Why are my garrisons disappearing from my own fiefs?

[SoMeOnE_the_oDD]

So for almost my entire game, I've been stockpiling the best troops possible to defend my castles and cities. I assumed this was working as the personally controlled garrisons increased forever. Now, however, either I've poked some hidden game mechanic or something has changed to give other armies access to MY garrisons.

I went from hundreds of carefully preserved top-level troops, hordes of war horse riding bowmen... to a dozen or so troops.

Where did my troops go? What's the point of player controlled garrisons if the AI steals them?

[BLAME! 40K]

Starved to death

[Clovis Sangrail]

Yep. Starved or deserted because you just slammed a bunch of soldiers into your garrison without regard for whether your town or castle could support them.

Not the game's fault. It's yours.

[DabaDOO]

Two options,

1 - the"parties" you created by Companions can take troops from garrisons. They took it.

2 - You took them and forget.

first option seems more reasonable but hey, how would i know.

[Teralitha]

Originally posted by DabaDOO:

Two options,

1 - the"parties" you created by Companions can take troops from garrisons. They took it.

2 - You took them and forget.

first option seems more reasonable but hey, how would i know.

Ive never had a companion take troop garrisons.

[DabaDOO]

Originally posted by Teralitha:

Ive never had a companion take troop garrisons.

If you have any parties in your clan they will, regardless you command it or not.

If you don't have any parties, then your settlement must be sieged and battered but somehow survived. If your villages are under constant raid, then soldiers can starve too. You can raid a settlements villages continously (for a looong time) and that will cause that settlements soldier capacity to drop to none in time.

One easy way to re-garrison is to create new parties and then disband them when they are full. but it would be mostly tier 1 troops.

[✪︎DΞ︎AD_iwnw]

They starved, castles can't support hundreds of troops

[Theo Hardmeier]

Originally posted by ✪︎DΞ︎AD_iwnw:

They starved, castles can't support hundreds of troops

Castles are less impacted by starving then cities.

Cities are where the hunger games are at.

[Blood Flowers]

Originally posted by Theo Hardmeier:

Originally posted by ✪︎DΞ︎AD_iwnw:

They starved, castles can't support hundreds of troops

Castles are less impacted by starving then cities.

Cities are where the hunger games are at.

Either type of settlement will see rapid starvation of the garrison once prosperity hits a certain point. Increasing the number of hearths in surrounding villages helps, but the effect is fairly minimal since the villager population (the dudes who are bringing food to your city/castle) will increase significantly as well... which slows their move speed to an utter crawl. For instance, I own Vostrum on 1.4.0 that has ~13000 prosperity and all three villages have over 8000 hearths but I cannot put a garrison in the city because the city cycles through several days of having food and several days of starving. The move speed penalty to the villagers is pretty huge since despite carrying way more (~loads of 500+ grain each time) the travel time is much longer and more caravans stop by to buy the grain since the price is so low.

The same thing applies to most castles above 2000 prosperity.

[Teralitha]

Originally posted by DabaDOO:

Originally posted by Teralitha:

Ive never had a companion take troop garrisons.

If you have any parties in your clan they will, regardless you command it or not.

If you don't have any parties, then your settlement must be sieged and battered but somehow survived. If your villages are under constant raid, then soldiers can starve too. You can raid a settlements villages continously (for a looong time) and that will cause that settlements soldier capacity to drop to none in time.

One easy way to re-garrison is to create new parties and then disband them when they are full. but it would be mostly tier 1 troops.

Ive never had a companion take troop garrisons.

[SoMeOnE_the_oDD]

Almost certainly starvation then, since this specifically happened in a settlement (also Vostrum). I get constant raiding of its towns and, because my allied kingdom is full of incompetents, I've had to recapture the neighboring castle probably a dozen times by now. The only control I have over food is to set the town to irrigation, which it's been on for a long time, and to defeat every single raiding army.

I hadn't had this issue with my other castles and settlements, largely because the game balances itself in those matters (right up until it doesn't). It's hard to micro-manage some of those elements because the game doesn't make clear what is actually impacted by, well, almost anything. Not having played Warband very much, I don't automatically know which elements are tied together. If the game were logical, I'd have better dungeons by now and my allies wouldn't waste their time capturing isolated castles half the map away. 10 looters couldn't take out legionaries and cataphracts when facing an army of 150. Archers could hit things in a siege and infantry wouldn't fall off walls.

For reference how critically under explained features are to a new player, I made it some 150 days into my first character before I learned where companions even were. It took me another play through to realize that, if I tracked down a faction leader, I could become a mercenary. Another eternity to realize that mercenaries can't own fiefs (that one was a hard dead end to find). Another eternity to realize that you can form caravans with your companions. I'm nearly 1,000 days in and I JUST discovered that you can buy workshops. I finally realized that not all nobles are attached to armies, and that I need to find them in order to get married. I didn't know that assigning other clan members to roles prevents mine from gaining levels, which is particularly important for stewardship which sat at 14 while my riding had made it to 140. My kid keeps auto-assigning to Surgeon, and I have no idea if that's affecting my troops.

As fun as it can be discovering gameplay organically, it can also be a huge disappointment to find you've been blindly grinding away in the wrong direction for tens of hours.

[BLAME! 40K]

@ someoneodd , given the fact that the older games are the same , i assume thats by design choice

[SoMeOnE_the_oDD]

After painfully gathering my 6 fiefs all right next to each other, the game stopped offering me the fiefs I was capturing. Dozens of sieges with no reward meant my only way forward was to become my own kingdom.

Unfortunately the quest for that timed out and, despite breaking off and appearing to have my own "faction" color, I can't access the faction panel to so much as see who's at war with me. I can't form armies, attract lords, issue policies, or use influence. 1,000 days into the game and I'm blindsided by an arbitrary mechanic that makes the whole campaign pointless.

I think I need to play something else.

[Inforiel]

Originally posted by SoMeOnE_the_oDD:

After painfully gathering my 6 fiefs all right next to each other, the game stopped offering me the fiefs I was capturing. Dozens of sieges with no reward meant my only way forward was to become my own kingdom.

Unfortunately the quest for that timed out and, despite breaking off and appearing to have my own "faction" color, I can't access the faction panel to so much as see who's at war with me. I can't form armies, attract lords, issue policies, or use influence. 1,000 days into the game and I'm blindsided by an arbitrary mechanic that makes the whole campaign pointless.

I think I need to play something else.

Give it a while before touching it again - My current save got stuck with a crash to desktop bug a few seconds after the save is made so going to abandon it. Hopefully things get more stable soon. Was more disappointed to find out how many of the perks you can choose in skill tree actually does nothing at all.

But yeah, game mechanics are made based of someone who really investigates a whole lot... I have played the earlier game M&B and still several things that took a long time to figure out.

Especially since some parts are locked to roaming about in cities while others are a quick click away from world map.

[Vuud]

Check the size of your militias too. I think when you have more militia garrisoned at a location, that will take away from the max number of troops you can garrison there and then cause your men to start deserting.

[Panzerechse]

In the end it sums up to "It is hard to get good troops, but it is easy to lose them completly in your own towns/castle"....."We will also kill them no matter what rank, because clan armies are communist armies, everyone gets the same provisions."

Which is just bad game design.

In a feudal setting I expect my player character to be so feudal, that he will rather keep the dumb peasantry on cabbage mousse all their life then let one of his elite troopers starve to death.

The definitely need to put some kind of ration system into the game. With less loyality and happines of the population as penalty.