Reworked Recruitment Pool

Controversial opinion time: I love how CA did recruitment in ToB. Well at least I love what they were trying to do…

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Let’s take Wessex.

You start with the classic trash Saxon Fyrds that had been their hallmark for centuries and a few decent retinue units to keep everything together. Then as you progress in your campaign they become more militarized. The Fyrds get way better and you get more, better retinue units to support them. And then you finish up with legendary forces that defeated the last Viking invasions and just barely lost to the Normans.

This progression feels right, both from a RP perspective and a gameplay one. Now let’s get to the "trying" part. In practice the above cool progression during your campaign doesn’t actually get to play out because of a poor design choice: the unbearably low initial pool caps and slow replenishment of this pool.

How does it actually play out?

You start as Wessex. You own 6+ provinces and a ton of vassals. You can muster A SINGLE unit of retinue infantry and A SINGLE unit of retinue cavalry. It will be 9-15 turns (3-6 in game years) before you are allowed to muster another SINGLE unit of either of these. So you look at the tech tree and see you can get this down by grinding military branches. You spam recruit enough trash to hit the required caps and start doing quick turns to grind the tech out. But as you start to get the turns to replenish the pool down, you are also upgrading the units. Thus you never really use the tier 1 and especially the tier 2 units. Once the pool is actually replenishing at a rational rate you are already at your Huscarls and one of the best parts of the game has been wasted.

By tying the "turns to replenish pool" to the same techs that "age up" your troops CA disincentivizes sticking to the the awesome multi-tier unit system by practically forcing you to grind to the tier 3 units, just so you can have army compositions that aren’t 90% chaff.

• 4x increase to the starting amount of every unit in the pool.
• 4x increase to the max base cap of every unit in the pool
• Levy and Retinue pools have a base replenishment of 1 unit every turn (3 in game months)
• Elite and Catapult pools have a base replenishment of 1 unit every 4 turns (12 in game months)

Yes, you are going to have a lot more retinue and elite units, but this is to give the player choice and take away the endless waiting. You can choose to spam elite/retinue units if you think that’s fun. You can also choose to just enjoy building armies to RP.

This is a startpos mod. It was the only way I could modify the starting caps aside from scripting in a language I don’t presently know. It needs to be first in your mod list.

If you would like to achieve something like this without editing startpos, Zinn has two mods that get close. But these still take 10-15 turns to kick in and don’t really work like this until 30+. This works on turn 1.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1608012731
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1622395435

The goal here is to make the Pool Size/Turns to Replenish Pool parts of the tech tree irrelevant. You choose how to build your armies. You don’t have to grit your teeth and spam 30-50 turns just to get your army game going. You grind the trees when you want new units or to “age up” your forces. Until then you have a perfectly functional tier 1 or tier 2 roster that can flesh out as many armies as you can afford. This also means you could focus on economic research for a while and then work on your armies later.

Maybe this never bothered you. Maybe you enjoy the early game levy spam and like a really slow paced game. Personally I found this miserable. My OCD just wanted to make decent army comps, the history buff in me was confused as to how a large nation like Wessex could only field a handful of decent swordsmen every 3 years, and I just don’t have the time for 100hr campaigns.

I highly recommend playing on harder difficulties, especially with the current state of pool replenishment. Use “Bran Mac Born Thrones of Britannia Campaign AI“ for a much better battle experience and an actually dangerous campaign: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2156063756

This is the opening part of my attempt to put together a Blitz style campaign structure that allows for quicker campaigns that are more combat focused while remaining balanced for the player and AI.

4x increase to starting count of all units, 4x increase to base max count of all units, units return to the pool very quickly.