How do i get a bigger army ? newish player

[oldcracks~-]

I say newish player because i have about 56 hours but thats mostly from goofing around and now i would like to play the game more seriously. Anyways my question is, how do i get bigger armies ? Do i need to build some sort of buildings? Is it Levy reinforcement rate ? Or Levy size? Garrison size ? help a noob out please :(

[ゆのーさん]

Each holding you own has its own army or a "levy". The levy of a holding will be raised to fight the enemy's army. If your levy is damaged or hurt during the war, you will have to disband your levy and wait for the levy to recover to reach its full efficiency. The levy of a holding can be increased by constructing buildings that add to the levy size or by having modifiers applied to the holding. Your vassals will also give a fraction of there levy to you. You can also increase your army by using retinues, which is a standing army that never needs to be disbanded.

[Das Boot]

You can also use gold to hire mercenary companies, which will provide troops to you for so long as you pay the company. They desert or revolt if you run out of money, but you can declare wars with them already raised and can therefore catch an enemy off-guard.

[that guy]

There are generally two approaches for your demesne:

Building tall
This approach involves personally owning as many holdings as possible in your capital county/duchy.

Depending on your rank and whether or not you're an independent ruler, your capital duchy gets a bonus to levy size and your capital province gets an even larger bonus. Your concillors also get missions that you can assign them in order to boost a province's taxes or levy size.

Imagine that you send your steward to boost taxes for 50% and your marshal to boost levy size for 50%. If you only had 1 castle in that province, you might get an extra 10 gold per year and 500 max levy. But if you had 4 castles in that province, you would get an extra 40 gold per year and 2k max levy.

All those troops would also be affected by your capital's tech, which is undoubtedly higher than other provinces in your realm.


Building wide
This approach involves owning as many provinces as possible.

Basically, the more provinces you own, the more barons you have as direct vassals. The way vassalage works is that a vassal supports his/her liege with a portion of his/her taxes and levy. Let's say that everyone gets taxed 20% of their income and troops by their liege.

Imagine that all barons have 10 gold income and 500 troops. So each baron gives their count 2 gold and 100 troops. If you are the owner of the province, you get all of that.

However, if the owner of the province is a count that's your direct vassal, then you get only 20% of what he gets, which would mean you get 0.4 gold and 20 troops from each of those barons. But what if the owner of the province is not your direct vassal?

If that count is under a duke, then that duke gets 0.4 gold and 20 troops from each of those barons. But as for you, as the king you only get 20% of what your duke gets, which means you get 0.08 gold and 4 troops from each of those barons.

And if you're an emperor, a vassal baron under a vassal count under a vassal duke under a king that's your direct vassal only provides you with 0.016 gold and 0.8 troops...

Each level of vassalage means an extreme reduction in the amount of taxes and levies you get. So it's in your best interest to own as many provinces as possible to have as many barons directly answering to you as possible.


Which is better?
I'm not sure, there are pros and cons to each. I personally prefer building tall.

[☭Woodsman☭]

The other answers are correct, but to be clear about the different building upgrades, levy size raises your max by percentage, while other buildings increase specific troop types, like heavy infantry +40 and pikemen +20 or whatever. Reinforcement rate determines how fast you recover troops that die in battle. Garrison size effects how many non-raisable troops are in each holding to defend against sieges. Hope that helps.

[that guy]

Garrison size is solely affected by the holding's building upgrades. Levy size is affected by the building upgrades, martial stat of the owner, and any levy bonuses that are being applied.

If a building upgrade says that it adds 40 pikemen, then the garrison increases by exactly 40 pikemen. As for the levy size, if the owner has 10 martial and no other bonuses are applied, then exactly 40 pikemen are added to the levy. If the owner has 20 martial, then 60 pikemen are added to the levy. If the owner has 0 martial, then only 20 pikemen are added. Each point in martial is a 5% change.

[oldcracks~-]

thanks to all of you with the awesome tips. All of this is starting to make a lot more sense and more fun since im beginning to understand the game more. One thing i dont get though, what are retinues ? Or to be more clear, how do i use retinues ?

[Jiks]

Retinues are professional armies, as opposed to levies who are basically reservists in modern terms.

As such retinues are always on the map, which costs maintenance. Recruiting them also costs gold & takes some time. To start with (assumming you start small, very sensible while learning the game IMO) you can't use them or at least not get a reasonable number of them. The number you can raise depends on number of holdings, tech, various buildings, etc but basically early game ignore them, late game they will be a major part of your army or even most of it.

There's a whole bunch of advice on which retinues to recruit and how to use them but if you are not at that point yet I wouldn't worry about it for now. ^^

[Das Boot]

Originally posted by that guy:

There are generally two approaches for your demesne:

Building tall

and

Building wide


Each level of vassalage means an extreme reduction in the amount of taxes and levies you get. So it's in your best interest to own as many provinces as possible to have as many barons directly answering to you as possible.


Which is better?
I'm not sure, there are pros and cons to each. I personally prefer building tall.

You can do both; directly owning a few heavily upgraded counties (TALL) at the heart of a massave Empire (WIDE). Additionally if you upgrade the buildings in your vassal's counties, or build new settlements in said counties, then you can increase the amount of troops and wealth those produce (as well as the amount you recieve).

[oldcracks~-]

Originally posted by Jiks:

Retinues are professional armies, as opposed to levies who are basically reservists in modern terms.

As such retinues are always on the map, which costs maintenance. Recruiting them also costs gold & takes some time. To start with (assumming you start small, very sensible while learning the game IMO) you can't use them or at least not get a reasonable number of them. The number you can raise depends on number of holdings, tech, various buildings, etc but basically early game ignore them, late game they will be a major part of your army or even most of it.

There's a whole bunch of advice on which retinues to recruit and how to use them but if you are not at that point yet I wouldn't worry about it for now. ^^

Awesome, makes sense
thanks guys

[Ametrin]

Also, high martial attribute = larger army. Hunting and war focus can help.

[al_x_ator2411]

Retinues are available only if you own the "Legacy of Rome" DLC.
At the start you should mostly focus on numbers (light infantry is best for that) to deter factions and speed up sieges. Later in the game when your retinue cap gets bigger and bigger you can have 10K+ heavy troops and so they become very useful.

[ZombieHunter]

Mercenaries are extremely useful. Since they cost so much you want to send them to their deaths as soon as possible. They are great to end wars with as they can assault holdings and take heavy losses but still win and the losses don't affect your armies so you don't have to recoup those losses later. I use mercs as throw away troops b/c they are cheap if you don't use them for very long. As they die off your monthly fee continues to go down so utlizing them quickly and efficiently is best.

I usually don't have them join my armies b/c then losses are spread across the entire group and I would rather the losses be concentrated on the mercs since I'm paying the most for them.

[greatorder]

Originally posted by Das Boot:

Originally posted by that guy:

There are generally two approaches for your demesne:

Building tall

and

Building wide


Each level of vassalage means an extreme reduction in the amount of taxes and levies you get. So it's in your best interest to own as many provinces as possible to have as many barons directly answering to you as possible.


Which is better?
I'm not sure, there are pros and cons to each. I personally prefer building tall.

You can do both; directly owning a few heavily upgraded counties (TALL) at the heart of a massave Empire (WIDE). Additionally if you upgrade the buildings in your vassal's counties, or build new settlements in said counties, then you can increase the amount of troops and wealth those produce (as well as the amount you recieve).

It's actually advisable to do both. The larger your direct levy, the more members need to join a faction to be able to overpower you.

If you have 5000 in levies, the AI needs 5000+ before they feel willing to enforce their faction demands, and often you can easily pick them off because the faction members are usually spread across the country, rather than just being a single blob. As a result, you can just bonk their armies on the head one-by-one rather than facing a large mass of foes.

[Liberty Prime]

I don't think anybody has really talked about vassal levys so I will. At first most of your levies will be your personal levies but when you get to maybe about emperor size you will notice that vassal levies start to be more numerous. To increase your vassal levies even more you need to make sure your vassals like you and increase the obligation laws. Those laws make a massive difference and can increase your levy size by the tens of thousands when you get to a pretty large size. Also, use your vassal levies much more often than your personal levies since you don't have to pay for them, they reinforce faster, and it will weaken your vassals, not yourself when you take casualties. Just beware the opinion penalties from using them too long. If you raid with them vassals don't mind btw so they're great for that.

[Liberty Prime]

Also if you play as a tribal you're army size is misleading since it doesn't take into account that all your vassals are also your allies and thus a tribal realm can get massive armies by calling their vassals in as well as using "raise tribal army" and if you're a defensive pagan you troops for piety in a defensive war vs an infidel.