Free upkeep. How does it work?

I ask because it often happens that some units in the cities get free upkeep and some don't. It's really wierd. Is it a bug that some units don't get the free upkeep when garrisoned?

Units only get free upkeep if you can build the unit in that city, or at least that is how it works back in vanilla M2TW, however, it seems like there is a a workaround from some entries in the EDB:

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                recruit_pool "Italian Spear Militia"  0   0.000001   0.999  0  requires factions { milan, venice, papal_states, sicily, }

With that entry on a building level, you cannot build the unit nor will it appear in the building browser, yet it will still get the free upkeep in that settlement as the game thinks of it as "available".

I thought something simmilar. But for example, i recruit a unit in the town, yet it's not getting the free upkeep. For example the higher tier infantry units with the boii; the free upkeep only works for slingers and such

Originally Posted by Anubis88

I thought something simmilar. But for example, i recruit a unit in the town, yet it's not getting the free upkeep. For example the higher tier infantry units with the boii; the free upkeep only works for slingers and such

Strange, that should not be the case if the unit has the free_upkeep_unit in its attribute, the unit does not get free upkeep even if it is the only unit in that city?

In vanilla M2TW it also wasn't any unit you could build in the city. "Free upkeep when garrisoned" was an attribute in their description, and it was only the 'militia' units that were free upkeep.

In EB2, so far, it's completely confusing as to what can and can't be free upkeep. Chalk that up to incompleteness.

There's also a corresponding attribute in the EDU about free upkeep - apparently a whole bunch of units are missing theirs.

EDIT: In fact, Medusa0 mentions it upthread, it's free_upkeep_unit and not every unit has it.

It's a bit more complicated. The missing piece of the puzzle is that certain buildings have a "free_upkeep_unit" bonus. You can see this easily - do a text search for "free" in EDB and many examples will appear. It is also mentioned in several of the building descriptions. Simply being IN a city is not enough, it needs to have one of these special buildings. Also, it ONLY works for the number of units covered by the bonus value in EDB (could be 1 unit, 2, 3 etc.) AND it only works if units have the free_upkeep_unit attribute in EDU.

And yes it isn't working quite as well as we'd like, but here's why. One of the last changes to EB2 prior to the first release was to fix all the mercenary pools. Many regions had none, and others had only a fraction of the sorts of units we felt should be available. BUT, since we only have 200 units to choose from (of the eventual 500), most of the units which *should* be in the merc pool haven't been created yet. So we borrowed liberally from the existing unit pool to the point that almost half the units on the map are also available as mercs. And MANY of them had the free_upkeep_unit attribute in EDU. Which we then removed because it made no sense to be able to hire mercenaries and then not have to pay them.

Thus fixing a really important game feature inadvertently led to a slight mangling of another feature - but one which frankly hadn't been thoroughly thought through (a typical instance where factions with active leads had features that similar factions did not), and was thus imperfectly implemented anyway. So yes, this is another area where more work needs to be done.

So this means we can't have no upkeep when garrisoned units at all playing as for example Rome in the Italian regions? Given the already extremely high unrest you guys gave to regions, combined with high upkeep units, and no free upkeep when garrisoned... It's just quite extreme as you'll need tons of units to garrison a region and you end up spending a great deal of money just garrisoning a province in upkeep too, rendering a very big portion of its income as obsolete...