During the first month of CCNet Nations 2 we had NPC soldiers which sadly were implemented too poorly to be viable to keep existing and the community collectively agreed to remove them. I personally disliked them aswell as they were very spammable due to not a reasonable manpower cap existing. If you were a large nation like nords back then you could summon like 50 gunspammers every day (very unbalanced and caused extreme lag).

Now Im not saying NPC soldiers are what CCNet needs, but Im interested in seeing people's thoughts if this feature was implemented again but in a more refined way.

For starters you could make a hardcap of NPC soldiers being used at same time at like 10, allies included, to reduce lag and NPC dominance. NPCs didnt have great damage but it stacked very good and could kill people back then. Now with the damage tick thing being a goner, I think NPCs would be more balanced as ure not being gunned down by all of them at once losing hearts in a heartbeat. Though I still dont think they should do great damage as it would ruin the purpose of actual gunner players.

NPCs manpower would be based on like the amount of residents a nation has but not like a 1:1 ratio more like a 1:10 ration aka 10 residents = 1 NPC manpower daily. This means that after NPC your army dies once in a day you cant recover them, but its also literally NPCs so they can be gunspammed to death either by other NPCs or other players. NPCs main target should be other NPCs by default, so if both sides have NPCs they dont damage players but rather damage NPCs first then players (if that makes sense it would balance again NPCs combat affection).

Their range should in return not be high so they dont get abused by being placed on fort. NPCs would be good to fight like 2 blocks near fort or straight up on the field, not snipe like a gunspammer. This might make them useless but cba tbh I think NPC vs NPC combat on the side of player vs player combat would be too funny.

What are the thoughts on this? It seems fairly balanced if u ask me like it doesnt affect pvp unless one sides NPCs are all dead and even then theyd do bad support dmg thats unstackable and theyre easy to counter with player snipers