Feudal Warfare - Recruitment Plus Early Game Overhaul

Bannerlord’s early game is brief and easy. Your rise from nobody to Calradian Legend should not be pre-paved for you. Notables shouldn’t fall over themselves to offer you men. Nobles shouldn’t embrace you as one of their own before they’ve even met you. Success is something that should be earned, not inevitable. So with that in mind this mod makes a number of changes, large and small.

[]Troops: Historically, troops mostly equipped themselves, so personal wealth dictated caliber of gear. Poorer troops strive for essentials like a good weapon and a helmet - possibly a shield if they fight in the melee. Wealthier troops will deck themselves out in the best their culture’s smiths make. Calradia has four distinct social classes, the peasantry or freemen, the artisans and craftsmen, the professional warrior class, and the minor nobility. Each culture’s trees are designed to be imbalanced but powerful when the right tactics are employed - I have an article for each culture.

[]Recruitment: You can always find mercenaries in the taverns from all walks of life. From lowly rabble who are out of work, to the wandering remnants of the Vaegir Guard. Recruiting from notables, though, requires that you earn that right. There is no single path to it, however. You can befriend notables through questing (and the mod Small Talk), you can join a faction, improve your clan tier, befriend the ruling lord, and the biggest thing of all - you can have your own fief. This mod also improves the AI’s calculations when recruiting to be precise so they never get stuck trying to recruit soldiers they don’t have access to. (The AI plays by the same rules as you).

[]Clan Tiers: Don’t expect to be tier 4 by the end of the first year, the thresholds have been pushed back. There are also 12 tiers now, instead of 6 so you can potentially have a lot of companions. Just don’t expect to pass the ruling clans so quickly.

[]Joining a Kingdom: Hitting clan tier 2 makes you eligible but does not give you the right to join whatever faction you want. Whenever a clan offers you vassalage you can take it, but to give it to you on demand you’ll have to befriend the faction leader. How good your relation with the faction leader needs to be depends on if you’ve married into that faction’s nobility. If you’ve married a sister off into the ruling clan or married someone from the ruling clan into yours, it’s very easy to join that faction.

[*]NPC Relations: First - prisoner donations relation gains have been nerfed - SIGNIFICANTLY. Making the game harder is not always popular, but donating prisoners is cheesing the relation mechanic as the relation gain does not mirror the meager value of prisoners. You will also see your companions respect you for strong leadership - is it weird that a companion will have a -1 opinion of you after you’ve paid them on time and kept them alive through