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Local Recruitment

Diversifies native recruitment, providing more interesting choices when it comes to native troops. To shake up player and AI troop selection and map character.

TL,DR: replaces Native barracks with separated recruitment buildings for Tribes/trooptypes and redefines where they can be built.


I love regional troops in total war, to be honest, a tw game without feels bland and pointless to me. But in pharaoh they are just a bit too good and to me it's always hard to justify factional troops. Why slowly build 3 different buildings in precious capitol slots, when you can just get one building that gives you tiers 2-4 of all unit types plus hefty XP bonuses? My first step to mitigate this issue is to break up the regional recruitment centers and give them some downsides. This way there is more of a complex tradeoff between recruitment buildings.


Each realm gets its recruitment buildings divided into 2 to 4 buildings. This may be along cultural/tribal lines(kush vs Nubian), based on social background(commoner vs elite) or according to troop type (archers vs infantry). Also there are some minor/major settlement shenanigans going on and I decoupled realms from recruitment sets. Here I tried to model historical settlement data and migration patterns. Sometimes there also is some overlap. For example the regions around Yamhad, irridu and emar have different mixes of Canaanite, Hittite, Akkadian, habiru and ahlamu/aramean buildings available.
Secondly, all native recruitment buildings have drawbacks to happiness, growth, influence or production. Thus it might be good getting a few of these buildings but you need to carefully pick which ones are worth it. Sometimes getting two extra units to fill a hole in your roster is well worth the penalties or is easily offset by a prosperous province but it's not a no-brainer anymore to have a tier 5 native barrack everywhere.

To keep minor AI players in the loop, afterall, I just nuked their main source of troops, I added some special buildings just for them. Which major factions cannot capture. These grant access to troops of their culture, not their region, so wherever you encounter them they will have access to troops befitting their culture.
All native recruitment options have their AI value decreased, so if they have alternatives they will get those instead, hopefully leading to more factional troops in encounters.
Most major factions get their tier 1 units from the main building in their own realm(so tausret gets peasants in upper Egypt). To help with early game.


Cyprus has its own rec building for Aegean raiders in addition to Canaanite and select Hittite troops.
Mat Tamti and mat Assur share their rec buildings but their stables are separated and also feature chariots.
“Cimmerians” can only be trained in Zagros non-river food regions.
Egyptian desert regions have a separate recruitment building from Nile regions.
Akhenaten has both lower and upper Egypt recruitment.
Hatti and Arzawa have some additional overlap, especially in terms of luwian and “Anatolian” troops.
Isuwan Axemen limited to isuwa. But more Anatolian/Hatti troops in the Highlands and other troops in the lowlands.
Select sea people troops in parts of the Aegean.


Add an encyclopedia page
Tinker with the Minor Faction Recruitment building. right now I don’t like the distribution.
Make custom Icons

I've also got a mod that instead of nerfing Native Recruitment buffs Factional recruitment. https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3401474232&searchtext=

You can combine the two if you want :) OR you get the Combined package with COHORTROY's units and some extra changes as the "reworked recruitment" mod.

Feel free to leave comments, I'm thankful for feedback even if you're just pointing out typos or tell me my choice of translations or placement is unorthodox. I'm a scholar of this field but I did not review the newest papers before typing every single entry. So share your insights, remarks and opinions.