Idea-might be crazy, might be interesting...

[Sar1n]

I took a quick peek at .org, and noticed a recent topic about the problem of standing armies. Essentially, in the ancient times, most of the army was levied for specific campaign and wasn't a professional standing army...well, I think we all know the issue.

But I might have realized just how it would be possible to implement...well, perhaps. The issue here might be AI, it might need a money script to help because it probably won't be able to make use of this feature.

A less known feature of M2TW is how disbanding troops in town works. If you disband a troop type that can be recruited in town and the troop pool isn't full, the disbanded troops are actually added back to it. So the idea is simple. Raise the recruitment slots higher-probably to the max in winter-decrease replenish rates for levy troops, increase their upkeep, decrease recruitment cost and ramp up their maximum pool to something like 15-20...or even more. The player would then be forced to recruit the levies for the war, and at the conclusion, march them home, and disband them. The huge pool would enable the numbers to be retained for later campaigns.

This is just a crazy idea. I realize it's going to need some polish-especially AI, balancing other troop types' recruitment pools, rates free upkeep and cost against this and possibly other blunders, but that's why I'm throwing this here for brainstorming.

[QuintusSertorius]

Some observations:
1) There's already a money script for the AI to prevent them going bankrupt. It also features a script to disband mercenaries when the AI is poor (though I don't think you can force the AI to move them to a settlement to disband).
2) Unit costs are based on a consistent formula for all units, regardless of status. I don't see much value in making special rules for levies in this regard, or any other kinds of units for that matter.

[rovert]

The game is engine is designed to have standing armies and garrisons , I think having an AI capable of this is years away considering we have been moving backwards in PC gaming for 7-8 years .

The AI is always going to have as many troops as possible , nothing can be done with that , but one thing that be really nice to add is a garrison script for the AI when it gets sieged like in (Deus Lo Vult) . It increases turn time but that's not all that great atm anyway.

[z3n]

The AI is always going to have as many troops as possible , nothing can be done with that

Yes, this is correct, you can't really change the fundamental basics of how the AI acts in certain financial states versus other. Presumably because all the algorithms/decision triggers for that sort of thing are located within the exe.