Volunteers: Military Made Easy!

Suggestions
1

This is an off-the-cuff suggestion, but it struck me as a simple enough idea.

Promoting soldiers one by one might be a good way to custom-tailor an army with the fittest, bravest, most expendable force possible, but to form a sizable force it strikes me as something that could get tedious… as it can in certain other games, cough cough. So what if we had a “Volunteer” setting for the army?

With this mode active, certain villagers would sign themselves up for military service, independent of any micromanaging on your part. There could be a lot of under-the-hood factors here; personality traits like aggression, bravery, mortal grudges against goblins, peer pressure from friends/family, and so forth would persuade villagers to volunteer.

A soft cap for the number of volunteers could be set either manually or by the “danger level” of the town, dependent on how often and how badly the town’s been attacked; a safe settlement without a care in the world might have a handful of paranoid or boisterous sorts who sign up for fun, while a fortress under siege would see its people divided between those too cowardly to fight and those too brash not to.

If nothing else, an option like this would allow for a bit of set-and-forget to handle early town defense, and perhaps keep recruits flowing in if/when things get too big to manage. What do y’all think? Good idea, bad idea?

5 Likes
2

I love the idea of pulling up the character sheet and seeing

  Gordon Ramsay                                Health-90 Will-120 Spirit-20
  Class - Cook

  Grudges- Kobalds, wolves, televised love.
  Vendetta- Kobo The Kobald - stole food, destroyed property. (harsh)
            Bob Burlyhands - criticized food. (mild)
5 Likes
3

That’s a wonderful idea, Maybe after you hire a footman, you can make them a recruitment officer? Hehe i’d love to see a Hearthling sitting behind a table and waiting for volunteers, while yelling slogans like “Protect the innocent berries!”, “Who stole your beds! The goblins did!”, “This isn’t about their coal mines! Don’t listen to the liberals!” at random hearthlings walking by. Haha!

4 Likes
4

If this is not made canon, I will be very disappointed.

4 Likes
5

I’d like to see something like

Garry the Goblin - Killed my Father (extreme prejudice)

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6

So… goblins are the new ‘hot button’ in Stonehearth politics?

Just watch out for those pesky goblin sympathizers. Some people just want to watch the wood burn.

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7

Haha, whatever gets those recruits lining up!

8

Freakin Greenos. Why don’t they go live with em if they lovem so much.

9

I love the term ‘Hearthlings’, hopefully it’ll become official :slight_smile:

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10

Heh, yeah it’s not bad :slight_smile: . I’ve mostly stuck to “settlers” and such in the absence of any set name.

Anyway, on the volunteer side of things… I guess I’m in two minds about it. On the one hand, it is pretty cool… but on the other, it could really mess up your settlement plans etc when half your skilled crafters, farmers etc rush off to kill goblins, wrecking the food supply chain for everyone whilst they’re gone, or losing the precious carpenter’s saw whilst away etc.

Several ways you could get around that though. Only workers could volunteer, there could be a check-list to ban certain professions from enlisting (like IRL), or you could exclude specific individuals from enlisting (kinda like IRL too).

1 Like
11

I think this idea has potential, however this would be implemented so far down the road. Your settlement would have to be extremely large before having to resort to an automatic drafting system. Also, Stonehearth’s population grows so slowly, it really wouldn’t be hard to hire a footman every so often and keep up a solid army.

2 Likes