Stalwart Swadians Stand Against the Vaegir Horde

[Ancient Whale]

Something that I think could be improved is that the Vaegir and Swadian units are pretty much mirrors of each other. Although I have noticed certain differences between respective units(Swadian sharpshooters, for example, all have leather armor, but longbows and crossbows while their counterparts, Vaegir marksmen, have better armor but not as powerful weapons. And pretty much all Vaegir units have steppe caps). There have been many suggestions, I recall, about giving each side their own unique units, like horse archers for Vaegirs and armored crossbowmen for Swadians. But I think the differences in the two armies should be more fundamental, and that it would be a completely different experience to play one side or the other.

I have one idea about getting closer to this goal. I've been mainly playing with a swadian warband, and I've often had a caption in my head as I position my archers on the top of a hill. "Stalwart Swadians stand against the Vaegir horde". Which gave me the idea: That Vaegirs would be more numerous than Swadians. They would be cheaper to recruit and maintain, but have poorer equipment and skills. This alone would break the system however, as eventually you would reach the maximum amount of units you can lead at the time and fourty swadians are better than fourty vaegirs. Which leads to the main point of my post: Vaegir units would take less space than swadian units. For example: Three vaegir units would take as much space as two swadian, or four vaegirs would take as much as three swadians.

I feel like this would add much to the game, but I don't know if it's hard to implement or if everyone disagrees with me.

EDIT: I was going to make another topic about this, but I felt it was related enough to have in one thread:

A way of making this easy to implement was to replace the "troop capacity" that is increased by the Leadership skill as well as the Charisma ability with what I like to call "Command points(subject to change)". Basically, you would get a number of command points that dictate how many and what kind of troops you can command in your party. Knights would require more command points that peasants, for example, being rich, skilled and probably very headstrong as well. Also, you would need a certain amount of command points before you can keep a knight in your band.
EXAMPLE: If you had 50 command points and a knight requires ten points, you could have five knights in your band. BUT, you can only upgrade to or recruit a knight if you have two hundred command points or more.
And a Vaegir knight would perhaps only cost eight points, but a Swadian knight ten, and peasants one.

This is a fairly bare-bones suggestion, but something I'd like discussed.

 

[Cataphract]

I respect your suggestion but it would be idiotic to not let the player command 100 units of his own choice, there shouldnt be any "Rules" about that. "3vaegir knights are harder to command than 1 peasant stuff", If the player has the cash he should be allowed to have 50 knights instead of peasants or archers. Its more the games fault if 50knights are always better than a carefully picked mixed party. I think knights and higher ranked units should be much more rare instead, which they are now though but even more. There simply shouldnt be as much knights as peasants in calradia which would make them very expensive.

 

[Garth]

I'm no history buff, but if I'm correct, knights were more the commanders and elite units within armies and a wandering army of 50 of them was probably unheard of.

Knights should be pumped up even more than they are, way more rare as Cataphract suggested, and much harder to obtain, maybe having to earn a lot more experience and then also having to visit a king on top of that.

And just because of their style, Vaegirs should have Warlords instead of Knights.


And finally, to actually answer Ancient Whale, I'm a Vaegir myself (I'll see you out on the field, scum), and I don't quite view Vaegirs as the vast barbarian horde trying to thwart the righteous Swadian empire as it would appear you do; I view the situation as more of scattered rebelling Vaegir tribes fighting against the oppression of the vast Swadian Empire. So lets wait and see how Armagan decides to flesh out the conflict, and if Vaegirs are indeed a large barbarian horde, then I definitely think they should be given larger numbers in the method you suggested (though I don't know about this Command Point idea). Vaegirs always seem to lose when fighting against an equal number of their Swadian equivalents.


But in the end, I support having more unique units on each side more than anything. Yay.

 

[powerg8]

Khights in the real world were noblemen only.In the game you can hire a peasent at a tavern and if he lives long will upgrade to a khight.But back then if you where a peasent there was no way to move up in the social classes.

 

[ManOfHonor]

But back then if you where a peasent there was no way to move up in the social classes.

not exactly correct.... but 99.999% of the time, yes... peasant to knight = a no-no


i dont know about you, but whenever i fight vaegs, its always with me heavily outnumbered, and almost all my knights have been killed off, i usualy carry a 15-25 member party, an most ofem r militias at over 15.....

and i just love taking down those 50 men vaeg 'war partys' (more like criminal horde)



but if it was balanced so that it was supposed to be more like this.... well that would be awesome...

 

[Can O Soup]

Well, I play as a Swadian in my vanilla setup, but as a bandit in my mag7. The whole reason I play Swadian is because the name sounds better to me.

About the story you guys want.... I hope Armagan wants to make it so that theres not really any right or wrong with who you pick to be loyal to. I mean, if he did, either 1/4 (Swadian) or 3/4 (Vaegir) of the message boards might be a wee bit angry about it, while the others are happy. I certainly hope that he makes both nations vicious and brutal towards eachother and make them both viable choices for a "good guy only" playthrough of a game.

 

[Garth]

Or perhaps they both start out neutral and become either righteous or cruel based on the choices you make?

Because that would be like, I dunno... umm, you know, umm... ridiculously awesome?

 

[Destichado]

A few things...

Knights were not exactly COMMON, but they weren't rare either. The gentry were a little less than 10% of the population. Of course not all were knighted, but then there were a hell of a lot of men that we would *call* "knights" who were never knighted at all. And some small number of them were baseborn, too!

Having a large number of knights in a group was actually rather common. A knight bannerette, for instance, was a knight of some renown who had the money and reputation to gather other knights under his banner (hence the name). Bannerettes would generally gather between twenty to fifty lances, with that many again or more on foot; plus supply trains, servants, provisions, etc. I like to throw in that I too would like knights to be much more deadly (faster weapon speed?) and harder to kill.

We could avoid all the social-class stuff by simply saying that all our characters were gently born. Maybe they're poor as dirt, maybe they'll die poorer, but they have good enough blood that they would be allowed to advance.

 

[DaLagga]

I really do like the idea of units simply costing different amounts of command points. However, to keep you from just going mass of a single unit, perhaps once you had a certain number of a particular unit, it started to cost more to hire each additional unit of that same type. That way you would be forced to have a more balanced force, rather than knowing that knights are the best unit in the game, so why go for anything else. And making them more rare wouldn't really balance anything IMO. It would just make it 10 times more frustrating when one is killed because he decided to rambo. In addition, i think that once people built their army of knights and lost a battle, they would feel compelled to just reload before the game auto-saved (or just play on the non-realistic mode).

 

[Ancient Whale]

There seems to be a minor misunderstanding regarding my comment about the "Vaegir Horde". I did not mean that the Swadians were the good guys facing a greater, evil opponent. The "Stalwart Swadians..." poster was more something that someone like Uncle Sam would post. Swadian propaganda you know. Meanwhile the Vaegirs would be posting things like "Brave Vaegir soldiers stand valiantly against the Swadian scum" or something like that. I always think of Russians when I see vaegirs, I don't quite know. The Swadian-Vaegir war is a little like the German-Russian war, with the Germans being better trained and better equipped, but the Russians far more numerous. Except the Swadians aren't ruled by a madman with a stupid moustache(or are they?).

DaLagga, the command point system would(I think) already balance things so you wouldn't have all the same units(Should I have thirty knights or fourty-five men-at-arms?). Or maybe not. I don't know. I just don't quite like the idea. Maybe because the Command Point(capitalized) system is already limiting enough.

 

[The Pope]

The unit stack limit makes balanced forces almost impossible whether you want them or not. If formations are added, I'd say the stack limit should be scrapped and the leadership skill should govern how many seperate formation groups you can have. Tactics would govern which ones you could use - at low levels, you would be limited to clump but later on you could use line, square, wedge, circle, skirmish and clump.

 

[Gaidal Cain]

In 1302, the French army in the Battle of the Golden Spurs (that was defeated) held 2500 knights, 1000 crossbowmen, 2000 pikemen and 3000 regular infantry. I don't think knights were THAT rare.


Well, maybe after 1302 *chuckles*

 

[0cool]

that was b/c things get lost in translation a knight is a Noblemen that has mad the art of war is live....how ever you had to have LOTS of money to be one for the armor they wear isnt cheap...so many of them where most likly horse men that were give lances and didnt have the armor or noblelity of a REAL knight. so out of the 2500 i would say that only 1000 of them could have been knights max...the rest just look alikes.

 

[fak]

"The French was by contrast a classic feudal army made up of core of 2500 noble cavalry, both knights and squires. They were supported by 1000 crossbowmen, 1000 pike men and 2000 other light infantry, in total 6500 soldiers."
Found from Wikipedia