Recruiting

[Ivan Khan]

Cool just as long as they don't have tunics and butter knifes at their new price.

Well, they're bandits.  They're the vikings too volatile or unreliable to join up with the factions on their forays to Britain. I don't think you can expect them to have the same equipment supply and maintenance as forces with faction support behind them. Swords break, no smith to repair them. Get drunk, fall off the boat and have to ditch your armour, no armourer to buy new stuff from.

The viking bandit's high level reflects his hard self-reliant lifestyle, but so does his inventory.



On the other issues, I agree it should be easier to get bodyguards than nobles. You rescue plenty of caravan-guard nobles(?!) from various sources so I already end up with proportionally less bodyguards, which just looks weird.  Now I can train a few higher tier troops the disparity is getting even more obvious due to the fact I end up with more drengr than hirdmann to start from.  Looking at the Alban faction, their bodyguard tree has higher levels than the noble line, which I'd imagine will probably exacerbate the problem for those players.

Nobles should be rarer than their bodyguards, basically.  If you're trying to push the player towards a historically accurate spearman-centric army that's good, but maybe nobles should be on the other tier then.

I think you misunderstand what a body guard was at the time. Your bodyguard was generally a small elite group of highly paid retainers, who helped with in other things keeping your lesser nobles in line. A noble at the time was basically any distant tribal relation who was free born. The difference was whether they were paid or had an obligation due to tribal obligation. At a time when capital was small you could not afford to pay many bodyguards.

 

[kraggrim]

For some reason I assumed they were the bodyguards of the 'noble' troops rather than the player/lord, but I guess you're right.