Unit Recruitment and a Call to Arms!

What calibur and equipment level of soldiers might appear during a Call to Arms would be contingent on a number of factors.  First, it depends on how well they have been drilled.  Rather than receiving a one time training period like your professionals do, they will be drilled, when citizens aren't working presumably, by your free barracks buildings when they are not currently training professional units.  So in other words, if you don't have a build command in your city for a spearman or swordsman to be built, that barracks won't just sit there and go to waste; it will be drilling the local populace to hone their skill in case there is a war.  The more free barracks you have, the more training goes toward the population at large.  The current calibur of your citizens can be represented by a simple calibur score, which = (total calibur / citizens.)  A certain number of free barracks would be required simply to maintain a certain level of calibur.  If barracks are destroyed or used in lengthy periods of time to create professionals, your citizens begin to lose their edge.  When a Call to Arms is declared, the citizens that appear at the city gates to go to war will have a quantity of experience upgrades that reflects your per capita calibur in that particular city.

Now the kind and quality of weapons that are available upon a Call to Arms will depend on your equipment score and wealth score of the city.  Equipment works in a similar fashion as calibur, with your unused Smithies building equipment for private ownership by your citizens, aka increasing your city's equipment score.  If your equipment score is very high in relation to the number of citizens that you have, you can expect better equipped citizens to show up for war.  If you have virtually no equipment and many citizens, you get peasants with pitch forks.  Also, if you have high wealth in your city, you can expect certain "special" citizens to show up to fight for your nation.  Merchants and their mercenaries or the nobles of an influencial house, their wealth affording them mounts and better quality armor.  An adventuring hero who calls the city his home but doesn't serve you directly might answer the Call to Arms as well.  A few hedge wizards might join your war as well, if you have built wizard guilds and libraries in your city.

Now, when your troops appear at your city and march away, the wealth, equipment, and calibur that was used to create them is deducted from your city.  When they return, it is added back to your city.  If they don't come back, those values are lost and must be regained.  This creates a much more serious air about wars because an offensive war in which you face a possible striking and decisive defeat will cripple your cities.  In most strategy games, a decisive defeat in a battle isn't generally a big deal, because the production capacity of your cities is unaffected, and you can merely spam new soldiers to fill the ranks.  With the Call to Arms method, every time you move a regiment of spearmen from the city of Azonia into position to charge the enemy lines, you'll be considering what that means for the health of the City of Azonia.

Equipment Score and Calibur might be added together to create an empire strength score and would be listed on your empire stats screen to represent how strong your empire is during times of war.  On the flip side, you can see the see opponent's strength scores if you have enough intelligence on them.

Your total equipment score and calibur will never all be sucked up all at once during a Call to Arms.  Presumably, many nobles and citizens will ignore, evade, or find some other way to exclude themselves from the call if they find it unjust or unworthy.  Your Call to Arms score (which will be contingent on the legitimacy of your war declaration) will pull a certain amount of citizenry, equipment, wealth, and calibur from your city.  So a Call to Arms against an ally and trading partner won't do much to encourage the merchants of your city (who's interests you are hurting) to join enthusiastically. 

I'll create another post later detailing other implications of wealth, calibur, and equipment scores. 

I like it! But you gotta make sure that the CtA armies are well balanced. The CtA army should not be able to beat the trained units, except if it's a huge army... but that would kinda ruin the idea of CtA armies... coz you can just train a lot of superior units.

And it would also be cool if the CtA armies would represent your population; if you have a wealthy but small trading empire, you get better but less units (of course also peasants, but more nobles), and if you have like 10 cities but all of them are poor, then you've got to make do with peasant armies(and a few nobles here and there)... And a rich AND large empire... would be even tougher to beat.

tl;dr:

This would be awesome but hard to balance.

Interesting idea but there are two major flaws I can see with this system:

1) Experience.

If the hordes of troops you get from a Call to Arms melt back into the population, what about any experience they might've gained? How in the world would you keep track of that? Even if doable, I can think of no way for it not to be messy, without retaining those soldiers in some way (for example, all those squads still exist, but are stationed at cities and demobilized by the player). But if that's the case, if I do a Call to Arms and get unlucky and none of my experienced troops respond... I'd be pretty annoyed.

2) Storage!

Where would the weapons and armor come from? In the current economic system, nowhere. No storage means no way to keep a stockpile of weapons or armor on hand... And when those troops melt back into your population, what happens to it all over again? If you still retain those squads of troops, then it isn't a problem, but then you have other problems (like the one mentioned above).

Personally I'd rather some sort of abstracted version of a system like this. Allow us to train big armies, but give us a 'demobilize troops' option for troops stationed in cities. They'll still be there, but if you want to use them in a military capacity you would have to do mobilize them which could take a few turns. If you have no plans for any large-scale combat coming up, send back the bulk of your army and demobilize them, and you no longer have to pay for their upkeep.

This would lose the feature of your Call to Arms system whereby the number of troops you get depends on the circumstances. That could be pretty cool, but it could also be a bit frustrating if you and the computer are not on the same page... 

Edit: your first response to your OP wasn't there when I started responding, so some of these have been addressed already. I am a bit skeptical about the whole 'equipment rating' and 'drill score.' What if I want to gear my empire towards a certain type of combat? They would need a whole interface to let me futz around with how my 'equipment rating' should be divided... And the 'drill score' still does not combat experience to last between successive calls to war.

Yes, I would never expect that Call to Arms citizen soldiers to ever be as effective as professional soldiers with the same equipment.  After all, a citizen soldier training on the weekends isn't the same as a professional training ever day.

Pigeon, legitimate concerns, but the answers are actually already implicit in the score system.  Every trait that a citizen soldier has when they were raised to fight have a corresponding "calibur" value.  So when the unit gains experience during a campaign, they gain levels and when they lay down their arms and return to work, that experience gained is converted into the calibur pool.  For instance:  Let's say you have 3 regiments of spearmen who have 120 calibur worth of experience when they are raised as soldiers.  Let's assume that none of them die and gain experience equaling 150 calibur.  When they return to the city population, they will be converted back into 150 calibur rather than the 120 that they started.

As for the second post, this is addressed by the equipment score.  Technically, the equipment score represents equipment that has been floating around in the economy and that were purchased by your citizens or by the minor nobles that rule over them.  So when you soldiers leave, the equipment score is reduced based on the values of what your citizen soldiers are armed with.  When they come back, the equipment score is replaced depending on who returned, who survived, etc.  Also, you can have an option in your empire management screen which allows you to make a "pretend" call to arms to see what kind of soldiers you'd end up getting based on deciding factors (which will be described next.)  We could call it something like "Muster!" and you'd be able to call a muster in any given city to see what units you'd likely get in a call to arms.

As for what your soldiers are armed with, that might depend on the kind of buildings you've built in the city.  If you have bowyers or a hunting lodge in the city, you can expect them to be armed with bows.  If there is a lumber mill in the city, axes and spears.  If you have a lot of swordsmiths in the city, you should expect that your citizens will own swords.  The point here is to maintain simplicity and give the player an organic ability to customize their citizen soldiers.  Instead spending half the game outfitting every individual soldier, you build extra swordsmiths if you want your citizens to have swords available, etc.  Sometimes, what your citizen soldiers are armed with will be effected by your economic decisions rather than your meticulous military outfitting decisions.  Ultimately, this method gives you slightly less authoritarian control over exactly what you build in a desperate Call to Arms, but it forces the player to think on the fly and think outside of the box.  If you have a bunch of spearmen rise to fight for you from a lumber city, you have to think of how to creatively integrate them into your army of professionals. 

This method is much more simplistic than having sheets and sheet of data about what citizen is armed with what weapon, and cuts down on micromanagement substantially.  If you want to, you don't even have to worry about what your citizen soldiers might be armed with but focus instead on customizing your elite professionals.  I think there are a lot of possibilities. 

This is truly by far the best suggestion I have read on these forums. The system you propose is intuitive due to its reliance on historical mythos that many people are aware of; it is simple because of the small number of beautifully interconnected mechanics; and it is versatile because it can be linked nicely with diplomacy, adventuring or whatever other facet of the game the modders might later engage with. And, as an added bonus, it is new. Thumbs way up and karma for you, friend.

I like this, too!

Thanks Wits :-)  What I like about my Call to Arms method the most, I think, is that it is less authoritarian than the current paradigm.  In most games, you have complete and utter control to the extent that your people don't really have any control of their own lives at all.  With the Call to Arms method of warfare recruitment, its implied that you, the sovereign, is merely creating infrastructure by which your people may work with.  There is a sort of assumed market place for weapons that is present in a city, and each facet of the city is integrated into what kind of weapons you end up with.

Some people may not like that your citizen soldiers will likely end up with a broad range of weapons and training, but I think it will be more fun.  In city planning, the buildings you use will influence your economy and military composition.  And on the battlefield, you'll have to think on the fly more often than if you just had the same 3 or 4 kinds of designed "professional" units. 

One interesting element that might be added to the Call to Arms method of recruitment would be to allow the player to create a unique icon for each of their cities if they choose.  Then, when you field your soldiers in battle, that same icon will appear on a regiment's banner depending on what city they are from (with professional soldiers having your Empire's insignia).  Then you could tell at a glance, "Oh, there goes my militia from Fairweather, city of rangers and hunters" or "Uh oh, looks like the levies from my Capital City are taking a heavy beating.  I'd better have them withdraw, or I won't have anyone running my mithril mines by the end of the war!"  Even if you don't use the icons in this fashion, it would still give a lot of flavor to battle,

  Great idea.

I won't bother debating the details since we haven't really seen how the game works yet. But the broad concept seems promising.

True.  Technically, a system like Call to Arms doesn't even really change the current mechanics of the game at all, it would just be a matter of adding a few extra features tacked on to pre-existing features.

I like this suggestion in Concept.

Conceivably this shouldn't be too difficult for a "total conversion mod" to do.

total conversion mod? mod? conversion? total?

If we need any kind of "total conversion" to the game in order to add a call-to-arms, then it definitely will A) not come out for months if not years, and B ) be very difficult to do, and possibly not function in multiplayer.

I think the concept of call-to-arms should either be "in the game" or "not in the game". If its just added in later it will probably feel awkward, and against the grain of the rest of the game. This is either a possibility to make "wars" different from isolated skirmishes between knightly orders (under control of the sovereign), and also make being "unstoppable in a skirmish" or having the "best professional armies" not equate to being "unstoppable" and "leading to your defeat". Instead, It would take some serious sort of threat for you to wish to spend all of your resources on a complete, all-out, dare I say "total war". As opposed to going to war simply because you want "more land" or their influence is over-powering yours.

By the way I would rather influences not tend to over-power each other, and/or I would like for battles to be able to change borders without taking cities (see the influence based war mod for Civ 4) ... basically any battles won in-between two rival cities will move the borders closer to the loser ... "expanding" the borders of the winner, in other words. Although I would like for a cities workable tiles to not be stolen from a player ... merely extra land for fortresses, resources, or what-have-you.

Either way ... the decision to add Call-to-Arms or not is entirely game-changing, and could suffer to change almost EVERY aspect of the game. Therefore, while this is probably agreed by some to be one of the best ideas so far ... the decision should be made early, and admittedly its quite a risk to implement such an avante-guarde system. Correct me if I am wrong.

I am still skeptical, and for the same reasons as before. Your response to my first post hasn't really assuaged my skepticism much.

1) Experience: if I send out a Call to Arms and go to battle, imagine the following scenario. I get 1000 troops from my CtA, 500 of them end up in the thick of it; 200 of those 500 survive with significant experience. The other 500 were used to fortify key locations and never saw battle. When all these units are reabsorbed into the population, the 'caliber' of my population will go up accordingly. But next time I send out a CtA, what happens? Assume I get just as many people responding this time as the first - but do I end up with 200 veterans, or 1000 troops with that experienced averaged between them? Some sort of statistical sampling? There is a huge difference between all of these... It also means if we get perks with experience, those would only be relevant for our professional, standing army.

2) Equipment: Still seems like 'free' equipment to me. Especially if you've got lots of good resources, the ability to raise what will likely be the biggest part of your army (numerically at least) instantaneously with all their equipment there (without you ever having spent anything on it) just doesn't seem like it'd work well to me. Where did the resources to make all that come from? In the current system I'm under the impression that any unused resources per turn are used to speed up projects. If there were actually resource 'waste' then this would be a good place to send it, though... If there is no waste, though, the this is just free equipment.

If there were resource storage, on the other hand, this could be solved quite easily. Without resource storage, all I can think of is to have a kingdom setting that reserves a %age of your resources/turn to go towards improving your equipment score... But it'd be a real pain for it to also factor in the different kinds of resources.

I think a system like this definitely has potential, but it has some major hurdles that would need to be jumped to make it really workable. What to do with experience, how to handle equipment are the two major ones as I see them. The equipment problem would be solved in one stroke if they give us storage, the experience problem is trickier.

Well, for Call-to-Arms, I think the entire idea is that these people are not meant for battle. If you want to take an experienced regiment and train them into profesional soldiers, be my guest, but I think re-absorbing them into the city should lose all their experience points, and that there should be no "perks" for absorbing battle-hardened peasants into a city. All you would get are traumatized citizens which get drunk alot and have nightmares ... realistically your city value might go "down". As far as equipment, lets say you get 1% chance for that caliber of resource to be used in peasant creation for every 1.0 unit of resource you have access too (or even a % chance only based upon the rummage value) ... so you complete the % chances for it having basic access to each equipment (always a lv1 iron sword, NEVER a lv5 iron sword), and those that do not get proper equipment get an attack n defense value of 0.5? and have cloth armor with wooden mob-weapons (like stakes, pitchforks, and clubs). Thats my personal idea anyways. HP could be randomly assigned from 1-5, (10?) although highly weighted towards having 1 HP ... just to represent the fact that some people have hidden talent. I think this should be random for each individual peasant soldier ... so your never entirely certain of a peasant unit's effective-ness ... you just have to pray to God and Saint George that there are a couple iron-weapon 10hp peasants hidden in all that rabble. Im certain there are certain strategic developments you could make (as well as getting a Storage system purely for this mechanic, able to stock-pile weapons in preparation for possible invasion/total war) which could make your Call-to-Arms better than some-one elses (like a Crusade for instance) ... so while you could make the peasants that arrive better, wether due to a last-minute en-masse bootcamp or what-have-you, the actual NUMBERS of peasants would always be Diplomatically dependent, dependent on the willingness of the Populace to fight.

Meanwhile Royalty are theoretically always trained for combat, so would be part of the professional army at least in heart and mind. Also, perhaps the presence of a well-liked royal family member could inspire the peasants with extra morale or hitpoints (somehow) ... and nearby the Sovereign would be filled with perhaps Holy or Religious reverence.

Since a peasant (or militia, since I consider militia vastly superior) force is highly dependant on numbers, I think it should, like the Imperial Guard, have very low morale and be entirely dependent on morale modifiers (like nearby respected generals, nearby professional troops, extra pay ... anything you can think of to modify morale). Therefore, to defeat a peasant army, you must break their line or break their willpower. However ... I should think peasants on the same battle-field as their Sovereign should either have extremely high morale or be infinite morale. For a soldier/mercenary/hero, protecting their Sovereign is a normal job, a way to get paid. For a peasant, protecting the sovereign is their entire life. ... or perhaps a special spell or ability Sovereign only could increase peasant morale to infinite. Either way ... it would be a scary thing to see (if you had 15,000 peasants vs 500 professional soldiers, for instance)

IMO, that would be dismal. I would not want to play a game where wars are determined by such randomness, and where by necessity all full-on wars are fought by rabbles of worthless peasantry, and where experience is meaningless for all but your professional army. Realistic? Mostly... Fun? Not really... 

I dont know pigeon ... there could be technologies to make your rabble better, for you to focus on this strategy ... while there could be other technologies to focus more on professional soldiers ... some-how both start-technologies need to disqualify the other however ... so you can either technologically focus on bettering your rabble or getting more Strength for the Training buck (or more bang for the buck) to make professional soldiers better at killing large numbers of rabble.

Also, it doesn't have to be random, but I certainly do not want them gaining experience which lasts beyond the war. If you re-settle them in a city, then they lose their experience, its a strategic decision. But of course they would gain experience throughout the war. And if a Victory Screen includes captured equipment, you could re-equip those crappy peasants with better armor and weapons (maybe). Its a tricky thing to play with/work around ... but honestly I think it would be a fun way to display the horrors of total, nationalistic style warfare .... (even if back in Medieval times most wars were only fought by the proffesionals, I think this game is in a different theme from that, being totalitarian live-or-die circumstances, with awesome magical power, I think Nationalism would be alot stronger, and discovered as soon as the wild-men meet the Sovereign)

Basically launching a full-scale war could cripple your own economy ... but they would most likely have to do the same. Well, I said in concept the idea was good. Of course there will be arguments on how to implement.

Pidgeon, all legitimate concerns, but there is no free equipment in this system.  What it really is based on is the idea that your citizens have their own private lives, and you as a ruler are less of a Totalitarian Dictator and more of a minister when it comes to managing their lives.  In other words, you don't own own the citizens.  You build public works like mines, lumber mills, and weapon smiths with the taxes they give you and they get to use it when you aren't.  What I was really aiming for with a Call to Arms was to make it as elegant as possible, with as few unnecessary "moving parts" as possible.  It seems like all the things you are asking for in the Call to Arms method are already there.  For instance:

Equipment: The equipment score IS a representation of what you have stored up.  Let me illustrate.  You start your very first city next to an iron mine and forest.  At this moment, your equipment score and calibur are 0.  You build a mine, lumber mill, barracks, and weapon smithy.  Your people use some of the lumber for other building projects, which leaves a good bit of iron available for creating swords and light armor.  Currently, you are training no professionals, so the barracks trains the populace at large instead.  After a handful of turns, your equipment scores rises to 100 (with level 1 swords having a value of 10) and your calibur rises 150.  During this time, your sovereign discovers a dungeon inhabited by fiersome monsters, and decides he should train some professional soldiers to accompany him.  You spend 25 turns training some professionals, sucking up the productivity of your weaponsmith and barracks toward this effort.  As a result, your equipment level is no longer growing, and your calibur drops 20 points, as your citizens get a bit rusty. 

After you've trained your soldiers, you also coincidentally no longer have any construction projects in quo either, so the lumber from you lumber mill is funneled automatically toward weapon contruction as well.  Because your weaponsmith is flooded with choice options for weapon contruction, your equipment level rises rapidly to 400.  Your barracks gets back to work training citizens, and calibur rises to 250 (the population has increased quite a bit too, though, so the per capita calibur hasn't changed much.  You call for a Muster (which is a "sample" Call to Arms to a specific city) to see what kind of citizen soldiers you'll have available if it comes to war.  A regiment of 26 swordmen (10 x 26 = 260 equipment) and a regiment of 28 spearmen (28 x 5 = 140) appear at the muster field.  They have no levels but a trait called "minor training" which makes them less likely to route.  A few units within the swordsmen regiment even have the trait "competent" which gives a minor attack bonus or +1 to HP. 

Now the formula that decides what units get what weapons can be written in a variety of ways.  There can be a small ticker built into each build that tracks how long that building has been around, thus determining how long it has been theoretically supplying materials for weapons.  These values would be hidden from the player except during a muster call, to keep the player from being swamped with information.  All the player sees is a score in the city interface with an arrow pointing upwards with projected gains.  The equipment scores of all of your cities would be tabulated in your empire info screen.

Now, in regard to experience.  If you declare a second "Call to Arms" and a good bit of that XP is still left from a chain of victories in the last CtA, you don't get the exact same units that came out last time (from an internal game mechanics standpoint, the game doesn't keep track of them, otherwise things get complicated for the player).  Instead, it is assumed that regiments have been shuffled somewhat due to shifting demographics inside of the society.  Some veterans will retire, or be assigned to a different regiment to help train newer citizens, some citizens will cash out their spears for swords, etc.  In other words, you keep some of the experience depending on how much time has ellapsed, but things have changed, so your regiments change as well.  Professionals keep their experience, obviously, because they are able to train full time to keep their edge. 

Now, if by the end of a campaign, some of your citizen soldiers have performed admirably, there may be an option by which you could pay to convert them to professionals (paying gold simulates you buying the weapons which they privately own, etc.)  I was also thinking that when you go to train professional soldiers from the populace, you might even have the option to spend gold to dip into the calibur pool or equipment pool of a city to get a production boost.   

Also, there are many other interesting implications for equipment scores.  For instance, if you have excess equipment scores throughout your city but not a whole lot of wealth, you might sign a "weapons trade" treaty with a friendly neighbor, allowing your weapons to be available in the free market between your empires.  As a result, a certain percentage of your equipment growth would go to your trade partner,  The equipment score of their cities goes up by the corresponding amount.  Conversely, their wealth score in their cities declines a certain percentage and the wealth scores in your city increases by a certain percentage.

The biggest implication though (and the one that inspired me to come up with this idea) is it's impact on War Fatigue.  In most strategy games--- most notoriously seen in the Total War games--- both players have prestine, largely unencumbered cities spitting out new units toward the tug-of-war at the front.  Now, when you go into an all out war and have taken losses, you aren't just losing a stack of units that can be re-spammed quickly now that you aren't paying as much maintenance.  If you march half a game's equipment gain off to war and lose it all, you'll be feeling it in the morning.

I have no idea what you mean by the "caliber" of the citizenry, they are citizens! the only Caliber of a citizen should be how much food he can eat, imo. I don't see how training units will make your citizens get "a bit rusty".

Calibur represents strictly their ability as stand in soldiers.  When you aren't training professionals, your barracks spend their efforts drilling the masses with military technique on weekends or what have you.  Almost no amount of barracks buildings would be able to train all of your citzens completely, but two barracks buildings are better than one for that purpose.  Let's say, for instance, that you are almost always training professionals with your barracks.  You'll have a lot of good professional soldiers, but your citizens won't even know how to form a straight line.  Let's say you have 4 barracks buildings in a relatively small city, and you almost never train professionals.  You can expect that most of your citizens who answer the muster call will be almost as good as professionals. 

Even though calibur rises faster the more unused barracks buildings you have, eventually that calibur will come to a per capita equilibrium level because your citizens will never have as much time to train as your professionals.  After all, they must tend to their farms, shops, or other tasks. If your citizens don't have access to a barracks for too long, they begin to forget some of their milita discipline (or newcomers to the city militia aren't getting any training) and this is represented by a fall in calibur.

Buhh now it's gotten all complex on me, though.

So when, exactly, does my equipment score go up? Does it always go up? What if I'm using all my resources to their full potential? You're saying that there's really more to be had, but my measly little peasants are hogging it? Why would I let them do that when I have a kingdom to build from the bottom up  :P. Also, my impression of the planned economy system is that as long as a resource is being used anywhere in your kingdom, that resource will be shipped to wherever it's being used in order to speed it up... Which means your resources would only be unused if you aren't building anything at all that requires it...

Would it be easy for a player to tell why his equipment score is going up or down, and by how much? When he musters, will he understand why there are 4 times as many spears as swords? And what about armor? Will your peasants ever get anything but the most basic equipment? How is that determined? How can that be displayed so that the player can understand it and figure out how he can affect it to his liking?

And you still haven't really addressed the free equipment problem. If your equipment score only ever goes up when you aren't using all your resources, then I suppose it's not technically free. But if it goes up even if you are using it, then it is most definitely free. Let's say there's a player whose focus is predominantly on his professional army; he doesn't expect to get much out of his CtA, and he intends to use what peasantry does show up as fodder to minimize casualties of his more valued professional soldiers. If equipment score goes up even if you're using all your resources, this player would be at a disadvantage to a player who relies heavily on a CtA - the latter's rabble of peasantry has been equipped by a completely separate, ambiguous, shadowy resource pool; the former player, on the other hand, hardly sees an effect from that pool - he had to pay for pretty much all the equipment of his military (it being professional) out of his pocket!

There absolutely should not be multiple, separate and exclusive resource pools, even if one is only sort of kind of there. (Also, as a side note - lumber mills do not make weapons). 

There is actually a similar problem related to the drilling of your peasantry by barracks. Why do I have to pay to train professional soldiers out of my coffers, but not a cent to drill my peasantry? In the system as proposed, someone could refrain from training a single professional soldier, then have war declared on him. He could then send out a Call to Arms, gather a massive army of decently well-trained and equipped peasants for free! He didn't spend an ounce of gold, and depending on whether or not the equipment score draws from only 'left over' resources or from a separate pool entirely, he might not have spent any resources either. It just seems wrong to me.

The inability to affect the kinds of weapons contributing to your equipment score (besides building many more of a certain type of building than perhaps you'd ever need for any other reason...) is also a problem. If I know that I am going to be facing armies consisting largely of mounted units for the foreseeable future, I would really like to be able to steer my equipment score towards being mostly pikes, followed by bows. Swords, maces and axes would be pretty much worthless. Without actual storage, doing this would be quite a mess... There is some appeal in dealing with what you're given, but it is also quite frustrating if you know what you need but are unable to get it due to confining mechanics.

Regarding peasantry caliber... First of all of the caliber goes down if there aren't enough available barracks to drill them, then the optimal strategy will be to keep your barracks open before wartime; make sure you have a sufficient professional army, then keep your barracks drilling your peasants all the way up until you send out your Call to Arms. If it doesn't decay, then your peasantry might become too fearsome. If experience isn't really maintained between calls to arms, then a player who relies heavily on their peasantry will largely miss out on experience as a whole, and their armies will not really gain veteran status over time - they will have to start fresh every time. 

This is already more complicated than what it's supposed to replace. It's got a lot of interesting features and ideas stuck in it, but I just don't really see it being fun in actual implementation. Now, storage would solve most of, or maybe all of, the equipment problems (storage seems to be a good solution to so many of the problems in so many of the ideas that have been tossed around lately... sigh); so if they gave us storage and if we could figure out a good solution to the experience/caliber problem, then perhaps I'd change my mind about it.

I would prefer to go extra-simple, with equipment divided among the peasants based upon resource availability, wether pure addition or, my preferred, upon Probabilty ... if say you had Iron, Copper, Steel, Mithril, Glass, and Wood, and lets say you were making weapons out of all of these, well, A couple peasants might have mithril, while some more would have Steel and Glass weapons. Even more would have Iron, and Plenty would have Copper. The rest would be equipped with wooden weapons beffiting a frankenstein tale (pitchforks and clubs).

Now, with probability, its not guaranteed to get exact numbers of each equipment, so I like it better. In either school, its simple and straightforward, and your peasants will be equipped with whatever is most available ... usually being Wooden weapons, and various equipment will be included as anything under the rainbow. Wood-using peasants however, will be familiar with their weapon, and will therefore get +1 hp (most peasants have only 1 hp, so +1 would double it)

I think peasants from a single city (and tabard) should share how much morale and endurance each unit recieves. The morale is based upon the Prestige and Happiness of a city, while Endurance is directly related to Food Availability/ food rations.

Just in-case things get hairy, the stats I see fit for a wooden equiped, unarmored, untrained peasant would be 0.5 attack, 0 defense, and 1 hp. very little morale and very little endurance. Now, available equipment, Prestige level, and Food availability can influence all of those things into a healthy range of positive values.

A peasant army lives and dies by morale modifiers ... I think Despotism and such should allow for a Government Agent to lead a rabble of peasants as a "leader" who whips the army into line, primarily killing the ocasional slacker when the enemy was at the doorstep.

To Address experience concerns ... each peasant unit could have a militia Unit commander, who is normally part of the town garrison/guard perhaps. Any experience the unit learns is stored in the Militiamen. Militiamen is now tagged as Peasant Commander. Once the people retire into their cities, the Peasant Commanders perhaps are stored in the city as experience place-holders, perhaps. Then when the next Call-to-Arms is sounded, the Peasant Commander will train the new recruits a certain amount of the previous unit's experience. How much of the experience thats passed on could be dependant on the time, decreasing (to give an arbitrary amount) 2.5% each turn to a minimum of 50% tranferred after 100+ turns of inaction.

If you want the peasant commanders to be doing something while stored in the city (because it would be too troublesome to rejoin them with other soldiers (place them back as soldiers) ... but they can be placed as cityguard/police figures, and their combined experience level can help to fight crime within the city, increasing efficiency and decreasing waste.

Pidgeon, a lot of text so I'll try to address points one by one :-)  First off, this is our idea so I guess we can say it works however we want it to.  However, my vision is that the sovereign is not the Totalitarian ruler of his society.  He is the curator, the guardian, and an administrator that collects taxes.  He does not own the people, but has certain rights as a monarch figure among nobles.  Minor nobles and peasants have day to day lives that the sovereign does not necessarily control.  This makes sense, because if your citizens came out of the wastelands a generation or two ago, they could just as easily go back if they think you are a prick .  What's more, there are no loose ends here that are out of the player's control.  There are fewer demands on the player's attention, but that's only because your actions have multiple consequences.  I try to add elegance to my ideas so that the player is not burdened with so many tasks that he/she just ends up neglecting most of them.  As for most of your questions, they have already been answered in previous posts, but I don't expect anyone to follow every detail out of that wall of text, so I'll repeat some of them.  With this in mind:

Equipment only goes up when you aren't building professional soldiers and never declines unless they are lost in warfare.  Let me repeat that statement and bold it.  Equipment scores do not rise while you are building professionals.  I think I've said this a lot, and I'm not sure how else to say it to make it clear (I've given an example in the previous post).  After all, an iron ingot can't be used simultaneously to make a sword for a professional and a sword for a peasant.  I haven't answered the question of armor yet, but I think a unit's armor should probably be linked with what unit type it would be, otherwise you'll end up with far too many citizen unit types than can be managed on the battlefield.  I envision there being a finite number of citizen unit types which are only modable outside of a given game and each have an equipment value.  For instance, levy swordsmen (10 equipment), levy spearmen (5), noble swordsmen (25), merchant guardsmen (20).  Whether you get nobles or peasant levies depends on whether there is wealth in a city to support a large noble or artisan class of citizens (I haven't gotten to wealth scores yet, but they aren't too complex.) 

Only calibur falls, which is essentially a check to make sure your professionals aren't ever extremely out classed by your citizens.  I've also mentioned before, to address the "fearsomeness" of peasants that you are concerned about, that there is an equilibrium per capita value for barracks.  So for instance, if you have 1 barracks building, your per capita calibur cannot go over 20.  If your have 2, it cannot go over 35.  If 3, 45, etc.  This prevents citizens from becoming better than professionals, but nonetheless makes them better in battle.  Citizens soldiers are not meant to be veterans from war to war.  If 20 years go by between wars, there's little reason to expect them to have their edge if they are only training part time.  If you want to convert some of your veteran citizens at the end of a war to professionals, I don't see where there should be an option for it.

What equipment is built is determined sort of on the resting state of your city.  Whatever is left over from the sovereigns efforts the peasants use in their marketplace.  Your professional soldiers will have maintenance, but personally armed citizens will not, so I assume that your barracks and smithy buildings will be fallow most of the time.  It would be silly to assume that they are shooed away from a weaponsmith or barracks if it is being usused, and by my method, it's likely privately owned by a minor noble anyway with the sovereign having given money to the owner for concessions of service when required.

If you hover your mouse over the "muster" button, it shows you what your citizens are armed with.  If you click right click the muster button and select "more details," it tells you the rate at which you are currently gaining equipment and why, but you are unable to set priorities from this menu.  Priorities are elegantly set by the economic decisions that you make, which adds double meaningfulness to your actions.  If you are building housing projects with your lumber, that lumber isn't floating around as much in the general marketplace for the purpose of materials to be converted to spears at your weaponsmith.  Hence, free lumber in the marketplace will be more expensive to your citizens and fewer spears will be made rather than swords from abundant which are coming from an abundance of iron.

Well, this wouldn't be a hard thing to implement if you really wanted it.  You could just add a teeny option in the muster detail screen that I mentioned earlier where sliders are next to each weapon type.  It could even be in the empire management screen too, and it would only take up a small space, as I'm assuming there won't be more than a handful of weapon types.  However, if you set priorities, you will lose efficiency.  My original vision was that your citizens are arming themselves, so they are being economical about what they buy.  Also, there are some citizens that have absolutely no intention of fighting for you in an unfounded war of aggression, but will readily defend their city if it is attacked or be willing to form a possy to fight a small band of monsters that are raiding their farms.  If there is a build priority, it will represent your sovereign meddling with the current market forces to encourage a higher percentage of weapon construction of a certain type (taxing the use of iron by peasants, making weapons that are heavily wood based more economical.) 

You have to consider that if you make a build priority for something like spears and pikes and you don't have much lumber, you'll get what you want (more pikes and spears) but your equipment score won't increase as much.  You can use lumber more efficiently by working with it slower, but you can't create a spear and pike shaft out of thin air.  And I made it very clear earlier that lumber mills don't make weapons--- weaponsmiths so.  Last time I checked, though, it takes lumber to make weapons like bows, pikes, and spears.  If you want to make that priority you have set more efficient, you build more lumber mills so that there is more lumber for your smiths to build these wood based weapons out of (nothing absurd about needing stuff to build weapons from).  You made it out in your post that extra buildings to improve your CtA strength was a "waste" that you wouldn't otherwise build, but you have to consider that in this method, a CtA is a very major part of the game, not just a bonus.  If you improve your citizen soldiers by building extra lumber mills to increase your equipment score, that's not a waste: it's good planning.

But in this method, when you declare a CtA, you aren't meant to have a concisely tailored army that works like a well oiled machine.  The whole point of a CtA is that you are grabbing what you can get.  Yes, the OCD crowd won't like this, but there is no less strategy involved, just a different kind of strategy.