Windyplains said:
Captain of the Guard
Garrison Recruitment: Through the captain you'll be able to designate what kinds of recruits you'd like hired to stock your garrison at a city as well as set a target limit. The advisor's persuasion and renown will have a noticeable influence on this function. Also your own renown will influence this.
Garrison Training: The captain will then take these fresh recruits and train them up in a series of "upgrade chains" that you'll be able to designate. The idea is to make it so you can configure this upgrading option to stop at a specific point in a chain or continue to the highest rank. The advisor's leadership & training skills will have a noticeable influence on this function.
Last time I spoke about the Captain of the Guard changes I merely hinted at the features in the above quote, but now I'd like to explain a little of how they'll work here. And for those wondering, v0.10 is effectively at a "quick polish" stage of looking for obvious bugs, but is effectively done so it should be released within a day or two. I'm going to probably ramble a bit here for having just woken up so bear with me.
Garrison Recruitment
One of the more annoying aspects for M&B gameplay (to me) is that of having to stock each garrison after it is taken. Yes, it is intended to be a part of the difficulty, but it is a time-sink vs. a gameplay challenge. Running about gathering a few peasants and bringing them back to put in the keep just doesn't strike me as the sort of work kings & lords should be worrying about. Diplomacy had a good idea with the roaming recruiter that could bring in high numbers with a little increase in cost and a large chance of failure. I instead decided to go a different way looking at this as a "recruiting in the background" setup where peasants find their own way to the castle. It functions quite different and is balanced quite differently.
A peasant traveling to become a soldier and help defend his lands is likely to stick nearby to his own village because why would he care about a village on the other edge of the map that is probably a different culture? So when recruitment is turned on, each keep only draws from its own bound villages. This gives a strong advantage to towns over castles and with reason as they should have a larger pool to draw from. Towns and castles will also recruit from within.
The largest reason I stepped away from the roaming recruiter is that it relied upon luck of not being slaughtered during travel to balance gaining a potentially large sum of fresh recruits. This approach didn't really take into account; the prosperity of a village, any attributes about the recruiter himself, a difficulty rating for the game or any of the kingdom management options I've added since which is why I went to the background recruiting method. Diplomacy simply didn't use the same "systems" so it didn't need to take that stuff into account, but what it did very well was factor in distance from its recruiting source and risk in travel. I can fake the distance part via formula, but the risk is hard to make up in the same manner so I haven't done so. Instead the recruiting numbers are simply smaller. In testing I've seen recruitment numbers range from 1-15 per day depending on the things that influence recruiting. Please note that drawing recruits from villages as you've always done in native is entirely unchanged. These are extra troops and as such are more restrictive.
So here are some of the primary factors in determining how fast your garrison will build in size:
[*] A greater prosperity rating will improve recruiting.
[*] A smaller distance from village to town will improve recruiting. (villages only)
[*] A higher persuasion score from your Captain of the Guard will improve recruiting.
[*] A higher renown score from your Captain of the Guard will improve recruiting.
[*] A higher renown score for your main character will improve recruiting.
[*] A higher "improved number of recruits in villages" kingdom management setting will greatly improve recruiting. (villages only)
[*] A lower mod difficulty will improve recruiting.
[*] Enabling the "mandatory conscription" decree will greatly improve recruiting, but triggers its penalties.
These are some of the limitations recruiting faces:
[*] Recruits that villages produce only go to their bound castle or town.
[*] Captains will stop recruiting when the garrison reaches a certain threshold to prevent you from building keeps larger than the AI. This threshold is a base of 300 men + 100 men for every 5 combined points of Persuasion & Leadership. So a persuasion + leadership of 11 would enable the Captain to recruit up to 500 soldiers.
[*] Captains will only recruit members of their own culture.
The idea here was to increase convenience without wrecking balance. So there is a lot of factoring in of conditions to determine if you should be drawing travelers to your garrison or not. It should also be obvious that picking the right companion for the job will go a long way as their skills alter their effectiveness.
Garrison Training
Now that we're stuffing the garrison with a bunch of green recruits, we'll look at turning them into soldiers. The Captain's ability to train the garrison is not intended as a free training service, but it does accomplish a form of "background training". Sometimes you get in a position of pulling recruits out of a keep simply to drag them around the map while your companions' trainer skill ups their level. While this may give your character more to do, it simply doesn't make sense to me from a realistic standpoint. Instead I'd expect to see your garrison training back in your courtyard and when you pull some out to take in your warband it is because you need soldiers ready to fight, not train.
In Diplomacy this system was done by selecting a generic melee or ranged option which was actually simply saying "stick to path 1" or "stick to path 2". This lead a lot of folks to be unhappy with it in Floris due to so many troop tree branches that simply didn't get accounted for. As a result, I've set things up so that any troop that has an upgrade option now has a percentage chance of that option happening by default. So if troop A can turn into Troop B or C then each of those options starts with a default 50% chance. You can speak to the Captain to alter these percentages by looking at the info screen for Troop A (screenshot below). Setting up this balance is how the Captain knows to upgrade troops to your preference and this setup is global. So you won't need to set it up in each keep as it is based on the troop, but you won't be able to have Castle A upgrade troops in a different manner than Castle B. Some folks may not like that, but using either system (castle specific or troop specific) was going to have a pro & con so I elected the latter.
Note that much like the recruitment system, Captains will only upgrade members of their own culture. Your Captain wouldn't know how to train soldiers of another culture in their fighting styles. This upgrade is currently set to happen on a weekly basis. Again with this system the choice of Captain makes a fairly big deal as his stats have a strong influence on the effectiveness of his training methods.
Soldiers can only be upgraded up to a maximum tier and this is directly limited by a combination of your Captain's leadership & training skills. The actual formula looks a little like [
tier = 2 + (Leadership + Training)/5 ]. Similarly the Captain's attributes influence the number of upgrades that can occur at each tier with a strong emphasis on his leadership and training again. That formula presently looks like [
chance = 8 + (Leadership + Training)/2 ]. Keep in mind that these are still very much at a balance and polish stage.
Treasury
You may have noted that I avoided talking about the cost or payment mechanics for both of the features above so I'll discuss that here. As I was developing both, I kept struggling with how to make these systems work within the existing weekly budget. While I could easily charge you on a per-upgrade/recruitment basis, if I don't let you know what your costs are then you could very easily feel like you have little control over something that is absolutely capable of draining your coffers. And who really wants to read spam messages about recruiting in center X anyway? I was already wanting to implement a system of using a treasury so that concept melded well with what I needed. Here I definitely need to give some credit props to the Diplomacy mod as their use of this kind of system certainly influenced my choice in using it. The system is still in a very early state, but it works great for supporting these two systems at the moment. Right now you can either make direct deposits / withdrawals to your treasury (similar to Diplomacy) or authorize deposits on a weekly basis that are incorporated right into the weekly budget screen. So you won't have to travel to Wercheg repeatedly to deposit another few thousand. Simply give them a per week allotment of a 1.5k (or whatever amount) as needed to support the town as needed.
Garrison recruitment will cost you on a per recruit gained basis and this recruitment occurs daily. The cost for this entirely comes from the treasury of the recruiting town and if insufficient funds exist then the recruitment will simply halt until the treasury builds back up. This lets you set a growth limit on recruitment of your own by simply starving the treasury if need be. You could easily drop 5k into a town's treasury and then not pay it another penny, but let it recruit as much as it can with what you've given it.
Garrison training will also cost you on a per soldier upgraded basis (using their actual upkeep costs). This also comes directly from the treasury and will stop if insufficient funds exist. This way neither of these systems should be a constant drain on your financial resources
unless you want them to be by setting up a per week income.
In closing, and if you're still with me so far, reward yourself with a few screenshots and a shot of caffeine. Sorry for the length, but bullet "change log" lists can only convey so much and I hope folks gain some insights from reading these on why a system evolved a certain way. Today I'll be doing some heavy play-testing with hopefully a release tomorrow, but I can't promise that for certainty. As v0.10 will be save game compatible, I don't want to screw up someone's save game because I forgot to carry a 1 somewhere.
Screenshots:
Discussing the state of defenses with the Captain of the Guard.
Looking at the specifics on a single troop in the training setup.
The treasury interface.
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Think that I would use savegame i place here few days ago, or start a new game.
