Better Armies & Garrisons

Are you tired of delegating every fight because the garrisons are too weak and the AI doesn’t come up with effective army compositions?

Then don’t look any further! My mod improves the garrisons and unit recruitment behaviour for all Han Empire factions, Bandits, Yellow Turban Remnants and Nanman factions!

Improved Garrisons

Capturing settlements in the base game is rather easy, since most of the used units are militias. This leads to the repetitive experience of delegating almost every fight. Therefore, the first part of my mod seeks to solve this issue by increasing the quality of the stationed units, but keeping size and unit classes for the different settlement types roughly the same. For examples refer to the attached pictures.

– Basic settlement levels will now primarily focus on decent early game units or bad faction-unique units to make them easy to capture but still defendable, should the need arise.

– Advanced settlement levels will shift their focus to mid-game compositions like Dragon units and strong faction-unique units. This will enable them to defend themselves against mediocre army builds.

– Elite settlements levels will boast imperial and other strong end-game units. Even well-equipped full-stack armies will not win without severe losses.

Note:

– The garrisons may need to be refreshed to change to the modded version. This can be done by either upgrading / downgrading until the garrison level changes, or conquering / losing settlements.

Improved AI Unit Recruitment

In the vanilla build, the AI primarily decides what to recruit based on how much the units cost. Unfortunately for them, this leads to unfavorable army compositions with a lot of militia units, as they are the cheapest units in the game. While the AI indeed gets told that militia units are of lower quality then many of the other units, they often use them regardless to fill gaps in their armies, especially when they run out of money or have used almost all of their dedicated recruitment money.
The second part of my mod will therefore tackle this issue by changing the following things:

– Militia, peasant and basic bandit and Nanman units have been set to be extremely low in quality when compared to all other available units, making them look more unattractive to the AI. On the other hand, the quality of faction-unique units has been vastly increased in comparision to encourage the AI to recruit them more often.

– The cost of militia units has been increased by 900% for the AI, which will make it prefer the now cheaper other units who have not been changed in their price.

– All units in the Bandit tech tree can now be recruited up to 36 times with each unlock (instead of 1-5 times, depending on the unit). This aims towards making AI Bandit factions rely less on their outclassed basic bandit units and will also spice up your own campaign.

– The amount of money the AI can spend on recruitment per turn has been increased, aswell as how much of their income can be dedicated to army upkeep. This will make it easier for them to raise and maintain large armies.

Overall these changes will reduce the variety of the used units in favor of healthier and stronger army compositions. For examples, check the pictures.

Additional Notes:

– The mod works as intended for the base game, the 190 Yellow Turbans, Eight Princes DLC, Mandate of Heaven DLC and the Nanman factions. As of now, I don’t recommend using it with the other DLCs.