Barracks recruiting capabilities - reference?

So...I'm browsing through the encycylopaedia (such as it is), looking at different factions' troops. Trying to figure out who I want to play next now that the Pontus AAR is finally finished.

What the encyclopaedia doesn't show is which barracks type and level correlates to a specific unit. Either in the building or unit listings.

So, for example, there's nothing here which shows that Pontus must have the Level IV hoplite barracks built in order to recruit Bronze Shield Pikes. I eventually figured that out by trial-and-error during last campaign.

Is there a reference floating around out there which is readily accessible?

The encyclopedia in this is really crap compared to just about anything we had before and I'm not just saying it isn't working properly (which it isn't) half the time but it's actually really unhelpful too with a lot of the descriptive text in it being copy and pasted across a lot of different units (there are literally two blocks of text that describe the entire Roman infantry and they even copied it for a lot of ships) and a lot of times, the descriptions are actually kind of pointless too.

I remember trying to look up the Scythian horse archers to see strengths they have and the text I got on the Scythian horse archers was some sort of short summary of the entire faction, which they copied for all cavalry units. I really miss the descriptive short texts from Rome 1 and Medieval 2. Even Shogun 2 was better than what we have now >_>

I really do not like the web-based encyclopedia that we first saw in Shogun 2. As Sp4 said, the older ways were much better, much easier to access, and just an overall better system.

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Originally Posted by Bramborough

So...I'm browing through the encycylopaedia (such as it is), looking at different factions' troops. Trying to figure out who I want to play next now that the Pontus AAR is finally finished.

What the encyclopaedia doesn't show is which barracks type and level correlates to a specific unit. Either in the building or unit listings.

So, for example, there's nothing here which shows that Pontus must have the Level IV hoplite barracks built in order to recruit Bronze Shield Pikes. I eventually figured that out by trial-and-error during last campaign.

Is there a reference floating around out there which is readily accessible?

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Excluding any link and content hiccups (of which lately there have been many), you should always use buildings as a base. So grab the tier 4 barracks of your culture of choice, and to the right you will see what units it provides as a garrison and what units it allows to be trained. These vary per faction of course. I usually go to the core unit production buildings to see what I can expect to field, then check out the requirements for these buildings (technology is my primary concern) and take it from there.

Apart from duplicate icons, missing content and bad links, my main #1 gripe with the encyclopedia is the lack of easy unit to unit comparisons. I want to compare Foot Companions to Silver Shield Pikemen for example. I want a quick and easy matching of the unit stats so I can judge which is better (on paper).

That encyclopedia is a real piece of ... very hard to compare anything or even find what you want. On top of that it's laggy as hell (for a simple HTML/pdf document).

For me, the easiest way to find what each level of barracks can train (in addition to the lower level barracks) is to hover over the barracks building in the research tree. It shows, what additional units the barracks give. This does not seem to be an exclusive list though. I guess, just the very top level additional units are shown.

As a tip, whenever you conquer an enemy territory and they have some military buildings there check what you can recruit. They might provide units that are not available to you at that point (or at all) even though the icon in the city interface shows that you cannot use the foreign barracks. Actually, you can train units there. In my Egypt campaign, some barbarian high level barracks were giving me thorax pikemen and royal peltasts before I could train them myself.