Questions about PD and other

[RedWurm]

That's only a fair assumption to make if your opponent isn't relying on relatively small numbers of resource-heavy troops in their armies. for that type of player, they've spent a bit of cash that they don't especially need, fortified their border against opportunistic raids and freed up their armies to do something useful.

never mind the fact that for most nations it is presumably even less desirable to be forced into creating a substantial army just to leave it sitting in striking distance of a border they don't particularly want to attack in the hope of deterring a raiding party.

[Gandalf Parker]

Any assumptions are actually correct. The problem is that they are correct for the map and game types that the player is used to playing.

[thejeff]

And for little things like Call of the Wilds/Winds and maybe even Hordes.

So Sombre, if PD is wasting money against raiding parties, do you use it for anything? Beyond 1PD to defend against scouts, which is really only the extreme case of what I suggested. Against someone with minimal PD, if you have flying/stealthy troops it's possible to take practically all his uncastled provinces at once. That's devastating.

Probably also depends on the phase of the game. There comes a time when the standard raiding party is a flying/stealthy thug capable of killing almost any PD. Then PD may be worthless but so are most armies.

[BigDisAwesome]

I start the game with only 1 pd per province to save money. Then I like to give it all a bump to 10 to catch stealthers and for Call of the Winds attacks.
If I have a hostile border I'll try to get about 20 pd and hire some deer tribe archers and maybe drop a mage there for good measure. I generally don't do that very often though, as I like to have NAP's with people.

The only time I ever go above 10 is if I have some extra money and no army where I'm expecting to get attacked next turn. This generally only works if the army attacking you is a small raiding force though. But if your pd gets slingers or archers they can be devastating against a small force of troops not expecting much.

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

I'm using PD to great effect in one of my multiplayer games, in a province that hasn't even seen any raiding parties. Now the issue of whether its cost-effective will require a bit of thinking on my part.

The map is Parganos. I'm playing MA Agartha in the North West, in behind a mountain range with only three single-province chokepoints.

I'm highly troubled by the idea of R'lyeh's Starchildren assassins killing off all my researchers. At ten points, I get one measly destealth point. At twenty, 11. My infantry are slow, imprecise, and resource expensive- in short, bad patrollers. I've started recruiting a few spare indie woodsman archers each turn as part of a patrol force, ferrying them to that province. I've now got about forty archers and 20 pd there.

The basic stealth strength of a scout is 40, a Starchild 45. Hmm... Thanks to the PD I was able to redirect troops elsewhere. My light infantry was .9 destealth apiece.
My PD cost around 200 gold, no upkeep for 11 destealth. It would have taken 13 LI (@10 g, 10r apiece) to match that. 130 gold, ~9 upkeep. Not a gold bargain by any means, even if throwing in the cost of a commander. Still it allowed me to dedicate my limited supply of resources in more important directions. On the equivalent amount (in destealth, not units) of militia, I would have spent 77 gold. In woodsman archers (1.15 desealth), 100 gold.

So gold effective for patrolling? By no means. In resources, its a bit of a godsend- all those indie commanders I didn't have to recruit, ferrying units all over the place- it also saved me some valuable time and probably mages.

To match the stealth of a scout, I needed ~40 patrollers- about the limits of an independent commander, and not too hard to manage. But throw in the star children's stealth bonus and the 2d25 rolls on each side, and things are getting a bit iffy. I'm pretty certain quite a few more would have made it through if I hadn't backed them up with 20 PD. On the plus side, it made for a little bit of a fallback point or a rear-line if my forward force wasn't going to move from the siege. On the downside, it was by all formulae, a waste of money, though not resources.