Things I need for companion parties to not be a headache:
-I want to be able to disable noble companions from joining armies. Either I can set a toggle in the party management screen or a pop-up could alert me to an army forming that a party of mine could join and I could yea or nay it. Currently wanderer leaders will never join an army and it seems like noble leaders will ALWAYS join an army. This does make the Golden companions extra valuable in a sense but for the love of god allow me to control it. I hate having a strong party with good troops get sucked into an army and are then thrown away to bad decisions unless I personally follow the army with my own army just to protect it. (although this isn't actually a bad strategy a lot of times, when enemies swarm your friendly army you can swoop in with your backup army and get tons of prisoners/relationship points pretty easily and then you can take the city)
-I want to be able to tell a party to patrol around a certain area and defend it. You could do this in Warband. Since you lose relationship if an enemy is interrupted while pillaging I need to place parties in choke points to prevent the pillaging from even starting. This wouldn't be hard to do if I could just tell my parties to do so.
-I want to be able to disable pillaging of enemy villages. I don't really want Nathanos to run into enemy territory on his own where he will get swarmed by 5 smaller parties. Nathanos is supposed to be a good guy. If you don't want to give us direct control at least make it connected to the traits of the party leader. Honorable people shouldn't really pillage. Evil, merciless, vindictive and cruel people would probably do it non stop.
-Speaking of toggles, make it so that our companions only donate troops to towns/castles if I have the option enabled in the party management screen. AI parties will never donate to the player so the whole system needs to be reworked based on how the AI lord feels about the owner of the castle or some such thing. In fact there needs to be a fix for player controlled kingdoms. If you join an AI kingdom all conquered cities/castles default to the king until the election happens. You can walk an army into a newly captured city and have the army donate 100 free troops! Then the election happens, you win the election and they are your troops. YAY. It's good for the kingdom and for you. In a player owned kingdom the newly conquered city defaults to the player and the army you are leading will refuse to donate troops. This seems a little lame and if it is not overpowered to operate one way in the AI kingdom it shouldn't be overpowered to operate that way for the player kingdom. Regardless both cases should have the same mechanics and having two different systems reeks of a mechanic that needs a rework.
-ALLOW US TO MAKE ARMIES WITH OUR CLAN MEMBERS WHEN NOT PART OF A KINGDOM!!!! Currently you have to essentially leave a kingdom to form a kingdom because of how difficult it is to conquer anything with only like 180 troops in your army. A tier 4 clan should easily be able to bring the clan parties together into an army and conquer land in order to found the kingdom. I don't mind choosing a dieing kingdom and backstabbing them once I have my town but it is a step that adds nothing to some styles of play. A conquest through charm play through will still want to join a kingdom and such but a mercenary playthrough should just allow you to seize a castle and declare yourself king.
-Let us allocate stats/skills/perks to companions not in our party. It makes it pointless to create parties before you are in a kingdom with a garrison because the companion/family member you send off as party leader will never be able to rejoin your group unless they get captured/released or you are willing to throw away a ton of troops.
-Allow the party leaders to actually earn scouting points. They earn stewardship points, they earn tactics points, they earn medicine and engineering but the party leader will never ever ever earn scouting points. I have no idea why. In 1.5.1 you can even set clan roles specifically for a party like Nathanos' party can have a separate scout assigned that is not your scout but it doesn't seem to work.
-Prevent parties from taking more troops then they can support which causes deserters. I know that this is related to parties taking all possible troops that were prisoners of defeated parties BUT perhaps make it so that the AI only takes troops up to their max party size and have them take the highest tier troops they can while abandoning low tier troops. I'm tired of constantly taking militia spearmen, looters and peasants out of my companions party before they lose a tier 6 cavalry unit.
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