Captain Enhancements

[cjnodell]

Personaly I think that it could be cool to enhance the NPC captains in a manner similar to what Artemesia proposed for PC captains. Perhaps make it a type of periphenilia. You hire one and pay it like you do healers. It's pay increases as its skills do. It has Leadership, Mounted Combat, Foot Combat and Ranged Combat skills. It improves in these skills as it participates in battles. Units can change but captains only leave if they are fired by the Noble, die or desert due to lack of pay. The bonus provided to the unit depends on the captains leadership skill and appropriate combat skill.

Captains could perhaps be made persistent so that a Captain could be hired and fired by several nobles.
Captains can be hired at capitals only.
Once hired the Captain serves the Noble until they die (age or battle), are fired or desert due to lack of pay.
If a captain is fired or deserts they make their way to another capital and wait to be hired by another Noble.
If a captain dies a new "rookie" captain is generated in a capital.
There should be some kind of player to captain ratio that is maintained so that as new characters are created captains are created and as characters depart (death or retirement) as characters are deleted.
Captains are created in, or migrated to, realms that need them most.
Captains are removed due to reduced player base they are retired based on age?

I think that this would be a very cool enhancement!

Example:

A new noble is created in RealmX.
RealmX has plenty of Captains in their capital so a new rookie captain is instead created in RealmY which is short of captains.
The noble travels to the capital clicks Hire Captain and sees three captains available:

Code Select Expand

Name Leadership Mounted Foot Ranged Cost per Week
JimJon  15% 5% 20% 5% 8 Gold
BillBob   5% 5% 5% 5% 5 Gold
DaveDick   65% 55% 10% 5% 12 Gold
The new noble hires BillBob as his captain.
The new noble has an infantry unit and joins many battles.
BillBob's Leadership increases to 25% and Foot to 25%.
BillBob becomes too expensive so the new noble lets him go and hires a cheaper Captain (SamDo).
BillBob goes where there is work (where captains are needed) in RealmZ and gets hired by a Baron.
The new noble fights a few battles and SamDo dies in combat. He needs to hire a new captain.
The only Captain available has 15% Leadership and 15% Ranged. Not the best fit for infantry, but he will learn.
BillBob goes on to serve several Nobles and reties in hi old age.

Just some ideas!!!

[Shizzle]

That sounds very interesting, actually! ;D

Would players be allowed to choose their names? I'm in doubt on that.

Negative would be that the richest nobles will only get more power. They can already field the strongest units, and now you want to further increase that?

Perhaps Marshals or Vice-Marshals should be able to hire Captains at a lower rate?

[cjnodell]

Or perhaps the pay does not go up. Just brain storming really. I could see a captain improving over time but not demanding more money as he feels a sense of loyalty to his Noble. I could also see the Captain only requiring a hiring fee and not a weekly fee with the assumption that he is paid with the rest of your men. All kinds of possibilities.

[MaleMaldives]

Perhaps having captains could reduce travel time for larger units. It would almost be like you are the marshal for your own private army with captains leading smaller groups. In any case i love the idea.

[cjnodell]

No that could play nicely in with Artemesia's original idea of PC Captains. Captains recruit and manage troops and Nobles recruit and manage captains and their units...

[Shizzle]

So would one be able to divide his forces, or command small subunits of different unit types, each with their own captain? :)

[vanKaya]

I love Pelgart's idea! I feel like I always would like to develop a bit of a bond with my captain and feel I  don't get the chance cause he really just doesn't do much. Being able to hire from several different captains, being able to fire your captain and have him hired from another, and captain death/ rookie captain creation I think are all AWESOME ideas.

But I'm afraid pretty much all the suggestions afterward over complicate Pelgart's idea which is elegant in it's simplicity.

-If you want your men to march faster, set them to vanguard. The idea that a captain makes them march faster is a little bit much.

-As for naming the captain yourself, not necessarily a bad idea but the captains I've had over time have all had solid names that I've enjoyed and I kinda like the fact I'm not allowed to name him. He's a captain after all, not a family pet.

-If you're worried about  money leading to too much power than don't play a historically accurate game. Money= power, in real life and in battlemaster. I dont think theres anything unfair about the Duke of a city being able to hire a better captain than the knight of his region. Also in addition to that, I play as a General and I would put policies in place rewarding those who had good captains by giving them funds that would allow them to keep said captain. Thats just me though, I'm a little more egalitarian on BM than most.

Also, the only thing I would add to the idea (since I think Pelgart got it pretty much perfect in my opinion) is that the captain's abilities would rise very very slowly. So that a realm doesn't end up with a ton of highly trained expensive captains within a month.

[Shizzle]

I suppose the Captains would be trained at the Academies already present? Maybe a realm could decide on how much to invest into their training?

[Zakilevo]

Increase by 25? isnt that too much?

I think it would be better if those captains gave bonus to training instead of actually bonus to infantry and ranged.

[songqu88@gmail.com]

That wouldn't give captains much use, if you think about it. Sure, the boost to training might help initially, but that doesn't make captains much help in the long term. If you manage to keep your unit alive until the end of time, then that means a long time before the end of time that captain will have absolutely no role, because you'd probably get to max training anyway. The same goes for all the other factors that have caps that can be reached fairly quickly (cohesion, mainly). A morale boost would be nice, but it would have to be a passive and persistent bonus.

The thing I want to see with captains is some sort of persistent usefulness. Right now they do give bonus to leadership, which is...good and all if you're a marshal I guess, and a little bit if you're just a normal noble TL. But by the time you get to leadership 100%, your captain's not going to be much help, and he'll be what, +30 at best? That's a stretch, by the way. That's also assuming he lives that long. Instead, I'd like to see a slightly improved initial boost, but not so much that it's broken. It's hard to balance out something like this, but difficulty is no excuse for reluctance to try something. Usually I'd be reluctant to make any changes to something that isn't insufficient already, but there could be something done to make combat a bit more detailed.

Seriously, look at all the pretty features we got, and then look at our spartan and dull combat system. Yeah, maybe some people are genuinely impressed by the BM combat system, and maybe some people say simplicity is a good thing. The strategy is satisfactory right now. Maybe some AI tweaks, sure, but on the whole there's nothing lacking in terms of the combat system as a means of providing a strategy game. But there's something I can't quite put my finger on that is very bothersome about how BM is right now, with its flair and fanfare in many areas, yet something about battling seemed strangely boring. Of course, some people might indeed find these battles the most exciting things in the world...And to be fair, the combat system has been changed a lot. Still, for some reason this game recently has felt to me to be something akin to me buying Starcraft, then getting a bunch of patches that gives me more diplomacy actions for multiplayer, as well as a complex resource sharing system, a morale rating that determines whether my SCVs will actually work, actual Harvest Moon like farm sim in-game where I have to raise crops and livestock to supply the food for my marines, a full-blown economy system that incorporates every contemporary style of economics, etc. And yet I find that the only changes made to combat are some bugfixes and maybe a few balance changes.

Then again, it could be said that we shouldn't fix things that aren't broken. For example, if I were allowed to recruit heroes in SC then it wouldn't really be SC but more like WC3. I wonder though, would making changes to a thusfar mostly cosmetic part of a unit cause this not to be BM? I'm not sure. Has the captain always been intended to be more or less a roleplaying device whose name is randomly generated from some list and who gives a passive leadership bonus, most of the time which is pointless? I guess if nothing else it helps people who can't think up even one name, or don't want to, have a name to write down in their roleplays, or other messages.