Barbarian unit costs

**CaesarVincens** · March 28, 2009, 12:52 PM

A point has been raised in the main XGM forum about Barbarian units.

Historically, barbarians would not have standing armies, they would levy an army quickly, but that army would also disband quickly, especially if it wasn't doing anything.

Now this is hard to model with the RTW engine, but one suggestion is to raise the upkeep costs for barbarian units. This would entail lowering the recruitment costs though.

Overall, barbarian units would cost less to recruit than civilization units, but they would have higher upkeep costs.

**Zarax** · March 28, 2009, 04:10 PM

I think we should be very careful as the AI risks bankruptcy very easily this way...

**RedFox** · March 28, 2009, 05:53 PM

Have a background script that injects cash when the treasury is running dry for the AI factions, DTW has such a script, so you can easily copy that.

**Zarax** · March 28, 2009, 05:54 PM

It could be a solution but I'm decisively allergic to BG scripts

**Anakarsis** · March 28, 2009, 07:53 PM

Acutally, the opposite

While its true that barbarian armies were ofthen raised "on the spot", the dismissed once the war is over, we are battling here with the impossibility of training units simultaneoisly. Then, if you don´t have enough settlements, putting higher upkeep should make impossible to raise numerical worthy armies as you cannot cummulate troops without losing a lot of money. I don´t like this feature even on the cililised and i normally use 0-time recruit for everyone. While in civilised nations you may point that a professional or elite unit needs time to be trained, raining so few soldiers from an entire region is not very realistic at all.

I would prefer the opposite, increasing the cost and lowering the upkeep, since many barbarians warriors affords their own upkeep.

Another possible solution i to give the Barbarians higher upkeep, lower cost, and 0 recruit time. That will represent things more accurately. Barbarian armies are raised and dismissed rapidly, but not from nowhere; they are raised form a warrior popularion that often keep training in peace times even if they are not "on service".

However, both lowering the cost/recruit time or the upkeep should give the barbarians an edge, specially since we were working a lot in increasing their combat effectiveness. What i suggets is giving the barbarian barracks, both civic and auxiliary, a penalty to income bonus. This will represent the difficult of barbarian societies in the accumulation of wealth since the warlord must share its gainings from looting and taxes with its soldiers. A penalty of -5 per barrack level may even make unnecesary to increase the upkeep