retraining suggestion

[Hate Farmer]

I tried searching to see if this was suggested before and didn't see anything, but retraining damaged units in this game is the one thing that makes me want to play more modern TWs. Is there a way to make it so you can retrain all of your units in any settlement you own, regardless of whether it has the proper recruitment buildings? Maybe you could make it twice as expensive if you don't have the proper building, or even more expensive the further you are away from your capital. As far as I know hundreds of men wouldn't be sent potentially hundreds of miles behind the front lines to replace some of them, and it's not a very fun gameplay feature either. With this feature I would have absolutely zero complaints about this game. It's the proper Rome 2 as far as I'm concerned.

[Ovidius Empiricus]

Is there a way to make it so you can retrain all of your units in any settlement you own, regardless of whether it has the proper recruitment buildings?

It would at least involve a lots and lots of changes in the building file (if not others) to make them recruitable (not just retrainable, since I'm pretty sure that by itself isn't an option for RTW). I still don't think it would work for all units, since there might be a limit on the number of slots each settlement has. You might be able to recruit 100 different units throughout a large empire, especially including merc buildings, but each settlement's unit limit would only be something like 25-30. (This is a guess.)

As far as I know hundreds of men wouldn't be sent potentially hundreds of miles behind the front lines to replace some of them, and it's not a very fun gameplay feature either.

Well, realistically, you simply wouldn't have chosen to do that with those hundreds of men, and they wouldn't have magically appeared (from the other side of your empire, let's say) even if you waved extra money in the air or waited a very long time. These people actually have to come from some specific place. And, if it were logistically just a bad move to make, they wouldn't have done it or would've failed miserably when they tried. (And personally, I think the challenge of dealing with these things, along with maybe feeding my obsession to details like that, is part of the fun.)

I'd say using multiple armies for each zone might be your best bet (maybe not full stacks -- and of course you could them build them up over time), so one can fight while they other goes back for retraining, or so they can support each other in sieges or larger battles. Then, after conquering someplace, one serves as a garrison while the other fights off attackers. The point is that doing it this way, you've already dedicated more than enough troops to the area than are generally needed, so it's not a big loss when a few go back to be retrained.

Also note that you can shuffle soldiers around between units, so you won't have to take everyone back so they all get retrained. Assuming "huge" size: let's say some spearmen start with 243 men, and you have four units of them. After a big nasty battle which didn't work out so well, the numbers look something like this [200, 230, 220, 150]. How many units really need to take a long trip back to be retrained? Only one of them, since you could move them around like so: [243, 243, 243, 71]. Or let's say you only have one unit of that type, and you could ask yourself why it's not at least paired with another to make this kind of thing go more smoothly. (I've noticed some people play with armies where nearly every unit is something different, which can be pretty useful sometimes and certainly makes for a colorful army, but I still wonder if think about this at all....)

[Hate Farmer]

Ah crap, you're right about the recruitment limits. As for the increasing cost the further away you are, I meant that as a way to simulate the cost of sending soldiers further distances to the front line. They wouldn't just magically appear, it would take the entire turn (is it a year? can't remember) for them to be trained and arrive. But, now I do doubt it's possible. I think the replenishment feature since Napoleon is great though and that's pretty much the only thing that I miss from newer iterations.

[Souka]

This, being able to unmount and a couple of other thing from later series is what I really miss in RS. Most of them can't be done with this engine such as retraining the way you ask of. If you are familiar with Third Age Mos submod they add a "Fiefdom barracks" for Gondor. This barracks enable retraining for all your faction aor units, but you can only build it in your capital. You also can't recruit from it, only retraining is possible. I was looking into the code to see if I could replicate it and convert it to RS and make it possible in only a few big cities throughout the map. But MTW uses a different retraining style than RTW. In RTW there are always one unit available no matter how many of them you recruit. So you could essentially recruit an unlimited number of units giving you have the population and money for it. In MTW the retraining works so that you can set up how many units you want in your recruiting pool and how fast they replenishes by turn. So for example by turn one you have zero spear militia available for recruitment, two turn later you have two of them available. If you then recruit one spear milita it goes down to one again. So the way the Gondor fiefdom barracks work is to never have a unit fully replenish so that it shows up in the recruitment pool. Let's say you need 100% for a unit to show up in the recruitment pool. They made it so that it only goes to 99% meaning you can never recruit the units but they are always there behind the scene for retraining. Hope this made any sense to you, and that you see now why it can't be done with RTW engine.

[Hate Farmer]

Ahhh ok thanks, that clears it up for sure. Even without that possibility, this game just embarrasses Rome 2. It's been said before, but if the RS2 team had CA's budget, that is some serious wet dream material right there. Thanks again.