Stele #2

[General Appo]

They probably are considering. And even if they´re not the new unit-pools will still restrict recruitment of elite armies. Which is very historical.

[Tellos Athenaios]

Yes we are. It makes no sense to have an all out Triarii army; and such limits would force the recruitment-happy AI to 'balance' their armies better.

[TLT]

Is it possible to make disbanding more realistic, i.e. when you disband a unit in a city that unit gets added to the recruitment pool of that city, instead of all the man and armor suddenly being gone.
This might be facilitated with a 'retirement' building which allows you to build all units in quantity 0 & experience 0 ~ to be upgraded when a unit gets disbanded. i.e. you can re-recruit your unit where you disbanded it ~ for a price ofcourse. And over time the count would lower again as the veterans grown too old to fight.

[General Appo]

Is it possible to make disbanding more realistic, i.e. when you disband a unit in a city that unit gets added to the recruitment pool of that city, instead of all the man and armor suddenly being gone.

That already exists in RTW, and EB. However this was removed for MTW2 and I don´t know if it can reactivated. Seeing as it´s pretty much the same engine for both games I hope it can.

This might be facilitated with a 'retirement' building which allows you to build all units in quantity 0 & experience 0 ~ to be upgraded when a unit gets disbanded. i.e. you can re-recruit your unit where you disbanded it ~ for a price ofcourse. And over time the count would lower again as the veterans grown too old to fight.

Not possible. For one thing, there´s no way to keep track of how old a unit is or how long it´s been since it was last retrained.

[Mulceber]

Much as I like the idea of free upkeep for certain troops, wouldn't that effectively mean that factions that had access to them would have a full stack in every city and would thus be virtually impossible to conquer? Personally, I'd dread having to face the AS if every city had a stack full of Klerouchoi Phalangitai. -M

[Epimetheus]

I've played a fair amount of M2TW, and I never noticed the AI spamming their cities full of free upkeep units. I don't think the AI is aware of their free upkeep ability, and simply evaluates them as standard troops for their cost and field upkeep. I think it's much more likely that if the Klerouchoi Phalangitai cost a lot more to maintain in the field, it's possible the AI will dismiss them as not worth the money, and end up not training any at all.

[Tux]

Still don't forget the population of the cities greatly diminishes if they do that, around 2000 people, this balances the game in a way that they won't have elite units as much. Also if you consider that when a city is besieged most of the population will participate so I think it's also more realistic.

[Omegoa]

I've played a fair amount of M2TW, and I never noticed the AI spamming their cities full of free upkeep units. I don't think the AI is aware of their free upkeep ability, and simply evaluates them as standard troops for their cost and field upkeep. I think it's much more likely that if the Klerouchoi Phalangitai cost a lot more to maintain in the field, it's possible the AI will dismiss them as not worth the money, and end up not training any at all.

Would there only be a certain amount of free upkeep units per city? Epimetheus makes a good point here; I wouldn't want to attack a city full with troops either.

I was just playing N:TW, and CA has implemented an interesting system. Basically, when you besiege a city a few units of "Armed Citizenry" appear to help defend the city. Would this be possible in EBII? It would realistically represent the peasants of a city taking up arms to defend their homes.

[Genava]

They probably are considering. And even if they´re not the new unit-pools will still restrict recruitment of elite armies. Which is very historical.

Yeah, I like that. It's really important, the factions will have to develop their building to increase the limit of the elite units, often they are rich persons or aristocrats and thus they are in limited quantity. That will change with the armies of knights of M2TW.
It's possible to make a limit in function of the units that you create? Example, to create 4 princeps, it's necessary to have 4 hastati before.