SP - General Recruitment, troop level up method, noble troops, leadership and Vigla recruits (it's long, sorry).

[pmotapereira]

I had some ideas recently about these topics, don’t know if similar suggestions were made.

1 – I liked the recruitment options from With Fire and Sword, where you went to cities asking troops to be trained. Now I wouldn’t suggest that as replacement, but as an addition, here is what I thought:

• Castles and towns could have a Quartermaster NPC, from who you could ask that specific troops be trained. You need to be a member of that faction for this to be possible. The quartermaster would then present you with the troop tree of that faction and you would choose which troops you want and how many.
• You would have to pay for three or two things: the price of the natural evolution of those troops (as if you had them and going from recruit to the desired tier/troop type), the price of the quartermaster’s service and the price of gathering those recruits, which could be optional.
• If you take the recruits that you got from towns and villages to the quartermaster, the training time would be shorter and price lower. So, it would still be good for players to go to villages and towns getting recruits.
• This would improve the mid and late game army building, for example, I have one castle, where I leave my main army, Bucellarii and Cavalry, while I need to go around with a bunch of recruits, for the second army I want to build, who cannot do anything against a mid tier Vlandian army, my current enemy. Right now, any AI lord can muster and level up their armies much faster than the player. Of course, they could also use this service.
• Now, there is the problem of the troops that need a specific item to level up, which will be addressed in the next suggestion.

2 – About the need to buy horses and war horses to level up certain troops: I get the point, I understand the idea, but the way it is right now makes things very boring.

• Instead of having to buy a horse, certain troops upon leveling up to certain tiers, had a much higher cost in order to represent the purchase of better equipment and mounts, and that in this case, that troop can only be leveled up if the army is in a town (where they would “buy” said equipment). For example for my Equite to become a Heavy Cavalry I would pay 1000 denars (average price of a war horse?). I don’t need to buy the horse as an item, but the idea of the horse is still there. I suggest this because it feels strange that you need to provide the horse, but not the rest of the equipment. So either make us buy everything (which I think would make things really difficult and boring) or represent that equipment as the total cost of levelling up a soldier.

3 – I wish Noble troops were e little bit easier to gather. I like to make cavalry only armies with the empire, and my god it is impossible to build a decent army under an acceptable amount of time.

• Every town should have noble troops because that is where the money and the power is. Furthermore, villages with noble troops should not be random. I will give a simple example: in one playthrough the northern empire had only three villages with noble troops. If I were fighting for them, I would have serious problems to gather Vigla recruits, when the war with the southern empire started (I was in this case fighting for the south, they had three times that number of villages with noble troops).

4 – Leadership skill should receive XP from other sources than just leading armies and high morale (which right now provide near zero XP). Also, it would be nice if the leadership skill also had better effects, like discount in troop wages and a daily XP bonus to troops (the same argument as before: raising armies takes a long time for the player, while a recently released AI lord will have tier 3 and 4 soldiers in his armies in a few days).

5 – To finish: Aserai youth and Vlandian squires start as cavalry, why the vigla recruit has to go through the slow and painful (and wasteful, because as infantry they are horrible) process of having to fight without horses until he can be upgraded to equite?

 

[dangitsdaaaaang]

Hopefully the devs see your post, it's well thought out! Just wanted to offer my two cents on certain points:

#2 - one of the reasons I appreciate (and wish there were a more flexible system for specifying more requisites to upgrade aside from money and a choice item) the current system is that it takes into account post-battle looting. Recovering horses from a battle is generally how I upgrade my cavalry, not by purchasing them in a town. I would like the same to be applied to armor and arms, but then there's the complexity of specifying which weapons qualify for specific unit types, and that all seems unnecessary given their other priorities. It's always been strange that upgrade costs are so low relative to the market price of new equipment, though.

#3 - Nobles should generally not be found in towns, largely because towns are where the free commoners and burghers live, not the nobles. Being that this is based on the High Medieval period, most lords owned manors and castles in the countryside, so it makes sense for the more elite troops that would presumably form their retinue be found there.

 

[pmotapereira]

Hopefully the devs see your post, it's well thought out! Just wanted to offer my two cents on certain points:

#2 - one of the reasons I appreciate (and wish there were a more flexible system for specifying more requisites to upgrade aside from money and a choice item) the current system is that it takes into account post-battle looting. Recovering horses from a battle is generally how I upgrade my cavalry, not by purchasing them in a town. I would like the same to be applied to armor and arms, but then there's the complexity of specifying which weapons qualify for specific unit types, and that all seems unnecessary given their other priorities. It's always been strange that upgrade costs are so low relative to the market price of new equipment, though.

#3 - Nobles should generally not be found in towns, largely because towns are where the free commoners and burghers live, not the nobles. Being that this is based on the High Medieval period, most lords owned manors and castles in the countryside, so it makes sense for the more elite troops that would presumably form their retinue be found there.

Thanks for your thoughts

2 – So, I get that, and I remember, when the game came out I did the same thing and it worked fairly ok, but right now I feel it is much more difficult (in the last two times that I started a new game). Maybe the looting system and the items available in towns needs to the balanced more. On second note, it would be nice if you could choose which horses will be used for the level up, because I won a bunch of horses in tournaments and now, they are with my Mamelukes. Me and my companions didn’t have enough ridding skill to use them (and I wanted to save them for us to use).

3 – Well, yes nobles would have their villas and properties outside the cities, but I think the game (as it is presented) falls in the last years of the roman empire, nobility would have their villas and castles, but would still be present in the cities. I get your point and is worth considering. Maybe they could be present at least in the capitals, a place that would naturally concentrate nobles from that faction. I hope they just find a way to balance this in the future. Maybe castles could have recruits too (a reduced number, not comparable to villages and cities). There is a very nice mod that shows which villages have noble recruits (and helps to see how unfair the random distribution can be), that would be something worth adding. To make it more interesting they could make that you can only mark the village as having noble troops after you visit it.

PS: What you said about the level up cost and the armor and weapons they have: I sometimes look at my cataphracts during the start of a battle and demand to know how they got those things, while I'm wearing something I won at a tournament.

 

[Apocal]

Hopefully the devs see your post, it's well thought out! Just wanted to offer my two cents on certain points:

#2 - one of the reasons I appreciate (and wish there were a more flexible system for specifying more requisites to upgrade aside from money and a choice item) the current system is that it takes into account post-battle looting. Recovering horses from a battle is generally how I upgrade my cavalry, not by purchasing them in a town. I would like the same to be applied to armor and arms, but then there's the complexity of specifying which weapons qualify for specific unit types, and that all seems unnecessary given their other priorities. It's always been strange that upgrade costs are so low relative to the market price of new equipment, though.

Why not use weapon and armor tier instead of specific weapons? But that would very much demand a fix to equipment prices.