The questing knight is wrong - two of their attacks do no damage. Bugged. Please fix.

I also noticed that they don't have an attack animation.

Please fix the questing knights, having 0 damage on lance and hoof attacks makes it almost useless.

@Lorellion He can, but it's very difficult. You need to become the Prince of Darkness (the Relic ritual at a Gallows), then cast Personal Gate to travel to Inferno (alone!). From there, you need to gradually summon up enough Imps and single Demons to successfully take over the Infernal Capitolinum, controlled by Belial. This isn't easy, for sure, but once you do, you can spend 333 Sacrifices to cast the ritual "Infernal Throne", reclaiming your soul and becoming the Prince of Hell, a Level 3 Infernal/Dark caster. You also gain the ability to learn the remaining Demonologist rituals that you had missing before now, which give you much improved access to summons (as well as the ability to get back to the surface world).

I havent gotten to the throne part of the class. But does making the pact stop minstrels from coming? I very much like stupid roamers. Or do you get new stupid units when you seize the throne? also some of the units dont have forest stealth even though they are bandits. Like the bandit leader.

Can the prince of theives not upgrade to a teir 3 character? I feel like I'm missing something.

I don't know if this is a glitch or not, but questing knights do 0 damage on their lance charge and hoof attack?

I love this mod, but it feels like it struggles massively in the mid to late game. I actually got a gallows to sell his soul with and it still took forever to really progress. Getting units is hard, but the near universal access to ranged units makes it great against animals and a hard counter to unarmored units. I haven't tried it in multiplayer in both PVE and PVP, so I'll come back to discuss more on that. It'd be nice if you posted updates or changelogs since I did see you do that once or twice such as changing Landless Knights from Slow to normal speed IIRC, which makes them from a "Well nevermind then" result to an actually solid roll.

4) Let the Friar be able to control Ancient Forests - Being able to slowly spawn forest creatures or some type of interesting troop(s) in addition to his neat ability.
5) Beef up recruitment a bit. Maybe 5-10 units minimum instead of 2? Thematically it doesn't hurt the class to be attract to a few more ruffians to your cause : )
6) Let the Bandit Chiefs build Brigand Lairs (if you are able to improve them) - maybe an increased cost? The Prince of Thieves would want his network to expand : )
7) Perhaps have Cities spawn mid level units to your cause.

I like many of the other suggestions I've read below. You've created a really fun mod and I've enjoyed playing it.

Still playing this Mod and enjoying it. I've played 3 games now to midgame and haven't seen a gallows yet. I'm assuming that this unlocks some better units because the best unit I had was a Knight after installing a puppet King. . . . I've only found 1 castle in my 3 games as well.

So some suggestions (Piggy backing on some ideas from others):
1) Give Stealth to the Bandit chiefs and Prince so you can scout out the rare gallows and Castles.
2) Not sure if it's possible, but have a gallows or Castle near the start up
3) Brigand Lairs - Never found a need for them as they recruit the same as the towers/cities. Having them spawn troops would be useful - similar to the Dryad Queen

Very sorry for the wall of text. Apparently I had even more to say than I thought; hopefully some of it is useful!

Definitely an interesting class, and I love the writing you've done for it! It's very clever, often dryly humorous, and altogether replicates the CoE style extremely well. Though it's also something of a hassle to play because your units are so difficult to mass reliably, so it requires *a lot* of clicking and transporting dudes between citadels, particularly when you need to rebuild your army and you don't have any Alms-able towns or cities in the area. Still, that's part of the charm, and it works okay-ish, though it does make scrambling a quick defense or reaction force a bit of a pain until you manage to capture a castle and install a pretender for more reliable recruitment. But with all that said, I'm mostly fine with the system as it is, as it rewards skill and planning more than most recruitment lineups, and you can expand with it very effectively against most indies and rush some classes, which means it's doing its job well enough. Overall, I like it!

However, there are couple of things I noted:
1) Defiled Graveyards can't be claimed for some reason, so if you spawn a Vampire Lord when Graverobbing it will never die even if you kill it while occupying its home tile, at least in my experience (it'll just keep respawning over and over until your dudes are dead).

2) It feels like Bandit Chiefs and the Prince of Thieves should have Stealth, or at least Forest Stealth, both for thematic purposes and so they can lead their merry bandits/poachers in ambushes.

Honestly I kind of feel like all of your initial recruits should have some form of stealth, other than the Landless Knight and Saboteur, if only because it's cool and no other class has as much stealth access. Though admittedly that might trip up the AI, since it's pretty bad at putting scouts in most of its armies, and it would screw over the few scout-less factions very hard.

3) I've played three fairly lengthy games with the class (all on Large maps) and have yet to use the Establish Bandit Camp spell once. You definitely do need a lot of citadels, but it's just too expensive for what you get, given that you need all the gold you can get your grubby mitts on in the early-mid game, and it doesn't help that it's on a unique commander who you already need to send all over the map to claim Castles and Gallows. Fortified Camps have the same problem, only worse, because you don't really care about your BCs after the early game since you'll either have more and hopefully fortified citadels or already be dead.

I agree with ThatGuySenpai; if Bandit Camps/Fortified Camps freespawned a slow trickle of Bandits (~1/turn, or maybe a batch of 1d10 or 2d10 once a year? Not sure about the numbers here, could be too many or too few), that'd actually kill at least two birds with one stone by making BCs more worth building/upgrading and also giving you a steady stream of dudes that you can use for garrison duty and army filler, which would be very useful for the class. It might make things a little swingy if you manage to take and upgrade multiple free bandit camps early in the game, but they're rare enough even in the Agricultural Era that that's pretty unlikely.

4) Piggybacking off other comments, I love the idea of letting Friars anoint Questing Knights, as a way to make both them and Landless Knights more interesting, and letting Minstrels create wandering bands of troubadours or other stealthy travelers sounds like a great way to improve your scouting network, which is quite important for the class given that you want to find a Castle ASAP, and those can be rare in some eras. While giving Apothecaries a way to heal afflictions is a nice idea, I don't think it really fits the class. Most of your dudes are pretty fragile, so they tend to die rather than get afflicted, and hey, you're a bandit king, do you really care that much about your minions? If you want them to have a use beyond being your best national mage recruit, maybe give them a gold income bonus like Alchemists? I think they're okay where they are, really.

I also agree that you should be able to do something with Ancient Forests, or at least stop them from spawning new critters. Maybe having an Ancient Forest unlocks some kind of nature-y mercenaries, like pixies, Cu Sidhe, or some similar sort of trickster or animal/animalistic fae, and more Forests give you a better chance of being able to recruit them? They'd probably go away if you decide to go the Demon route. You could also just have a ritual that lets you recruit one batch of Merry Men (aka probably Yeomen and Poachers) on each Forest. You could even use Ancient Forests as an alternate path to the Infernal Prince, maybe something like 'Prince of the Wild Hunt' which unlocks herbs and nature summons, possibly turns you into a weredeer or somesuch, and encourages you to take over the Primal Plane rather than the Inferno in order to realize your full power? Could be pretty neat and would give your endgame more variety, though I'm sure it would also be a terrific hassle to add.

5) Lastly, neither Towns, Libraries or Temples have any effect on class recruitment, at least according to the tooltip, which would be very unusual if accurate. If I recall correctly, normally Towns will make magic items and mercenary units more common, and Libraries will make it more likely to recruit mercenary mages even if your faction is otherwise mostly magicless (a la Senator and Baron), so it's pretty weird that you don't get even those relatively minor bonuses as the Bandit Prince. Might just be the tooltip acting up though, I'm not sure.

I'm only early into the game and I'm loving the mod so far! Just a quick question though, what are the Gems used for?

Excellent and fun mod.

perhaps have them be upgraded to allow them to do some helpful, but non essential stuff rather than gaining higher level spells would be a good idea? The friar gaining an income bonus, or the ability to turn a landless knight into an upgraded 'Questing knight'. Minstrals being able to recruit stealthy 'pilgrims/travelers' non-combatants that wander the map, apothecary having a ritual that lets him heal afflicions somehow? I am unsure you have done an amazing job as it is

Just a heads up, the ritual spells that have been given to commanders using the copyritual command don't have a description in game (Dispense Alms on the Prince of Thieves, for instance)

Whoops, guaranteed gallows was on the list but it looks like it slipped through, will fix soon. I'm not sure there's an easy way to force multiple terrains for a single class; I had not actually considered castles as I don't know that I've ever run into a map without them.

The Landless Knights are already stronger all around than heavy infantry. My notion is that for flavor reasons they don't seem like part of the main army, but they're probably not quite good enough to justify slow. I might take them back to armor 2 and give them full movement.

There will probably be a few upgrades and minor rituals added to the support commanders. Generally I'm not a fan of having anything important gated to random minor commanders, though, and I'm not really looking at having a lot of more powerful spellcaster access.

Oh I agree about the landless knight, I personally made them not slow to differentiate them from heavy infantry. It's not like you can really mass them after all.

Another note, the Landless knight.... Only slow unit this class gets and you can only get 1 at a time when you use Alms on a town+ That's not worth having a slow army for, and in cities/ports i often find myself accidentally selecting these guys with my other recruitments. It's just slightly annoying, hope you change it somehow!

Last thoughts:
The enemy summoned by the rob grave spell seem very variable in strength, which makes it hard to justify. Considering that you can only rob a graveyard once, I think it should maybe have a bigger reward or weaker enemies.

More early summoning rituals would be cool, like a stronger version of Alms that only works in Cities.

If possible, perhaps guarantee the spawn of a castle/gallows in order to progress down the tech tree. Also maybe allow the king to be crowned in the capital? Haven't seen either in both of my games, so I haven't had the chance to check out the late game content.

Overall, I like this one a lot, with a bit more tuning and content could very well be one of the best classes on the workshop.

Really cool class! I love the focus on assassination attacks, very unique. Perhaps even more units should have an attack like the enforcer. I've played 2 games pretty far, and I have a few thoughts.

Friars don't have their rituals like they're supposed to, that chaff ritual is pretty useful.

Perhaps Bandits instead of costing less, come in a larger number, like 5. The low recruit size is interesting but having one chaff-ish unit to fill ranks early could be useful.

On the same thought, perhaps bandit lairs should provide some free-spawn, like bandits? I'm not sure how strict the terraforming ritual is, but there doesn't seem to be much use to making new lairs, since if another player takes them they don't spawn the neutral brigands anyway, and having a citadel on the front lines, while useful, isn't that great with the low recruit numbers.

Minstrel's don't have humanoid slots either btw!

Amazing mod,

Just a note, Bandits cost the same as Yeomen but Yeomen have more moral, better weapons and shields. There should be a cost/number of recruit difference or really why would you ever recruit bandits?

Thanks for the feedback! Good catch on the yeoman slots. The bandit had their cost tweaked at the last minute and was supposed to be even cheaper, I'll be updating some of the costs soon.

Note that enforcers don't actually target mages, they just get a free strike at the start of battle. They're there to play around with assassination mechanics but aren't a replacement for real assassins. At one point they had a strikes-anywhere attack so you could get a bunch of them together and hope that one of them got a lucky hit on a mage, but I wasn't thrilled with how random it was for how strong it was; I need to play around with them more to figure out how best to balance them.

You get a lot of assassin offers so it's still fairly easy to assemble an assassin squad to gank mages. The faction has weak magic overall (outside of super super late endgame stuff) so it's intended as an equalizer, but it takes time and it's not something you can do on demand.