Maybe try to make the game more of a challenge? recruit from your culture only.

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hi,
i've been playing a lot. but in the latest builds i found out that it is possible
to make it difficult, and it's also the style i like to play.
so what i do is f.e if i'm playing sturgia, only sturgian recruits plus mercenaries and searaiders.
if i'm playing aserai only recruits from aserai.
simply if i'm playing a culture, i get an army only from the faction i play, the bandits that develop
to a troop from my culture.

it gives me more of a chalenge, and it obliges me do city-village quests.
This is how im play, even in Warband. I just dont like Multicultural Armies.

The Kingdom you fight for + Mercs
 
Something like 10% of the wehrmacht, over 600,000 men, were soviet collaborators. The Allies didn't need to recruit germans in occupied territories because by the time they landed in normandy the war was basically over.

In warband and bannerlord there is no visible difference between the way different factions live, and lords switch factions like crazy, so why even bother trying to restrict who the player can recruit? In real life it was perfectly normal or even preferable to hire soldiers from recently occupied lands. State indoctrination the way we experience it today just didn't exist until relatively recently, and all the sources suggest that average people didn't give a single crap about the king ruling them so long as their own autonomy wasn't infringed.

Actually, I like your idea of limiting foreign recruitment to the foreign lands which you've actually conquered. Would go a long way to helping foreign recruitment in the game seem more believable. It would also make sense; that's how Rome got most of their Auxiliaries and specialist non-Roman units, fe.

Not only that but it would have the added benefit of giving players a lot more incentive to actually go out and conquer regions. Right now, there is very little reason for the player to conquer new territory apart from conquest for the sake of conquest. The prize of gaining unique cultural and specialist auxilia units from foreign conquest would add more dimension to the game. You could, perhaps, further increase the desire to conquer even more regions by proportionally linking the total number of foreign recruits available to the number of related cultural regions. Something like that could maybe work nicely.

Of course, mercenary (free men) should be recruitable pretty much whenever you need them (if available).

I have nothing against foreign military contingents. The idea is sound and historical. What bothers me is the implementation, which we've had since Warband. The fact that I can be at war with a Lord, march into his territory and freely recruit native serfs and peasants (who would be under the strict jurisdiction of their Lord & Liege) makes little sense to me and is not very believable.
 
What bothers me is the implementation, which we've had since Warband. The fact that I can be at war with a Lord, march into his territory and freely recruit native serfs and peasants (who would be under the strict jurisdiction of their Lord & Liege) makes little sense to me and is not very believable.
It bothered me when some village elder would not let me hire, because he was the boss.. I can raze his village at any moment AND it would be historically correct. If they dont have a decent army or walls, they better give up some recruits :smile: even today bandits and rebels/paramilitary forces recruit inside what is hostile territory.
 
It bothered me when some village elder would not let me hire, because he was the boss.. I can raze his village at any moment AND it would be historically correct. If they dont have a decent army or walls, they better give up some recruits :smile: even today bandits and rebels/paramilitary forces recruit inside what is hostile territory.

Well fine, I like this method of recruitment too. The bully-boy method of recruitment where a lord takes what he wants when he wants it :smile: I think there's lots of room for improvement and variety when it comes to recruitment.
 
which we've had since Warband. The fact that I can be at war with a Lord, march into his territory and freely recruit native serfs and peasants (who would be under the strict jurisdiction of their Lord & Liege) makes little sense to me and is not very believable.

Then don't base your idea of history and realism on modern day notions of nationalism and Hollywood. people didn't care about their lords as long as they where left alone, it would be amazing if they even knew who their lord was and what he looked like.

Like I said, as soon as the Frankish king ventured outside his own region around Paris he was risking his life, and he really had no authority outside of that region despite being the king of the Franks.

There where no notions of national identity to identify one selves as a people. That didn't come about until the 18th century or so and only really took off in the 19th century
 
I've been thinking that maybe upgrading tier 5 units to tier 6 should only be possible, if you're the same culture as the troop.
And maybe recruiting from prisoners should only work if you're the same culture. (Or they are from neutral culture, like bandits and mercenaries.)

This could be something you could toggle by a difficulty setting.

Something like this:

1) Very Easy:
Same as now.

2) Easy:
Can only upgrade tier5 troops to tier6, if your character has same culture as the troop.
Troops of other cultures in your party have lower morale.

3) Realistic:
Can only upgrade tier5 troops to tier6, if your character has same culture as the troop.
Can only recruit from your prisoners, if the troop has the same culture as you or if the troop is a mercenary or bandit.
Troops of other cultures in your party have lower morale.
 
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I've been doing my best to do this as Sturgia. I only recruit Sturgians, I only convert/recruit Sturgian prisoners. But I am running the mod that gradually converts recruits in newly conquered territory to the owner's Culture which helps.

I do recruit Mameluke cavalry from the Noble's Son line because Sturgia Cav are pretty weak and because I have a Companion that's Aserai and I'm playing with him as the 13th Warrior with mostly all Sturgian Companions.
 
I've been doing my best to do this as Sturgia. I only recruit Sturgians, I only convert/recruit Sturgian prisoners.

Though I do recruit Mameluke cavalry from the Noble's Son line because I have a Companion that's Aserai and I'm playing with him as the 13th Warrior with mostly all Sturgian Companions.
The 13th warrior because they were only 13 guys, that would be some awesome play through. Probably not possible to find 12 Sturgian companions even with mod to hire them all.
 
The 13th warrior because they were only 13 guys, that would be some awesome play through. Probably not possible to find 12 Sturgian companions even with mod to hire them all.

oh, that would be interesting, and possibly viable with how crazy high levels of 1h/2h are now, just add some really good really expensive items and it might be doable. They would need to fix the leveling system first though, and add better high end items first.
 
Then don't base your idea of history and realism on modern day notions of nationalism and Hollywood. people didn't care about their lords as long as they where left alone, it would be amazing if they even knew who their lord was and what he looked like.

Like I said, as soon as the Frankish king ventured outside his own region around Paris he was risking his life, and he really had no authority outside of that region despite being the king of the Franks.

There where no notions of national identity to identify one selves as a people. That didn't come about until the 18th century or so and only really took off in the 19th century

You're correct, "nationalism" was a late development. But the feudal contract was there for many thousands of years. Pledges and allegiances between lords and their peasants were inherited over generations. So a solid understanding of a peasant's place and who he and his kin "belonged" to was actually well understood. From what I can make out, this did actually form a sense of localism. Not exactly nationalism, but not far off.

A peasant may or may not have liked his lord but he (in general) was smart enough to understand that his and his family's prosperity were linked to his lord's success - particularly in times of war with a foreigner. Remember, 90% were peasants whose existence deepended on the lands of their lord, the other 10% were some variation of freeholder but all had a vested interest in the land and local traditions which were potentially threatened by any foreign invasion.

Would a foreign invader honor the terms of the oaths we currently "enjoy" with the house (family) of our current leige? Probably not. In fact, very unlikely. If that foreign invader occupies our village, they will probably show very little mercy to us peasants. Our daughters will be raped, our sons murdered, and our food and land stolen. We will be made destitute and our way of life shattered.

People during the medieval times were not very sophisticated but they were not stupid.

It's in this light that I find it really hard to believe how I can so freely recruit from the villages of my enemy.
 
Would a foreign invader honor the terms of the oaths we currently "enjoy" with the house (family) of our current leige? Probably not. In fact, very unlikely. If that foreign invader occupies our village, they will probably show very little mercy to us peasants. Our daughters will be raped, our sons murdered, and our food and land stolen. We will be made destitute and our way of life shattered.

This was pretty rare. All the examples I can think of in the middle ages were of the invaders trying to keep as much of the local infrastructure intact as possible. A really extreme example of this is after the First Crusade where Jerusalem was sacked, but the surrounding countryside was left almost untouched and the locals didn't get taxed. I read a source some 100 years after the first crusade (written by a Muslim) where there were still pre-Islamic, possibly pre-Roman local governorships intact after 500+ years of Islamic and crusader rule. Even the Crusader settlers either integrated with locals or built settlements according to local knowledge.

Another set of examples is in West Africa and Iran where the rulers changed but the institutions stayed the same. In Iran the same "court government" existed basically from the reign of Cyrus all the way to the Khwarezmian Empire in the 1200s. Similarly some West African state bureaucracies had an almost unbroken chain of inheritance from the late middle ages to the late 1800s despite constant conquest and war, and the local institutions have been around for as long as historians can even confirm.

I'm not saying conquest is all flowers and roses, but for the average person it was unlikely to represent much more than a change in coinage. Medieval wars were very limited and even when two big states went raiding each other, only small parts of each state would get affected. The reason people bring up the chevauchée so often in these discussions is because they were exceptional for the time and represented a prelude to the more totalising national wars of the future.
 
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Would a foreign invader honor the terms of the oaths we currently "enjoy" with the house (family) of our current leige?
what oath? you are born as your lords possession.

I don't think mass burning pillaging and raping etc... of the commoners was the norm.

Raiding of villages and committing atrocities where mostly to force the enemy to commit to battle. Which was a trick to commit your enemy to battle even since Roman times, but your army still needed to be fed and that food had to come from the land especially in enemy territory it's not smart to go ahead and burn the fields and villages that will eventually have to provide you with food, especially if you end up in a prolonged siege of an enemy stronghold at one point.


It's in this light that I find it really hard to believe how I can so freely recruit from the villages of my enemy.

You will always have adventurers trying to escape their lot, their choice is: be a serf and be born as property of some dude who takes a tenth of your crops who can execute you for hunting in "his forest", and forbids you from ever moving from his land, and have all your children and their children and their children always be born to suffer the same fate. Or pick up arms with this army showing up and have a chance to escape your lot and make a bit of a living and have a slightly more comfortable life.
 
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That's why this game needs religion (or some other modifier) like Viking Conquest that negates points from party stability for clashing cultures.

+++100

Not just within your party, army or within your companions but also regional/cultural effects on the game.

It could get overly complicated real fast so I'd love to see the most basic forms of religion involved. I'm talking about not even naming the religions, just having a "religious" value for each culture with the building of shrines and erecting temples adding to happiness and productivity but also causing cultural rifts. Or destroying these shrines and temples effecting how we rule our conquered lands.

The player could have the choice to purge the local populace and destroy of their temples. This would require gradually/slowing bringing in settlers from their kingdome, which would result in very low initial productivity and reveneue for quite some time, but with zero chance of revolt. The other option would be not slaughtering the locals, keeping the local traditions and shrines with higher productivity in the short term but with a higher chance of revolt over time. This approach would require the player keeping a large garrison in this type of conquered city to keep the locals in fear of swift and overwhelming military reprisals for any civilian uprising.

I hate to continuously point towards Total War games and mods, but I must. TW games and mods in Rome and Medieval TW had a descent system of culture + religion effecting the happiness of the conquered local populace with ways for the player to negate or overcome the religious and cultural conflicts in the regions they conquered.
 
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I disagree, the whole point of religion and public order in total war games is just to slow you down and has no real basis in history. Conquest is already tedious enough, and having to go through the motions of converting the population would be worse still.

People of different religions could and did coexist in the middle ages. Religious violence typically only got bad when it was encouraged by institutions to maintain control, and even then it was directed at other civilians, not the state. Christians and Muslims lived alongside each other in the same villages during the crusades, and Muslims ruled over majority Christian and Jewish communities up until the Ottomans (who were so commited to the multi-faith idea that they combined churches and mosques into a single building). This video game idea that you have to commit genocide in order to keep conquered people under control is just nuts.
 
I disagree, the whole point of religion and public order in total war games is just to slow you down and has no real basis in history. Conquest is already tedious enough, and having to go through the motions of converting the population would be worse still.

People of different religions could and did coexist in the middle ages. Religious violence typically only got bad when it was encouraged by institutions to maintain control, and even then it was directed at other civilians, not the state. Christians and Muslims lived alongside each other in the same villages during the crusades, and Muslims ruled over majority Christian and Jewish communities up until the Ottomans (who were so commited to the multi-faith idea that they combined churches and mosques into a single building). This video game idea that you have to commit genocide in order to keep conquered people under control is just nuts.

No basis in real history..... Okay, :roll:
 
This video game idea that you have to commit genocide in order to keep conquered people under control is just nuts.

Last year I read the Livonian Chronicle of Henry, which was written down by a christian priest, who accompanied the christian crusaders during the northern crusades. He describes how entire villages of civillians were tortured and killed, including women and children, simply because they were pagans.

That said, I'd prefer if the devs kept religion out of M&B. I don't want it to turn too much into a grand strategy game. The appeal of M&B is it's battle system. It's not supposed to compete with CK2.
 
I hope the devs never do this. There is enough of forcing the player to play the game a set away already as it is. This may make a great mod or total conversion.
 
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