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Warbands Expanded - Skaven - Mount and Blade Style-ish

this is the best warband upgrade mod!

I kept upgrades cheap to take the skaven's low recruitment cost in consideration. Most upgrades follow CA's template but WoC tend to be elite heavy infantry so their upgrade cost pattern might not be sensible for skaven or zombies/skelemen.

Unit upgrades are (based on how CA approached chaos) divided into rank 4, 6 and 8 with +-1 for special cases. I figured skaven slaves sharing the same trash tier as gobbos, could use a low rank.

You're right on the plague monk vs stormvermin thing.

Well, list your proposals, I'll add em in.

1) Some Skaven upgrades are too cheap. (Even compared to the rather cheap vanilla Chaos Warrior upgrades.)
From slaves to clanrats / Night Runners (3 unit rank + 300 gold)
From clanrats to Plague Monks/Stormvermin (Sword & Shield) (5 rank + 300 gold)
I propose to increase the requirement in the unit rank.

2) Upgrading clanrats to Plague Monks and Stormvermin for some reason require the same unit rank and cost the same price, although these are units of different price segments. I suggest making the Stormvermin upgrade a bit more expensive than the Plague Monks upgrade.

3) For some reason, all upgrades cost 300 gold. I understand that this may be a temporary measure, but I still propose to introduce a different cost of improvement.

@Deviant

The shields not being an upgrade was a conscious choice for 3 reasons:

1 - Lack of UI space. You can see that the red tree is already saturated. The plague monk line would have to be squished down below and I like how everything neatly lines up.

2 - It was brought to my attention that shields aren't always an upgrade. In their example given, it had to do with recruiting shield-less Empire spearmen against the Vampire Counts. Why pay for extra upkeep against a faction that have no ranged units? In the empire's case however, it was a +8 MD so technically still a considerable upgrade but for skaven, it's only +4MD which is a 4% less chance to be hit in melee. Far less significant for the literally the same increase in upkeep, 81 vs 94 gold per turn.

3 - Thematically I do agree completely and I think it's a cool step up to take. I think I'll revisit this and see how it'll look if it was moved around and separated.

@Deviant

Theoretically AI can use this as this is a feature available to the faction and not just the player. I'll have to look into the AI tables to see if they're actually capable of using this.

I suspect that they don't because because AI is often programmed with shortcuts to just recruit higher tiered units as they become available. From the player's perspective, it makes no difference as long as the AI's armies are filled with stronger units as the turns go by.

I'm not sure I'd actually enjoy the AI using this mod. Since I play on VH/L often and the AI's army is full of higher ranked troops, the end game would be all bloodthirster/abomination spams. As money and ranks aren't barriers, they would just beeline to endgame units asap.

1) I think it's fair to separate clanrats with and without shields into different stages of the chain.
And upgrading from clanrats without shields to clanrats with shields is cheap to make.
2) Write in the description whether the AI can use this mod.
3) Thanks for the mod!

Absolutely amazing work on these, keep it up!

You're an absolute legend!