declining marginal recruiment cost

[parcelt]

First, apologies in advance if this idea has been proposed and discussed before (I couldn't find it though).

I just read this comment by Little Legioner:

One of my friend has been made a full stack heavy chariot army of Britons in RTW and he won numberless battles with this Panzer Division like horde. He didn't care politics, developing his cities and such as this things.

And it made me think of the following mechanism that may counter the feasability of building stacks full of advanced uberunits:
- all units will be labelled as being more or less advanced (e.g. something similar to early, middle and late period units in MTW).
- when a new unit type first becomes available, it will be very, very expensive. Building it will still be wortwhile given the new unit's impact on the battlefield, but it will be economically impossible to recruit them in very large numbers quickly.
- over time, as the cumulative number of a certain type of unit being recruited passes a certain treshold, an official message could pop up telling us that due to increased experience and specialization, the smithy (or whatever) is now able to produce that horse armour (or whatever) at significantly reduced cost. The unit is now a 'normal' unit of the period, and this is reflected in its cost.
- this could probably be tied in neatly with the city vs castle development stuff.

Just an idea, probably not new but something I would definitely love to see implemented. Apart from leading to improved army-balancing it will definitely provide for a special feel to the battles every first few times you're able to field that special (expensive) new unit (or face one!).

[Husar]

Well, there is the new system where you apparently need enough noble population or so to build knights, shouldn't this already limit the choice in units?

[Tamur]

Nice idea parcelt. I do think that the recruitment pools will go a long way toward solving this problem, but it would be very interesting to highlight (and limit) new units in such a way.

More generally, I have wondered about floating recruitment cost for units of all types. Would players get angry or frustrated when unit costs vary considerably from place-to-place, and year-to-year, or would it be considered part of the realism?

[hoetje]

Well, there is the new system where you apparently need enough noble population or so to build knights, shouldn't this already limit the choice in units?

I think that will solve the problem more then enough

[econ21]

Not sure I am getting this - a declining marginal recruitment cost will tend the player towards a corner solution of maxed out armies. You've paid a high fixed amount to get one or two, why not binge and buy a lot more as they decline in cost?

An increasing marginal recruitment cost makes more sense. You can afford one or two knights in a stack, then it starts to get prohibitive.

That's all gameplay. In terms of realism, I don't know. In the modern world, there are declining costs for high-tech gear - you pay the R&D up front, then the per unit production costs are modest. But when you are talking about elite units like knights (or indeed SEALS, paras, marines etc), you could argue there are only so many "alpha males" in a pack, so scarcity could lead to an increasing marginal cost.

[Bar Kochba]

hes talking about lets say muskets whent hey a brand new they cost alot but then there are some new developments and they become more popular they become cheaper

[econ21]

I guess you could say that the cost of the buildings required for you to access muskets represents the R&D cost. Once you know how to make them, I am not sure the marginal cost would decline much.