De Re Militari

Overview and Introduction

A persistent problem in Mount & Blade is that after a certain point the first few tiers become irrelevant other than as a stepping stone to more elite troops. In turn, this furthered a snowball effect as the losers were stuck with hopelessly outclassed recruits and levies against coat-of-plates or lamellar armor wearing murderblenders. The introduction of Common and Noble recruits did little to change this as common troops still became high-quality Tier V units while the noble troops only got one tier over them. Especially for the player, a mob of peasants with pitchforks would become a very well armed and armored fighting force capable of mauling through the enemy quite quickly.

De Re Militari is an attempt to rectify that, taking full advantage of Adonnay’s Troop Changer to enable multiple smaller troop trees that reflect different kinds of troops. In turn, these trees have hard limits based on how reasonable it would be for the irregulars to get their hands on such equipment. These smaller troop trees ensure that players can still upgrade their troops and get some choice in composition, without having to path every unit from the humble peasant as in Warband.

Broadly speaking, the common troop tree is broken up between an Irregular and a Regular tree. The Irregular tree contains various levies, conscripts, and other moderately equipped part-time soldiers, who end at either Tier II or Tier III, and make up the bulk of common recruits. Regulars are the actual career fighters of an army, beginning at Tier III and ending at either Tier IV or V. Finally, Nobles begin at Tier III and end at Tier VI, following the same rules as elite recruits normally do.

These different troop trees also serve to allow different cultures to stand out in their strengths, while adding further depth to army composition. While every culture has at the very least a bulk infantry option in their irregulars and one foot archer somewhere in their common trees, everything else is fair game. This should encourage more differences in play style depending on your army, and also further emphasize the thematic strengths of the factions and limit how much they play the same.

To TLDR the above, De Re Militari is a troop overhaul mod that aims to strip out the elite armies typical of Mount & Blade and create a greater sense of the mixed quality that medieval armies had in their composition, highlighted with these four points:

• []To better reflect the historical levies and part-time irregulars that made up the bulk of medieval armies, while also allowing the professional regulars and noble elite to stand out without obsoleting any of them.[/]

  []To give each faction a more distinct identity within this framework, creating a thematic asymmetry of unit quality between factions.[/]

  []To avoid overloading the player with excessive options or stages that add nothing but additional clutter to building and assessing army strength.[/]

  []To still give players some choice in their troop upgrades even with the limitations of the smaller trees, while maintaining the above.[/]

  For your benefit, I have written articles as manuals to help with understanding the units available and similar changes. These are primarily primers for each faction to help illustrate the mindset of each unit and the faction as a whole, as well as commentary at the end of each faction on the design process or areas I feel needed a bit more explanation that did not fit elsewhere. It is not required to read these play the mod, but it will hopefully answer some questions of design that you might have. If you have a question about the mod, I would suggest checking the manual first to see if it is already explained.

  Overall, this mod should provide a considerably different experience from the vanilla game simply in how armies are composed and how you handle recruitment.

  Compatibility

  Requirement: As of DRM 6. 0. 0, the War Sails DLC is required in order to play. This requirement may change later.

  Requirement: You must download Adonnay’s Troop Changer and place it above De Re Militari in order to play this mod. Both files should be below the Native files. ATC is necessary as it allows for the recruitment of Regular unit options. If you only see a faction's irregular units in villages, this means that ATC did not load properly.

  Note that as of DRM 4. 2. 3, DRM now includes a configuration file that will overwrite ATC's. This means that you no longer need to set the file yourself, though keep in mind that if you wan