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Immersive Armies (Classic Version)

A Mod that updates and rescales most units in the game.

If you want to play with Rising Tide use this updated Version instead!

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Sick of 2 Tank-Sized Soldiers representing a squad? Ever realized that Squad sizes shrink when upgraded while Unit-Sizes grow? Did you notice that most troops basically don't use and formations? No? Well, you should have paid more attention then! But anyway, now that you know how much you dislike these things - I have a solution for these problems! Awesome, right? What a coincidence!

So here comes Immersive™ Armies, a mod that was created during one long sleepless night, and aims to make armies look more... well. Like armies.

The features:

Most units have had their model sizes adjusted to create a more "immersive" ratio between soldiers and vehicles. Obviously, the sizes used are still nowhere near "realistic", there's a balance to be struck between nice proportions and, well.. keeping soldier units big enough so they don't look like little black pixles on the terrain.

Human(-like) Units have also been scaled for consistency. No longer will the Soldier be 50% bigger than the Scout, no longer will Soldiers magically grow bigger as affinity is gained. All human models - including the poor tier 1 soldier who controls the worker unit and never gets any upgraded gear - are now about equally sized (With minor changes only when Gear looks "bulky" - the battlesuit for example is a bit bigger than most other units). Alien Units have been normalied, too - the Raptor Bug that is used as a Mount in the Xeno Cavalry, the 2 Raptor Bugs in the Xeno Swarm and the Raptor Bug that... well, is just a raptor bug now all have the same size.

2-3 Soldiers represent the army that is occupying a tile? Oh, come on. With the downscaled models there's a lot more space on the tiles to add a lot of additional Units to the "Squads". And that's exactly what I did - squads now have 14-20 Units. Most vehicles still have 2-4 Units in them, creating this - at least in my opinion - really cool picture of big armies full of soldiers and vehicles that actually feel strong, when they fight Squads that completely outnumber them. Ultimate Units are still 1-per-Tile - and seriously oversized to be the stars on the battlefield.

So... not going to lie here: The formation system is somewhat basic at the moment and I may re-work it later to better represent the affinity-combat styles. But for now "organized" Soldier Units actually use somewhat organized formations as you'd expect from a "marching army". No longer are soldiers just unorganized "blobs" of units. Alien Units (and the Xeno Swarm) on the other hand still use somewhat "random-looking" setups to represent their feral nature.

Obviously, all of this is pure eye-candy and does not have any effects on gameplay.

Some words about performance:
Obviously, if you add more actors, that will have some impact on the overall performance of the game. However, even after spamming my whole screen full of soldiers, I could not notice any performance drop - and my PC is FAR from being anything that could be considered "high-end". So I assume unless you're really scratching the minimum requirements for the game, reduced performance should not be much of an issue. (<- Would be nice to get some reports from people with low-end machines to confirm that!)

Compatibility:
This mod creates new ArtDefines instead of editing existing ones, which prevents some compatibility issues but at the same time means that custom units added by other mods will *NOT* be affected by this mod. This mod also overrides UnitFormations.xml, so other mods that add UnitFormations will not be compatible.

Credits:
whoward69 did some *magic* and created easy-to-use ArtDefines[forums.civfanatics.com] back in 2014 which I used as a basis for this mod. This saved me a LOT of time and headaches - so thanks for the great work!