Mosheer Rommel said:
To further improve my performance, I just wanted to know how much should I increase my standard army size? I'm at 12,000 right now, but I can afford a lot more. I just chose 12,000 cause that would double my old number.
The simple answer is "4 more regiments than the typical number of regiments in an enemy army, and at least 4 of your total number of regiments should be cavalry". This is in order to get most bang for the buck. Remember that regiments square off one-by one along a front with infantry in the centre and cavalry on the flanks, and that regiments can hit "as far to the side" as their maneouvre rating, i.e. 2 for cavalry, 1 for infantry. Thus bringing e.g. 16 regiments against 6 regiments (and assuming at least 4 of your 16 are cavalry), what happens is that you match the 6 regiments along the front, have 4 on the flanks hitting, and 6 in reserve at any given time... They'll all be taking attrition as you move around but only some will actually be fighting.
Now, in practice you do not want to micromanage your regiments all the time so including a comfortable safety margin in number of regiments will help you steamroll the opposition as you detach or disband depleted regiments along the way.
Note that this goes primarily for SP - things are much nastier in MP where the other player performs his own regiment tricks and you seldom know which sort of line you are coming up against ahead of time once wars get big and bloody.
My rule of thumb is to use something between one third to one half cavalry and the rest infantry in a general purpose army. Definitely not the perfect setup for all situations, but, on average, it is good value for your money.
As regards tradition, your tradition gain is directly proportional to the casualties you inflict divided by your base force limit (i.e. before dp-sliders, governments, and ideas are applied). As such, the larger your realm gets, the more men you need to kill within the same time period to gain the same tradition. What that means is that once you are a major steamrolling minors and thus have a huge force limit compared to the numbers you kill, you do not gain much tradition at all... Only by fighting dangerous wars with massive casualties against other majors will you see really high tradition, and dangerous wars against the AI are few and far between in SP for majors. On the other hand, those poor minors you pick upon get to field military geniuses amongst their few survivors since killing just a couple of regiment's worth of your troops is huge in proportion to their force limit.
What you
can do to help is to take battlefield_commisions, which is probably the single most powerful national idea in the entire game for a warmonger, and (late-game) build a war academy - this significantly reduces the yearly decay of tradition... but really, you should not need that as a major nation trying to deal with the AI.
