Recruitment

When you wish to recruit or reinforce an army, it’s important that you chose the appropriate troops for the intended purpose. For this you can use a mix of what your economy allows you and what common sense would recommend. For example, don’t use cavalry to invade a mountainess terrain! Cavalry will neither perform adequately in combat there nor move at a decent pace.

Your army will be a group of contingents and each contingent a group of soldiers. When you recruit, you choose the number of soldiers of a given type that you are going to mobilize. They will form a contingent. You can then split or join contingents and armies as previously stated. You can recruit either using the map, or the webpage interface. Recruiting is an immediate procedure, and so there is no need to wait for the turn to be processed, you can immediately access the recruited units and give them orders.



When you attempt to recruit in a given territory, you can see what contingents you can recruit there according to your Land type, the population type(s), the required ironworks and the available recruits (in the territory or nearby according to the presence of a recruitment center).

The actual recruiting can be done trough several navigational paths:


 * In Land => Territories => Territory X you can find a “recruit” link to allow you to recruit in that given territory;


 * In Military => Armies => Army X you can also find a “recruit” link to allow you to recruit into that given army;


 * In the map you can select a recruit option for the desired location;


 * Or you go to Military => Recruitment, which will show you a list of all your territories. Click on the desired territory to recruit there. Each territory also displays some information that may be useful for you to determine where you wish to recruit.

Interface
The recruitment of new soldiers is allows done in a specific location (territory) into a determined army. Regardless of the path used, you will always find yourself in the recruitment interface, which has several areas.

1- A territory area, that shows where the recruitment will take place. It also shows the ironworks (white on black) and the recruitment center (white on red) levels

2- An Army area that shows you into which army the newly recruited contingent will be recruited.


 * When you choose an already existing army to recruit the new contingents, its units will be displayed below to help you visualize the army at hand;


 * There is also a New Army button. This allows you to recruit into a new army to be created instantly. If you choose this, two fields will appear for you to fill, one with the name of the new army (by default it’s the name of the Land followed by a number), and the other with its initial order (by default it is Train).

2- A Available Recruits area. This is a display of the recruits you can gather in this territory, adding together all population from the territory itself and eventually from nearby territories if the one where you are recruiting has a recruitment center;

3- A New Contingents area that allows you to define the size(s) of the contingent(s) you are about to recruit. Here you can visualize each possible contingent type you can recruit (wait with the cursor for about one second over the image if you have any doubt) and use the appropriate text boxes to fill the desired quantities. There is a “max” button in each one to fill the text box automatically with the highest possible number (considering recruits and resources), a “c” button to cancel the already inserted number, a display of the “total cost” of the desired quantities, and finally a “recruit” button to actually issue the order and execute the recruitment.

Recruiting Facilities
There are facilities that affect recruitment.

Recruitment Center
A recruitment center improves the initial training of the troops and allows to recruit from adjacent territories

The range is given in hexes. For instance, a level 3 recruitment center allows to recruit from territories 2 hexes distant.

Ironworks
An ironworks allows to recruit heavier troop types and improves the recruited contingent's armor.

The armor bonus reduces casualties in battle.

Costs and Maintenance
Recruitng costs Gold, and possibly also Iron, Wood and Horses, dependeng on the contingent type.

Then, each month, maintenance for troops must be paid, in the form of Gold and Food. Each soldier will need pounds of food per day equal to one plus the number of horses required to recruit him. So for example in a 30 days per turn game 1000 spearmen will require 30 food (remember that food is in tones) per turn and 1000 light cavalry in the same game will require 60 food per turn. This is also a very important limitation, and raiding enemy armies may destroy your ability to produce enough to feed your armies, so having a decent stock of food to face harsh times is advisable.