[0.86][Feedback] Who gave my militia lightning hammers?

I have the totally opposite experience. In my games city militia are always crappy and dont get any better as far as I have noticed

The lightning hammer isn't good unless your unit levels up. It's a weak weapon if your unit is level 1. Militia is level 1.

Balance aside, I think it is also "unrealistic" within the setting of the game that militia gain any equipment you have available, including magical ones. They're supposed to be expensive!

I agree that we should not meet city militia with super equipment. 

On the other hand they should improve on attack, hitpoints and such during the game. If not they are totally useless. When you build command post, castle walls and such, city militia could improve a little

I confess I gave them the hammers Please don't hit me.

I think cities with a blacksmith should equip their militia with the best available mundane armor and mundane weaponry.

While cities with an Armor-smith and a Weapons-smith should give militia *best* available armor and weapons respectively.

(militia is supposed to be significant after all)

--> Without a blacksmith should be a tier or 2 below the best ... for instance leather armor if chain is available, and chain if plate is available. Perhaps?

Do militia units which happen to equip stuff which would normall require iron or crystal end up pulling that resource from the resource pool?

If you didn't want me to hit you, you shouldn't have given me so many hammers. 

I would prefer for militia to be a viable defense tactic, not a drain on resources. Arguably if one militia unit dies, the same equipment could be used for the next round of militia.

Therefore I think what they are equipped with should be based/limited on the buildings in the city. More advanced infrastructure/ investment into defense should allow for a more beneficial militia force without further cost than the initial investment.

Spot on.

This sounds pretty good to me, too. Then, perhaps once a blacksmith is built, militia get to use iron-based equipment, for example?

"Militia" should be crap.  I wish that armorshiths gave my militia chainmail and shields and armor smiths gave them maces.  Chainmail and maces sounds like the highest form I would expect out of my city guard, realistically.  Unarmored peasants with magic hammers, not so much.  

I agree with this wholeheartedly. Chain/Maces/Wood shields should b the best militia gear.

Blacksmith/Armorer should upgrade the militia as well as making said equipment cheaper to build. Wood shields should be tied to some other building, and available after Blacksmith and Armorer. This scaling would help the militia actually be something other than a toss-away unit after the early game, but keep them from being the sole necessary defenders of a city.

Yes, I think that would be a good idea.

Blacksmith -> Metal Weapons and Armor

Armorsmith -> Masterwork Armor

Weaponssmith -> Masterwork Weapons

(or some rough equivalent)

However, legendary equipment and magical equipment ... I am less sure about.

Having lightning hammers on peasants (for no good reason) should certainly be an undesired anomaly I think.

Hmm.

Perhaps, if you go along the magical path instead of the warfare path ...

certain magical buildings would equip your militia with magically enchanted weapons rather than iron/steel weapons.

(probably only for Tower/magic specialized cities though ...)

I wouldn't mind a level 4 city from having an excellent militia force, as long as the city deserves it.

Of course, a 'stack of doom' would always defeat even the best militia ... however expeditionary forces, lightly armored blitz forces would likely not be successful.

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You wouldn't be able to defend a city from an entire army with just militia, and you would still need an excellent force to defend against an excellent force ...

yet this would allow defense to be (much?) easier than attack given the right set up.

1. This should not be possible with only minimal investment (would only be worth it with Bell Towers, Militia Barracks, etc)

2. This would help the AI not be stuck with crappy defenders.

Probably a good idea also.

This would also serve to further differentiate the magic weapon research from the warfare weapon research, too. Thus, another tradeoff in deciding to research the magic tree would be that you don't get any benefit to militia, whereas researching the warfare (and civ, I suppose, if upgrades are tied to buildings) do provide some benefits to militia.

I can see the Masterwork equipment thing, but really only as a high-level city level upgrade such as 4th or 5th Level "Master Smith" which grants all your in town militia masterwork weapons and decreases production time on iron gear.

That way the city gets some amount of differentiation, and you get a city level up that matters, but lets be honest with ourselves here. Most militias in most cities are a force of semi-trained civilians who get what gear is available, and "Masterwork" doesn't sound to me like to sort of stuff that winds up just laying about to be used by Joe the Butcher in defending his home.

True. I guess it will come down to how many tiers of weapons we have.

Will we have Crude -> Basic -> Excellent -> Masterwork?

In that case Blacksmiths should unlock Basic and Specialty smiths should unlock Excellent instead of masterwork.

Another interesting tradeoff might be that such buildings that improve militia are only available to be allowed after city level-up. Instead of being the blacksmith, armorsmith, or weaponsmith which confers the militia abilities, it might be various kinds of quartermasters. Having to choose between a beefed-up militia and a bank makes the decision a bit more dire.

Thus, strategically a player could choose to make a city more defensible via militia upgrades if that city is at a choke-point, at the sacrifice of all sorts of production bonuses, depending on how big the city could eventually get.

Or perhaps such militia boosting abilities are only allowed via the Fort/Castle type of city.

(will be posting a Diverging City Paths thread in the potentially near future)

I would hope militia to be upgraded in some way during gameplay, so the random scouting unit, or a tiresome spider wouldnt just go in and trash a city, ive been rather annoyed at having some games start next to a spiders lair, and not being able to beat the spider at lvl 1 it would go trash my capital if i left it undefended for 3 turns with my main hero. (I know I can train units etc. to counter that, but even through that gameplay, that particular unlucky start gives me a resource penalty from turn 1).

Although, to please some members, at a certain point they could rename the militia to some other more heroic name that is fitting for the scramble defenders of civilization, - like minutemen, or conscripts.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

To be clear, Militia are those crap units you build in the first part of the game. The units that appear in city defense are called City Defenders. They should start out as crap, but get better armor and weapons as you focus a city on defense. No focus should mean less defenders with crappy gear. Right now we can only get a few defenders and they only can get weapons. This is almost certainly not the intended final design concept. In my latest mod I have given a clear path for city defense, making sieges something only attempted in the mid and late game. I plan to also give them armor options and can't wait for that bug to be squashed that only allows 18 units in a battle. 

I would like to see City Defenders have equipment only from the Civilisation tech tree.  These are just city folk who grab arms which are easily available and not a trained professional army.  So boar spears, etc, okay, lightning hammers, no.

Given that crystal and metal are resources in the game I would not expect any militia to be able to use any equipment that consumed these rare resources both as an unfair offensive and defensive advantage.

Leather armour and low weapons is all I'd expect to see on them, they're not paid, equipped soldiers, they're farmers and stable boys who run out and get mowed down when their city gets attacked.  I doubt they should even be in groups larger than 3 given their lack of skill and training.

Just my 3 cents.

Maybe, at some point an established city should have regular, trained and professional defenders instead of relying on farmers and stable boys?

It maybe by design that if you truly want a good defender, than you have to train and garrison them yourself, but I still think it would be cool if your defenders improved more with the building you put in your city.  Right now the cost of maintenance on a lot of these building don't really make their creation worthwhile.

I think that is more a function of how strange and unbalanced the economy in this game is currently.

While I agree that there should be buildings that you can build to improve the quality and unit size of your city defenders, I don't think that at any point they should be as good as what you can train and garrison yourself.