im not talking about a situation where the to didnt start, im talking about a to in progress on top of losing a battle in the region. in the same scenario (gathering troops) one cannot recruit a unit in their capital, a situation in which one would assume raising troops from the population would be easier as there are more people in a smaller space.
recruiting men to your unit and recruiting militia are the same thing in terms of the rp world actions of your char, they are going out, finding fighting men, slapping a pike and a few coins in their hand and telling them to go fight. logically neither should be possible if one of them isn't.
there was not too long ago an interminably long thread about how bad the current reliance on militia is for the game. there was, as usual, no change that came out of it.
part of the inherent contradiction in your argument is that realms with more nobles almost always tend to be larger and wealthier realms, thus more able to afford militia and less reliant on individual nobles' units being as strong as possible, meaning lords can hoard more gold to drop militia.
the other part is that smaller realms can't raise large enough armies to compete with the massive militia forces that can be placed in even middle-wealth regions currently, and on dwi specifically they can't compete with the insane peasant hordes that get kicked up at the slightest amount of looting.
and as you are well aware my annoyance with (and awareness of) this issue stems from a battle between my smaller realm and your larger realm.
the real problem with war right now especially in dwi with the anti-looting code is that npc units play way too big of a role, consistently in favor of the wealthier, larger realm. it massively reduces the importance of which army is better managed and more coordinated, mostly all that matters is who has more gold to drop militia and not have to loot at inopportune times to keep troops in the field.
the continued ability to rely on militia as a crutch really reduces the quality of wars and further makes playing in a small or poor realm an unappealing prospect to most players, no matter how good that realm's army is.
