Question about troop garrisons in towns held by DKs

[Pellagus]

A mate of mine is playing NE and said that when the DKs took one of his towns, their garrison immediately bumped up to something like 300 men. Is this correct or does a lord have to leave some of his army as a garrison, like the player would?

Having listened to his woes and read some of the other comments on this forum, I'm beginning to think I've had a bit of an easy time with the DKs.

Also, I'm assuming that DK lords with towns do better than DK lords with castles as they can draw more recruits from villages? I've seen DK caravans, too, but who do they trade with? They were at war with everyone in the game I'm playing.

 

[Josef_the_Pretender]

I wasn't really looking at the figures when they started taking over everything, but I think that your mate is correct. Seems to me if they siege a castle successfully, then they automatically garrison it with 146 DKs, at no cost to the DK Lord's own party.

When they took Jelkala in my game, the garrison seemed to go into overdrive. I believe that they stuck in the usual 146 or so, and started recruiting like mad from the University or Citadel or whatever it is. I vaguely remember an initial garrison of 300 but I could be wrong. Jelkala now has 788 people garrisoned, including 122 Elite Arbalestiers and a similar number of the other Rhodok elite (can't remember what they are). How they can afford this I don't know, they must have brought a stash of Dark Denars with them (exchange rate = 1:100).

I see their caravans coming out of Swadian cities, so their trade doesn't seem to be affected by the normal rules of war either.