I puzzle to understand why the outdated systems for recruitment was carried over from Bannerlord. Whereas in Warband, battles were confined to 150 men in total, in Bannerlord this number has risen up to a 1000 alongside dynamic reinforcements to accurately simulate battles of 2000 - 7000 thousand men but recruiting them 7 villagers at a time from some weird towns with overpopulation problems is not an answer.
Sure when you are only starting out as an adventurer you can afford to hire 10 helping hands to help you smash bandit skulls but once you own your own fief, recruiting the odd, broke farmers out seeking their fortune should become irrelevant, especially given that they are overrepresented for this time period.
Villagers were historically tied to their land and recruited in levies to supplement a lord's army, making up roughly 80-90% of army size alongside more professional mercenaries and as the mod 1257 has shown for Warband, this feature can be successfully implemented in the Mount and Blade Universe, allowing a perfect explanation and realism for an AI lord's armies based on the prosperity and militia count of their fiefs dictating both the quality and number of troops.
In terms of the vassal system, it needs to be expanded. The first rank of a landed title (not counting player or AI mercenary companies) should be that of a knight, lording over a village (lords level 2, rulers level 3). With it, a levy of around 20-30 soldiers should become available of tier 1 strength, able to be raised to tier 2 and a maximum of tier 3 if the knight spends time on quests to train his peasants/subjects how to fight.
As you understand, 20-30 men no great army makes which obliges the knight/s of the villages that are subservient to their direct lord to which their villages are tied to, to join their armies thus bolstering their numbers with usually better equipped troops if trained (villages should levy tier 1: 20-30 men, towns should levy tier 2: 50-60 men and castles should levy tier 3: 30-45 men AT DEFAULT, so without any training, cash infusions by the lord to improve his military, no training quests achieved, no special buildings and with no high tier trained units or mercenaries companies hired in bulk to supplement their armies.
This, without being any sort of downgrade, would allow lords to more realistically recoup their losses while lords of many towns and especially rulers will actually find their numbers not only bolstered for army action but also equipped with named knights that act as well-equipped sergeants during battle (think mini-tank bosses) that depending on their tactic level can present new challenges to the player.
This would also eliminate the problem of players complaining that the modern lord uses witchcraft to raise back their armies of the dead from a million towns in but a day whereas with this system the potential pool of recruits would have been growing back home while a lord was at war, allowing not only the realistic raising of new hosts but also letting them go back into the system to produce more goods in the simulated economy while allowing the lords to save a lot of money from their upkeep while still retaining the possibility of raising back their troops on the spot, meaning that the potential threat calculation would be higher for npc lords, thus reducing the frequency of wars in a natural way.
Now onto the technical side of things, is this feasible? The short answer is: Yes. Levy amount can be simply attributed to a fluctuating number as prosperity and militia are treated with a minimum and a maximum gap ensuring balance (so no 100 men raised from a village). The entire action could be confined to a single button, with additional decisions coming up as events, kingdom policy changes or simply two or three dialogue interactions with the steward over the levy with the addition to (for a lord) to incorporate a mercenary company into the ranks for a fixed cost. Aside from that, levies would have to be tagged and only those that are tagged as part of a levy could be returned back to their point of origin with the mercenaries having to be let go manually (paying them gold to depart) at the time when a player wants to relax back into civilian or lordly life.
The point of this system is to prevent the over ballooning of armies from the deathstacks that we see today while also including more interesting characters and actions into the actual build up of one's armies instead of just spamming the upgrade button whenever it becomes available. It would also severely enhance the ability of a state to wage war on a strategic level, making preparations and build ups of levy manpower count on the battlefield and thus making large battles more decisive in their outcomes when they are to happen. The benefits to the economy in bringing resources that might be required to manually upgrade levies in castles and towns naturally increasing and decreasing the needed supply and prices of certain raw goods in a changing world can only be counted as a benefit in such a system, besides the culture-specific levies that would also flesh out all the troops on the battlefield of the kingdoms of Calradia.
Sure when you are only starting out as an adventurer you can afford to hire 10 helping hands to help you smash bandit skulls but once you own your own fief, recruiting the odd, broke farmers out seeking their fortune should become irrelevant, especially given that they are overrepresented for this time period.
Villagers were historically tied to their land and recruited in levies to supplement a lord's army, making up roughly 80-90% of army size alongside more professional mercenaries and as the mod 1257 has shown for Warband, this feature can be successfully implemented in the Mount and Blade Universe, allowing a perfect explanation and realism for an AI lord's armies based on the prosperity and militia count of their fiefs dictating both the quality and number of troops.
In terms of the vassal system, it needs to be expanded. The first rank of a landed title (not counting player or AI mercenary companies) should be that of a knight, lording over a village (lords level 2, rulers level 3). With it, a levy of around 20-30 soldiers should become available of tier 1 strength, able to be raised to tier 2 and a maximum of tier 3 if the knight spends time on quests to train his peasants/subjects how to fight.
As you understand, 20-30 men no great army makes which obliges the knight/s of the villages that are subservient to their direct lord to which their villages are tied to, to join their armies thus bolstering their numbers with usually better equipped troops if trained (villages should levy tier 1: 20-30 men, towns should levy tier 2: 50-60 men and castles should levy tier 3: 30-45 men AT DEFAULT, so without any training, cash infusions by the lord to improve his military, no training quests achieved, no special buildings and with no high tier trained units or mercenaries companies hired in bulk to supplement their armies.
This, without being any sort of downgrade, would allow lords to more realistically recoup their losses while lords of many towns and especially rulers will actually find their numbers not only bolstered for army action but also equipped with named knights that act as well-equipped sergeants during battle (think mini-tank bosses) that depending on their tactic level can present new challenges to the player.
This would also eliminate the problem of players complaining that the modern lord uses witchcraft to raise back their armies of the dead from a million towns in but a day whereas with this system the potential pool of recruits would have been growing back home while a lord was at war, allowing not only the realistic raising of new hosts but also letting them go back into the system to produce more goods in the simulated economy while allowing the lords to save a lot of money from their upkeep while still retaining the possibility of raising back their troops on the spot, meaning that the potential threat calculation would be higher for npc lords, thus reducing the frequency of wars in a natural way.
Now onto the technical side of things, is this feasible? The short answer is: Yes. Levy amount can be simply attributed to a fluctuating number as prosperity and militia are treated with a minimum and a maximum gap ensuring balance (so no 100 men raised from a village). The entire action could be confined to a single button, with additional decisions coming up as events, kingdom policy changes or simply two or three dialogue interactions with the steward over the levy with the addition to (for a lord) to incorporate a mercenary company into the ranks for a fixed cost. Aside from that, levies would have to be tagged and only those that are tagged as part of a levy could be returned back to their point of origin with the mercenaries having to be let go manually (paying them gold to depart) at the time when a player wants to relax back into civilian or lordly life.
The point of this system is to prevent the over ballooning of armies from the deathstacks that we see today while also including more interesting characters and actions into the actual build up of one's armies instead of just spamming the upgrade button whenever it becomes available. It would also severely enhance the ability of a state to wage war on a strategic level, making preparations and build ups of levy manpower count on the battlefield and thus making large battles more decisive in their outcomes when they are to happen. The benefits to the economy in bringing resources that might be required to manually upgrade levies in castles and towns naturally increasing and decreasing the needed supply and prices of certain raw goods in a changing world can only be counted as a benefit in such a system, besides the culture-specific levies that would also flesh out all the troops on the battlefield of the kingdoms of Calradia.
