recruitment, how does it work

[OSUbuckeye]

Hey all,

I played Surrectum II briefly but found the recruitment to be a bit ridiculous. I currently love playing MedievalII:SS as it affords a much more enjoyable recruiting experience.

My question is (not having played RTR) how does the recruitment work?

In SurrectumII, you're stuck with 2 options. Either 1 turn recruitment which leads you to have to create lots and lots of cities geared towards building units (or suffer the consequences) or 0 turn recruitment where by the 100th turn, the entire map is peppered with full stacks (this is fairly annoying)

in SS they have a method called "real recruitment" that only allows you to recruit a specific unit every x number of turns (I'm sure there are more factors involved)

Also, as you can tell by the number of posts I'm quite a noob, but if you could help me find an answer that would be fantastic.

[AngryTitusPullo]

Medieval 2 recruitment allows you to set certain limits per unit which is not possible in RTW except when using heavy scripting.

I don't really know how the recruitment ladder work in RTR right now though it's safe to say that you will not be able to recruit units in 1 or 2 turns in newly conquered cities. You'll probably need 10-20 game turn before being able to recruit units I think and longer if the new province is of different culture.

In my current Attalid campaign (243 BC) I'm still recruiting from Pergamon and ship my armies to the frontlines.

[Sphere]

RTR VII has done some tricks to get something like M2TW recruitment using the RTW engine.

First, some elite units are re-trainable but essentially cannot be recruited. For example Macedon starts with one unit of Heteroi that can only be retrained in Pella, ( a province which you actually do not start out with). You can train a new unit of Heteroi at pella, but it costs 40k and takes 40 turns. So essentially you have only one unit of Heteroi for quite a while if not the whole game.

Second, you can only recruit in "major" regions which are ~30% of all the regions on the map. And for conquered major regions it takes ~30 turns to get the build tree far enough along to recruit

Third, you can only recruit certain faction units in your core provinces. And even then there are certain units that can only be recruited in your capital itself.

All this leads to fielding only a few armies (1-5) with a solid core of elite/faction units, surrounded by cheap expendable units. And so far this is true of the AI as well (more or less).