Techerakh
Recruit
Hey all!
I posted this idea over on reddit, and was encouraged to post it here as well. It's an idea to fix some of the annoying issues around clan parties and armies as a vassal.
Basically, right now, any vassal with enough influence can summon a gigantic army. If you have a kingdom with enough clans, this means you can have a ton of huge, equally sized armies roaming around, and the AI can kind of spam armies when you are fighting them.
Clan parties are also kind of a mess. I've found that I really can't leave them alone for a second and trust them to stay alive. As soon as I let them loose in the world, they wander off to the other side of the map, or deep into enemy territory, and end up dead. I think some of the time that they are doing this is because they have been called into an army elsewhere in the realm. I am left to defend my holdings alone; if an enemy army comes to siege, I am often unable to call my own clan's parties into my army, because they are already serving in a different vassal's army. I basically end up ignoring clan parties until I am a vassal and able to call an army myself, and then I make the clan party and immediately force it into my army so that they don't wander off on their own and die (and if I ever have to disband my army, I also disband the parties and put them into a garrison because, again, I can't leave them alone or they'll wander away and die).
This basically turns clan parties into... just extensions of my own party (with companion leaders that I annoyingly can't level up / choose perks for, because they are technically in a different party even though they're literally sitting across the lord's hall from me in my army).
My fix is this:
Instead of being able to call ANY vassal into an army (and being able to call your clan parties for free), you (and the AI lords) should ONLY be able to call their own clan parties to their armies. Calling your clan parties should cost influence, depending on the size of the party. Kings would be able to call any vassal into their army (or any of their vassal's parties).
This means that instead of having 3-4 equally sized armies that constantly reform under different vassals after being defeated, each kingdom would have 1 "main" army (the King's) that would represent the largest military force of the kingdom and then a increasingly smaller armies as you go down the pecking order of vassals.
Powerful, high level vassals would still have larger armies compared to lower lords (because they can have more clan parties). My personal clan parties would stop leaving my territory to go join someone else's army (if they could also be set to only recruit from my own holdings, even when part of a larger kingdom, that would be EVEN BETTER - that way they actually stay near my stuff and contribute instead of dying in the middle of nowhere). And a decisive battle that crushes the enemy king's army would ACTUALLY derail their war effort (since if the king is captured, they won't be able to raise a single large army anymore - if YOUR main army is still up, they will need multiple smaller vassal armies to defeat you, assuming the two kingdoms are fairly evenly matched). After all, these are MY clan's parties; MY clan's troops. I am still paying the maintenance on those troops even when they are fighting in someone else's army; it seems weird that some nobody clan tier 2 lord with a couple small holdings can steal my clan's parties when I am clan tier 4 and have twice as much land to defend (and cities to boot); who is this nobody who can order my troops around? This change would also make being King feel a bit more special, since you would have an additional army capability that your lower lords don't have (the ability to call them, or their parties, into your army).
Thoughts?
I posted this idea over on reddit, and was encouraged to post it here as well. It's an idea to fix some of the annoying issues around clan parties and armies as a vassal.
Basically, right now, any vassal with enough influence can summon a gigantic army. If you have a kingdom with enough clans, this means you can have a ton of huge, equally sized armies roaming around, and the AI can kind of spam armies when you are fighting them.
Clan parties are also kind of a mess. I've found that I really can't leave them alone for a second and trust them to stay alive. As soon as I let them loose in the world, they wander off to the other side of the map, or deep into enemy territory, and end up dead. I think some of the time that they are doing this is because they have been called into an army elsewhere in the realm. I am left to defend my holdings alone; if an enemy army comes to siege, I am often unable to call my own clan's parties into my army, because they are already serving in a different vassal's army. I basically end up ignoring clan parties until I am a vassal and able to call an army myself, and then I make the clan party and immediately force it into my army so that they don't wander off on their own and die (and if I ever have to disband my army, I also disband the parties and put them into a garrison because, again, I can't leave them alone or they'll wander away and die).
This basically turns clan parties into... just extensions of my own party (with companion leaders that I annoyingly can't level up / choose perks for, because they are technically in a different party even though they're literally sitting across the lord's hall from me in my army).
My fix is this:
Instead of being able to call ANY vassal into an army (and being able to call your clan parties for free), you (and the AI lords) should ONLY be able to call their own clan parties to their armies. Calling your clan parties should cost influence, depending on the size of the party. Kings would be able to call any vassal into their army (or any of their vassal's parties).
This means that instead of having 3-4 equally sized armies that constantly reform under different vassals after being defeated, each kingdom would have 1 "main" army (the King's) that would represent the largest military force of the kingdom and then a increasingly smaller armies as you go down the pecking order of vassals.
Powerful, high level vassals would still have larger armies compared to lower lords (because they can have more clan parties). My personal clan parties would stop leaving my territory to go join someone else's army (if they could also be set to only recruit from my own holdings, even when part of a larger kingdom, that would be EVEN BETTER - that way they actually stay near my stuff and contribute instead of dying in the middle of nowhere). And a decisive battle that crushes the enemy king's army would ACTUALLY derail their war effort (since if the king is captured, they won't be able to raise a single large army anymore - if YOUR main army is still up, they will need multiple smaller vassal armies to defeat you, assuming the two kingdoms are fairly evenly matched). After all, these are MY clan's parties; MY clan's troops. I am still paying the maintenance on those troops even when they are fighting in someone else's army; it seems weird that some nobody clan tier 2 lord with a couple small holdings can steal my clan's parties when I am clan tier 4 and have twice as much land to defend (and cities to boot); who is this nobody who can order my troops around? This change would also make being King feel a bit more special, since you would have an additional army capability that your lower lords don't have (the ability to call them, or their parties, into your army).
Thoughts?
Last edited:
