I'm not entirely comfortable with the way military units are handled in Birthright. There seem to be a number of issues with them that cause problems.
  • Racial bonuses are not included. This means, effectively, that you must "buy" any racial bonuses. For example, the average elf has a +2 Dex bonus, and therefore +1 to AC and to their attacks with missiles. They should be better than the equivalent human archers that lack this Dex bonus; if you want to reflect that, though, you have to buy them heavier armour and/or +Miss training, so that the elven unit ends up more expensive. Now, I understand that this is done for balance reasons, but it's still an awkward mechanic.
  • The costs to muster units have little to no correlation with standard price lists. This is most obvious when you consider how much 200 horses would cost for a cavalry unit, but if you run the numbers for virtually any unit you discover that these soldiers are very poorly paid, as there is little left over from the seasonal maintenance cost after feeding them. Presumably these are professional soldiers, not a militia - they would expect better wages than a farmer would get. But this is a minor issue at best; the vagueness of the value of a GB can be pointed at here in order to evade the question.
  • It is not easy to represent powerful creatures because of the first point. A unit that consisted of 200 ogres, for example, could not possibly be represented with the range of statistics available. Granted, the rules suggest that a "unit of ogres" would actually be mostly smaller creatures with only a few ogres, but there is no getting around that the inability of the system to represent a 200 ogre unit is a restriction.


I actually do quite like the actual resolution system of war cards, though. I just feel that the way that the units are created is quite clunky.

It seems possible that you could construct a system whereby racial bonuses were paid for separately to training. For example, if you worked out that a unit of ogre standard irregulars should have a +8 melee attack bonus rather than +4, you could make ogres cost (say) 4GB more than humans do. The advantage of this is that you could then have trained ogres that were even better. You could also take racial penalties into account this way to lower the cost.

The main advantage of such a system would be that you could create units that were actually different, as opposed to the current situation whereby every race can construct pretty much the same units.