I think the game should polish the military side of things a bit. A couple suggestions:
Have some kind of ‘‘reserves’’ system? this could be achieved in a couple ways:
say i recruit a soldier out of my population pool, use him to fight off raiders or destroy a raider camp, he gained some combat experience, right? Now, to save money and especially to have him available to gather resources, i’ll dismiss him… next time i hire a soldier, if he is that re-hired soldier, he should keep the combat experience he already gained i think.
That would allow the player to slowly build up some kind of reservist pool for when they’re needed.
That should absolutely be paired with the ability to stock military equipment in the barracks so that hiring a new soldier and deploying them isnt so complicated… Maybe that could be added as part of the tech tree?
another suggestion: show us the equipment stats… so if i’m buying a weapon from a trader, whats the stats of the crude weapon vs the sword? I think that should be visible.
I disagree with this opinion. We need to develop ways to utilize our soldiers even in peacetime. For example, patrols for external intrusions and petty crimes. It would be a good idea to set up zones and recruit soldiers to determine patrol density.
that would be even better than my suggestion. it would give that monthly fee a reason to spend… because raids are once every, what… 2-3 years? At least that’s about what i am seeing on the easy difficulty, i’m on year 21 now and i think i got raided 3 times… I destroyed raider camps strategically, once a year, to diminish the occurances, though… Anyways my point is now i have a total of 70 gold per month fee for my soldiers and currently they’re only useful once per 2-3 years…
Having them do patrols, reduce crime, explore the map or do some manual labor (like building roads, fences… you know, what the Roman soldiers actually did do back in the day), would mean that they are getting paid for something…
I think it would make a lot of sense to have a system that would reward the player for both demobilizing soldiers when there is not a need for them, and reward them for maintaining military readiness in peacetime. And thus giving the player a meaningful choice between two options.
This could be done by removing the gold cost for recruiting soldiers - thus making it more attractive to disband your companies in peacetime.
At the same time, let companies slowly gain veterancy up to 1 or 2 stars even in peace-time, to represent the day-to-day drill and training. This would make it attractive to maintain your companies in peacetime.
Thus the player would have a good reason to both maintain his companies in peacetime and a good reason to disband them.