Quote Originally Posted by Evil_Maniac From Mars
A combination. More or less like Zenicetus said, the recruitment would operate on a national or territorial basis. The way this would work would be that you could call up a relative mix of units, getting better and changing in type depending on your buildings, but couldn't control which units beyond the structures you built making new ones available, which would be thrown into the mix on a relative basis. On the other hand, you would be able to recruit "elite" troops from specific settlements, such as a capital or historically important region, and be able to build them like in previous TW games.

So, more or less, you "build" elite troops and "call up" weak-medium troops to make up the bulk of your army.
Like Russia can just call on loads of serfs and its cavalry etc are acually trained?