Recruiting and managing units in CityStates: Medieval

If you missed our recent development update on Medium you might want to check it out to see how far things have come along since previous updates on our Medium blog.

In this article, we’re going to explore a couple of the newer functioning buildings currently being tested in the developer build of CS:M.

The Camp

The camp is where a player can train their population to become fierce military units

If you played in our PVP beta and have been missing the glory found on the battlefield, you will be pleased to know that we’re a step closer to stoking the fires of war once again!

Previously, the developers would manually issue beta testers with squads to field. Recent updates however have now made it possible to recruit these in the camp.

Building a functional army in CS:M requires a player to follow a number of steps. The camp and barracks are arguably the beginning of this process. The camp is one of three unit recruitment buildings and focuses specifically on making melee units such as shield(“Melee”), dual wield and two-handers.

Example of recruiting melee units in the camp

Training these units will require resources such as food and time, that latter of which can be reduced by upgrading the camp. It’s important to note that you will need to train a suitable amount of a specific unit in order to later combine them into a squad, for example, a squad of dual wielders at the time of writing requires 8 of that unit.

The Barracks

The barracks is for housing military units and managing citizens who you wish to assign to a camp

The barracks is the second building we’re going to discuss today. Previously we released a video that touched on population management in CS:M. This video however revolved around civil population, or members of your city who manage tasks such as farming and mining.

Using the Barracks, you will be able to conscript citizens allowing them to be trained in the previously discussed camp building. You will need to find a balance or strategy that works for you depending on your playstyle when deciding how many citizens to conscript vs assigning them to civil tasks.

By adding more citizens to the barracks we can recruit more units

In the above example you can see that we currently have the means to recruit 2 more units out of 123 citizens. We can adjust this by clicking the “+” or “-” to allow for more troop production or to release conscripts back into the general public if we wanted to focus on another non military task.

In the currently named “Professions” menu you can see an overview of what’s happening with your citizens

Upgrading the barracks will allow you to house a bigger army in your city meaning warmongers may want to focus on levelling this earlier while players who are more interested in their city economy may prefer to spend resources elsewhere.

In closing

We hope you enjoyed learning a little bit more about military population management in CityStates: Medieval. In addition to the discussed camp building, we will also be implementing an archery building which will recruit ranged units as well as a stable for cavalry which we will of course discuss in more detail once fully implemented.