Back to the numbers: recruit spam yes or no?

Today in our guildchat we had a small discussion wether recruits spam is viable, and since I had some time left I went number crunching :)

The caculation:
Every unit needs a certain amount of resources:
(Every units needs a settlers which is 25 bread)

1 Recruit = 25 bread, 5 beer, 10 bronze swords
1 Militia = 25 bread, 10 beer, 10 iron swords
1 Cavelery = 25 bread, 30 beer, 40 horses
1 Soldier = 25 bread, 15 beer, 10 steel swords


After you know the used resources per unit you need a standard unit of measure, I used pinewood logs since it's the smallest/cheapest item in game.
For the conversion I used the conversion factors of Castle-empire:

25 bread = 243 pinewood logs
5 beer = 44 logs
10 bronze swords = 130 logs
10 iron swords = 679 logs
40 horses = 560 logs
10 steel swords = 986 logs


After you got the conversion done it's time to sum up all the logs per unit
1 Recruit = 417 logs
1 Militia = 1011 logs
1 Cavelery = 1070 logs
1 Soldier = 1362 logs


After that you can divide the number to calculate how the units measure up against each other:

1 soldier vs 1 recruit = 1362 / 417 = +- 3,3
1 Militia vs 1 recruit = 1011 / 417 = +- 2,4
1 Cavelery vs 1 recruit = 1070 / 417 = +- 2,6


In other words, if you loose 1 cavelry in your combat caculation that's cheaper then for example 3 recruits.


So there you have it: is recruitement spam allways the answer? Ofcourse not!
It's more complex, you need to calculate what's better, is it worth to loose a few cavelry to save loads of recruits? Well that depends on *hpw much* you save :)


And in my eyes the numbers above should be a guideline to asses what is more expensive in the long run :)



And to allready fence of comments:
Ye steel swords are way higher priced, but that will eventually be normal again, just like happened with the coins :)

you need to factor in the time also though, recruits are quick to produce whereas cavalry and militia take considerably longer (including time to breed horses or make the weapons).
If they are just going to get wiped out, how long is going to take to replenish them? Remembering of course that beer & horses both require the same resource - wheat

Yeah i came to the same conclusion that other units take way longer to create which makes the calculations not complete.

Considering you can recruit 360 soldiers or 240 cavalry per day with a level 3 barracks, i don't think the time to make them actually matters.

Time to create them doesn't really matter indeed i actually meant time to create those weapons :P. Either way you can't make 200 soldiers or cavalry each day cause you would need an insane amount of buildings.