a good general and not being exhausted.

Also historically speaking, it is a misconception to think the desert people (nomads or not, they were not all nomads) were pushover or that the population density was extremely low. The prime example are the Garamantes.

Even if Herodote said they were quite numerous, he depicted them as basically savages. But recent findings prove the contrary. With the fall of Gaddafi some projects have been initiated. One team from the University of Leceister on site said they had:

- Several cities
- hundreds of fortified farms
- castles made of red brick
- numerous irrigation work and wells
- cemeteries


Here is a link in English to another article on Germa, their capital (in the middle of the desert*)
https://www.temehu.com/Cities_sites/germa.htm

"The capital became so powerful and quickly gained complete control over the lucrative caravan trade routes of the central Sahara, and even carried out successful raids on Berber-Carthaginian Carthage, Berber-Roman Leptis Magna"

*: Climate 2000 years ago was much better than today in North Africa. Not saying you had jungle where now is the Sahara desert, but it was definitively much less hostile to life.

Now, they were not unique in how relatively powerful they were. Arabs from Felix Arabia or further north like the Kingdom of Lihyan. They were definitively not push-over and the population density was decent.

Just saying that Settled Oasis are a mean to show that there might be a significant opposition even from desertic people. It's not a 'walk in the park', err the desert.

[Zarkarion]

Palmyra was an "independent oasis garrison", and yet in the 3rd century AD it fought a successful war against the mighty Sassanid Empire, and then briefly conquered most of the eastern half of the Roman Empire!

I am not suggesting that they should all be so powerful, but the activities of the Pre-Islamic Arabs also suggest that desert areas had substantial numbers of defenders available.

[Quasicide]

Let me give you just one example:

Desert Territory
1 population, no Buildings and no Oasis, nothing but sand

In FOG Empires the Garrison is 7 units! With a Combat Power of 24.
1 Camel
4 Regular Infantry
1 Skirmisher
1 Militia

Do you actually feel that garrison realistically reflects the forces available to literally the most desolate wasteland in the game? Every desert territory can't secretly be a powerful city-state in disguise. And, if it was such a citadel, you'd think there would be at least a building or two.

But it gets so much worse when you load that battle into FOG2.
That garrison force becomes...

11 regular infantry
1 Militia
2 Camels
1 Skirmisher

The 11 regular infantry is just broken! In a battle like that, those regular infantry are the backbone of each army. Doubling the numbers like that massively skews the battle. Especially, when you compare it to how my Judea Army was "adjusted".

In FOG Empires my Judea Army had a Combat Power of 53.
1 Zealot
2 Regular Infantry
4 Skirmishers

That becomes in FOG2:
1 Zealot
5 Regular Infantry
8 Skirmishers

It appears to be erratically deciding the conversion.
Why did my number of skirmishers double, but the garrison remain 1 skirmisher?
Why did my Zealots and their Militia stay 1 unit but the Camels double?
Why did the regular infantry explode from 2 and 4 units to 5 and 11 units?
Do you think I retained a greater than 2:1 combat advantage with that conversion?

The whole point of my buying Empires was to play the battles out in FOG2. Yet, the unit miniatures, size, strength and stats often don't match what you export. The conversion is frustratingly unpredictable and inconsistent.

Why can't the two games just do a direct port of units?

[PocusFR]

Admittedly, the minimum limit of units was implemented before we had the finalized and polished decadence kicking it that would slow you down. Perhaps we can indeed tone down the minimum force defending a region.

As for the conversion, There are some logic about why some unis convert sometime with a 2 to 1 ratio. I'll ask the FOG II author to chime in and explain, you'll see it has some strong benefits.