How to recruit

I haven't played much in a while, but the thing that used to make that happen for me was not having enough gildar to recruit the champion. You also might be having problems because of a very low Charisma, and I think it's possible to design a custom sov with extra points for being a weaker recruiter.

Yes, save up your gildar and/or add some points to Charisma.

Play as a bard and max Charisma to 15 at startup. When your sov levels, put points into Charisma. You then have a likeable dude who hires champions for cheap AND he/she can quickly raise cities to level 3. I call it my "Slick Willie" Bill Clinton strategy and it works.

Thanks for the replies. Still doesn't seem to work though. My char is now lvl 7, 16 points of charisma, 160 guilders free, traits are adventurer, organised, intimidating, insane. The champions are just named that, champions. Are they supposed to be named? Even then, on other games if they had names I couldn't hire them. Only people in my party are the sovereign, Janusk and a summoned bear. Is it bugged or what is going on? There's a female champion wandering my territory and I want a queen

Hmm.

• What version # are you playing?
• I remember in previous versions there were unhirable "Champions" but that was probably pre 1.1. I haven't seen that issue for awhile.
• If the hero is inside your zone of control (ZOC) then you should be able to mouse over the recruit button and it should say how much gildar it costs to hire them
• If the hero is outside your ZOC, then you need a unit next to them to speak with them. Do the same thing and mouse over the recruit button to see the gildar costs.

It sounds like you're playing an older version of the game where unhirable Champions were running around. Just a hunch.

I'm playing 1.1. Windows 7 did keep saying the game may not have installed properly. Might be a messed up file, then again the 1.1 patch should have corrected it. Haha this game is frustrating, not allowed to build some wonders despite having all the requirements, continuous crashing, not sure what several things do, unable to build harbours in areas that should be legit, still haven't figured out what the tribal alliances and holsten's victory in diplomacy do...

Might have to get a crack on and try to finish the game before my sovereign becomes old and crumbly.

Oh god, just found out what's wrong. When it installed 1.1 it didn't override my old 1.0, I was still playing 1.0. It instead installed 1.1 to a different directory. Haha. Thanks for the help.

Cool, glad to hear it's resolved!