I’ve been really enjoying Nova Aetas. It’s come a long way! I like how the town management now: with the building and recruitment mechanics they feel more like some you shape to your needs. However, I am having a problem with how population and recruitment work right now. With late game cities, a squalor modifier is so heavily applied to cities with 11,000 to 12,000 that there is almost always negative growth. Since growth is tied to recruits, my larger cities are rarely able to produce any units.

I understand that historically cities were not large in pre-industrial Europe and that mechanically if cities got too big in the game they would produce ridiculous amounts of money. But can’t believe a town with over 10k people would have zero people to train. I feel recruiting from cities needs to be handled differently. Perhaps the current resource pool needs to be calculated separate from population or the population can be reduced directly, rather than from a separate recruitment number. The training time and build queues for units is enough to keep a kingdom from spamming units, so altering the recruitment system shouldn’t result in a Renaissance Kingdom having Soviet numbers of troops.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that crossbows seems to out preform firearms; Both in player use and unit use. I had a higher accuracy and “steadiness” (the three-sided cross hair was closer together) with a crossbow at about 100 crossbow proficiency than wheellock at about 300 firearms proficiency. While ancient firearms were no where as accurate or easy to use as their modern counterpart, they did out preform crossbows. See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeGtPxLwkuk

As you can see the matchlock had more range and more power at further range than the crossbows had. Yet both the player and units are inaccurate when using even the late game firearms. This combined with that even wooden shields can absorb quite a few shots makes it more worth it to train more accurate, faster firing crossbowmen.
I just really think guns need a buff, especially the last tech level’s.