Knowing how to get retinue in Manor Lords is essential if you want to stand the best chance of defeating any adversaries, such as raiders and bandits, who dare invade your land and challenge you. Retinue soldiers are stronger than any member of your standard army, so while your retinue likely isn’t quite as big, they can turn the tide of battle with ease.
Retinue essentially means retainer, which is exactly what these soldiers are. While your army is full of men from your village who usually have standard jobs and only become fighters when combat is nigh, members of your retinue have fighting as their sole purpose.
Here’s the lowdown on how to get retinue in Manor Lords and how to increase retinue size. We’ll also explain why retinue recruits are missing.
How to get retinue in Manor Lords
Firstly, let’s tackle how you get your hands on retinue soldiers in the first place. To do this, you must have a Manor in your settlement.
Constructing a Manor will grant five soldiers into your retinue automatically, who will deploy themselves when combat is about to begin. Because they’re stronger than your usual soldiers, we recommended that you lead the charge with them with the rest of your standard fighters behind.
How to increase retinue size in Manor Lords
To increase the size of your retinue, you must click on the army option along the bottom, between construction and map. Your retinue will be listed here and selecting them gives you the option to rally, which can only be done during combat, or customize, which is where you need to go to increase the size.
In retinue customization, you can spend money from your treasury on hiring more retainers. It costs 50 gold to recruit a man-at-arms, and while there’s an option to promote one of your citizens to retinue, it’s currently grayed-out in early access.
This is also where you can upgrade your retinue, by improving the armor of each individual soldier. You can import a full suit of armor for 34 gold, or if you have an armorer in your settlement, for 17 gold.
You can recruit up to 12 soldiers this way by paying 50 gold at a time, but if you have a Garrison Tower attached to your manor, it’ll allow for another 12. You can place one Garrison Tower per region you control, which means you can only have a maximum of 24 retinue soldiers before you must expand your control of the land.
How to fix recruits missing in retinue
If you’re running into a pop-up that says you have recruits missing, all that’s happened is that your soldiers have been killed. This happens with your normal army (the fix for which is to simply have more families move in, something that happens automatically when your approval rate is high enough) but with your retinue, the fix is simply to go back into the customization screen and rehire the missing soldiers.
That’s all there is to know about retinue in Manor Lords, but make sure you also read up on how to trade if you need to import any missing products to your settlement.
