Thoughts on Levy and MAA

[paulatreides0]

A few things have bugged me a bit about CK3's implementation of "feudal obligations" (putting aside the whole historicity of "feudalism" and its presented quasi-uniformity thing):

1) Pledged vassals only really give you levies, which are basically - near-useless cannon-fodder as soon as anyone can afford anything beyond a modicum of MAA - and themselves as knights.* Historically, a huge part of a lord's subordinates was their ability to bring their retainers alongside them and provide that to bolster a lord's army. It wasn't just that Sir Richard the Ponce would bring himself and 5000 farmers with sharpened pitchforks, it was that he'd also bring his own retinue of professional and semi-professional soldiers and subordinate knights and man at arms in excess of what the lord himself could nominally support, allowing him to mobilize much more force than he could otherwise (due to administrative, socioeconomic, and practical restrictions)

*Honestly, I'm also of the opinion that knights themselves should just be reworked as basically a "super-unit" that punch much harder than other MAA (though not as absurdly as they can do now), but and don't really have an army limit - but are only available in handfuls through vassalage. Basically - axe the knight limit and trim down their bonuses. They will still be really strong force multipliers, but not enough to make up for entire armies as you can achieve in vanilla CK3. Accolades can do the job of representing the small pool of hyper-elite "hero" units that knights do.

2) You either have the "professional" man at arms who are basically a "standing" army ("standing" because they aren't always deployed on-map) or the completely untrained and near-useless rabble. There really isn't much in-between. I guess that the different types of units are meant to somewhat represent the differences between infantry covered in full plate and the farmer wearing just his linens which you wouldn't really see much of in an actual army. Man at arms are somewhat meant to represent this, but I think a middle-ish ground would provide some more room for in-game development and play.

My thoughts:
1) On Feudal Obligations: Generally, I think that the Administrative Government is, ironically, actually better at representing this idea of "feudal obligations" than the actual feudal governments because it allows you to requisition the troops of your themes (for influence). This means that a high influence emperor can potentially have a huge army ready to deploy at any moment (though it's a bit tedious . . . it'd be really nice to have a faster way of requisitioning theme armies, as it gets really tedious if you want to do more than a couple - maybe a EUIV macro-builder-style map interface, that displays the different army compositions and influence cost over each theme, and you can click on it?)

1. Force contributions in Feudal Contracts should by default requisition a share of the Vassal's Man at Arms and sub-knights as part of their contributions. This would also go a bit of a ways in making Feudal kingdoms a bit punchier without them needing to get oodles of gold in a way that feudal countries historically really weren't. This also makes loyal vassals much more valuable for rulers, as now they provide a LOT more military capacity than they would otherwise.
2. In general, I think that Administrative armies are treated a bit weirdly. This comes down to Administrative REALLY needing a treasury system like what China is getting. Byzantium was a fairly centralized empire and the flow of gold to and from the capital was a HUGE part of why it was as rich and powerful as it was - the centralization of the treasury and Constantinople's ability to directly redirect and assign the collected, centralized wealth of the empire was a central pillar of the byzantine state and it's endurance. It might also help to counteract how obscenely, comically [personally] rich administrative rulers can become in relatively short order. I generally think that:
   1. Administrative realms REALLY need a treasury system that drives how they fund their armies and interact with their administrative subdivisions (the themes)
   2. Administrative rulers should be able to influence the MAA in their themes (e.g. tell a theme to produce archers and not yet another unit of spearmen) - rulers/the state should bear a chunk the cost of this, of course
   3. The maintenance of the theme armies should be, in the case of a treasury, directed from the treasury and partially borne by the ruler when they are called up during times of war, and in the case of no treasury, partially borne by the ruler in times of peace and mostly borne by the ruler when they are raised in times of war
   4. Administrative Armies should probably cost more to maintain than other armies, to reflect the more established and formal expectations of pay from a rich, centralized administrative state and also the logistics and infrastructure that swirl around such enterprises
3. The balance between administrative and feudal empires is thus constructed:
   1. Administrative realms can have larger, if more expensive, armies that require influence and consistent and significant gold contributions from the state/ruler to maintain and use - if you can bare the financial strain and influence cost, you can fully utilize the entire military potential of your empire - you can fine tune the military apparatus of your empire, but it will cost you
   2. Feudal realms can by default mobilize more military force passively simply through their contacts and can offload a large share of that cost to their vassals and sub-vassals, allowing a feudal ruler to wield outsized military capacity, especially of relatively expensive, specialized units like knights (the Byzantines wound up reliant on Western cavalry themselves, as it was easier and cheaper in the greater scheme of things to just hire Western knights than to organize their own native cavalry because Western society - due to the structure of their societies and conflicts - were more able to produce/had more excess of these kinds of soldiers) without ever needing to worry about whether they have enough "influence" to support their campaigns or not - all that matters are feudal contracts and vassal loyalty
   3. Feudal empires can now actually somewhat compete with Administrative Empires. Administrative Empires are still stronger in the best case scenario, but the is more room for feudal empires to be situationally stronger (Admin Empire with emperor without much influence) - as it currently stands, a few themes mean you can mobilize substantially more MAA than feudal, which is absolutely balance breaking between feudal and admin and lets you stomp over large and rich feudal empires with even a comparatively small and poor administrative one

2) On Levies and Quality: So, I might be a bit of an odd one out here in that I wasn't a huge fan of CK2's levy building system in and of itself for a variety of reasons - though the retinue system did somewhat fix this, though I had my own issues with it. But I do think it has an interesting idea there. In absence of some greater population/manpower system, I think that:

1. Military buildings should represent the ability to support intermediate level/semi-professional troops - basically occupying a space between man at arms and the standard "rabble" levy. It's a heavy infantry or light cavalry that is almost as good as the MAA heavy infantry or levy, but not as well trained - say like 80% of their capability. It can also be gated by unit type so that, say, you can't just conjure up a bunch of cataphracts from your peasantry. They cost more to maintain than the standard levy but less than the MAA - there is an infrastructure cost as well as an ongoing maintenance cost (when raised)
2. These semi-pro levies would inherit cultural/religious bonuses from whatever province they are raised in, so heavy infantry from a culture that inherently provides better heavy infantry troops would also provide better heavy infantry levies
3. Each level of military building exchanges some portion of levy size for their new semi-pro unit. You are losing the ability to use rabble for better troops. The idea is to gradually transition away from rabble that should only really be using in desperation towards better units.
4. It would also mean more of a sink for the excessive amounts of gold in the later game, as you are trading gold for increased army capacity and NEED to do it to keep up with the other armies.
5. If these are factored into peasant revolts it would also go a decent way towards making them a lot less of a triviality you just swat aside without issue or consideration, as the revolting provinces can influence what gets spawned alongside the rabble - also makes your MAA more PERSONALLY valuable since they will never revolt and are dependable at all times

MAA would still be very valuable elite units punching well above what you mobilize from your territory as "levies", but the balance is not quite as lopsided and you still need the mass of your greater territory. Because these capabilities also scale as the game goes on, levies remain something you need to keep an eye out throughout the course of the game, instead of just something you ditch after the first few decades/century for your entirely MAA army. A sufficiently well developed levy force could through sheer force of mass overwhelm just a small elite, but at outsized cost - retaining the importance of both MAAs and Levies throughout the game. And because the levies would benefit from much of the same bonuses as the units that get stationed there (e.g. heavy infantry buffs would apply to levies from region X as well as whatever heavy infantry gets stationed there), it retains relative parity (and can even be scaled to progress in either direction if desired) such that MAA don't just outstrip the levies through stacked bonuses alone.

Now, is this going to support historical armies of size and composition? Nope. But I think it would certainly go towards making development of armies a bit more of a thing besides "wait until I can get my next MAA bonus" and also making "levies" a bit more balanced and fleshed out.

This of course, doesn't handle tribal, clan, or nomadic empires. But my general quick thoughts: I think much of this is extensible to Clans, nomads have their own system from the DLC that can be tweaked to adjust with the above and not fall much behind, and tribal . . . never played tribal, so I can't speak to that offhand.

 

[DiabloDeVille]

You didnt need to make a new thread dude