Oh, my apologies then. I'm sure your family is lovely.
It's not so much giving them troops that's an exploit. It's that you can give them an unlimited amount and pay no associated wages (even town garrisons cost wages). Seems like it was an oversight to me, but I think the way you can abuse it classifies it as an exploit currently.
And the way you can finesse your way into super strong, super fast caravans doesn't seem intended as is either. After all, the game explicitly doesn't allow you to take troops out of a caravan if you desired to do so.
Something I just realized that I had overlooked before is that you can also do this for town militias. That is, totally pull your town's garrison out through the "Manage Garrison" menu and donate all of those troops to the town's militia. You will now not have to pay any wages for the garrison but still receive the same amount of protection. There are other added benefits from this as well, such as the negative "Garrison" modifier for Food Production being removed, allowing food stores to build up faster, and in turn increase the town prosperity growth rate.
There is meant to be a negative "Retired" modifier to your militia size that would cause this not to be sustainable, but it's non-functional at the moment so troops you add will stay there permanently. A word of caution though: once you donate troops to a militia you can never take them out again, so keep that in mind.
All of this applies to castles as well.
Yeah, they will desert. It's not the most efficient way to do it, but it's just a numbers game. Think of it as buying speed and party strength. You might recruit 5k worth of mounted troops (not hard to do in Khuzait territory) and stuff them into your caravan. After the desertion is all said and done you're left with 2.5k of the original troops in a stable party configuration. Now, however, you're party is 0.6 speed faster and some % stronger than the original party because you've shed some of the weak foot soldiers. This amounts to a lower chance of bandits catching your caravans, and a smaller portion of bandit parties even willing to engage, resulting in higher odds of survival. If you can avoid losing your caravan for twice as long you've saved 18k assuming you go out and buy a new caravan immediately each time it's destroyed. It's actually a bit more because caravans have a period of delay before making money, and the fewer times you have to repeat it the less downtime you have. You could argue that those troops are better spent in your own party though, and you may be right. But if you've hit the cap, then all those recruitable troops sitting in villages are just going to waste anyway.Sure, but won't most of them just desert anyway? You'd probably need to give the caravan 50 or 60 of your high tier troops to wind up with 30 after desertions. That's a pretty big cost and you'll never get those troops back. And they probably won't live all that long in the AI's hands anyway. Autocalc will steadily whittle them away and they'll start getting replaced with recruits again. At best, its just a temporary buff for the caravan.
That seems to be true. It will slow the rate that your militia grows below the cap, but won't remove any soldiers above the cap. Good catch.Are you sure about the "Retired" modifier not working at all? It may not actually pull already-existing militia numbers down (I haven't seen it do that either). But seems to me it is taken into account in the various tooltips showing militia growth rate when building them up. So kinda appears it's "half-working", at least.
If you want to play it safe, just give villager parties some troops. I was messing around with that earlier and even just a handful of troops made a HUGE difference to how afraid they were of bandit parties and by extension how quickly they got to town and back. Just sit in the town for a day and observe which villages are sending parties, then go out and distribute troops accordingly. You can even hire the villages own troops to give to them.Somewhat afraid to try it, lol; probably as soon as I shift all my garrisons over, they'll patch out this obviously-unintended loophole and I'll lose several hundred troops, lol. Gotta do it with at least one castle though.
Yeah, they will desert. It's not the most efficient way to do it, but it's just a numbers game. Think of it as buying speed and party strength. You might recruit 5k worth of mounted troops (not hard to do in Khuzait territory) and stuff them into your caravan. After the desertion is all said and done you're left with 2.5k of the original troops in a stable party configuration. Now, however, you're party is 0.6 speed faster and some % stronger than the original party because you've shed some of the weak foot soldiers. This amounts to a lower chance of bandits catching your caravans, and a smaller portion of bandit parties even willing to engage, resulting in higher odds of survival. If you can avoid losing your caravan for twice as long you've saved 18k assuming you go out and buy a new caravan immediately each time it's destroyed. It's actually a bit more because caravans have a period of delay before making money, and the fewer times you have to repeat it the less downtime you have. You could argue that those troops are better spent in your own party though, and you may be right. But if you've hit the cap, then all those recruitable troops sitting in villages are just going to waste anyway.
New caravan party distribution seems somewhat random at the moment, but I have seen it as bad as 21/30 foot archers to 9/30 cavalry. That party is doomed from the start unless you intervene because having that many slow tier 3 units means it will be caught sooner rather than later.
There are more efficient ways to get strong troops into your caravan, however, they are less time efficient. You can follow you caravan around and add troops 1-2 at a time until desertion brings them back to 30/30. This helps because say you add 20 units to that party distribution above; it's a 21/50 chance, or 42%, for a foot archer to desert on the first day (odds change fast as desertion happens so I won't list them). But, if you add just 2 troops you have a 21/32 chance, or 66%. Better odds.
The most troop efficient, but time inefficient way would be to follow them around until they get attacked, then swoop in and save them at the last minute. Follow them to the next town and donate the precise troops that you want to bring them up to 30/30 again. No wasted troops in this case.
This is all probably temporary though, because I have a feeling they will allow you to pay to improve your caravan as a feature in the end anyway.
That's all nice info, now delete this thread before devs waste time removing this useful exploit.
But seriously why can't I give away troops if I want to? Everyone wants them and they are scarce, it makes since I should be able to do it and it enhances player agency.
PLAYER AGENCY
me want control and influence game world, ME, not AI, ME
I know I used the term exploit loosely (I also used the word workaround) as far as caravans go, but I was also refering to using militias to bypass garrison wages. That part is an exploit. As far as whether or not TW wants you to be able to replace caravan troops with any troops you want, that's for them to answer. It's true that using the method I outlined above has a fairly decent cost to it (though I still think in the end you come out ahead, even using high tier troops). Stay tuned though, I've learned some more things and will update the post soon with an actual caravan exploit.I agree that there's a benefit, but i just don't think that it should be considered an exploit.
That's almost exclusively what this game is at the moment: a battle simulator. Kill everything is about the only thing on offer right now...I still feel like I have very limited agency in the game beyond KILL EVERYTHING.