Hi, first of all thanks for fixing the garrison bug that fast!
One suggestion for balance:
Maybe you can add an MCT Option for garrison upkeep cost percentage?
Currently playing on hard/hard and I notice that default generated garrisons (means not the most impressive ones) are eating up my income in early game while AI is using quite insane garrisons (lots of tier 2 units) from start.
I understand that its intended to make the game harder, but in my opinion that slows down the early game quite a lot.
An upkeep option is maybe the easiest way to let players adjust it themselves.

Thanks anyway for this great mod!

Good Evening,

TLDR in case the wall of text is to much
garrison upkeep is currently 1 / 5 of base unit upkeep, please give suggestion for new number.

thanks for giving feedback! and no problem, fixing the bug was just a single line, I missed cause I was tired, so not much of a problem.
That said I agree balance sucks atm with the imbalance between early game and later on.
One problem is that the entire game is mostly balanced on the singe factor of how much money you have, once you have enough of it the game becomes trivial basically immediately.
I do want this mod to be a part of the solution by having the garrisons be a money sink that is both player adjustable and grows with the size of the players empire / quality of the garrison.
atm I cant seem to find a sweet spot where its not debilitating early game but also not trivial towards the mid / endgame.
It is probably futile until I have more of my puzzle pieces in place and I guess the best solution momentarily is to reduce the upkeep costs.
Currently they are at 1 / 5 the base unit upkeep without modifiers.
After having played with the mod do you have a suggestion what to set them at?
Changing the upkeep cost via an mct option would need an effect and I am not sure if I can limit that to just my buildings, or if that would effect all foreign slot buildings that use upkeep.

You probably already know these but you can:
1 get rid of garrison units by just demolishing their buildings
2 mess with mct options as to what / how many units are generated in the player garrison
3 soonish the additional garrison buildings will give an upkeep modifier as well to reduce cost and give them something useful to do as well

I actually never intended to have the mod just give units to the player and mostly planned with the idea that a garrison starts empty and the player fills it up, tho that does not work well with the way recruitment currently is...

Honestly I know why they balance the modern games the way they do, but im not really happy with it, there was a lot of really clever game design back in something like medieval 2...

Hm hard to tell a number... 1/5 of normal is already quite low and you are totally right, later on this is no problem any longer or even too easy.
Thats why I suggested a setting, but if that's hard to do...

Upkeep decrease on garrison buildings can be a good way, but needs to be playtested.
I see two difficulties with that:
1. it doesn't help really early on because they are level 2 buildings and mostly built very late anyway because groth and money are more important
2. it undermines your idea of garrisons to be moneysinks in late game, if you make them cheaper with a building you will most likely build very often because you no longer need growth

-> maybe a stat buff for the garrison would be the right thing to do?

Back to the initial problem "balancing early game":
You could fix that on the other end: make AI garrisons weaker, ideally by restricting the random generation by settlement level and let them "reroll" on settlement upgrade. I don't know if thats possible, sounds hard to implement...
I know you added MCT options to restrict specific unit types for AI, but connecting this to an ingame mechanic would feel better :-)

Just some thoughts...

I think I will look into adding an mct settings, cant think of a better solution

Yea adding another bonus on a building that scales with its level / later availability just makes the imbalance worse, tho it would be pretty useful to have as an option for extra strong / expensive garrisons
As far as general bonuses for garrisons go, there are a bunch of mods out there that give them and I dont want to just double up what they add.
That would also be a problem for compatibility

Sadly I have very little direct control over the ai garrisons, foreign slots ignore settlement level restrictions and I cant interact with the ai garrison buildings at all (no building or demolishing them)
I considered adding a new resource and making the ai buildings cost that resource, that would give me at least a little control over the quantity and quality that they can build.

I find your suggestion connecting garrison unit availability to an ingame mechanic interesting, any further ides in that direction?

As far as garrison units go, maybe you can figure out a way to tie them to what the faction can recruit? If a faction neither has a garrison building to add those units, nor the ability to recruit them, it would make sense they shouldn't be able to have them in garrisons, right?

I feel like that would make for very boring garrisons, I hope that the mct options provide enough room for balance adjustment to make most people happy

If you really want it I could add it as a toggle

Originally posted by BlackJackGear:

If you really want it I could add it as a toggle

I would quite appreciate that, yes, but don't haste yourself with that. It'll be quite a while before I get to work through my game 3 modlist to get it working anyhow.
It's just that I like things making sense, and having garrisons be made up of the things a faction has access to seems like one such thing.

I added an mct option to allow only recruitable units to be generated.
As I feared it makes garrisons a little bland, but its there if you want to use it.
Factions that don't have traditional recruitment fall back to their full roster.

You're working fast, man.
It's still a step up from base game garissons, no? That's good enough for me. But I'll definitely play around with both settings once I get to it.

Once you have robust systems in place it gets easier to add small stuff like this.
If you want to get a feal for how the options influence garrisons the best way ist to use a no fog mod and start a new game.
Makes it easy to spot what the options change.