Adventurers and Men at arms are way OP?

[Imperium]

I feel like... I could squash entire empires like bugs with my 60 year old adventurer focusing on heavy infantry (not on purpose, it was just first regiment I got and I kept stacking bonuses for it. So now I have 5 stacks of 500 "house chosen" or whatever squads that exeed 100 attack, 100 toughness, but also have additional stats. I rarely loose over a 100 out of 2500 in any given war even taking on stacks twice my size.

ALL AI armies are very weak man at arms and rest are levies that just die like dogs. THEN I also get 25 faking knights with 200%+ efficiency. I dont see how this was balanced this way lol... as adventurer you should be capped to one regiment...

On top of all that you get those troops for FREE, there is no upkeep, not even supplies unless they are deployed. They can be resupplied again for free at any town using decisions. You also get near unlimited money since you get money for wars, you get money for contracts some are near instant, like training nights or dueling bandits.

OH but when I decide to convert my adventurer into an empire, my finances just tank to all crap since as a poc adventurer I can support all that, but as an emperor I cant afford even quarter of that army,

[brownacs]

Adventurers are pretty OP early on but they're not as good later when the AI can field really large armies. If you wanna keep your adventurer MAAs then you wanna plan for it so 1) stack a fair bit of gold before settling, 2) settle as young as possible (the 60 year old might not be a great idea) so you maximise the -50% upkeep and 3) think about going for the conqueror decision because they get a further reduction to upkeep along with a bonus to passive income and events practically throwing gold at you... and more.

[Lera]

They're OP and broke nas sh*it but no one cares or fixes it

[Razorblade]

As you stated yourself, Adventurers are militarily powerful, but they're not great at translating that temporary power into long term success. You grind for an entire lifetime for Fame, and your reward at the end is getting to conquer a single Kingdom title that can't support your army.

Meanwhile, Adventurer army sizes scale poorly into the later game. You may be able to compensate with modifier stacking, but that's just more time wasted grinding.

In the early game, you could just be a Tribal ruler and get even cheaper armies, while being able to actually lay down some foundations for your future lands and dynasty. As for most of the rest of the game, you could just be an Administrative empire and rake in tons of money, have nearly infinite MAAs at your disposal, and have your vassals constantly expanding your lands for you.

Adventuring serves two main purposes: mobility, if you want to spread your dynasty further afield, and disaster recovery, if you've lost everything. It is rarely the optimal government form, since you have to grind for the benefits that other governments can just automate. It's hardly more OP than anything else in the game; it just follows different rules that may be situationally optimal.

[armyissue69]

You know...tribal, man one of the best runs I've ever had was 2 horse archer and 2 konni stacks...absolute complete wrecking ball anywhere west of the Chinese (they have crossbows early). There are some clever runs to hybrid pretty easily.

You could also do a greatest Khan run, not too hard to do... lots of fun at least once.

[Imperium]

Originally posted by armyissue69:

You know...tribal, man one of the best runs I've ever had was 2 horse archer and 2 konni stacks...absolute complete wrecking ball anywhere west of the Chinese (they have crossbows early). There are some clever runs to hybrid pretty easily.

You could also do a greatest Khan run, not too hard to do... lots of fun at least once.

Yeah so much scenarios to try. I love it, just was surprised by how I was wooping 10 empires at a time with some elite troops lolz.

[Lera]

Nothing better than starting a new playthrough and get instantly crippled by losing an entire leg in the first battle you lead. This game is something else.

[VoiD]

That's an old issue with the game and there's no real way to fix it without a full overhaul/remake of the military system.

The game runs on levies as a basis for everything, but levies are worthless and knights/MAA can simply delete tens of thousands of them within days of combat, the result is what you're experiencing.

This game needs a custodian team far more than Stellaris ever did, and Stellaris was unplayable when it got one.
On the topic: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/the-levy-system-does-the-rest-of-the-world-dirty.1720526/

or

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/ck3-is-too-easy.1599035/

You'll notice that pretty much every thread repeating this sentiment gets massively agreed with and nearly nobody downvotes them on the official forums.

[Silmaril03]

lol, I started an Adventure on the Elven Mod, within 15 years, I had amassed an army to invade Rome and took it for myself, supposedly strongest group in the game lost to me

Adventurers are OP, not certain it is not part of how the game is designed, especially at the start, because it shows the power of mercenary groups, maybe to easy to min/max, but I think it is fairly in line

[Silmaril03]

As a balance, I think the Men at Arms should require a pay, some gold, some provisions on upkeep. Knight Eff should not be as high, but the number of units is fine with an upkeep

Doing adventures should give a 2 or 3x gold (again balanced by upkeep), there needs to be ways of getting rando conscripts and not just Men at Arms for food and gold, with events for a peasant to become a Man at Arms or maybe even Captain of themselves post campaign, basically an alliance group of companies throughout the region working together or against each other