TIP: Increasing your recruitment que

[Shahed]

Hi everyone !

Here's a tip which I discovered a while back, thought I'd share it.

• Train units in one settlement.
• Move them to another settlement which also has the buildings required to recruit these units.
• Disband the units.
• Next turn your recruitment que will have these units in it.

You can use this to reduce travel time to the front, and to concentrate your production. In the following example I wanted to centralise most military production to Nottingham.



Hope that's useful for someone.

SALUTE !

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

That's different. Seems like a lot of work, but I guess it could be useful if you know that you're going to have a war soon...

[Shahed]

Most likely you'd be producing units anyway (if you were playing the total war/domination way). I remembered also that I had a high level armorer at Nottingham, so I could have all those armored pikes coming out from ONE spot, nicely and neatly organised into pike & canon armies.

This also helps you to some extent to get rid of your excess cash.

[Doug-Thompson]

The importance of this is that you can reduce maintenance costs massively. Just have a massive buildup right before you attack.

Also, I'm going to use this in my current Hungarian campaign. I have all much of North Italy, but retraining my HA is a major hassle because the closest castle is Bran. Now I've captured a HRE castle at Innsbruck. I'm going to send rookie HA from Bran to Innsbruck and disband them. That way, I won't have to pay maintenance costs and restore my veteran HA after each battle.

Good find, Sinan.

[WhiskeyGhost]

also, it makes getting some of the guilds a little easier for some factions. Like if you want Sherwood Archers, you can just buy and disband your best archer unit in Nottingham over and over to build up the points for the Woodsmans Guild. No more waiting for good units to respawn (which give more points i believe) or filling the gap with fodder units (like peasant archers)

[Kobal2fr]

So in essence you're just paying for them twice to avoid some upkeep ?

[Shahed]

Thanks Doug. Good points Whiskey ! I forgot to mention this but I used it before as English. Indeed that's probably one of the best things, you can have HIGH end units in the ques, mo more waiting ! kobavelli, in essence you don't pay upkeep and can produce a long run of units from a location of your choice. I don't really care about the money, never short of it. It's probably cheaper to pay upkeep but that's not my point, the emphasis is not economic but military.

[andrewt]

Thanks Doug. Good points Whiskey ! I forgot to mention this but I used it before as English. Indeed that's probably one of the best things, you can have HIGH end units in the ques, mo more waiting ! kobavelli, in essence you don't pay upkeep and can produce a long run of units from a location of your choice. I don't really care about the money, never short of it. It's probably cheaper to pay upkeep but that's not my point, the emphasis is not economic but military.

Is the recruitment queue only increasing in the place you disbanded them on or every place?

[Slaists]

Thanks Doug. Good points Whiskey ! I forgot to mention this but I used it before as English. Indeed that's probably one of the best things, you can have HIGH end units in the ques, mo more waiting ! kobavelli, in essence you don't pay upkeep and can produce a long run of units from a location of your choice. I don't really care about the money, never short of it. It's probably cheaper to pay upkeep but that's not my point, the emphasis is not economic but military.

If the point is not to save upkeep money I am not sure I understand the reasoning behind this tactic. In order to disband you have to have the unit trained somewhere, so you already have it, and obviously have walked it into the province you want it in anyway. Why disband and retrain (unless the motivation is to save upkeep)?

[Doug-Thompson]

So in essence you're just paying for them twice to avoid some upkeep ?

Yes. An Hungarian Noble unit at full strength costs 210 florins a turn. It costs four turns of upkeep just to move it from Bran to North Italy. The recruitment cost of 750 plus four turns is 1590. (Thanks for the correction, Sinan.)

Just a couple of disbanded rookie units should increase Innsbruck's "pool" enough to keep up with demand until I can build enough stables.

Unlike the Egyptians, for instance, Hungary is an HA faction that cannot build racetracks. It makes the retraining situation more challenging.

I would have made a castle out of one of the Italian towns if they weren't all making money hand over fist.

[Shahed]

That's 1590, if you mean (210*4) + 750 ?.

[Dorkus]

This is excellent for retraining purposes. After a big fight or two at the front, your forces are generally seriously depleted, but also with significant experience. Instead of sending them back into the empire for retraining and then having to send them back to the front, you can send units from all over your empire to your front, plop them down in one city, and instantly retrain your vet troops to full strength.

Incredibly useful for a faction like Byzantium, which otherwise gets a max 3 recruitment pool and very slow growth, on vards. Immediately after taking a castle it takes 5 turns to grow a single unit for retraining!

[Ciaran]

Interesting. I never knew the recruitment pool could grow over its limit (well, it can´t on its own), but with disbanded units in the area it obviously can. That reminds me somewhat of MTW, any unit you disbanded became available through the mercenary pool.