The number one rule in Bannerlord. Dont fight battles that will cost you any significant number of elites!
This isn't a rule at all. If you're playing the game normally and efficiently then you quite often have to take significant casualties to progress. It's much quicker towards the goal of conquering Calradia to siege a weak fief with your 200 man party, take on the 200 guys that show up to defend it, and lose 40 men, than it is to just abandon the siege camp every time a party shows up that you can't beat easily.
Obviously players don't like taking losses, especially from random bull**** like looters in autocalc, but there is such a thing as acceptable losses, see Geala's post where he only had 5 cav left.
With the exception of KG and Fians, which as we established will be fixed by balance changes, all other T6 in the game aren't incredibly powerful demigods that are totally indispensable. They're just a small upgrade over their T5 counterparts.
And again, they will just be substitutes for the real thing.
Even if this is true, it's not really relevant. The point I was laboriously making to you with that entire gameplay scenario is that despite not being as good in theory, in practice, if the extra notable gives regular troops instead of elites, it saves you a huge amount of travel time (and thus party wages, food, and not missing opportunities to attack or defend something during war) to just upgrade to Vanguards to fill out half of your cavalry.
In any case, It's not noble problem but rather make normal troop easier to upgrade more than noble do
That sort of solves one issue of Vanguards being comparatively useless but doesn't solve the other issues people have of:
* elites not feeling special at all when they're available at a nearly 40:60 ratio to normal troops
* immersion being damaged
* the perk to upgrade bandits to elite recruits being pretty useless when they're just sitting around in villages in large amounts
* the lack in variety caused by so much of your army being made up of a troop that has a linear upgrade path, so it actually works against the player having a balanced army composition when you go to a village to recruit and
three out of four notables only offer recruits that all upgrade to the same thing
* the disadvantage the player is put at if they want an interesting army composition and are forced to leave recruits there which the AI would just take because the AI (and NPC's in general
) don't care about having an interesting game
I find melee cavalry is actually useful, to counter horsearchers and archers, for example. I have to admit that it strains the cavalry a lot in heavy fights (high casualty rate) and that they need a backup from a solid shieldwall and from archers. I had only 5 cavalry left after the victory or so. I use RBM AI module however, so maybe it may differ in vanilla.
Yep, it differs hugely in vanilla. In vanilla they still have an even higher casualty rate, but without countering horse archers or archers like they do in RBM. Melee cavalry are the least cost efficient unit type in the vanilla game.
To the noble spawn, it should be toned town considerably, it is not immersive to have so many of them
Agreed.
