Originally Posted by
Sindathar
Hey; a suggestion, I'll write it down for the record, perhaps knights should be less, I've been fighting the HRE as Denmark and I've killed like 3 2/3 stacks with 2 units of them each in succession. I've been looking for historical army compositions, wikipedia cites a book that says that, for example, at Falkirk (1298), English knights would had been around 200; 1200 and 2400 for each side at Agincourt (Around 10% of the army). So I suggest an increase in replenishment (after all, there wouldn't be 100 armed knights coming out of an average town in the high period, and definitely not in every couple years), so the town in which you recruit a unit would just represent a mustering point (which would add up perfectly with the new 0 recruitment cost!).
I played a 4TPY game back in 0.9.5 using some TM tweaks, and set the replenishment to 50(!) turns, I didn't miss knights in battles, instead I applied another TM tweak which increased Generals availability (specially for the AI, which always had a general in field armies, often many, maybe up to 4 for big factions like HRE, ERE, Arabs).
By the way, the recruitable "Generals" could be changed to "Minor nobles" (or just noble), General seems like a term for the commander of a large army, but I'm not sure on this, I'd like to know what you all think though.
If anything it resulted in 3 things:
(1) I had to use my knights tactically and with patience (no more sacrificing them in a charge right away to kill half stack of the enemy, and always kept track of their location in the campaign). Every single loss was felt, if there were few remaining, sometimes meant I would had not been able to refill the unit, like a generational loss.
(2) Less annoying AI spam. (IMO overcoming knights with foot troops is epic and desperate, repeating it right away it's not).
(3) It increased a whole lot the importance of the Orders!
The rest of the cavalry should probably be sergeants, right now I'd say their numbers seem to be from on par with the knights to 3:1, I think it should be even larger (less knights). Lastly, for the late period, with the introduction of the men-at-arms type unit, their replenishment could be doubled or tripled, representing commoners being able to afford heavier armor, horses, more widespread use of mercenaries in larger armies, etc.