So for ages on forums and such I've heard people say that NPC lords don't really recruit, or that they say they're recruiting but nothing happens. I just wanted to point out that just now I've directly observed a Khergit lord come to recruit at a Swadian village and add Swadian Recruits to his party. Vanilla M&B version 1.011.
It's also worth noting that when I was burning as many Rhodok villages as possible, I began seeing a lot of Khergit units under Rhodok lords. So yeah, burning an enemy's villages apparently does place some sort of recruitment pressure on them, causing them to recruit from other factions, even if it's just a matter of not being able to recruit from a village under (looted) status.
So yeah, lords do recruit and burning villages does make that more difficult for them. What I wish I could find out are the rules underlying this. I wonder if the game specifically tracks which lords have pissed off which villages, the way it does for the player, or if it just prohibits lords from recruiting from factions they're at war with. I've never observed anything that confirms the former or invalidates the latter, but who knows?
I just kinda wanna put it out there somewhere on the internet that NPC recruitment and village burning do matter, because there's a lot of chatter out there to the contrary that seems to go uncontested. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Torvald of Gorvadia (talk • contribs)
- I don't know anything about recruiting from foreign lands, but as far as tracking reputation for AI like the player, I'd say probably not. Lords like to recruit from villages they own (or if they don't own any, they seem to still choose one to attach themselves to), they'll travel halfway across the map to recruit from their preferred village. Perhaps looting that specific village causes them to seek the next nearest village, even if it means hopping the border. I never seen a lord recruit troops from outside his faction in classic, or Warband, but I am quite sure even if they could in the original, they can't anymore in Warband.
◄► Tephra ◄► 21:20, April 13, 2014 (UTC)
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- I should have taken screenshots or something. But yeah, I watched a Khergit lord roll up to Nomar and stop there. When asked what he was doing, he said he was recruiting. I decided to go wait in Kelredan castle and see if his troop number went up, and as soon as it went from 42 to 44 I took a look at his troop composition and saw 2 Swadian Recruits who hadn't been there before.
- It's not that uncommon to see a handful of off-faction troops mixed into kingdom armies in Vanilla. Up until now I've been assuming that they were all merely recruited prisoners, just like the occasional bandit or woman who crops up, but now it's clear that at least some fraction of them are village recruits.
- It's also worth pointing out that Khergit units only began appearing among Rhodok armies late in a long campaign, and that the Rhodoks hadn't been at war with the Khergits. A few Rhodok lords had up to 10% Khergit units. They simply couldn't have been prisoners. I suspect the lords who had them were ones who lived close to Khergit lands and whose villages had been burned.
- As for the idea that the game tracks village rep for NPC lords, I don't know. The game is certainly tracking some set of variables for each of them, given the individualized behavior you describe.
- --Torvald