Birthright: Chimaeron

DM Juan wrote: ↑

Fri Mar 29, 2019 8:29 am

Limiting training grounds to 1 for warriors, and smaller map would cause much smaller armies. And equally importantly, caution about sending your army all over because training is slow...

Something like this is all we would need. Just limit the resources. The system isn’t broken, just too big.

Consider modifications for undead and summoned units when modifying muster rules.

Did Undead work as intended this game, especially with winter campaigns? Should they suffer attrition as well, even if just a negligible amount?

I can see a winter-map game with rampaging undead as problematic, I agree.

Was working on varsks as a counter-unit, but that doesn't work too well as a standard thing. We could keep the undead under control by limiting the corpse supply more, like by making it so there's none free to start with, and so the only way to collect more is raiding and pillaging, not simply winning battles. That way, the supply would be zero until violence had already taken place, and then it'd be obvious who the necromancer was, unless someone was raiding for bodies specifically to sell to someone else secretly.

I would suggest that levies get a bonous while fighting on home or core territory, they are defending their homes against invaders so they might be more motivated to defend their lands. A nother thing is that we are looking at each nation having a standing professional army, I think an option for a professional or standing or mercenary option should all be things to consider, a Levy army might say be able to raise certain troops based off the level of the province they are raised from along with buildings from that province, so you could raise a strong levy from a province with some knights archers scouts and what ever, but you have to balancet hat if you lose them your province takes a huge hit

A professional army negates this issue but has to be developed over time and has an upkeep price, one could also say that militia could be trained up or that a professional army could have a deeper manpower pool if they haven't been at war for a while as soldiers would retire could be called back up again, not sure how that would work in except that maybe there's a reserve system in place that can allow a few units to quickly be mustered for a slightly cheaper price.

A mercenary army wouldn't worry about attrition but would just cost a lot more money to field and maintain, they would also be less likely to defend as fiercely as a levied force on defence or fight as hard as a professional army.

Undead should take penalties in deserts and hot terrain

burn the corpses and scatter the bones , can't have undead then

It's less that levies get a bonus in their own lands and more that there's a penalty if they go anywhere else--the province's loyalty drops. I don't think defenders need an extra benefit, they already have terrain bonuses, fortifications, reduced costs and avoid attrition. Being able to levy high-quality troops instead of needing to muster them would be odd, since there's realm spells that have that effect--Summoning and Holy War, among others. Why cast those if you can do it for free?

Another possibility, for undead, is to just say they can't be used in the winter any more than living units can. They've got no body heat, after all; if the temperature's below freezing, they might just freeze in place. In which case wars would be in the summer regardless of what units were involved.

I think that works best if each turn includes all four seasons. That way, there's a summer season for wars and raiding every turn. If it's not enough to have just one action for war (or growth), we could determine randomly each turn how many of the actions each regent takes have to be in which season. Some turns there might be 3 actions, and be good times to take risks. Some turns there might be one or none, and players would have to be more conservative.

Taking a page from something Olaf mentioned, and drawing from the feudal ideas that underlie the setting, perhaps, in addition to limiting training grounds, you have a quasi-force limit that we could call "personal retinue". The retinue size would be determined by a player's class (mage/bard 1, guilder/thief 3, priest 5, paladin/ranger 7, fighter 9), and the retinue would be a hard cap on the number of units they can maintain during times of peace.

If a regent does call the banners/declare war, then they can muster and train as many units as they want, but that cap lift does not occur until after war is declared. So, in a war, the first round of the war would essentially be mustering. We could also say that any decree declaring war has to be announced at least three days (IRL) in the forum before turns are due.

Seems arbitrary, and disconnected from the realm the regent rules. If there's going to be a cap, I think it should be based on the holdings someone controls rather than directly on their class, otherwise there's going to be pseudo-regents with large armies that are not self-supporting. And that still seems redundant. The wealth of a realm determines what armies it can practically support, and the abilities of a character should naturally determine how effective their actions will be. A fighter should be better at winning battles because they're a fighter, not because fighters are allowed to outnumber the enemy at the start of a war.

One thing we never saw in the last game was regents becoming hostile toward guilders because the regents had power and needed gold while the guilders had less power but their coffers were overflowing. There was a strange laissez-faire attitude toward trade routes.