+1 to OP.
Noble troops were too difficult to get pre 1.5, but now they're way too easy to get.
It makes them feel less special, and also it makes certain troops nearly useless when a straight upgrade to them exists and is common - why would you want to upgrade your troops into the Vlandian Vanguard or Khuzait Heavy Horse Archer, when the Vlandian Banner Knight and Khuzait Khan's Guard are far better at fulfilling the same role?
The amount of noble recruits in castle-bound villages should be halved.
I always thought that scarcity of noble troops was intended. Have just came back into the game from a 10-month break. Was quite surprised with the current availability of noble recruits.
But grinding stupid village/city quests in order to have a powerful squadron of 5 cataphracts??? Nah, thanks. It's much worse.
There's such a thing as a happy medium. A midpoint between the old situation where they were almost impossible to get and the current situation where they're way too easy to get.
If you are annoyed with the availability of noble troops, just set the recruitment difficulty to realistic or don't recruit them at all.
That doesn't stop the AI from recruiting them.
Part of the issue is that they don't feel like the special "super rare endgame content the player has to work towards and feels rewarded when they reach them" they're meant to be, when almost every single war party on the map has them comprising nearly 25% of their forces!
Yeah it's how the best troops should be, there's no excuse for the other nobles (though fians are okay) to be so crappy.
I agree the other elite units should also be buffed, through changes to armor and cavalry mechanics.
However the Khan's Guard are too strong, they go too far in the other direction.
Currently 50 Banner Knights can barely defeat 150 Recruits, a force 3X their number.
While 50 Khan's Guard can easily defeat 500 Recruits, a force 10X their number.
In a game which is reasonably grounded in most other areas, that is pretty unrealistic.
It also makes it too hard to balance melee troops up to their level. Since Khan's Guard are well armoured, great archers,
and basically kill in one hit in melee without needing to charge first, if you didn't nerf their melee abilities, it would be impossible for melee-only noble troops (Banner Knights, Druzhinik, Elite Cataphracts) to ever compete.
I say buff the other options significantly and nerf KG a bit, so that (roughly speaking), any sort of T6 troop is capable of defeating a force of T1 recruits that outnumbers them 6X.
There are several advantages to easier access to elites for gameplay purposes.
It makes a melee based party more viable compared to a ranged based party by improving access to replacements.
Fixing armour so that it gives proper protection against ranged damage would automatically fix that problem, so we can reduce the number of noble recruits and not worry about that.
It eliminates the need for various convoluted recruitment strategies such as that of the conversion of bandits
On the contrary, it's a good thing if noble troops are uncommon enough so the player wants to get that perk. Otherwise, if noble troops are super common like they are now, why would you bother getting that perk- and the hassle of leveling up bandits through a long upgrade tree - at all?
It also positively affect the AI´s access to decent level troops which again means we do not have waste time fighting armies comprised of 80% tier 1-2 troops.
But the AI can just get Tier 3-5 troops. They don't need lots of noble troops for their army to not be all T1-2.