Total War: WARHAMMER II

Total War: WARHAMMER II

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Unshackle AI Recruitment
   
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Tags: mod, Campaign
File Size
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964.626 KB
13 Aug, 2021 @ 1:58am
29 Sep, 2021 @ 11:30pm
6 Change Notes ( view )

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Unshackle AI Recruitment

In 1 collection by Jadawin
Jadawin's Game Overhaul
30 items
Description
TWW2 is no longer getting patches or DLC, so my mods are also considered final and will not receive any more updates. Therefore I disabled comments on all of them to avoid constantly getting notifications for the same dumb questions that have been answered a thousand times already. Any comments or announcements I might make in the future will be posted under my collection here:
https://steamproxy.net/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1766089433

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Helps the AI create armies with better unit variety, especially in the early and mid game and for smaller factions.

The mod improves AI unit diversity by giving them access to a special building that unlocks all units of its tier. So for example the tier 3 variant will unlock all units that are normally unlocked by erecting the special recruitment building of that tier. Instead of having to build several different recruitment buildings, the AI only has to erect one building to be able to recruit all the units of that tier. They will usually erect the special building immediately in every province capital they own.

The building is upgraded whenever the settlement building is upgraded. Almost instantly at lower levels, slightly slower at level 4 and 5. So that a province can always recruit the units associated with the tier of the settlement building in the province capital. The building cannot be constructed in minor settlements. The player has no access to the building at all.

While that is technically an AI cheat, it doesn't really help the AI: In their autoresolved battles, a boring stack of only two unit types performs just as well as a diverse stack. But it's more interesting for the player to fight diverse armies and meet all the different units in battle.

The biggest difference is seen in the earlier stages of the game and in smaller factions that normally don't have enough settlements to unlock all the units and also earn enough money to recruit them. Big, rich factions are very good at recruitment even in vanilla. Therefore this mod is especially useful when other mods are used that block or limit confederations.

I evaluated the effectiveness of the mod by doing test runs using the new AI army upgrade mechanic from my Cost-based Army Caps mod. Counting every instance where that mod tried to upgrade a unit but couldn't because the faction was not allowed to recruit it due to lack of the required buildings, I could track how often AI recruitment is hindered by this problem. The results showed that there is a high variance: The different races are not equally adept at unlocking all their units in vanilla, and as said above, games with few large factions have fewer failed upgrades than games with many smaller factions. But on average, this mod reduced failed upgrades by 30-50%.

Note that very small factions that do not own even one province capital get no help from the mod, because they cannot construct the building.

NOT savegame-compatible.