Questions on optimizing retinues and culture-based troops/buildings

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So... I've started to step into the murky waters of retinues, and suddenly making actual decisions about army makeup is a thing. As such, details about how the cultural retinues and cultural buildings work starts to be important, so...

- What decides whether or not you get a culture's special retinue? Is it ruler culture? Is it culture of capital? Is it possible to have access to more than one at a time?

- If you've created a cultural retinue, and then (by whatever means) lose access to the culture that lets you build that retinue, does the retinue stay around?

- What decides whether or not you can build a culture's special building? That's the culture of the county you're building in. right?

- I know that cultural buildings can self-destruct by some means or other after a culture shift. What triggers this?

- My understanding of the way retinues and cultural unit-boosting buildings work is that all of the appropriate kind fo retinue get the bonus of the best version of that building you have. Is that true? If so, is that demesne only, or des it cover the whole realm? Is it possible to have your retinues benefit from the bonuses of multiple different kinds of cultural buildings (so, say, have a kingdom that spans both welsh and irish territories, and have the archer-heavy retinues benefit both from the welsh archery-boosters and the irish heavy infantry boosters?) If you're limited to only being able to use one at a time, is that based on the culture of your ruler, or something else? If, for example, you mess up with raising your kid, and suddenly have a ruler of the wrong culture, do you lose the bonuses to your cultural troops?

- If somehow you can have your retinues benefit from more than one cultural building at a time, is it possible to have more than one bonus stack on the same troop type? (ie, two different cultures, both of which have a cultural building that benefits light cavalry, resulting in a light infantry with a decent bit of punch)?

Also, anyone who wishes to weigh in with insights as to cultures that have particularly good retinues and/or building-boosts is welcome.

Thank you for your time.

 

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Okay - a bit of forum-archaeology, followed by some digging into game files based on pointers I found via forum-archaeology, and I've managed to come up with at least some potentially useful data.

- unique buildings are based entirely on the ruler's culture. If the ruler culture changes, the buildings are gone with no recompense. Thus, it's not possible to do any sort of stacking, and one needs to be wary of investing in cultural buildings if one is not sure of remaining the appropriate culture. Likely, retinues only benefit from buildings in demesne

- It seems reasonable to assume that retinues are handled in the same way - access dependent on ruler culture, and possibly even disbanding cultural retinues if the ruler culture changes.

- there are (or were at the time) only two ways for the culture of a given county to change. One required that the religion change at the same time, and the other required that the county be controlled by a ruler of the destination culture and also adjacent to another county of the destination culture which was itself controlled by a ruler of the destination culture. Apparently the religion trigger was somewhat hard to pull off, meaning that moving cultures onto or off of island areas (or even particularly isolated areas) becomes tricky.

I dug into the file that actually contains the pertinent data for culture buildigns in it (now in the CKII/common/buildings/00_buildings/txt file). I then dug into that to try to distill out a more easily accessible form

First a few notes: as far as I can tell, each culture building has four levels. Each level gives a boost to troop numbers for one or more kinds of troops (with higher levels generally giving larger boosts). Each also gives a percentage boost to stats. If that boost is to only one stat of one troop type, it's a .15/lvl boost (for a max of a 60% benefit). If it's to more than one troop type, each gets .075/lvl (max of 30% boost). In the one case where it's two stats, it's only one type, and it's .1/lvl on one and .05/lvl on the other. In addition to the culture requirement, most also have a religious requirement(muslim, christian, or pagan), which, as far as I can tell, is a requirement to build, rather than a requirement to own. I really don't know the details on this.

Longbow Range: archer numbers + offense(English or Welsh culture, Christian)
Schiltron: pikemen numbers + defense(Scottish culture, Christian)
Heavy Infantry Camps: heavy infantry numbers and defense(Baltic or Finno-Ugric groups, Pagan)
Horse Breeders: light cav, heavy cav, and horse archer numbers. horse archer offense(.1/lvl) and morale(.05/lvl)(Altaic or Iranian groups)
Lists: light cav numbers + offense(Frankish/Occitan/Norman/German/Breton culture, Christian)
Fast Horse Breeders: light cav numbers + offense(Iberian group, Christian)
Pike Formations: pikemen numbers + morale(Italian culture, Christian)
Armories: heavy infantry numbers + defense (Russian culture, Christian)
Huscarls: heavy infantry numbers + offense(North Germanic group or Saxon culture, Christian)
Hussars: light cav numbers + defense(Hungarian culture or west slav group, Christian)
Camel Cavalry: light cav numbers + defense(Arabic culture group, Muslim)
Catapracts: Heavy Cav and Horse Archer numbers and offense(Byzantine group, Christian)
Gallowglass: Heavy infantry numbers and defense(Irish culture, Christian)
Light Infantry Drilling Ground: light inf numbers and offense (Ethiopian culture)
Free Warrior Lodge: light inf and archer numbers, light inf offense (West African group)
Cavalry : heavy cav and light cav numbers and defense(South Slavic culture group, Christian)
Urban Militia: boost to light infantry and pike numbers and offense(Dutch culture)

To break this own further:

Light infantry:
- Offense: Ethiopian or West African Group. Dutch splits with Pikemen

Archers:
- Offense: Welsh or English Christians

Pikemen:
- Defense: Scottish Christians. Dutch splits with Light Infantry
- Morale: Italian Christians

Heavy Infantry:
- Offense: Saxon or North Germanic Group Christians
- Defense: Baltic or Finno-Ugric Group Pagans, Russian or Irish Christians

Light Cav:
- Offense: Iberian Group Christians
- Defense: Hungarian or West Slav Group Christians and Arabic Group Muslims. South Slav Group Christians split with Heavy Cav.

Heavy Cav
- Offense: Frankish, Occitan, Norman, German, or Breton Christians. Byzantine Group Christians split with Horse Archers.
- Defense: South Slav Group Christians split with Light Cav

Horse Archers:
- Offense+Morale: Altaic Group or Iranian Group
- Offense: Byzantine Group Christians split with Heavy Cav

While I was at it, I dug into the retinue side of things (CKII/common/retinue_subunits/00_retinue_subunits.txt ). It looks like pretty much everyone gets a cultural retinue as well, and none of these appear to be religion-locked in any way. They're all strongly associated with the culture buildings of their cultures: each gets a stat bonus equivalent to lvl 4 of the associated cultural building, and most are a single-type retinue composed entirely of the type that gets the boost (note that this is the only way to get a single-type retinue). Exceptions to the 500-of-one-type rule are listed below.

Altaic Group or Persian Group: 240 light cav, 260 Horse Archer
Frankish/Occitan/Norman/German/Breton: 300 heavy cav, 200 light cav
Byzantine Group: 300 heavy cav, 200 Horse Archer
West African Group: 300 light inf, 200 Archer
South Slavic Group: 300 heavy cav, 200 light cav
Dutch: 300 light inf, 200 pikemen

Also, the Nahuatl get a 250/250 light infantry/heavy infantry retinue with half offensive bonus each.

I have no idea if the cultural retinue bonus stacks with the cultural building bonus, and would be interested to learn. Anyone know?

 

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And now, a bit of analysis and/or pertinent thoughts.

- The only way to get buffed archers (which, from reports, can be awesome all by themselves) is to be one of two cultures that don't leave Great Britain much. If you want to take advantage of the associated building, you also have to be Christian.

- Most of the religion-specific buildings are Christian-specific. The pagans get heavy infantry, and the muslims get light cav (which, from reports, can be useful as one of your flanks, but shouldn't be your entire army by themselves).

- The non-religion-specific cultures include three that buff light infantry (check me if I'm wrong, but I'm not seeing that as a strong selling point) and Altaic/Persian, which buffs Horse Archers (which are quite good, and something that most cultures don't get to have at all).

- The concentrated default retinues (pure blocks all of the same troop type, all getting the full culture bonus) have a fair amount of strength for those cultures that get it (as long as the troop type is itself decent). By comparison, it loks like the Dutch and the West Africans just lose out. The rare ability to fill out some of your retinue with light infantry just isn't that special, and the Ethiopians do it better anyway. Everyone else who splits is cavalry of one sort or another, and splitting is the only way of getting a cultural retinue to contain non-light cavalry types. The heavy/light splits are actually pretty solid - they come in at 300/200, and the non-cultural cav retinue comes in at 100/400. The horse archer/light cav split (200/300) is the best available way in the game to field horse archers in large numbers short of being byzantine, and looks to me like a solid reason for muslim dynasties to consider trying to poach the Persian or Altaic culture groups. The byzantine heavy cav/horse archer split is just the Byzantines cheating like a cheating thing, and really does seem like the blatantly strongest option out there.