Re: Making non Magic national commanders more worthwhile
 

The Knights as thugs are only useful as army support. For me they are there, so I kit them out to deal some extra damage and give them some bodyguards so they don't die.

Lord Wardens are IMO great raiders because of the stealth and them being great fighters for humans. (hp:23!)

Re: Making non Magic national commanders more worthwhile
 

Btw: Quickening Song is just a great addition in CBM, especially in conjunction with the fast Knights of Avalon. You get quickened Knights of Avalon from turn 2. 6 KoA with a mother is a very reasonable expansion party, able to beat most indy provinces. And later in the game many an enemy is takan aback by Knights with 60 AP rushing to their backline the first turn into battle.

Re: Making non Magic national commanders more worthwhile
 

Define 'well defended'

In MP players rarely build more than 1 PD unless they're (1) anticipating an army vs. army showdown in that province in the near future (in which case you have no business attacking it with a thug because there's going to be an enemy army there too), (2) random events gave it to them, (3) nation has good enough PD that light (5-6) amounts of it will fend off common cheap remote spells like Call of the Winds.

Even given that, a bane will cheerily eat through 10-20PD with a frost brand and a vine shield against most nations.

Re: Making non Magic national commanders more worthwhile
 

Provinces at the front should have an army near, just for the case of raiders or enemy armies. That I mean with well defended. IMO raiding works well as strike and run tactics in the backyard of the enemy, not at the front.

I raise all my PD to 5 when an enemy starts to use Call of the Winds or that Ghoul sending spell. Even for 30 provinces thats only an investment of 450 gp. Well worth for saving the trouble.

Raising all provinces to a level that could stop thug raiders on the other hand is unthinkable.

Re: Making non Magic national commanders more worthwhile
 

10 PD may be quite worth it on occassion too, although it of course depends on the nation. Your size, etc.
However, the simple fact that it is not scriptable makes the vast majority of PD quite useless againt the vast majority of early thugs/raiding detachments.

Re: Making non Magic national commanders more worthwhile
 

Thugs are rarely used by themselves. You don't win a war with thugs alone. If you have an army operating in the area, you can often dictate what your opponent does with their army and slip your thugs around the side.

And thugs have work to do after you force an army confrontation and defeat their army in the field, since you still have a lot of land to claim. They free up your army to go straight to sieging castles and leave the thugs to clean up the rest of the provinces.

Or you might stab someone whose armies are occupied elsewhere.

Yes, having mobile thugs is frequently helpful, but walking thugs definitely have roles they can fill

Re: Making non Magic national commanders more worthwhile
 

Is it possible to make some national commanders recruitable without a fort? Because nonmage commanders are perfectly useful as they are, it's just that the indy variants are nearly as good without needing the investment of a fort, so all armies get led by swarms of generic indy commanders despite how unthematic it is. Ideally, indy nonmage commanders should be the same as indy mages and troops, recruited for what they offer that nationals don't rather than endlessly spammed.

Maybe make basic national scouts/commanders/priests tied to an event generated site called "successful assimilation" or maybe just make them indy but only recruitable by a single nation like capital recruits. Probably impossible for hardcoded reasons, but hey...

Re: Making non Magic national commanders more worthwhile
 

This probably/doubtless a misguided remark, and I don't know anything about this subject, but if what you want to do is make it so you'd rather recruit your own non-mage commanders, can't it just be modded simply so that all indie commanders have a leadership of 0?

Re: Making non Magic national commanders more worthwhile
 

No indy maps already do that. But there are issues. For one, you'll still never recruit second line troop commanders, scouts, or priests. Nobody is going to recruit a scout over a spy, a basic priest over a priest-mage/high level priest, or the 40/80 troop commanders over the 120s with standard. For another, some nations have legitimate reasons to hire indy commanders. Like LA Marignon, whose national commanders are all squishy low hp guys without shield or armor, and dangerously vulnerable to stray arrows.