Tips for building well trained army

[bit.BREW]

Trying to build up a better army but struggling to fill it with well trained men. Every time I have an army with decent troops they soon get killed and I have to rebuild it. Even with 60+ men using auto resolve against 8 bandits gets some of my best men killed.

Currently have a party capped at 71 men but its very recruit heavy as they're the only soldiers I'm finding. However recruit take an age to level up. Any tips on building, maintaining and replenishing a well trained army would be great.

[Blood Flowers]

Do not use auto resolve if you're trying to get a better army. It's basically RNG on which units you'll lose.

It's better to just find large parties of looters/bandits or enemy lords with a ton of recruits and fight them when you can.

[gobeers]

Get a mod?

[Trip]

You can't really use auto resolve in that way. In order to get a high level army you need to do manual battles.

In manual battles your dudes need to actually get the kill to get the xp to level. A recruit needs I think 2 kills to be ready to level. However, the kills a recruit makes all go to the recruit "unit", meaning the game does not know specifically which recruit needs a promotion just that 4 of your 8 recruits need a promotion.

To this end, try and get all your recruits ready to promote and promote them in bulk at the same time. Seperate out your recruits from others units by putting them in the 8 group that way you can send them to kill looters by themselves.

You can do this with every type of solider, seperate them out to their own group and have everyone in the group be ready for promotion before you level them up.

it takes while, good luck.

[katzenkrimis]

I've been playing M&B games since WFAS was released and I've never used auto resolve.

Do not use auto resolve. It's more efficient to fight manually.

Nobody dies + less troops wounded = Ready to fight again much sooner.

It only takes an extra 2-3 minutes of your time.

As far as building a strong army, be smart and be patient when picking your battles. You don't want them dying often. They need to survive to the maximum level.

Also, check villages/towns frequently for the rare troops. They are important.

[Scorpixel]

First of all: Never auto-resolve, not even against looters, the 1.4 patch does not fix it enough either.

Then: Be Vlandian.

Soldiers are made of paper, archers are OP and will kill multiple times their numbers (even highly armoured troops) before contact, so you just need a small shield infantry and core cavalry. Battles will be boring but you'll never lose them.

You can also steal the rare high tier units from your allies and give them a ton of recruits (they lose their good units in simulations against looters and bandits, it's a favour you're doing to them).

If you're willing to mod, there are some that greatly increase the survivability of units.
"Armor Does Something" on Nexusmod is very nice, there's also "Health rebalance" increasing everyone's health from 25% to 100% depending on how you set it.

The result is that you won't lose elite cataphracts to looters with heat-seeking rocks, railgun-wielding forest-bandits, or pillar-launcher raiders/mountaineers.
Battles also last more than ten second, the enemy can actually make contact and best of all, good units are far less likely to die to commoners they outnumber ten to one.

[Clovis Sangrail]

And don't forget captured bandits. Forest bandits, sea raiders, steppe bandits, mountain bandits, and the like. Most, if not all, of them will level up to T5 and T6 troops in one of the nobility troop trees. You'll need the Leadership perk Disciplinarian, but it's worth it. I just leveled almost 30 T4 Sea Bandit Chiefs into T5 Sturgian Druzhinniks. And they are easier to find than the Sturgian Warrior's Son.

** For those keeping score -- Yes, the Disciplinarian perk works.

And one more thing -- There are a lot of people in this discussion telling you not to auto-resolve. LISTEN TO THEM!!! (And don't come whining here if you auto-resolved and lost your carefully cultivated T6 Banner Knights because some Looters RNG'd a rock up side their heads.)

[Supply Side Jesus]

Grind looters repeatedly, bigger groups are better. Set your lower tier troops in a separate group (say 6) and then send only them into battle.

[Swirler]

So there's a few things you can do to recover/maintain your numbers.

When recruiting men try looking for areas not near the main fighting regions, those odd villages out to the side tend to have higher quality troops. Kingdoms that haven't been at war for a while also have better recruits available. Villages near the main fights are often looted as well, and lords will tend to scour them of men anyways.

Prisoners are a great source of new recruits. Simply pick and choose the prisoners to sell off and keep the better ones. Although early on you can't really have that many on you at once it's still worth it to hang on to a small group of them.

You can go into taverns to recruit guys. They're slightly more expensive than troops of a similar tier most of the time but they're better than recruits.
You can also occasionally find mercenaries in the dungeon and in the city if you wander about. But I mention the Tavern first because it's much quicker to find them there.

Don't auto-resolve fights. Ever. They will kill your best troops as much as your worst. The XP you gain from them is minimal. The calculation for auto-resolve is laughably simplistic. It's about as reliable as a blind man throwing darts.

Manually fighting the fights you can pick and choose which units go in to charge and you can manually level up your recruits this way. Simply set the elite infantry to the heavy infantry formation, tell your army to "hold fire" and charge your recruits in first.
Otherwise your cavalry and high tier units/archers will gobble up the xp and you'll be dragging them around for longer than necessary.
Also avoid killing enemies until the last moment if you can. You're levelling up your army not you.

Reduce the game damage to your men, this will reduce the game difficulty but honestly constantly replenishing your armies gets old.

Pick and choose your fights more carefully, if you only have about 71 men that says to me you're still in the early stages of the game.
Avoid sieges if you can, go for field battles. While sieges are more exciting they will grind up your army like it's nothing.
There's no penalty for leaving the army before a siege.
Field battles against enemy lords with prisoners ideally, if you beat them you can recruit those men they've imprisoned.

Pick off some lone lords and do your best to keep your company alive. You're not a big fry yet, don't bother dying the ground red with your soldiers blood. This isn't your land it's not your fight and you won't be rewarded more for dying faster. Bide your time.

Another thing, get a companion to create an army and throw some troops at them. If you lose your army in future there's a reasonable chance you can just find their army and pick up some troops they've scoured along the way. They will automatically fill their party to capacity.

Long as you have the money to afford the extra men to pay this is usually worth doing.
If you want to you can even just follow them around a bit and help them out here and there. Their location will be revealed in the encyclopedia "N" or the clan tab.
They will sometimes lose a fight and get captured. Not a big deal really. They still level up their skills and there's no cost to you for it except being denied a party member for a while.

Once you join a faction as a vassal you can call up your own army, the earliest kind will probably be made up of your own companions parties anyways. From there it's much easier to replenish your forces.

But even then I must add recovering your forces after a big battle can still be a long affair. Just going around hoovering up recruits and training them up can take a while.
And eventually even the AI will be crawling around with armies of more and more raw recruits. Especially if they have a lot of lords captured too much, likely if they're in too many wars at once.

[Rigsie]

Has anyone mentioned not using auto-resolve? lol

Someone above kind of touched on it, but separate your low tier troops and assign them to a troop type you do not use. 7 or 8 maybe. Whatever you do not use. You can micromanage who you send into battle to get xp that way, and do not waste xp on troops that are already maxed out.