Custom Troops

[diaphantos]

I apologize if this has been asked before, but searching "custom troops" brings up a lot of threads with "troops" only.

So, after reading the description for teatrc WB it seems like there are custom troops that can be armed and armored by the player, available from the training fields. However, when I try to recruit from them, after having finished the sparring challenge, the only troops I can hire are the lowest rank troops of each faction.

Does anyone know where to get custom troops, how to arm them, etc?

 

[Somebody]

They are upgraded from the arena fighter troops, townsmen, and manhunters, etc. When you form your own faction, these become easier to get as the last two are the town troops. The training grounds pull recruits from the nearest factions and will always have some basic fighters, which upgrade to a branch of the custom troops. Note that the Fighter branch is not customizable, and that the upgrade tree might diverge into regular mercenaries. To play around with them, you can always enable cheats and talk to any tavernkeeper to acquire any troop five at a time.

 

[diaphantos]

Can I customize them by talking with them through the party interface, or only through merchants?

 

[Somebody]

By default, they come with arena items, colour-coded for your convenience. You are able to pick which items they carry to battle by talking with them. In order to supply them with more items, you must talk to merchants and faction lords, which will give you a steady supply, or with a tournament and gain some of their weapons (or choose to keep it for yourself).

 

[AndarielHalo]

Are custom troops broken?  I had given them all spiffy names and started to equip them last night.  Then when I come on this morning, their names have reverted back to "Regular Fighter", "Regular Skirmisher", etcetera, and all the equipment I gave them is gone; the Veteran Swordsmen now have literally nothing.

I renamed them again, then saved game, exited, re-opened, their names are reset again!  AND they've lost all the equipment I bought for them, while my debt to the merchants stays the same!

 

[Somebody]

Well if you commented out the call to script_reload_custom_troops, it obviously won't work. Is the game still crashing on load for you?

 

[AndarielHalo]

I don't think it is.  Hasn't crashed at all yet, but mostly because I disbanded all my custom troops beforehand at some point.  I'll check now


ok it works now, and it doesn't crash either


Another question:  Is it possible to give different armor/weapon loadouts to the same type of unit of different rank?  As in, having Novice Fighters equipped with leather armor, then have Regular Fighters equipped with scale mail, then Veteran Fighters have plate mail?

 

[Somebody]

You make items available to a certain category of troops (horses to knights and dragoons), and then talk to the troops of different ranks to actually customize their loadout. Each of them already have default color-coded arena item loadouts that you can start customizing with right away.

 

[AndarielHalo]

But when I purchased a certain shield type for my infantry, the Regular versions did not have that shield available to equip, but only the novice and veterans had it available.


It seems to me that the hassle just isn't worth custom troops, especially since the equipment the merchants have available is very limited in variety.