Why not increase the AI clans' ability to maintain high tier troops...
Things to consider: It's already too easy for the AI to have high tier troops, all they have to do is exist and they get them in time. They don't depend on chasing looters or donating items to raise them. The only reason they don't have them is because they been being defeated and also using the auto-calc battle which of course wastes many troops. They are in armies and war far too often and don't do any proactive things to raise troops when at peace. They just spawn and wander around until summoned to an army. Despite this, sometimes they do amass a powerful force with hundreds of high tier units. I mostly see this with the aserai but sometimes with khuzait or one of the empires too. IMO the AI should be SPENDING MORE CAMPIAGN TIME building up it's forces outside of warfare/armies.
Next: Even when they have them they can still be slaughtered because they do not perform well in live combat. Often the AI wastes it's elite units rushing them into you (HA and Cav) or leaves them vulnerable in their defensive position (Cav can be shot to death without fighting back). For empires and vlandia, their noble cav is just not very offensively powerful (cav can't hit anything). If they made xbow units instead the battle would be much more difficult. Without actually making the AI know how to fight better and make better parties, just helping them have higher tier units with mostly result in the player having more high tier replacements form prisoners and a fatter payout form the ransom broker
ersonally I think that Tier 4 troops should be the optimal "bang for the buck" for the player, with T5 being less efficient, and T6 even less so.
This is already how it is. I takes an all in war playstyle to finance a t6 party, you have to keep winning battle and any peace or "other" activities drain your bank very fast without a very particular governor set up. T4 units are typically very good and what I consider the efficient level of troops. Even in extreme cases like the Khuzait noble troops, the t4 heavy horse archer actually has twice the ammunition so is a better unit until you can actually afford to make t6 KG units who have 2 stacks of arrows.
In other words, there should be diminishing returns when you upgrade your troops beyond T3-T4, where the increase in cost is bigger than the increase in lethality. Just how big this increase would be is of course subject to balancing, so I'm not going to give any particular numbers.
It is though, you can't kill em twice, so if you could defeat units with t4, t5 and t6 are just added insurance against **** ups (they have higher survivability) and going up against bigger numbers if need be. But there's only so many parties you can defeat in a day anyways, so it is a diminishing return, even it increases your resilience.
I also believe that all of this should be focused on the player and not affect the AI, as AI armies are already plagued by being 70% recruits after getting beaten once.
Nope, if you want to just play battles again Xyz troops over and over, just do custom battles all day. For a strategy campaign the AI needs to fallow rules as equal as possible and SPEND CAMPAIGN TIME. They already have too many cheats letting them not SPEND CAMPAIGN TIME on anything like the player has to. Spending campaign time is the heart of the game and it's a goof IMO that the AI has so many instant and remote functions letting them ignore so many things nad just conga armies all day forever. AI should have better troops? They should SPEND CAMPIAGN TIME walking their butts around the map fighting bandits and gaining loot to power them up instead of waddling around in armies non-stop.
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But somethings regarding élite troops are silly and unbalanced in other ways. For instance a noble son is 200$, this makes him usually cheaper then recruiting a nomad and buying a horse to make a tribal horseman. The Empire noble is just a baby infantry until it ranks up, then even after it's not as good in live battle as a xbow unit form their normal troops would be..... but in simulated battle the Cavalry is better..... take away the noble cav spawns and the empires takes a hit in AI X AI wars... but against the player the cav is dead weight.
Banned
