So, while responding in another thread, I started to spaz out, and started to fantasize about mock battles as a way to train your units. As such, I wanted to create a post with it as a more coherent thought, and to hopefully spark discussion, or mayhaps inspire the devs/a modder if they happen to stumble across it. My idea is as follows:

Mock battles would be amazing to have in this game. Being able to rent out an arena/the training field, or later on after you've built a training field at your castle/town, and have your units split off and fight each other. The idea being they're all equipped with training weapons, and literally fight each other to gain experience. Or (and I haven't played Warband, so forgive me if I'm wrong) the ability to fight one on one duels with your soldiers to give them experience. To pit the tier 1/2/3 recruits against your higher tier infantry, in mock training exercises, so the higher tier units are "giving pointers/battle experience" to your newbies, and they get experience that way. It'd probably have to be slower than actual battles, since they're not fighting for their lives, but with zero chance of death. Worst case scenario, they're wounded and have to take the regular amount of time to recover.

Additionally, I'm thinking of even having mock sieges with your troops, or other scenarios besides 10v10 or 20v20 or whatever numbers for field battles. To see how your troops would handle sieging a castle, deal with overwhelming numbers, or against different troop compositions, and gaining experience/traits for your troops that way. However, that would lead to a far more complex system for troops, such as them gaining individual traits such as Siege Attacker, or Field Commander, allowing your troops to gain bonuses or have debuffs depending on the terrain/type of battle you're fighting. If such a thing were possible, I understand it'd likely clutter up the party menu even more, as otherwise there'd be no way for the game to memorize that Troops 1, 14, 17, 23 or whatever in a 40 unit stack has trait X (say, experienced siege attacker), and the rest don't, or even have some other trait. So you'd probably end up with, like, a stack of 11 Legionaries that would perform better in a siege, a handful who maybe made it thus far being cowards (and thus have lower morale), etc.

I have zero idea how much if any of this is possible, but as someone who absolutely adores this game, shallow as it is at the moment, and is extremely excited about its future, I wanted to spark discussion, as I mentioned at the start. Hopefully, I can cause some inspiration for people, get the devs to see this, or even just have a fun topic for people to talk about, discuss, maybe even throw their own ideas into the pot.

Thanks for coming to my TedTalk.