ideas contribution wanted: recruitment mechanics

[sphere]

Looking for additional ideas (not implementations, just in case) for a recruitment mechanics mod I am working on.
Firstly, this is not meant to be a mod that changes recruitment stuff right away.  It is more like a kit that ALLOWS modders to have an easier time changing recruitment stuff.

Goals:

• Makes it easier to mod recruitment related stuff like: (Note: make it eaiser to do so, but does not do it by default)
   
• Customize who can recruit from where and how many and for how much. (e.g. recruitment from slave pits/parties that you own in some mod may be free but dependent on prisoner types).  Think it also helps if some sample can be given for a request I've seen quite often: how to get new troops that you created yourself recruit-able in villages etc, or how to enable recruitment from towns.
   
• Allows recruitment from parties other than villages (towns/castles, even other mobile parties.)
   
• Allow multiple troop types recruitable at the same time at a recruitment source (regardless of cultural faction etc)
   
• Allow specification of exact troop type and number for recruitment.
   
• Usable by both player and npcs (unlike the recruitment scripts now which is for player only). (This is groundwork for future AI stuff)
• Maintains zero-behavior change by default (if not customized, it behaves like Native)

The implementation details are too nitty gritty to list here, but basically involves refactoring the in-game recruitment related stuff to call script functions of my own design, which makes it easier for modders to customize recruitment in their mod by changing the content of these script functions without requiring to hook them up to the game engine since they are already hooked up from the start.

E.g. say a script function "script_my_party_get_recruit" is designed to return the type and number of troops volunteers available from a center.  In the original game scripts, where the values are directly read from slots, they are changed to call this new function instead.  Initially, within this function, it just does what Native is doing now, read from the slots slot_center_volunteer_troop_type and slot_center_volunteer_troop_amount.  But a modder can now easily this to read from other factors/slots by changing this function only. blah blah blah....

What I hope to have help with, is to try to have an idea storm here to see if there are anything I miss, or any better ideas, useful goals which are not covered yet, so that I can test the soundness of the approach I'm taking.  Or you can just talk about your wishes for recruitment (and I'll check whether those are feasibly achievable under current design)

thanks in advance.

 

[Ashmond]

Why script when you could just do it from various base dialogs like with the village elder and the guild master or on map conversations? 

Then your users could just tweak that for the various prerequisites, volume, costs and specific troops.  Of course this doesn't cover the future AI stuff but that could exist in and of itself...

And finally, if it maintains zero-behavior change by default, what would be the point of including it in a build?

 

[xenoargh]

I guess my thought on this is that the main way to achieve a major improvement to the existing mechanics would be two big features:

1.  A generic handler for Taverns that allows newbie coders to instantly decide how many random mercenaries show up daily / weekly / whatever, and how many are in the Taverns at once.

2.  A optional handler for towns, fortresses, and villages that allows for hiring there via a Dialogue or menu and the possibility of multiple choices.

However, past that, you get into a lot of very hairy and game-design specific issues. 

Troop availability mechanics are one of the big cornerstones of building gameplay, and everybody's going to want to do it differently.  The best thing is to develop a very clean, mean set of sub-mechanics, imo.