epil
Recruit
I think everybody would acknowledge that campaign gameplay has army blob / endless armies issue. This issue is caused by AI lords getting free troops if their party gets destroyed and they can quickly recruit further troops from settlements so if they're not captured in battlefield, they can reach similar size of army 1 week after the battle where they're annihilated. Even If they're captured in the battle, they are usually escaping or getting ransomed in short period of time. So eventually big battles like 1000v1000 battles feels pointless to the player because enemy recovers very quickly and musters another 1000 army before player is able to exploit the victory. I suppose this issue is deliberately caused by developers to prevent snowballing but this issue can be solved with some changes which I will propose without causing snowballing:
1)Battles in this game are for total annihilation. It goes until one side is annihilated and completely destroyed & imprisoned, which is unrealistic. This is rarely happened in real medieval warfare. AI armies must have ability to retreat with sacrificing some troops (player already have this option). Retreat actually happens in battlefield when morale is too low but soldiers which got away from the battlefield considered lost too so losing army gets totally annihilated nevertheless.
For example lets say army A (1000) and army B (800) is engaged in battle, in current situation if army B is weaker than A, the battle goes until B is completely destroyed. With this change B must be able to get away from the battlefield with, lets say, 450 troops who was able to escape battlefield. So B is no longer totally annihilated and if B's faction is outnumbered because of recent loss of manpower AI in this case must think it should conduct defensive operations around owned settlements instead of going offensive over enemy territory. This would increase their chance to hold their territory and regroup.
2)Free troops for AI lords when they're destroyed and high recruitment rate for AI from settlements should be significantly decreased. So that AI can't recover very quickly to assemble endless armies against victor.
3)Escape rates of AI lords when they're locked in to dungeons should be near 0 (realistically). This would allow winning side to deprive enemy from their manpower by winning battles. Losing faction must consider peace with paying tribute when they get to the point that they lost significant portion of their manpower because of imprisoned lords. This would also give importance to prison escape missions (which players dont tend to do because effort doesnt worth it since subject prisoner will probably escape or ransomed in short period of time).
Implementing these changes properly would make battles feel important to the player and would also prevent snowballing because AI armies won't get destroyed easily with their retreat ability + defensive strategies when they know they're outnumbered.
1)Battles in this game are for total annihilation. It goes until one side is annihilated and completely destroyed & imprisoned, which is unrealistic. This is rarely happened in real medieval warfare. AI armies must have ability to retreat with sacrificing some troops (player already have this option). Retreat actually happens in battlefield when morale is too low but soldiers which got away from the battlefield considered lost too so losing army gets totally annihilated nevertheless.
For example lets say army A (1000) and army B (800) is engaged in battle, in current situation if army B is weaker than A, the battle goes until B is completely destroyed. With this change B must be able to get away from the battlefield with, lets say, 450 troops who was able to escape battlefield. So B is no longer totally annihilated and if B's faction is outnumbered because of recent loss of manpower AI in this case must think it should conduct defensive operations around owned settlements instead of going offensive over enemy territory. This would increase their chance to hold their territory and regroup.
2)Free troops for AI lords when they're destroyed and high recruitment rate for AI from settlements should be significantly decreased. So that AI can't recover very quickly to assemble endless armies against victor.
3)Escape rates of AI lords when they're locked in to dungeons should be near 0 (realistically). This would allow winning side to deprive enemy from their manpower by winning battles. Losing faction must consider peace with paying tribute when they get to the point that they lost significant portion of their manpower because of imprisoned lords. This would also give importance to prison escape missions (which players dont tend to do because effort doesnt worth it since subject prisoner will probably escape or ransomed in short period of time).
Implementing these changes properly would make battles feel important to the player and would also prevent snowballing because AI armies won't get destroyed easily with their retreat ability + defensive strategies when they know they're outnumbered.
