I've been toying around with this idea in the back of my head for awhile, so I thought I'd finally write it down. Basically, I find the current recruitment system unsatisfactory.

My idea was to have a system of recruitment pools for everything that is part of a particular unit. For example, a cavalry unit would need to recruit from the soldier pool, and the horse pool. These pools would grow every turn based on the available population and the resources of the region itself.

The growth rate would be tailored so that a city of 20,000+ would be able to field a full unit every turn (or retrain a bunch of units, as retraining would draw from the pool as well), while a small town of 1,000 would not.

From a gameplay perspective, this would help take away from the "elite unit" syndrome. For example, Carthage would no longer be able to constantly stream out elephant units. Nor would they be able to make nothing but Long Shield cavalry. Egypt wouldn't be able to field full chariot armies. Parthia wouldn't be able to field full horse archer armies, etc. It would also make retraining your forward armies more problematic, as you'd need the pool to draw from. And finally, it would encourage people to not butcher every city they conquer. If they dropped the population too much, they'd have trouble fielding men from the pool to retrain/recruit.

The major downside that I see is that it becomes another stat to keep track of. It's easy to simply look at a single population value, having to track multiple pools would be more difficult. Still, I think a decent UI could alleviate that problem for the most part.

Bh