Making retinues more interesting...

[Dekent]

One of my favorite additions to the game is retinues from LoR. I'm rather disappointed to see that unless you are the great bastard who can start off making knights then have your descendents make longbow men, you will really only make the same type (your cultural squad with maxed bonuses) throughout the game. I was thinking to spice this up it might be cool if you could recruit special squads based on your traits. For example if you have the crusader you can recruit a knight/HI squad that has a high bonus to fighting different religious groups, if you fight and win against a mongol doom stack you may get a trait that lets you make horse archers until your king dies, or if you beat an aztec ar...*dodges rotten fruit being tossed* ok ok enough examples! I think it'd be more fun if there were more small goals/small rewards in the game like this.

 

[grumphie]

i'd persoanlly liek a system where you can incorporate some neighbouring and local retinue types/have "secondary cultural retinue's, save for the fact that you will lack their bonusses(i.e. england CAN make knight retinue's, but they wont have a large bonus. the byzantine empire CAN make huge heavy infantry retinue's but they wotn have special bonuses ect.)

 

[unmerged(362834)]

1. IMO, retinues that a ruler can hire, should depend on the culture of his capital province. It doesn't make sense that rulers can hire the same units whether they're from scandinavia, mali or middle-east...

First, I thought about ruler's culture... but what happen to standing retinues if the successor has a diffrent culture...! Capital's province culture seems more stable!

For example, desert cultures would be able to hire camels units instead of heavy cavalery


2. Only three leaders per stack of retinues is more reasonable. It becomes annoying when when you have 50k of retinues and each retinue unit need to have its own leader...

May I also suggest to make being a retinue leader as a honorary title... counties would be able to give only one such title... dukes would have two of these titles, and kings three.

Oh! and for muslims, characters who are holding such titles should not increase decadence!


3. Retinues should not be able to reinforce if they're standing outside their ruler's realm...

 

[icedt729]

If I were to mod retinues, the first thing I would probably do would be to scrap all the stock retinues (shock, defense, skirmish, etc) and instead give each culture multiple unique retinues. The reason it only makes sense to recruit your cultural retinues is because those are the only ones that are any better than or different from levies, so the obvious solution is to let each culture keep its very strong specialty retinue, but give it a tweaked roster of other retinues that represent a smaller but still appreciable improvement over comparable levees. That way there'd be some incentive to make balanced retinues of mixed troop types instead of the current setup, where anything other than your single cultural retinue is a bit of a waste.

 

[Haccoude]

The way it is now with every new retinue generating a random lowborn is annoying. They clutter up the courts and don't really add anything. Once my entire retinue was wiped and I rebuild them asap, resulting in a giant court with over a hundred members.

I would be happy if Paradox were to remove the automatic creation of lowborn characters, and a new "Invite knight to court" decision. Helps with the clutter, and means that if you want a martial focused lowborn you have to pay for him, rather than getting him as a free bonus from a retinue.

I would also really like Paradox let modders have more control over the retinues. Enabling more conditions, both for hiring and for the bonuses they get. What if a modder could tie retinues to titles rather than merely cultures? Or if what buildings you have in your capital affects what bonuses they have? Instead of a +60% to attack or defense from day 1, you could the bonus increase depending on how far your capital has progressed in the cultural building track.

Add the capability to add points to attack or defense in specific battle phases, rather than general percentages to every attack/defense.

How much couldn't modders do with retinues if all this was possible?