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[Descan]

I'd recommend against ever checking 'auto-stop plots'.  Plots are good, they give you just cause to imprison uppity vassals.

I usually keep it on because whenever I have it off, my ruler or heir tends to die horribly. So when my realm is more or less externally stable, I'll turn it off in order to begin The Purge. But if I'm threatened (or want to begin threatenING) I'll turn it on in order to not need to worry about being murdered to death.

re: Staying Tribal: There's one (very niche) reason to stay tribal: Easy cultural conversion. But, as I said, it's very niche. Usually you can just rely on the events to do it over a game period. The only true reason you'd want to retain the cultural conversion is Rome: If you're Catholic and want to maintain easy control over the Curia, then staying tribal long enough to conquer, convert, and then give back to the Pope the province of Rome means that you're pretty much guaranteed to have a pope that loves you within a few decades, as being the culture of the province of Rome gives a bishop a whopping +200 (out of usually 500-700 points, so it's a big boost) to become a cardinal. Which means, with very little maintaining effort from yourself (especially if you're the only independent realm of your culture, such as is likely as Irish or Breton, or Finnish) you can maintain a stranglehold on the Curia and do whatever you want with the pope, even without having him as a vassal; any Cardinal of your realm that votes for the pope gives him a +100 relations boost with you. Which means that even having only 2 or 3 cardinals that vote for the pope makes him a guarantee'd +100 relations with you.

That and the raiding, which if you're a raiding culture or religion, you can keep, and it's pretty easy to grab a raiding culture. I recommend Khazar; you also get Radhanite Quarter on Silk Road trading posts, which are pretty strong if you're in the area. Otherwise, Berber is good; They get troops that are good for assaulting holdings as their cultural retinue.

[ZeroGravitas]

Otherwise, Berber is good; They get troops that are good for assaulting holdings as their cultural retinue.

i thought berbers got an all LC retinue?

[pisskop]

camel rider is upgraded hi, essentially

[USEC_OFFICER]

i thought berbers got an all LC retinue?

They do so I'm not sure what makes them good for assaulting holdings. LC retinues are apparently excellent in combat though, so there's no reason not to use them. _{Basically they're excellent in the skirmish phase and okay in the other phases. However they do have tactics to quickly switch back to the skirmish phase if everything is set up properly. So they can wreck the enemy during the skirmish phase and survive in melee until skirmish comes back up for another chance to break the enemy. You just need to mix in some other skirmishers/whatever so that you have less than 75% LC on a flank, so that you don't get the downgraded version of a common tactic.}

camel rider is upgraded hi, essentially

From what I've read, camels are the best unit in the game because they count as Light Cavalry but are better at dealing damage for the same cost. So you get the good LC tactics with better base stats and can proceed to wreck face. _{They're worse at pursuing enemies than LC, but camels deal at least double damage to the enemy before they break so it balances out in their favour.}

[Micro102]

If the war went on long enough he could have dismissed his levies and then called them up again.

Its also possible that a loyalist vassal raised their own troops.  They AI doesn't do that to interfere in its liege's wars (although that's totally possible, and a realm with every count and duke raising their levies alongside the king would be terrifying) but they could have done so as a result of their own war and then happened to kill you on the way there.

It was a very short war and when I hovered over those armies it just read "'extremely hard to pronounce name's' army". They were indeed the Emperor's army.

Started playing again but need some help figuring out what happened. Ended up leading a faction revolt for lower crown authority against the king as a duke. The faction list said we had ~59% of the king's troops. I look up his numbers and he has ~10-11k troops. I see he has -60 gold and his armies are getting the -25 morale modifier. I see he has -14 "raised levies" negative modifier for nearly everyone. I attack...

It starts off disappointing but well. I don't get the 5k+ troops the faction list told me I was going to get (more like 3400), but I did get ~450 troops from an event. We made our way to the capital and were able to hold it against their 5k troops as their armies buckled under morale. Twice. We ended up killing over 2k of them and lost ~1500 ourselves. I try to clinche the war by hiring mercenaries to make sure they couldn't get lucky or anything. Then they appear again, probably via boats, next to my capital with 6k men... I've been checking the guy's coffers constantly to make sure he had that negative morale modifier, he always had it. And as I ended in white peace I tried to take hope in the fact that if my vassals got pissed off going from a 0 to -16 modifier for levies raised, he would probably be close to -30 by now. Nope, his vassal's levy modifier actually went down.


- Why didn't I get all the troops promised by the faction screen?

- How did he go from ~3k troops to 6k in such a short time? I don't think he could have used mercenaries as he had no money, and it looks like he didn't use vassals.

Wiki says faction strength is calculated like this:
 ( ( sum of member troops * 2 ) / ( sum of liege troops - sum of member troops ) ) * 100
Thus the strength of faction members is actually inflated relative to their actual power versus the sovereign. It is best not to use the faction strength thing as an indicator for troop numbers I guess

((3400*2)/(10000+3400))*100 = ~50%

Something didn't seem right there. I changed the minus sign to a plus sign as that makes way more sense mathematically and it came out to 50% which is not the number I got in the game. It would make a lot more sense if it the equation was based off the number the faction army size indicator, which told me I would have had over 5k troops, so maybe that indicator is inflated? I'm guessing that it might be including all the garrisoned units as well, but then the emperor who controlled more land than the rebels should have had an even bigger disparity from his perceived units. However he seems to have obtained at least 8k units in all. I'm really flustered about this. I can't prepare for a war if there is no way in telling how big the two armies are going to be.

[USEC_OFFICER]

From what I've seen online, vassal levy troops count only half for determining faction power. I'm not sure how much that affect the calculations but it's certainly something to consider. Of course your liege would have to have something like 8k vassal levies and 2k personal troops (both levy and retinue) for this to account for everything with the numbers you gave us so I'm not 100% certain that this is reasonable without further information. But basically faction strength is only important for triggering certain breakpoints. Comparing troop counts directly is far better for determining actual strength.

Also, the levy opinion modifier only gets worse during offensive wars/peacetime. During defensive wars like, for example, vassal revolts, the malus reduces to 0 instead. This explains what you saw after the war. I'm certain that the levy opinion malus going from -16 to 0 is partly responsible for the extra troops he got.

[Micro102]

From what I've seen online, vassal levy troops count only half for determining faction power. I'm not sure how much that affect the calculations but it's certainly something to consider. Of course your liege would have to have something like 8k vassal levies and 2k personal troops (both levy and retinue) for this to account for everything with the numbers you gave us so I'm not 100% certain that this is reasonable without further information. But basically faction strength is only important for triggering certain breakpoints. Comparing troop counts directly is far better for determining actual strength.

Also, the levy opinion modifier only gets worse during offensive wars/peacetime. During defensive wars like, for example, vassal revolts, the malus reduces to 0 instead. This explains what you saw after the war. I'm certain that the levy opinion malus going from -16 to 0 is partly responsible for the extra troops he got.

Ah right defensive war means no levy malus. Goes to show how long it's been since I played this. That decrease in negative opinion may have had something to do with it too.

Alright thank you guys, It's making a thousand times more sense then it was earlier today.

[Descan]

Ah, right, I fucked that up. The other Arab cultures get the Camel Rider retinue, but Berbers get the Light Cavalry retinue.

[Tawa]

Pike and heavy infantry retinues slaughter garrisons. I recall a Byzantium game where I had a 5000-man defense retinue, which made my main strategy "assault every castle in Europe". They also perform really well in battles because of their good melee stats.

Best retinues are thereby Scots or Italians because they get pure pike retinues with special cultural tactics. Pure heavy infantry retinues (Irish, Baltic, Finno-Ugric, Russian, Nordic, Frisian, Anglo-Saxon, Israelite, Frankish, Lombard) are similar, slightly more expensive and marginally worse stats.

What do you guys think is the worst retinue? My money is on Nubian Archers. On paper they seem like marginally better English Longbowmen, but Nubians don't get the special Massive Longbow Volley tactic that the English do.

[Loud Whispers]

Probably nubian archers. If you factor in geography, I'd say West African skirmishers. While the East African skirmishers and archers do not get the insane offensive power of West African light infantry, they can wage war competitively against loads of tribal and small Kingdoms around them, and are fantastic for raiding. The West African infantry however are locked in and crumble against berber cavalry

[pisskop]

so i slept with my wife out of wedlock, and then married her before the baby was born.

the bastard event triggered and i legitimized my son, much to the dismay of my wife

[ZeroGravitas]

What do you guys think is the worst retinue? My money is on Nubian Archers. On paper they seem like marginally better English Longbowmen, but Nubians don't get the special Massive Longbow Volley tactic that the English do.

probably Nubian, followed by Pictish Raiders? Han is also really bad, even thought the Pikemen might it seem like it should be good.

[Tawa]

Pictish raiders are pretty bad, but they make decent filler for small armies when you just need more men and have a low retinue cap (such as a low-tech tribal lord nearly at the edge of the map would have.) Plus, they get a lot of stat bonuses compared to, say, Nubian archers.

Christ, though, that nubing retinue is trash. It is worse in nearly every single conceivable way than the generic defence retinue, despite having the same troop types!

[notquitethere]

so i slept with my wife out of wedlock, and then married her before the baby was born.

the bastard event triggered and i legitimized my son, much to the dismay of my wife

Haha, it's all about appearances I guess.

[Micro102]

What happened to Byzantium horse archers being the best retinue? Or was that the strongest unit?