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Thread: City recruitment

  1. #1

    Default City recruitment

    Good afternoon,

    I think we can all agree that M2TW is not challenging enough. In my opinion this in some part, comes from the way the castles/cities system works:

    1) Cities often produce the best units

    2) Cities produce the most money.

    3) You can hold cities very easily because of high quality, free upkeep units.

    4) Cities can produce siege weapons.

    This is how I feel we should setup cities for recruitment so that they are more vunerable:

    Level 1 city barracks - Regional levy unit 'light inf/spearman' (one of the only two free upkeep units).

    Level 2 city barracks - Regional levy unit 'light archer' (one of the only two free upkeep units).

    Level 3 city barracks - The lowest castle barracks unit, i.e for Jerusalem, 'Latin spearmen' (no free upkeep).

    Level 4 city barracks - The worst castle range unit, i.e for Jerusalem, 'Latin crossbowmen' (no free upkeep).

    Level 5 city barracks - Medium spearman, i.e for Jerusalem, 'Latin sergeants' (no free upkeep).

    Level 6 city barracks - Medium infantry, i.e for Jerusalem, 'Latin men at arms' or for Armenia, 'Armenian swordsmen' (no free upkeep).

    Cavalry - Cities should not be able to recruit any cavalry.

    Siege - Cities should not be able to recruit any siege weapons.

    Following this model will do four things for us:

    1) Make cities very difficult to defend against stacks made in castles.

    2) Make it very difficult to go on the offensive using stacks made in cities.

    3) Prevent the AI spamming siege weapons in field battles, and also prevent it from filling its cities with siege weapons.

    4) We will only need to make 8 extra units to outfit all cities (4 regional light inf/spearmen, 4 regional archers).

    Cheers
    Last edited by AlphaDelta; March 24, 2007 at 03:28 AM.
    "I don't want to sit around Windsor because ermm .. I just generally don't like England that much" - Prince Harry, 3rd in Line for the British Thrown



    For King or Country - The English civil wars.

  2. #2

    Default Re: City recruitment

    I wouldn't even grant castle units to the cities. I can't bring up ironclad proof but I seem to remember the division of castle or feudal and city recruitment being an issue for the crusaders, and I'd like to see it in our mod too.

    I agree with being unable to recruit cavalry, or siege engines, so my issue is primarily with the conceptual roster you made. The problem is I can't come up with what I would change.

    I'm just unsure about letting them recruit decent spearmen from their cities. I'd think that's where upgrades could come into use. Perhaps we could let their levy or city militia spearmen upgrade into the 'military' (Latin Spearmen, basically sergeants) spearmen model. They'd look more professional but still lack in stats, and keep people from being able to supplement the needs of a castle (Decent spear or sword infantry) with the abilities of a city.

    What I guess I can say that is unless those medium infantry are city-specific (such as Genoese or Venetian crossbowmen), they should not be recruitable in a city. This could be flexible for certain factions, however. I don't think a castle/city setup would be as critical to the Abbasids or Ayyubids as it would be to the Great Seljuks or Crusaders.

    Do you think we could have a more flexible system, where some factions experience a much greater stress of castle/city balance than others? I can bring up some quotes, but in my osprey book of Saracen Faris, it seems to mention that they often lived and trained in the cities, not in the castles. Until we settle that issue I can't really say I'd agree with no cavalry for any city. For me it seems possible to be situational.
    Last edited by Ahiga; March 24, 2007 at 04:02 AM.

  3. #3
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    Default Re: City recruitment

    I agree with all your points except one. Muslim factions should be able to recruit light cav from the racing track.

  4. #4

    Default Re: City recruitment

    Hi, first time I'm posting here. As soon as I saw the map for this mod I knew I had to play and am looking forward to doing so.

    The mod I'm currently playing, TLR, has unified the recruiting of units between the city and castle. Not to say they're exactly the same, the city's barracks are normally a couple of steps behind and also the castle's troops get an experience boost, and other smaller differences. The thinking went that the computer never switches a castle to a city and vice versa. Therefore if a computer faction only has cities then the army it fields are made of weak troops.

    I'm not saying that you should do it exactly the same but I think if you weaken the cities for the player you also have to weaken the cities for the computer.

  5. #5

    Default Re: City recruitment

    Light cavalry from Muslim cities seems reasonable, with balance coming from the fact that Christian factions can recruit half decent spearmen from cities.

    steelbound,

    That's an interesting idea, but doesnt really fall inline with the idea of this mod. On the contrary to this idea, I believe we actually want poor quality levy armies to form the bulk of stacks, this is historically accurate. Elite units should only form, 20 - 30% of a stack at most. The levy troops will obviously need higher moral than vanilla M2TW gives them to prevent the insta-routes we are currently seeing.

    What we dont want is armies consisting of half town militia/crossbowmen, half siege weapons. That's a real immersion killer.

    Cheers
    "I don't want to sit around Windsor because ermm .. I just generally don't like England that much" - Prince Harry, 3rd in Line for the British Thrown



    For King or Country - The English civil wars.

  6. #6
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    Default Re: City recruitment

    Quote Originally Posted by AlphaDelta View Post
    Light cavalry from Muslim cities seems reasonable, with balance coming from the fact that Christian factions can recruit half decent spearmen from cities.
    Yes, Muslim factions should be able to field a higher yeild and lower cost light cav in general, while the Christian factions should be able to field pretty decent spearmen and swordsmen at higher yields and lower cost.

  7. #7

    Default Re: City recruitment

    hmm, Rajput states would have some erally great quality town militia ("city guards") and it wouldn't cost much. Similarly, every Rajput had a sword (the khanda) kinda' like every sikh has the kripiya (sp?)... so there'd be mediocre quality swordsmen available too. As for range... peasant archers ("shikari") would be cheap and low quality, and horse-back archers (or camelback if its in the desert region?) would be expensive and med-low quality.
    one point of conflict , however, is that every Rajput was a warrior (it was their caste, and _duty_ to be a warrior... even today, if they don't join the armed service, they remain unemployed). So, maybe this 'rule' wouldn't apply to the Rajputs? just a thought.....
    then again, i don't think the entire idea is very clear to me. i'm just suggesting stuff, and if u understand what i'm getting at, then u could reiterpret it in the 'right' way.

    -indian_boy

  8. #8

    Default Re: City recruitment

    Quote Originally Posted by AlphaDelta View Post
    Light cavalry from Muslim cities seems reasonable, with balance coming from the fact that Christian factions can recruit half decent spearmen from cities.

    steelbound,

    That's an interesting idea, but doesnt really fall inline with the idea of this mod. On the contrary to this idea, I believe we actually want poor quality levy armies to form the bulk of stacks, this is historically accurate. Elite units should only form, 20 - 30% of a stack at most. The levy troops will obviously need higher moral than vanilla M2TW gives them to prevent the insta-routes we are currently seeing.

    What we dont want is armies consisting of half town militia/crossbowmen, half siege weapons. That's a real immersion killer.

    Cheers
    Well one idea would be to either remove the ability to recruit lower quality units when you have a higher level city or castle (Which I disagree with), or to lower their recruitment pools and refresh rates as you go higher.

    A Militia barracks could have it's spear militia be a pool of 3 with 1 turn to refresh 1 unit. An army barracks could have it be a pool of 6 with 1 turn to refresh 1 unit. A royal barracks could have it be 3-4 with 2-3 turns to refresh 1 unit.

    Along with weaning the AI off of it (You can do it, some of the mods out talk about having better army compositions. Stainless steel is one I know of) we can make it so when you have better quality units, their lower quality militia counterparts are less readily available.

    Mirage: You say in general so odds are you are saying what I would agree with, but I'd stress for safety's purpose that we not lump all the Muslims together. For one, Ayyubids and Abbasids shouldn't be able to recruit any turkish horse archers as part of their national-roster (Their AOR = yes), but should recruit them as mercenaries, as was the case historically (I'll dig up some quotations if necessisary).

    They should also have better ability to recruit infantry more readily. But I think you already feel this way, so I am just echoing it for the sake of echoing it.

    For seljuks/ghaznavids it's the reverse, and for those that feel like a bit of a mix, like transoxanians or rum turks, we'll look into it.

    And of course, Jerusalem should have problems with recruiting knights, given the drought of horses for Outremer.


    So Alpha or mirage, do you think we should continue discussing it or do you think a revised list of what this idea is, is in order?
    Last edited by Ahiga; March 25, 2007 at 03:50 AM.

  9. #9
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    Default Re: City recruitment

    Quote Originally Posted by Ahiga View Post
    Well one idea would be to either remove the ability to recruit lower quality units when you have a higher level city or castle (Which I disagree with), or to lower their recruitment pools and refresh rates as you go higher.

    A Militia barracks could have it's spear militia be a pool of 3 with 1 turn to refresh 1 unit. An army barracks could have it be a pool of 6 with 1 turn to refresh 1 unit. A royal barracks could have it be 3-4 with 2-3 turns to refresh 1 unit.

    Along with weaning the AI off of it (You can do it, some of the mods out talk about having better army compositions. Stainless steel is one I know of) we can make it so when you have better quality units, their lower quality militia counterparts are less readily available.

    Mirage: You say in general so odds are you are saying what I would agree with, but I'd stress for safety's purpose that we not lump all the Muslims together. For one, Ayyubids and Abbasids shouldn't be able to recruit any turkish horse archers as part of their national-roster (Their AOR = yes), but should recruit them as mercenaries, as was the case historically (I'll dig up some quotations if necessisary).

    They should also have better ability to recruit infantry more readily. But I think you already feel this way, so I am just echoing it for the sake of echoing it.

    For seljuks/ghaznavids it's the reverse, and for those that feel like a bit of a mix, like transoxanians or rum turks, we'll look into it.

    And of course, Jerusalem should have problems with recruiting knights, given the drought of horses for Outremer.


    So Alpha or mirage, do you think we should continue discussing it or do you think a revised list of what this idea is, is in order?

    Yeah I'm saying in general. Of course once we have the general idea in place we will start tweaking it to make each faction more unique. Abbasids and Egypt will never get to recruit Turkoman horse archers other than AOR in lands east of Central Iran and of course mercs.

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