Recruiting Prisoners

[Long Dangler]

Seems to me that this is far and away the best way to get a really good army up and running. There's no penalty and you just get tons of free high tier troops. I was in a war with the khuzait and by the end of it my army was completely decked out with darkhans and heavy cav/cav archers.

I think at least you should have to provide a horse for mounted units considering you can get their horse as loot after battle and then recruit them with a new magically appearing horse. On a side not you should probably get the old horse back when you upgrade them to a war horse.

Saying all that though I'm not a massive fan of the current system for recruiting units because it's difficult to get the relations necessary to get higher tier troops when barely anyone is handing out any quests and some of them take ages to complete so maybe they both need a look at.

[PartyMaster]

Yea I'm all on board with getting my old horses back from upgrading the troops with a war horse... As frequent as it might be to find those horses, I don't find them as frequent as I do upgrading troops so i want mah dang horises back! But I'm not on board with there being any penalties or anything to recruiting prisoners because it can be pretty challenging to even get prisoners, let alone ones you want. You HAVE to use blunt weapons to 100% capture them and as of right now, the blunt weapons in the game given to us are poo poo.

I'm definitely on board with the whole relations with towns when trying to get troops because they do hardly give out quests and its almost not worth your time doing them because of how much money and everything you'll just lose over time doing it. It does feel really rough. However, THE BEST strategy is to get disciplinarian literally as fast as possible and turn your bandit captives into soldiers, ESPECIALLY forest bandits because they make battanian fians which is just <333333. even the looters turn into imperial warriors and highway men turn into vlandian knights!!! going the disciplinarian route to get units is pretty insane I.M.O. and a way better alternative than running around everywhere all over the map just to get like 2 recruits per town.

[Greldinart]

what the point of the post ?
you think its better to recruit prisonner and normal recruitement sux?
i disagree,
1/ prisonenr recruitement is limited at 1 by tier by day and to tier4 maximum.
2/ village/city recruitement is limited only per relation.
3/ farm relation is easy with hideout, when you spot one, the village nearby will have the quest, and that boost all relation in region...

with a 100+ army i can fill my army with a dozen of city/village in less than a week..i cannot with prisonner
, and i can be picky on 50-100-200denar troop if i want less recruit.
prisonenr are mainly there for be given, but you can only have a few of them (4each day) and not the tier5.....so prisonner are complementary.
i would say take the mercenary tier 3-4, and sell the other, that make 2 elite recruit per day.

[MinenSpecht]

Originally posted by Partymaster:

Yea I'm all on board with getting my old horses back from upgrading the troops with a war horse... As frequent as it might be to find those horses, I don't find them as frequent as I do upgrading troops so i want mah dang horises back! But I'm not on board with there being any penalties or anything to recruiting prisoners because it can be pretty challenging to even get prisoners, let alone ones you want. You HAVE to use blunt weapons to 100% capture them and as of right now, the blunt weapons in the game given to us are poo poo.

I'm definitely on board with the whole relations with towns when trying to get troops because they do hardly give out quests and its almost not worth your time doing them because of how much money and everything you'll just lose over time doing it. It does feel really rough. However, THE BEST strategy is to get disciplinarian literally as fast as possible and turn your bandit captives into soldiers, ESPECIALLY forest bandits because they make battanian fians which is just <333333. even the looters turn into imperial warriors and highway men turn into vlandian knights!!! going the disciplinarian route to get units is pretty insane I.M.O. and a way better alternative than running around everywhere all over the map just to get like 2 recruits per town.

You mean like going into hideouts with 6 companions all equipped with bows and tournament arrows?

Doing hideouts like this gives you 100% prisoner rate and you can choose the troops you want afterwards.

[Long Dangler]

Originally posted by Partymaster:

Yea I'm all on board with getting my old horses back from upgrading the troops with a war horse... As frequent as it might be to find those horses, I don't find them as frequent as I do upgrading troops so i want mah dang horises back! But I'm not on board with there being any penalties or anything to recruiting prisoners because it can be pretty challenging to even get prisoners, let alone ones you want. You HAVE to use blunt weapons to 100% capture them and as of right now, the blunt weapons in the game given to us are poo poo.

I'm definitely on board with the whole relations with towns when trying to get troops because they do hardly give out quests and its almost not worth your time doing them because of how much money and everything you'll just lose over time doing it. It does feel really rough. However, THE BEST strategy is to get disciplinarian literally as fast as possible and turn your bandit captives into soldiers, ESPECIALLY forest bandits because they make battanian fians which is just <333333. even the looters turn into imperial warriors and highway men turn into vlandian knights!!! going the disciplinarian route to get units is pretty insane I.M.O. and a way better alternative than running around everywhere all over the map just to get like 2 recruits per town.

It's not like warband where only blunt weapons wound enemy soldiers. Cutting and piercing damage still can wound the enemy. I don't know if blunt guarantees it though, not sure. Consequently you end up swimming in enemy prisoners if you fight large battles.
Do agree with disciplinarian though, it's great. Only problem with it imo is that while leadership is pretty easy to level up, you have to be quite far into the game to be able to call an army and it's hard to keep really high morale without being at war with a faction; it's almost impossible to maintain morale only against bandits.

[MinenSpecht]

Originally posted by Long Dangler:

Originally posted by Partymaster:

Yea I'm all on board with getting my old horses back from upgrading the troops with a war horse... As frequent as it might be to find those horses, I don't find them as frequent as I do upgrading troops so i want mah dang horises back! But I'm not on board with there being any penalties or anything to recruiting prisoners because it can be pretty challenging to even get prisoners, let alone ones you want. You HAVE to use blunt weapons to 100% capture them and as of right now, the blunt weapons in the game given to us are poo poo.

I'm definitely on board with the whole relations with towns when trying to get troops because they do hardly give out quests and its almost not worth your time doing them because of how much money and everything you'll just lose over time doing it. It does feel really rough. However, THE BEST strategy is to get disciplinarian literally as fast as possible and turn your bandit captives into soldiers, ESPECIALLY forest bandits because they make battanian fians which is just <333333. even the looters turn into imperial warriors and highway men turn into vlandian knights!!! going the disciplinarian route to get units is pretty insane I.M.O. and a way better alternative than running around everywhere all over the map just to get like 2 recruits per town.

It's not like warband where only blunt weapons wound enemy soldiers. Cutting and piercing damage still can wound the enemy. I don't know if blunt guarantees it though, not sure. Consequently you end up swimming in enemy prisoners if you fight large battles.
Do agree with disciplinarian though, it's great. Only problem with it imo is that while leadership is pretty easy to level up, you have to be quite far into the game to be able to call an army and it's hard to keep really high morale without being at war with a faction; it's almost impossible to maintain morale only against bandits.

It does. Try going at bandits with some vlandian sergeants. Many of them have maces and your prisoner rate will rise dramatically.

My usual approach: Train some sergeants -> Fight brotherhood of the woods -> gain masses of the 3rd best archers in the game from prisoners.

[Long Dangler]

Originally posted by MinenSpecht:

Originally posted by Long Dangler:

It's not like warband where only blunt weapons wound enemy soldiers. Cutting and piercing damage still can wound the enemy. I don't know if blunt guarantees it though, not sure. Consequently you end up swimming in enemy prisoners if you fight large battles.
Do agree with disciplinarian though, it's great. Only problem with it imo is that while leadership is pretty easy to level up, you have to be quite far into the game to be able to call an army and it's hard to keep really high morale without being at war with a faction; it's almost impossible to maintain morale only against bandits.

It does. Try going at bandits with some vlandian sergeants. Many of them have maces and your prisoner rate will rise dramatically.

My usual approach: Train some sergeants -> Fight brotherhood of the woods -> gain masses of the 3rd best archers in the game from prisoners.

My early game strat has been to fight mountain bandits for highwaymen or steppe bandits and role with all cav so you move quick for easy trading. Didn't realise blunt was guaranteed wound though. I did use a mace for a while but I thought I was still killing some of them, must have not been paying attention.

[Ri0Rdian]

Problem with prisoners is that:

1. You are not guaranteed to get them or even get those you want in number you want (recruits are much more predictable)
2. They slow down your army MASSIVELY
3. The current recruitment mechanic means you need a lot of different recruits and only get a chance to get one per day so it is quite slow.
4. You are true that the downside atm is tolerable, Warband had chance for them to escape after recruiting and they often did, I wonder whether we might see it back.

But I somehow agree, because I always carry prisoners around and recruit whenever available. If nothing else I donate them to garrison (even mine) or to my clans armies.

[Long Dangler]

Originally posted by Ri0Rdian:

Problem with prisoners is that:

1. You are not guaranteed to get them or even get those you want in number you want (recruits are much more predictable)
2. They slow down your army MASSIVELY
3. The current recruitment mechanic means you need a lot of different recruits and only get a chance to get one per day so it is quite slow.
4. You are true that the downside atm is tolerable, Warband had chance for them to escape after recruiting and they often did, I wonder whether we might see it back.

But I somehow agree, because I always carry prisoners around and recruit whenever available. If nothing else I donate them to garrison (even mine) or to my clans armies.

Yeah at least early game it feels a lot easier to just recruit high level bandits than to fight like 20 looter parties to level units up. The recruitment chance is per stack so if you fight each type of bandit party it's fairly likely you'll have more troops to recruit every day. I'm not sure if there's a skill that increases the chance but I have like 5 or so prisoners wanting to join every day.

Funny story as well. With the beta patch my companions have been glitching out and getting over 1000 in certain skills. It seems like surgery affects the enemy as well because with 288 tactics I can easily win with 80 decent troops against hundreds of enemies in auto calc and with 1000 surgery I then have like 200 prisoners I can take while 90% of my troops are only wounded. I'm at 230-ish troops now and they're almost all former prisoners.

edit: actually I think they're all former prisoners if I remember right because initially I just recruited highwaymen

[.]

The horses that you looted are their backups . You must noticed that you can loot horses from footman sometimes. This means some enemies have extra horses.

You have a chance to recruit 1 prisoner each day. It is random, Its nothing about relations ( at least for now )

[Karandras]

best way to get heavy cav for free, Its broken feature in mid/early game

[Battleseed]

Turning Forrest Bandits in to Battainan Fians using the garrison without ranking up to Disciplinarian perk has been profit~

Early game, most of my troops were former prisoners. Sear Raider Chiefs on the front line with Forrest Bandits backing them up.

[Gibbonici]

Originally posted by Karandras:

best way to get heavy cav for free, Its broken feature in mid/early game

I don't think it's broken. You've always been able to recruit from your prisoners, it's just another way of getting troops. The downside is that you're not guaranteed to get the best troops willing to join you, and carting prisoners round all the time slows you down.

One of the things that sets M&B apart from most other games is that it doesn't limit you to a static progression on your army. You can shortcut it several different ways.

And really, a few higher tier troops in your army isn't going to give you a massive advantage anyway, even if you do always have them in. The AI can also recruit from prisoners for one thing, and for another, all it takes is one messy battle to lose them anyway.

[Gibbonici]

Originally posted by Battleseed:

Turning Forrest Bandits in to Battainan Fians using the garrison without ranking up to Disciplinarian perk has been profit~

Early game, most of my troops were former prisoners. Sear Raider Chiefs on the front line with Forrest Bandits backing them up.

And it's pretty cool you can do that, right?

[Battleseed]

Originally posted by Gibbonici:

Originally posted by Battleseed:

Turning Forrest Bandits in to Battainan Fians using the garrison without ranking up to Disciplinarian perk has been profit~

Early game, most of my troops were former prisoners. Sear Raider Chiefs on the front line with Forrest Bandits backing them up.

And it's pretty cool you can do that, right?

Yup. Options are good.