Recruitment

From Almansur Battlegrounds

When you wish to recruit or reinforce an army, it’s important that you chose the appropriate troops for the intended purpose. For this you can use a mix of what your economy allows you and what common sense would recommend. For example, don’t use cavalry to invade a mountainess terrain! Cavalry will neither perform adequately in combat there nor move at a decent pace.

Your army will be a group of contingents and each contingent a group of soldiers. When you recruit, you choose the number of soldiers of a given type that you are going to mobilize. They will form a contingent. You can then split or join contingents and armies as previously stated.

When you attempt to recruit in a given territory, you can see what contingents you can recruit there according to your Land type, the population type(s), the required ironworks and the available recruits (in the territory or nearby according to the presence of a recruitment center). Now let’s take a look at how much it costs to recruit and maintain in gold a soldier of each type:

As you can see, militias are the only troops that just require money to mobilize, and cavalry naturally require horses. The amounts of wood and iron required depend on the equipment of the unit.

All militias are available to all Land types, so when the population of the territory where you are recruiting from does not match your Land type, you will only have available the militia of the population in question, if the population matches your Land type, you will have available all the light contingent types that are stated as belonging to your Land type, plus the medium contingent types if you have a ironworks level one or higher and plus the heavy contingent types if you have a ironworks level two or higher.

The maintenance cost column displays the gold need to pay each soldier’s monthly salary. You will see that although the recruiting costs are higher, it’s the maintenance costs that will determine on the long run what kind of army size and composition you can sustain.

Apart from the wages, each soldier will need one plus the number of horses required to recruit him pound of food per day. So for example in a 30 days per turn game 1000 spearmen will require 30 food (remember that food is in tones) per turn and 1000 light cavalry in the same game will require 60 food per turn. This is also a very important limitation, and raiding enemy armies may destroy your ability to produce enough to feed your armies, so having a decent stock of food to face harsh times is advisable.

In order to remove from you the burden of monthly having to check how much resources you would need to send to each army, this procedure is simplified, and you only need to have in your central stocks (at the capital) enough food to feed your troops and gold to pay them, and the needed amounts will automatically be removed from the stocks each month, since all maintenance is paid monthly, regardless of distance to the army and path to get there.

When food runs out, your armies will try to forage for what ever they can find, and the loyalty and status of your armies will go down (it’s a tiresome procedure!) and eventually you will have more defection from the ranks.

Each unit will have a different performance in battle. In the list below the classification given for each type of combat is an overall score, based on several characteristics (weapons used, armor, type of combat performed, etc). The number of circles and half-circles represents its effectiveness on the specific type of combat.

No circle represents no use in that type of combat, and the more circles the better. Note that this is a heuristic presentation of the actual values for each unit, so two unit types with the same number of circles don’t necessarily mean the exact same value, just that they are from “the same league”.

All these values will then be influenced by the condition where a battle may take place. Namely ranged combat will be greatly penalized in very dense forests (except for the Elves), cavalry will be greatly penalized in mountains, swamps and forests, but is boosted in plains, Orcs really don’t like forests, and so on. The speed is the operational speed, and is given in miles per day. It’s the distance the unit would go if it marches in normal speed in a terrain with absolutely no obstacles (0 forestation, 0 roughness and 0 swampness). So it’s a best case scenario for normal speed.

The actual recruiting can be done trough several navigational paths, namely:

• In Land => Territories => Territory X you can find a “recruit” link to allow you to recruit in that given territory;

• In Military => Armies => Army X you can also find a “recruit” link to allow you to recruit into that given army;

• In the map you can select a recruit option for the desired location;

• Or you go to Military => Recruitment, which will show you a list of all your territories. Click on the desired territory to recruit there. Each territory also displays some information that may be useful for you to determine where you wish to recruit, namely:

• • Recruitable. This shows how many recruits each territory has;

• • Population, to display the total population of each territory;

• • Rec Center. This shows the level of existing recruitment centers in each territory;

• • Ironworks. This displays the level of existing ironworks in each territory.

The recruitment of new soldiers is allows done in a specific location (territory) into a determined army. Regardless of the path used, you will always find your self the recruitment page, where there are three segments:

• An Army segment that allows you to choose into which army the newly recruited contingent will be recruited, using the appropriate select box, with the options of:

• • Select Army. You can choose an already existing army to recruit the new contingents. When you select an army, its units will be displayed below to help you visualize the army at hand;

• • New Army. This allows you to recruit into a new army to be created instantly. If you choose this, two fields will appear for you to fill, one with the name of the new army (by default it’s the name of the Land followed by a number), and the other with its initial order (by default it’s train).

• A Available Populations segment. This is a display of the recruits you can gather in this territory, adding together all population from the territory itself and eventually from nearby territories if the one where you are recruiting has a recruitment center;

• A New Contingents segment that allows you to define the size(s) of the contingent(s) you are about to recruit. Here you can visualize each possible contingent type you can recruit (wait with the cursor for about one second over the image if you have any doubt) and use the appropriate text boxes to fill the desired quantities. There is a “max” button in each one to fill the text box automatically with the highest possible number (considering recruits and resources), a “c” button to cancel the already inserted number, a display of the “total cost” of the desired quantities, and finally a “recruit” button to actually issue the order and execute the recruitment.

Recruiting is an immediate procedure, and so there is no need to wait for the turn to be processed, you can immediately access the recruited units and give them orders.