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It's a mark decrease of how many of your orcs can be in the feild, but they are there.
I don't mind that it's impossible for them to hide, I just want to see them in the wild like I have an actual army. I have never seen them trying to sneak up on enemy camps, and since I have made this post, I have only seen them in the wild twice, both where I have already captured the fortress, and they weren't sneaking up on camps or anything, just randomly walking around. I have yet to see any at all in regions where I have not taken the fortress, even though I have branded most of the captains and dozens, if not hundreds of grunts.
Yes, I found that. It's a disappointing omission. On one hand, I love the addition of fortresses to infiltrate and conquer, but it seems a backward step in other ways like the OP mentioned, that you don't come across your own captains and their followers.
Perhaps it was just a game balance decision, or programming mistakes with converted Captains kept getting triggered into fights and killed, I don't know. But there should be a feeling of progression as you're fighting an orc civil war against Sauron. It would be nice to see conquered regions 70% blue orcs, instead of just the fortresses. For challenges the player has the option of moving on to the next unconquered region...
With my fortresses taken back without warning, and constant Iron Will / Betraying captains, or those you have to repeatedly kill and de-level, Shadow of War feels like a grind and chore, and lacks the great balance of the first one. (In my humble opinion).
If you had branded orcs in an area and haven't left the area, your branded orcs will of course still be there fighting alongside you.
Granted, a lot of the "all out war" happens during/after end-game. If you need help getting there, here's my guide.
There is progression in the Nemesis missions to disable outposts. Whenever you complete such a mission, the related outpost will never trigger an alarm. Why is that good for the player? Because when an alarm is triggered, enemy orcs keep spawning, so you'll be fighting an endless stream of grunts.
Note that enemy grunts do get depleted if the alarm isn't on. If you keep killing the grunts in an area, you'll see it start to empty (try Shadow Strike's Chain of Shadows). However, don't fully clear an area of grunts, because a 100% empty area will spawn a new GROUP of grunts. Yes, it is a very bad mechanic here to spawn grunts just 10 feet away from you, so Monolith actually does need to fix this distance to spawn bug.
Grunts spawn for game balance. An empty open-world is not very interesting. Also, Intel grunts are more challenging to take down because of spawning grunts; you need to kill off the supporting grunts quickly or Shadow Dominate the Intel grunt right away. Shoulder bashing the Intel grunt can also knock him to the ground and give you time to clear surrounding grunts. Intel grunts will always run away from a fight, so you need to be quick if you want that Intel.
These grunts aren't those you branded. They are spawned. Use these grunts as support for taking down Intel grunts, for killing treasure grunts (mirian or gems), etc. Grunts are hardly effective against captains, but savages can stun-lock captains.
Still, I understand your desire to actually live out a war. In your normal runs through the maps, you are either fighting a guerilla war (stealth-based, hit-and-run) or you are surgical-striking a captain. Good captains should be recruited, and overly high level captains should be shamed/killed to avoid having them kill off good captains.
Now, let's see how we can get real war in this game.
If you're yearning for real war, there's Endless Siege mode (defense) and Online Conquest mode (attack). You can also create a single-player siege attack mode by losing at Endless Siege (which puts a fortress back into enemy hands).
If you're not yet at end-game, you can only do Online Conquest.
Note that siege mode (defense or attack) requires quite an effort to recruit good captains. See my rough guide on how to recruit good captains. Start looking at Immunities first.
It may not be immediately obvious, but the Nemesis system is where you build your army.
The more captains you recruit in the region, the less enemy captains (think bosses) you'll encounter out in the wild. Grunts are easy to deal with, but enemy captains can kill you and level up so high that they kill off other good captains.
You'll also often see missions spawn that involve some power struggle between your captains and an enemy captain. Either assign other captains to reinforce the mission, or go yourself to help out. If you don't do anything for these mission spawns, your captain may die, thereby reducing your army in the region.
We're talking about captains making up armies, not grunts. This is actually a very good game mechanic. The game lets you and your captains feel like legendary and heroic elements. Grunt do next to no damage to captains. Yes, Brutal difficulty means grunts can 3-shot you, but you get a lot more fun out of faster regenerating Might and Wrath, so you actually save time if your combat skills are decent.
Contrary to popular belief, captains don't betray you when you have more than 4-5 captains in a region. You should recruit all captains in a region, then make space by killing off (in Fight Pits) 2-3 captains that are least desirable. Each time your captain loses a fight in the Fight Pit against a random enemy captain (who won't appear in the region's roster), you can go down to the Fight Pit and recruit that new captain (who will take the empty slot your killed captain just vacated).
For all out war, there's the siege defense/attack mode. For dominated grunts roaming about, you'll see that way earlier right after you finished each outpost's mission (to stop alarm from ever triggering). For a clearer map to run around in, recruiting almost all (or all) captains in the region's roster will mean less captains sneaking up on you when you least want the attention.
Actually, as long as you finished Act 2 (captured 1st fortress), you can already do Online Conquest.
Shadow Wars will let you repeat that siege defense/attack mode. In Shadow Wars, you'll just need to finish up to Stage 3 (a stage that involves defending 3 fortresses). And you'll get the game's ending cutscene. (The whole story is actually very good, very cathartic. The individual story elements had to be unfortunately dumbed down to cater for better gameplay.)
Don't rush through Shadow Wars. Just have fun recruiting good captains. It can be quite therapeutic to clear out a region's captain roster (by recruiting them all). Try to improve my guide in this aspect: it would seem that certain Hates traits effective gives your captain certain immunities. You might hit level 70 by the time you're done with Shadow Wars.
I haven't experienced this in SoM. But then again, I rushed through the 2nd map, so I probably didn't notice.
In SoW, all blue grunts (your grunts) are spawned. There are 3 outposts (distinct areas) in each map, which altogether make up maybe 80% of each map. If you win the outpost mission (Nemesis mission), that outpost will never have its alarm triggered. This is when you begin to see blue grunts spawn in that outpost (and probably nearby areas too).
This is true because blue grunts are spawned. It's not an army you can build.
You will sometimes see your own captain out in the wild, but very seldom. I can't yet pinpoint exactly what kind of situations will prompt them to appear. It could be that they're on some kind of Nemesis mission themselves.
As per my latest comment on another discussion, I kinda regret a lot of my answers in this discussion. Maybe the only game that would give you (and me) what you want is Mount and Blade: Warband.
Having said that, the combat style is vastly different. SoW (arkham style) is cinematic with a lot of lock-on; Mount and Blade is very manual.
To be really fair to SoW, the all-out war and infiltration part is very streamlined, at the cost of being NOT open-world persistent (well, even Terraria is better in this regard). You can, for eg, dominate existing bodyguards of warchiefs, and those same bodyguards will betray the warchief when u next attack that warchief. You can, of course, also send any arbitrary captain to infiltrate a warchief's bodyguard party, which will require your captain to win a Fight Pit fight to gain that warchief's trust.
It's all there, the all-out war thing. But it is so abstracted that you don't get a normal feeling of logical progression. The orcs are endlessly spawning for gameplay balance because Talion's combat skills are 1-vs-1000 (Mount and Blade is 1-v-1, no superhumans). Your own grunts are endlessly de-spawning to balance out Talion's superhuman combat skills.
Personally, I would prefer persistent all-out war open-world over polished cinematic abstractions. (Mount and Blade certainly has way lower production values.) I'm currently around 1000 in assault rating in Online Conquest. I don't know if I'll be playing further once I hit 1200.