Retinue still costing prestige after Norse reformation/feudalism

[Phystarstk]

Folks, this is something bugging me in my current game, and I wanted to see if it was WAD or not.

I'm playing as Scandinavia after starting as a minor Norwegian count. For years, I had a large prestige based retinue, but, once I switched to feudalism, obviously that changed. However, I realized recently that I'm still losing substantial prestige to "retinue upkeep" even though it's not listed in the retinue section of the Military tab and even though the gold cost went up.

Is this WAD? Or should I delete my whole retinue and start it over?

 

[tmsheikkinen]

Folks, this is something bugging me in my current game, and I wanted to see if it was WAD or not.

I'm playing as Scandinavia after starting as a minor Norwegian count. For years, I had a large prestige based retinue, but, once I switched to feudalism, obviously that changed. However, I realized recently that I'm still losing substantial prestige to "retinue upkeep" even though it's not listed in the retinue section of the Military tab and even though the gold cost went up.

Is this WAD? Or should I delete my whole retinue and start it over?

If you still have tribal retinues then yes, they do remain as prestige-based. However if you want to keep them you should as a feudal easily be able to afford them.

 

[treb]

If you still have tribal retinues then yes, they do remain as prestige-based. However if you want to keep them you should as a feudal easily be able to afford them.

byzantinearmy.jpg

 

[Rags17]

It's WAD.

Your prestige based retinues will still cost prestige to upkeep but you should now have nothing but cash based retinues to choose from for any new retinues you wish to raise. In my last campaign for some reason my retinue score dropped by around 60% on conversion so I simply kept my old tribal retinues going as long as I could - it gave me a really great way to use otherwise useless excess prestige while saving me cash - the retinues themselves were mostly LI and thus useless but they were great for raiding and keeping vassal factions in check.

 

[jwalche]

Retinue is very expensive, and losing substantial prestige is better than loosing substantial ducats.

What tribal retinue do you have? It won't cost too much prestige if you don't subject it to melee too much. If you somehow can make a flank with LI and Archers (20+%) only, and focus on killing enemy during skirmish stage with Feint and Volley, it shouldn't cost too much upkeep. As a Norse, you can easily earn prestige by making invited and captured high born women your concubines and releasing them.

You can always delete them but don't rush it. If for nothing else, just used them exclusive as raiders.

And check your retinue cap first. Chances are that your retinue cap was reduced by going feudal, and you won't be able to remake what you disband for a while, until you get more buildings or tech up in organization.

 

[Dragatus]

the retinues themselves were mostly LI and thus useless but they were great for raiding and keeping vassal factions in check.

Light Infantry is only weak if you look at the soldiers as individuals. If you look at how much fighting power you get out of your retinue cap though it's great and second only to Camel Cavalry. The one major downside are supply limit issues.

 

[tmsheikkinen]

Chances are that your retinue cap was reduced by going feudal,

Checked wiki and looks like you should lose about 40% of your retinue cap by adopting feudalism
since hillforts give bigger buiding bonus that fully upgraded castle. Of course feudal realm should fairly soon have bigger tech bonus to retinue cap but that drop is still there.

 

[Phystarstk]

I think what confused me is that the Military tab no longer displayed prestige upkeep as part of the overall upkeep (only mentioning the gold). I honestly assumed my prestige retinues had been converted into feudal ones. I figured that explained the drop in relative retinue cap, as I thought the new retinues were higher quality but weightier in terms of caper unit.

It was literally like well over a century before I noticed it, haha. I've decided to keep them. God, even as an obscenely wealthy Viking Emperor, retinues are sooo expensive.

 

[jwalche]

even as an obscenely wealthy Viking Emperor, retinues are sooo expensive.

Retinue reinforcement costs 12x more than just maintaining it. So the key is not loosing men while using it.

You won't loose man if you make your enemy flee during skirmish stage. The best unit for that, other than Camel, is Light Skirmish retinue or something with similar LI:AR ratio. If you already have a huge LI only tribal retinue, you could mix English or Nubian AR only retinue to keep your AR slightly more than 20% and have the rest with LI. It is not as good as pure LI for sieging, but close enough. Make a side flank oversized with this retinue, and keep the other flanks with a small army of whatever you have - feudal, mercenary, LI retinue, etc. And it can decimate feudal army 80% of its size (or 200% of its cost) easily while not loosing many men.

If you need to strom holdings, use your levy (free reinforcement), vassal levy (completely free and they will waste it with internal wars anyway), or mercenary (the more they die the less you pay)