Wife and I played ( I was Germany, she started as Italy). AI revolted in my name in Bavaria, France and Aquitaine. before I knew it I had the HRE created. ( also I designed my own dynasty so there were no allies). before I could even get some good county claims going to get a stronger personal power base or even get the vassals to much care for their new overlord..a host plotted to take not only the HRE but everything..ending our game right away. If it wasn't for the Wife playing along side of me as Italy to join my defensive war it was a loss..the amount of troops he brought vs. what I was able too and at that time I made maybe 2gold income so mercs were out.. I even looked at the host and he didn't even have a single claim in my empire.. He was some poor Irish smuck that had a weak claim on Tara but seemed to be able to muster 20k troops in the year 890's and take on the newly formed HRE single handedly.. IMO that's lame and a game turn off.
Host army sizes are ridiculous
- Thread starter killcreak
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And keep in mind that, because the devs love this mechanic for some unfathomable reason, you don't get the defending vs foreigners/infidels opinion boost when attacked by a host; even if the attacker is a foreign infidel. That makes these even harder than normal defensive wars.
yea, that was my main issue with my HRE game. I was removing the Karling grip so not many liked me enough to supply me with the troops I needed. But, If I can't attack another Catholic w/o a claim ( which I think I should be able to if I wanted to but at a great penalty) to increase my realm size as such they were constantly doing in this time period.. then why on earth should a Catholic host army from Ireland be able to launch an attack on me for something they have not one single claim for. And be able to muster 20k troops in Catholic Spain in the year 890'd...broken.
I didn't know about the vassal thing, and that should be fixed...if the adventurer has a claim on your territory, you should get the popup same as your liege. If you're the liege however, adventurers are just big bags of cash...between your levies, your retinue, and the fact that you have a 2-year warning to start saving cash for mercs, nobody should ever be caught unaware.
That assumes the liege is in charge of a powerful realm.
I've had adventurers show up when I was the duke of Jorvik with no remaining event troops, just exhausted my treasury in defending against a holy war, and all but one county in my realm still subject to the "newly conquered" penalty. I saved up enough money for one assassination... at 23%. On failing I decided I couldn't be bothered to have my only duchy annexed by some random event and restart a game I'd already spent hours on so I console killed him. A second adventurer declared a few months after that.
Short of gamey mass imprison/banish or just straight luck with assassination rolls I'm not sure how that could have been legitimately won. There is no way as an early game duke I'd have mustered enough troops to have a shadow of a chance in two years.
In that case you have some powerful allies. The money you spent on an assassination might have been more usefully spent on bribes for them.
Race between adventurer stack against fragile holdings and allies? Adventurer wins.
And not every duke in the game has all the Lodbrok family to call on.
Like others, I have yet to have problems with adventurers. You should have two years warning - with that warning, not being at war, and having money for mercs should not be hard (and if you are begrudging the money for mercs, well the guys got 500 gold why do you think he has it?). Of course, you do risk being mugged if your realm is comparatively weak & there are some situations that seem to spawn adventurer hordes that are out of whack (like the guy that got hit by about 20k because he had 3 spanish kingdom titles).
I will add, too many people who complain about adventurers seem to have an enthusiasm for using the console. To be frank, they probably should learn to deal with them.
No, you are wrong. They are capped. Easy to notice when the stacks are the same size as you get bigger. In the event, judging by his comments he isn't getting adventurers (adventurers can't be landed) he's getting decadence revolts (which is also a broken mechanic, but at least one that is clearly defined as a fail state).
I will add, too many people who complain about adventurers seem to have an enthusiasm for using the console. To be frank, they probably should learn to deal with them.
No, you are wrong. They are capped. Easy to notice when the stacks are the same size as you get bigger. In the event, judging by his comments he isn't getting adventurers (adventurers can't be landed) he's getting decadence revolts (which is also a broken mechanic, but at least one that is clearly defined as a fail state).
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No, I'm right, because I was talking about how they can be hugely bigger early-on, before your available troops catch up to the maximum adventurer size.
I was replying to this bit. You know, the second part of the post?
Checking the code, there's the whole 'match_mult' line, where it spawns adventurer stacks as blocks of six troops, and there's one of three scenarios: either they're (in total) 1.5 times maximum levies, 1.2 times, or 'only' 0.9. The problem is that it seems to match total realm troops, not the amount the liege can draw on.
Hence why you get a realm with, say, 10k available men facing a 30k stack as the total troops is 20k and they're not universally beloved, plus got a bad draw.
Mercenaries. And train troops. At that size (unless you are the duke of jorvik owning half of england), they would have been about 3k. That leaves aside the question of what they were aiming for - even if its your primary title, you can just create another to mitigate the losses
You have a point however, that was not a host vs me, it was a recently invadeded muslim Sultanate that went from Barcelona to Mali, and Tangier to Tunisia that launched a holy war on me, a two county kingdom of Navarra and my allies. They had such a easy work winning the war to claim Andalusia from the other sultan because they had high decadence and recovering from a war with me. When my war with they started they had at least 25k of the event troops remaining, plus the levies they would be able to raise that the ledger said 22k in total before the war. What I want to pass on it that hosts are unbalanced and sometimes allow to already super powerfull realms to get impossibly hard to defeat and start to paint the map, until they suffer another invasion and start again.
If I could sugest something to change on the hosts, is only that the event troops disband at the death of the sucessfull invader. To that, instead of OP invasions to make titles move hands, make more ways to dynasty to die out, so realms can switch hand more often, like the pope excomunicate rulers, smaller but more frequent local noble uprising, rival families killing each other, suport pretenders in theirs claims dunning civil wars that kind of medieval age stuff.
Sounds like bad management to me. If you are unable to raise sufficient troops from your realm, then you obviously are not a good ruler. This is where the whole de jure system comes in and allows adventurers to break up realms which have expanded beyond their de jure borders.
I too see nothing wrong with them, but I always do my best to keep my de jure borders perfect and drift everything into my primary title. However there are several different adventurers hosts it seems. Random adventurer hosts from - aka non claimants - they are weak and you don't even need to raise your levies to defeat them a group of mercs and your set. Claimant hosts those that have claims on the realm they are invading seem to get much more troops, I just had someone leave my current realm to go attack their neighbouring relative, they spawned ~56k troops. I laughed pretty hard at it because I was waiting for enough piety to do the same, they then took a grand total of 1 county and didn't take the kingdom, duchy or the other 3 county claims he had. So there is now a small island province in the middle of this realm with 12k troops, capable of attacking everyone nearby and winning, but because borders it is not likely. 56k =/= 12k I know the aggressor was different religion and lost alot of troops to holy orders, I was watching closely incase I needed to lend a hand to win it for him. This in addition to the seljuks insta-spawning inside your realm with 0 warning with ~60k troops also shows that it is not limited to 30k troops for all situations. I later destroyed the remaining 50k+ troops of the seljuks with 30k troops, through much planning and baiting them perfectly.
I rarely see claimant host claims against my realm, because I actually land my family members if possible. Occassionally see small adventurers but they are never a problem, even for the AI. I'd say adventurer claims run about a 20% success chance and the claimants at about 50% against the AI. They are not that common, they are a feature of the game that adds alot of flavour and family management. I'd say rather than bitching about something in the game that is as far as anyone can tell is working fine, perhaps ask for help with how to deal with the issues.
I never assassinate adventurers, but for some reason it does seems that perhaps 30-50% never even actually launch against you. Best tip is fix your de jure borders, if you are outside this range expect to see people wanting to see this land given to someone else. Prepare properly war by saving cash. Learn to not wait for adventurers even, let them come, let them take a couple of holdings it weakens them more than you. They will split their stacks everytime, when one is a little away from the rest bait it away with a small army and crush it with reinforcements. Learn that the armies are typically 3 flanks divided into 3 armies, all in the centre. Stack your centre with defence and your flanks with damage. There are so many small easy tactics that can be used to win every war, they will not always work, but with practice and experience the AI can not win a war against you without outnumbering 3:1 or if you get really unlucky.
Also the disbanding of event troops is not a good idea. Unless they have a timebomb trigger that leaves them active until the land captured has lost the negatives to income and troops. You invade a region and disband your troops whilst surrounded by enemies, I think not.
While the Seljuks, Gavazinids(sp) and Timur are mechanically adventurers, I'm ignoring them as they are meant to mug whoever they spawn on (so again they aren't meant to be 'fair'). I do however think Paradox does need to include a warning event, instead of 'look there 60k troops all over my backyard, what are they for?'. Theres a few cases where things would have been helped by the game taking the time to make it look reasonable (like the adventurer plotting in your court, but mysteriously not being treason).
If you're a liege and you have a solid 7k men, you should be able to handle most stacks up twice your size by fighting the war correctly. Just let them burn off a few men assaulting / siege a few provinces and then basically juggle the war score as narrowly as you can by recapturing those territories. That should produce enough attrition that you should be able to reraise levies and hire an extra merc to swing the tide and then slowly clean up. That's basically how I can almost always win vs Turks as ERE in 1066 without any DLC. You just have to know your terrain very very well. However, if they have the organizer trait over you, you're screwed. Do not just let them bash into your stack because you will lose since battles are basically a numbers game.
Oh, right, because you have no right whatsoever not to optimize everything... Like not having a perfect state at day one, having bad luck with heirs and early deaths, being busy with another warmonger, or even -- oh my god -- roleplaying. No, the player has to be punished for those, (s)he's so lame!
Ahh, you sort of just proved my point. If your realm is spread thin and unable to withstand the assault, you deserve to lose the war. You know that is how it works right?
As for your roleplaying arguement, again proves my point exactly, you want to roleplay a weak lord and then come and bitch and moan. Your weak lord got attacked, his bad at managing the realm and unable to raise full levies. Oh my I wonder why he would lose the war, if you are going to roleplay, then roleplay. Don't try coming here and saying you can't.
As stated before in my post, I don't have any problems dealing with adventurers... but that doesn't mean that they are well balanced. They reach their 30k max limit far too easily when you can't in actuality raise anywhere near the 'max' potential of your realm simply because of changed game mechanics in how levies work.
Eg, in my current game with as good relations as I could muster, I could only raise 6k troops max. I had two adventurer's announce their intention to take my lands within a few months of another. I handled both of them, but they were just an aggravating nuisance that I didn't need when I'm fighting alternating defensive wars vs the Byzantines and Abbasids. I loaded a save and let them spawn to see their numbers and... yep, 30k troops each (one of them magically spawning on my capital to boot and starting to insta-assault my 500-man garrison counties barely 70 years into the game). Some people in previous threads on the same topic suggested upgrading buildings to make them suffer more losses in assault... not a chance of that happening so early in the game with poor levels of tech. Besides anytime you assault a holding with 20 times+ the number of units garrisoned inside them you will take minimal losses regardless how well fortified it is.
The top 4 merc bands cost 360 gold each with an attached 20g/month cost for 3600 men. That's 14400 men for 1440 gold and 80g/month upkeep. They start at low morale and need time to get to the location where the adventurer currently is in your realm. There's a huge price tag involved in this and this still leaves you short by over 10k troops. In my current game I would have to tyranny imprison/banish people to get that kind of cash twice in a row.
Again, people shouldn't assume people that dislike adventurers are bad players because, without trying to sound arrogant, I'm certainly not. Most of my games I abandon because they get too easy once I've established a decent realm. I've personally played 15+ games since the RoI's release and I believe I've had a good feel for the situation now.
The issue here isn't that people don't want challenge, they just want to encounter 'challenge' in a less hamfisted and crude manner. One of the problems here is that the danger still persists afterwards since if they only take a portion of your land, then you'll have an angry neighbour with 28k troops just standing there waiting for the truce to expire.
Also, people seriously need to stop assuming that people who are complaining over them are only doing so because they lost to them. I have NEVER lost to an adventurer before when they attacked me directly but I still think it's the only really dumb game mechanic left in the game that adds nothing of value to your experience.
And as others have pointed out. Another big issue here is the AI simply being utterly incapable at defending against such things. This leads to powerful historical dynasties getting booted out of power in no time by some random shmuck planning world dominance in a random hut somewhere.
Eg, in my current game with as good relations as I could muster, I could only raise 6k troops max. I had two adventurer's announce their intention to take my lands within a few months of another. I handled both of them, but they were just an aggravating nuisance that I didn't need when I'm fighting alternating defensive wars vs the Byzantines and Abbasids. I loaded a save and let them spawn to see their numbers and... yep, 30k troops each (one of them magically spawning on my capital to boot and starting to insta-assault my 500-man garrison counties barely 70 years into the game). Some people in previous threads on the same topic suggested upgrading buildings to make them suffer more losses in assault... not a chance of that happening so early in the game with poor levels of tech. Besides anytime you assault a holding with 20 times+ the number of units garrisoned inside them you will take minimal losses regardless how well fortified it is.
The top 4 merc bands cost 360 gold each with an attached 20g/month cost for 3600 men. That's 14400 men for 1440 gold and 80g/month upkeep. They start at low morale and need time to get to the location where the adventurer currently is in your realm. There's a huge price tag involved in this and this still leaves you short by over 10k troops. In my current game I would have to tyranny imprison/banish people to get that kind of cash twice in a row.
Again, people shouldn't assume people that dislike adventurers are bad players because, without trying to sound arrogant, I'm certainly not. Most of my games I abandon because they get too easy once I've established a decent realm. I've personally played 15+ games since the RoI's release and I believe I've had a good feel for the situation now.
The issue here isn't that people don't want challenge, they just want to encounter 'challenge' in a less hamfisted and crude manner. One of the problems here is that the danger still persists afterwards since if they only take a portion of your land, then you'll have an angry neighbour with 28k troops just standing there waiting for the truce to expire.
Also, people seriously need to stop assuming that people who are complaining over them are only doing so because they lost to them. I have NEVER lost to an adventurer before when they attacked me directly but I still think it's the only really dumb game mechanic left in the game that adds nothing of value to your experience.
And as others have pointed out. Another big issue here is the AI simply being utterly incapable at defending against such things. This leads to powerful historical dynasties getting booted out of power in no time by some random shmuck planning world dominance in a random hut somewhere.
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You seem to think that a players has the character he deserves. What if you start as a 40ish count which already has an adult heir whose stats kinda suck, for example? What are you going to say, you'd deserve to be crushed because you'd choose a loser of a count? Oh, wait, just assassinate him, that makes so much sense!
What you call "good ruler" is to be, in my opinion, a gamey ruler. Thou shall nevah have any vassal below 90 relation, bribe them all with gold, squeeze them of any levy they can produce, or you're a bad ruler and deserve to lose! What actual king had no enemy in his court, no internal threat? What actual ruler went elective because it will mean more troops and super breeds of heir? What actual ruler revoked city titiles to gather monster taxes to hire ten times as much of mercenary than he has levies?
I get the feeling adventurer's are a lot harder to deal with when you're running a small realm vs. a larger one. When you're a 2 county Duke with poor lands that generate little income and virtually no levies, 5,000+ troops showing up can be an unbeatable game over. Only times I've survived an adventurer as a small realm was when my realm was split in half by a revolt when the declared, so they only got half the troops they otherwise would've; and b) when they didn't bother to show up. As a Kingdom like England I found it easier, at least pre-ROI - haven't bothered with the post-ROI patches so I don't know if that's gotten worse too.
Allies and things can help ... if they aren't busy with their own problems. All very well having a dozen allies, but if they're all involved in their own wars then they'll accept your call to arms and send you precisely nothing. And the warning is great ... but when you're counties earn less than a tenth of the cost of attempting to assassinate the guy in a year, it's quickly unviable unless you spend the whole game in a paranoid fear that they'll be coming at some point.
It's a shame too, because they're could be some great mechanics behind it ... the claimant petitioning other nearby rulers for support; maybe you could find out this and plot against him, try to kidnap/assassinate or maybe convince or offer concessions to other rulers to lock him up for you ... courtiers and vassals within your realm feeding him support ... so many things. Instead it's just "RAAARRR I'M COMING. and then "RAAAR LOOK AT MY DOOMSTACK SPAWNING ON YOUR CAPITAL!"
I've seen it mentioned that turning off the old gods turns off adventurers ... is that true? And if so is there anything else besides playing as pagans that a catholic ruler would lose out on by doing so?
Allies and things can help ... if they aren't busy with their own problems. All very well having a dozen allies, but if they're all involved in their own wars then they'll accept your call to arms and send you precisely nothing. And the warning is great ... but when you're counties earn less than a tenth of the cost of attempting to assassinate the guy in a year, it's quickly unviable unless you spend the whole game in a paranoid fear that they'll be coming at some point.
It's a shame too, because they're could be some great mechanics behind it ... the claimant petitioning other nearby rulers for support; maybe you could find out this and plot against him, try to kidnap/assassinate or maybe convince or offer concessions to other rulers to lock him up for you ... courtiers and vassals within your realm feeding him support ... so many things. Instead it's just "RAAARRR I'M COMING. and then "RAAAR LOOK AT MY DOOMSTACK SPAWNING ON YOUR CAPITAL!"
I've seen it mentioned that turning off the old gods turns off adventurers ... is that true? And if so is there anything else besides playing as pagans that a catholic ruler would lose out on by doing so?