https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php?topic=213256.0

"At all the castles, villages and towns that you are the lord of you will be able to recruit your faction troops. In other cases you will have to rely on mercenary troops(This includes if you are a lord(or mercenary) of a faction and try to recruit from fiefs that do not belong to you)."

Don't worry about merc's being expensive, you'll still get loads of dosh. Just go and talk to somebody like in Britian when you have 60 or so mercs in your party and join in a merc for that faction. You'll get tons of pay, and if you disband your horse men (since I hate horses, used to playing as Rhodoks) you'll get even more money. Go kill fools and make more dosh.

The town or village you own will have "lances" available for recruitment. One lance seems to be 6 to 10 guys. They will be various kinds of troops, at various tiers. They replenish over time, so if you hire all of them at once, you have to wait for the new lances.

ANY village or castle you go to, even one of your own faction, will not give you troops unless you own it. the only other way to get men is to go into any town and hire mercenaries for $3,000, and you get about 20 good tier troops this way. Mercenaries can't be upgraded. they're decent level troops but not top quality. you'll want to have an army of "real" troops, but you'll always have the expensive option to raise a whole army just by travelling between 3 or 4 towns.

I've played 1257 AD with both modes and have only recently started to prefer lance recruitment.

With native recruitment, you get to control the composition of your army. you go to towns for infantry, castles for cavalry and villages for missile troops. If you're playing with native recruitment, you can recruit from *any* village or town, so you can get infantry and missile troops regardless of what faction you're in. For cavalry, you have to be part of a faction and you can only recruit from that faction's castles.

They all obviously start at recruit level and you have to train them up. With native recruitment, you also don't get the batches of 20 mercenaries, you only get the handful of men from the taverns, like in the vanilla game.

what I used to do is exclusively recruit at castles to build an all cavalry army, then level them up to knights and destroy everyone for the rest of the game. lance recruitment keeps things fun by ensuring you a realistic army composition.

@fuzzytoastpops

thanks a lot