150hrs+ now and 3 main issues with the game in my opinion.

[Kemsley]

Love the game, its full of potential but right now there is 3 main issues that suck a lot of fun out of the game...

1) Training of men - This is tedius busy work once your in mid to late game and generating armies of tier 3-4 troops should be trivial at this point not hours of repetitive grind. Conversely getting tier 5-6 troops should always be hard until the very late game. You should have some way of mass recruiting peasants and training them up to tier 3-4 troops in your castles (the speed and level they get trained at/to can be building ect in the castle to slow people down in the early game).

2) Amassing of force - Hours of collecting men and training them up to veterans wasted since they all vanish into thin air within 2 days of being stored anywhere. This has made me just quit the whole game for now in frustration, its unfair and not fun. Soldiers should not consume food outside of sieges, they are paid in gold and can sort themselves out while off duty. The balance of food/military is totally whack right now.

3) Basic town management tools - Managing your empire is not fun and needs to be expanded somewhat, you could solve the previous two problems and many more with a more robust management simulation in the end game. Why not have a whole region under one screen with the City and its satellite towns (A little like Total War does it now) and within that screen you can set numbers for the troops you want recruited to defend the city/towns and the level you would like them trained to and the game could automatically recruit and maintain these numbers (at a cost of course) with buildings to enable and enhance this process. More in depth production line control and tools for how trading works ect would be welcome also, a lot of depth could be added to this side of the game.

And a bonus problem is not being allowed to actually deploy your army until you have 75 tactics, that is difficult to achieve until the mid to late game and an insane design choice imo. This should just be a basic feature (at the very least much easier to get), its not fun having to panic set up your men when your thrown right into a fight with cavalry charging at you.

 

[andycott]

+

Suggestions with possible solutions for these problems
Suggestion. Make training grounds the new main source of training, especially for recruits. Add recruiters and patrols in the game.
Tools to balance food and prosperity. Detailed suggestions for food shortages.

I would also add an overall disbalance problem with possible solutions here too
Suggestions. Maths and Winter attrition for balance. Detailed explanation

 

[Kemsley]

Thanks, these are pretty good but i still think you should be able to automate a lot of it from the settlement management screen and have the defences you want maintained automatically (At a cost of course). Because of the nature of this game (You cant interact with anything unless you are personally present) the whole system of management becomes extremely frustrating and is to simplistic to be engaging. In the late game the recruitment and training of your forces should become something you can largely automate with good management skills. Governors could be more useful also, maybe they could ride around the region they are governing and defend it ect, at the moment it just seems like a waste of a precious companion.

 

[andycott]

Thanks, these are pretty good but i still think you should be able to automate a lot of it from the settlement management screen and have the defences you want maintained automatically (At a cost of course). Because of the nature of this game (You cant interact with anything unless you are personally present) the whole system of management becomes extremely frustrating and is to simplistic to be engaging. In the late game the recruitment and training of your forces should become something you can largely automate with good management skills. Governors could be more useful also, maybe they could ride around the region they are governing and defend it ect, at the moment it just seems like a waste of a precious companion.

I fully support you on that!
Also one of the reasons I suggested all this is also automation.
This one already fully automates the process of recruiting. recruiters recruit recruits and take them to the fief where they will be trained on training grounds without player's/lord's help. That's one of the main points. And that's why I wrote about it here.
Suggestion. Make training grounds the new main source of training, especially for recruits. Add recruiters and patrols in the game.
Emphasized this in my thread. Though I thought it was already clear. Guess it was not.

And I fully agree on that fief management needs automation too! And not only fief. Everything that can be logically automated. Like in grand strategies, you should be able to do it without any additional interactions, like you said.

I will think about fief automation and add something about it in a new suggestion or in Tools to balance food and prosperity. Detailed suggestions for food shortages.

 

[Kemsley]

I might have actually stumbled on a sort of fix for some of this but need to experiment. When your parties of villagers are inside a town you can interact with them and actually give them soldiers! This can make them untouchable by looters and increase carry capacity leading to better deliveries to town i think?

This needs some more experimenting but even if its true its still a frustrating amount of tedium to get everything set up right and then have to keep an eye on it, would become a nightmare to manage a 10 city empire if you need to personally monitor every villages little band of men. I want to conquer the whole map but when i think about the amount of work involved in the management of even a small empire it sucks all the joy out of it.

 

[andycott]

I might have actually stumbled on a sort of fix for some of this but need to experiment. When your parties of villagers are inside a town you can interact with them and actually give them soldiers! This can make them untouchable by looters and increase carry capacity leading to better deliveries to town i think?

This needs some more experimenting but even if its true its still a frustrating amount of tedium to get everything set up right and then have to keep an eye on it, would become a nightmare to manage a 10 city empire if you need to personally monitor every villages little band of men. I want to conquer the whole map but when i think about the amount of work involved in the management of even a small empire it sucks all the joy out of it.

That's why in the same two threads there is one suggestion, which unites them - adding patrols, which will protect each village and respectively their inhabitants either in villages and when they are going from fief to fief.
In a suggestion about food there is also a point on adding manhunters, which will do part of such work.

 

[Kemsley]

That wassnt a suggestion, you can interact with your villager stacks when there in towns and transfer troops over to them right now.