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