Clan Parties?

[kharille]

Only discovering this in recent months. I worry what they get up to if I don't manage them directly via an army. Seems I must've missed out on caravans early in the game.

Do you maintain a lot of parties? Any idea what the normal/defensive roles do? Seems the best thing for me to do is to load them up with tier 6 cavalry and get them to form an army with me.

Seems to take forever to disband.

[Azunai]

I usually run the full allowed number (4 or 5 i think?) In the mid to late game when i'm fighting constant wars of conquest. I don't bother manually assigning troops to them. I treat them like any other NPC party in the realm - draft a few parties of 100+ soldiers, fire them from the army as they get depleted and draft new parties ad replacements while the depleted ones roam the hinterland and refill their ranks.

They have the same silly behavior like all NPC parties of always donating troops to garrisons of newly conquered fiefs, so it's a waste of time trying to set them up manually - your elite knights will sit around in some backwater castles for the rest of the run or the NPC owner will pull them out of the garrison and waste them. Or they delete them.

You can manually correct that behavior if you're the King (you can pull out the garrison and manually assign the troops to the parties), but it's too much work for little gain imo.

[kharille]

Yeah, I noticed they don't seem to have wounded. I give them 110 elite cataphracts and it keeps dropping to about 90. I ought to give them my tier 3 troops and not tier 6....

[PotatoScav]

Originally posted by kharille:

Only discovering this in recent months. I worry what they get up to if I don't manage them directly via an army. Seems I must've missed out on caravans early in the game.

Do you maintain a lot of parties? Any idea what the normal/defensive roles do? Seems the best thing for me to do is to load them up with tier 6 cavalry and get them to form an army with me.

Seems to take forever to disband.

Caravan is garbage, everytime you on war your caravan get instant destroyed.

Once you join a faction, caravan can be ignored.,

[TruXurT]

Originally posted by kharille:

Only discovering this in recent months. I worry what they get up to if I don't manage them directly via an army. Seems I must've missed out on caravans early in the game.

Do you maintain a lot of parties? Any idea what the normal/defensive roles do? Seems the best thing for me to do is to load them up with tier 6 cavalry and get them to form an army with me.

Seems to take forever to disband.

At some point once you are a king and your kingdom is in a conquest mode, clan parties are great force multipliers. Utilizing them allows your clan to field an army of over 1000 troops and you have certain control of its composition.

I like running clan parties as a core of my army because:

I can offload extra prisoners to those parties. Many late game battles end up with hundreds of prisoners and I don't like them going to waste.

Same about freed prisoners, I don't like to just let them go (although those can be given to non clan parties too).

Clan parties do not cost any influence to rise and maintain, so that is a bonus too.

Leading those parties helps level up your family members/companions, that is an additional bonus.

You can freely exchange troops with those parties, I typically pick my favorite troops from them and give them the troops I am not too crazy about (or have too many of them). In the late game I will have my personal party of approx 500 elite troops, with my other clan parties of approx 200 good/average troops each to supplement.

They will auto garrison conquered cities and castles (As a king I get them automatically for a short periods so I pull back more valuable troops and re-distribute them to clan parties) or other parties in the army.

One advice I would have is to be careful in the early game, not to rise too many parties too early, especially if you struggle with finances, but once you are in the cruise mode, clan parties are very nice to have.

[kharille]

Yeah, I'm just anxious I'll give them my Elite Cataphracts and somehow they'll get themselves killed. Seems great for taking castles and towns but not sure I want to let them wander around. My Sturgian faction is at war with 3 nations right now....

I was at -8000 dinars a day and now its balanced out. Guess they dumped my tier 6 cavalry....

[Ruffio]

Originally posted by kharille:

Yeah, I'm just anxious I'll give them my Elite Cataphracts and somehow they'll get themselves killed. Seems great for taking castles and towns but not sure I want to let them wander around. My Sturgian faction is at war with 3 nations right now....

I was at -8000 dinars a day and now its balanced out. Guess they dumped my tier 6 cavalry....

tbh, I never found a big value in pump clan parties with high tier units etc. I just let them do their own thing. If a clan party did get defeated, It wouldn't bother me much either. Once the party leader escaped captivity I just tell them to form a new party. Sure you can form a own army with your clan parties when you get the ability to, but that doesn't really help train the party leader of those clan parties much.

[EfBee]

There are parties in this game? Where's the dj? LoL

[kristianjakob]

Originally posted by kharille:

Yeah, I'm just anxious I'll give them my Elite Cataphracts and somehow they'll get themselves killed. Seems great for taking castles and towns but not sure I want to let them wander around. My Sturgian faction is at war with 3 nations right now....

I was at -8000 dinars a day and now its balanced out. Guess they dumped my tier 6 cavalry....

If you fight enough (essentially chain-sieges) then they will more or less be able to cover their own expenses from the loot but otherwise they are probably going to be a net drain on your ressources.


The key things are really this.
Additional clan parties are only really going to add something provided you use them in an army under your own control and there is no good reason to field additional clan parties before you are ready to go all in on conquest.

The only real "currency" is power and the alternative to fielding more clan parties is to buy more clans and clans come with an often hefty sign up fee.

Clan parties generate influence whereas your vassals need to be paid influence for their services.


As for what type of troops you should give them the answer is basically just whatever troops you can get your hands on:)

[flyingscot1066]

When I start a clan party, I give them ZERO troops. I slow the car down long enough for them to tuck and roll and tell them to get the F out. They get Leadership exp from recruiting troops, so I drop them off in a place where there's lots of places to pick up fresh recruits. If it's a place with a lot of bandit activity, I'll stay close enough to ride to the rescue in case they get attacked. For some reason they seem to get more Tactics skill increases when I do this, not sure why.

Once they get up to about 50% capacity I'll drag them into my army and they can top off later. They also get Leadership from when I use my Paid in Promise and Giving Hands perks while they are in my army.

[The Mau Corporation]

Its possible to run a slaving type character that can recruit prisoners fast and feed troops to clan parties like a mothership. Preferrably one type; a heavy cav or druz imho. Once they start reaching peak tactics they dont lose much and AI lords will run away more when your parties field high tier troops. Large cav parties are fast and can take on multiple parties.
Having high scouting is obviously important to better avoid gang traps.

Its quite fun and thrilling trusting AI again after holding their hands and building them up. You guys should give it a go. Especially the vets in the forum.

[The Mau Corporation]

Originally posted by kharille:

Yeah, I noticed they don't seem to have wounded. I give them 110 elite cataphracts and it keeps dropping to about 90. I ought to give them my tier 3 troops and not tier 6....

Ideally the player gives them 1-2 tiers below top for half their roster so they earn leadership from lvl ups.

[The Mau Corporation]

Originally posted by kharille:

Only discovering this in recent months. I worry what they get up to if I don't manage them directly via an army. Seems I must've missed out on caravans early in the game.

Do you maintain a lot of parties? Any idea what the normal/defensive roles do? Seems the best thing for me to do is to load them up with tier 6 cavalry and get them to form an army with me.

Seems to take forever to disband.

I found that in defensive mode my parties would generally stick together in a region and trap smaller armies/defend sieges together. They would occasionally get caught out solo but in my case I was close enough to assist.

Once a kingdom has had their main army beaten and disbanded is the time to let them loose and train them up, imho.