Now what you are saying here is not what you said or even implied in your previous post, that I quoted. But I will say it again, army size is not relevant this is a game. So lets say - I don't know how big it is off the top of my head - ERE is 400 realm size. You have a realm size of 200 but can field 14k in levies - using my current game in india as example taken from the realm tree & journal - what would be a reasonable force to invade this realm? The ledger says Byzantines have 350 holdings and 46k troops. So looking at this I immediately notice an issue. I have 70 troops per holding, compared to the Byzantines 131 troops per holding. Why is this? It is because non de jure holdings do not give you max troops, which means when the calculations made for your realm size come in they are not accurate. If your realm was completely de jure and you had perfect vassal opinion, your troop numbers would be in the wheel house.
If a foreigner declared war or someone of a different faith? My realm strength goes from 14k to 20k+ in 1 day. Plus mercs. So what would ba a reasonable sized army that they can muster against me? 15k? 20k? 30k?
Personally I'd be disappointed if it was under 20k at this stage. But I suspect it would be 30k or larger, and it still would not stand a chance against my 20k levies. The largest army in the game does not matter, these troops are given to the aggressor to ensure if they do win the war, they can actually hold it for longer than the day they took it. If adventurers and hosts had the same size as the aggressed they would never win and they would be a just a free cash bonus to whoever gets targetted. They are perfectly fine the way they are now and saying they should be nerfed because largest army in the world is stupid. ERE has less then 20k troops? I guess Catholics are getting early crusades.
The adventurers do scale with smaller realms, saying a small realm uncapable of defending itself against adventurers is not really an actual issue.
'Army size is not relevant this is a game'. What are you trying to say? Of course army size is relevant, this is part of the game. The problem is that the calculations were originally made to roughly match available troops, or a bit more. Then levies were changed, but the calculation--and all event troops in general--weren't. So adventurers are matching against a number that you can only achieve in an ideal scenario. This is a flaw, as it's clearly not what they were meant to do when designed.
Secondly: you don't get the 'defending against' bonus with adventurers, for some odd reason (this has been mentioned in the thread before), so you're still with 14k troops, +mercs, against adventurers matched against your full possible force.
Now, if we follow on from this: many people playing the game are going to lose this war-out-of-essentially-nowhere (especially with the 'fun' addition of being targeted from beyond diplomatic range) because they aren't prepared to deal with 2-to-1 odds against an enemy that doesn't face attrition. An event that is essentially 'be good at the game or get an enemy with a huge army right next door to your depleted lands' isn't fun for people in the second group, and those in the first are either temporarily annoyed or get free money. Bad design.
The ERE doesn't actually have that many troops at the absolute beginning of 867. MTTH for a claimant is 50 years, which is halved by ambitious, further reduced by proud, and cut into a quarter if refused a title--reducing it with just the first and last to 6 years. Similar scenario for random claim-less guys, with the bonus that it isn't even
you refusing a title here (it starts off at 100 years, but this is promptly cut in half if Norman or North Germanic--so norse). Now, these second guys are only supposed to have 3/4 the number of troops of the guy they're attacking--but as previously discussed, the calculation is wonky, and they can get up to the 30k before their target does.
What this means is, at the beginning of the game, any landless guy could randomly start an adventure for basically anywhere else, or claimants could get grumpy, and they pull armies larger than the ERE (as infrastructure and the like hasn't built up at all) out of essentially nowhere, with no indication of early crusades at all.
The mechanics aren't doing what they're meant to.
This needs fixing. Even though it's an adventurer nerf, the fact some people are quite happy to deal with them as they are now doesn't mean they're working as they were supposed to.