Idea for Improvement - or Submod
Dave, first of all, I have to say that I love and dearly appreciate all of the work you have done. You have truly made a great game into an extraordinary game! In playing your mod, I have come to appreciate the changes you have made over some of my other ideas. However, there are, as one might say always room for improvement, and as each individual person has preferences, I came upon a great idea that I thought would compliment your mod all the better.
I love the way that you revised the recruitment system and truly the ai build far superior armies. However there is one thing I never really understood that occurred to me in assisting the building of better armies by the ai, though I fully understand their purpose for the human player. That is, peasants being able to be build by castles.
Here me out, for in addition to this problem follows a solution, that I propose to the community.
Other than being a cheap unit with high numbers to assist with garrison duties for city happiness, peasants are utterly worthless in battle. The other issue I ran into was that in your mod, most castles start out upgraded to at least the point of building sergeant spearmen. In addition, as every ai and player will upgrade their castles to build elite units as soon as possible, peasants get cut off (and rightfully so) by the EDB recruitment tree. In addition, besides rarely in slave armies, I have never seen peasants in any solo game I've played.
The issue came up when I found this great mod (though this isn't at all my proposal to you) in which I needed/wanted to add in 4 more units, dismounted knights templars, dismounted knights of st john, dismounted knights of eddessa, and dismounted knights of tripoli to the guild halls Templars Guild, Order of St john guild, and factions Antioch and KoJ respectively.
Upon analizing the EDU, I discovered that you have maxed out at 500 units.
So I went about creating a solution, which is what I propose for consideration now.
First I realized that to add the new units from this submod, I would need to delete 4 at a minimun from the EDU and associated files. The most likely candidate was sherwood archers (not recruitable by default, though I added them back in as recruitable for england in my slight variation of your mod) or peasants. But the problem arrose that there would now be no unit recruitable at the most basic barracks level for castles.
So I resolved to come up with a solution for this problem, which led me to an epiphany. Now I know this will destroy at least one level of difference between the city barracks and castle barracks tech tree, but I find this solution to be even more viable on all levels and solving many problems that popped into my mind.
And so the following solution I propose to benefit both this mod, overall gameplay, ai army composition, the immersion factor, and the added benefit of allowing you to have more slots to add any units you might have not been able to from the expansions due to the hard code limit.
I, for my mod at least, and what I propose, is to delete all peasant units (JUST THE MELEE, Not PEASANT ARCHERS!!!) from the EDU, this includes aztec peasants, ME peasants, EE peasants, NE peasants, and SE peasants (I think that is all of them), though I may decide to just leave highland rabble as they are, and etc. for other factions, or I might delete and replace them just the same to open up more slots in the EDU. Or even leave the basic peasant units recruitable for slave only.
This opens up 5 new units slots, and 10-15 texture slots from the 500 and 1000 hard coded limits respectively.
To replace the lost unit, we make town militia recruitable at the basic castle level. This allows for even more effective garrison reinforcement for the player (by allowing town militia/order militia (tuetons)/associated unit for each faction to be built at the castle and marched to cities who can give FREE UPKEEP, rather than cheap upkeep, or a marginally more expensive upkeep which is worth the added combat ability which provides a unit that can at least strike the enemy once before running away) and maintains at least the most basic of fighting unit from the castle tech tree, besides pitchforks (spear and shield more realistic). Not to mention the immersion factor that even peasants recruited to fight in any sort of professional army were historically given some sort of crude weapon, with spears being cheap, easy to use, and effective, and possibly but not usually a shield).
This in turn solves my problem of being able to add 4 or 5 new dismounted units to the game, a new dimension to the guild halls, maybe even going as far as to add dismounted knights of santiago or teutonic knights).
But the point for you mod is to allow you to add in more units if you like, improve ai army composition by providing better troops (I even prefer the idea of town militia being recruited to defend castles than peasants, for were not castles of the most importance and of the most prestige?) recruitable early on, and by solving the recruitment slot issue for castles?
To solve the uniqueness problem, I may just make a duplicate in the EDU, and rename them Peasant Militia or something much same way that peasant crossbowmen and militia crossbowmen are identical.
Just some food for thought.
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