Expeditions: Rome Legion Recruitment and Perks Guide

It’s important to understand how Legion recruitment works in Expeditions: Rome. Since you can recruit multiple soldiers to bolster your army in the form of Centurions and Praetorians, you’ll need to know how the various systems works, as well as what perks and options to look out for.

This Expeditions: Rome guide leads you through it all, telling you everything you need to know about Legion recruitment and various soldier perks. 

Expeditions: Rome Legio VI Victrix Legion Explained

As you advance further in Act 1 of Expeditions: Rome, you’ll gain control of Legio VI Victrix. Since there’s a lot to discuss, we advise you to take a look at our other guides regarding Outpost buildings and upgrades, Conquests and Strategems, and Pacification missions for a greater picture of everything you’ll need to manage when it comes to Legions. 

Suffice to say, what we’ll focus on in this guide are the Legion Barracks and its upgrades (those with the tent icon) in the Outpost Management screen.

First off, make sure that someone is assigned to the Barracks, preferably a character with the Recruiter perk. You’ll hire Legion recruits with denarii, and you’ll be able to check the large tent in the middle of the camp to see these new recruits after a few hours pass in-game.

Hire Praetorian Versus Hire Centurion: What’s the Difference?

When hoving over a soldier in the Barracks Recruit tab in Expeditions: Rome, you’ll see two options:

• Hire Praetorian — The characters you hire as Praetorians will become regular party members. You can have up to eight generic soldiers in your squad.
• Hire Centurion — The characters you hire as Centurions will be engaged with Legion battles against other armies (i.e., Conquests). You can select up to four.

You can review characters you’ve hired by clicking on the Party tab. This is also where you can replenish army casualties, as well as dismiss any characters that you’ve hired. Don’t worry, though: they’ll still appear in the recruitment pool for the rest of the campaign.

The Best Perks & Options to Look for When Hiring Centurions

Centurions will lead your army, though they won’t necessarily be part of your turn-based battles. Look for these perks and options when hiring Centurions as Legion recruits.

Specializations

Specializations pertain to the types of Strategems that Centurions boost when used in army battles. Examples include cavalry, infantry, logistics, and artillery. Because Strategems are drawn randomly from a pool, you might want to cover all your bases.

Reckless vs Cautious

The Reckless trait increases Aggression by 20%, but decreases Defense by 10%. The Cautious trait increases Defense by 20%, but decreases Aggression by 10%.

Medicus

Medicus will increase the casualty survival rate by 10%. Simply put: a few soldiers will simply get injured and can eventually recover instead of being killed outright. Make sure you have one Centurion with this perk and choose him to lead army battles.

Class Options

While the Centurion’s class doesn’t play a major role in army battles, there’s an important caveat that we’ll discuss towards the end of our Expeditions: Rome Legion recruitment guide. At the very least, try not to dismiss or replace the ones that you like if you can help it.

The Best Perks & Options to Look for When Hiring Praetorians

Next, let’s talk about the best perks for those you hire as Praetorians, your regular party members, in Expeditions: Rome. This is where you’ll need to be most selective during Legion recruitment due to various factors.

Class Options

Since Praetorians are your generic party members, you’ll want classes that can complement your playstyle and squad composition. Look at a Praetorian’s unlocked skills, too. A recruit that has top-tier abilities unlocked in a single tree might be better than another that has a mix of Tier 1 and Tier 2 skills.

You can refer to our class guides for the Princeps, Veles, Sagittarius, and Triarius for more info about the best skills.

Recruiter

The Recruiter perk is imperative if you want decent characters to appear in your Barracks. Make sure that you continuously upgrade the Barracks via the Outpost Management screen to increase the possible levels of generic soldiers.

Then, assign a Praetorian with the Recruiter perk so that the characters will be at your main character’s level. You’ll need to reassign this person over and over if you want to keep seeing a new pool in your Barracks.

Freeloader > Scavenger

A character with the Freeloader perk can be assigned to the Speculator Tent. They’ll provide an extra free replenishment for your tactical items. This perk is better than its counterpart, Scavenger, which only decreases the replenishment time. The character will leave this assignment once the process is completed.

Physician & Other Healing-Related Perks

Physician and other healing-related perks are used to treat injured characters. We discuss this mechanic further in our healing and injuries guide, but the quick rundown is that there are ways to heal and revive characters during battle outside of the default mechanics, and you want to make sure your Legion recruits have those perks. 

Characters that are downed or incapacitated become injured or wounded. This status can keep them out of the next fight at best; it will lead to death at worst.

Get Crafty

Crafty decreases the crafting time in the Armory. The difference is minimal (around five hours in-game), so it’s not as important as other Legion recruit perks, but it can come in handy. The character will leave his assignment once all items have been crafted.

Architect

Architect decreases the time required for new Strategems to appear in your Workshop. The difference here is minimal as well. However, if there are multiple Strategems that can still be discovered, then the character will continue with this assignment indefinitely.

Constitution

Constitution prevents injuries from deteriorating to a worse level. It’s not very important.

Ascetic

Ascetic means that Praetorians don’t eat as often, which means you don’t spend as many rations on that specific character. This, too, isn’t important.

Scout

Scout increases your travel speed on the world map by 5% for each character with the perk in your army. This has minimal effect.

Social

The Social perk can be assigned to the Bath. A Praetorian with this perk will increase the Legion’s morale by +4 every 32 hours.

Agreeable

Agreeable will make a Praetorian have a stronger reaction to the decisions that they like depending on their traits. Generally speaking, though, you won’t really micromanage this mechanic.

Likewise, it’s extremely unlikely that everyone in your party will have very high loyalty. However, we’ve yet to actually see characters who leave our party due to very low relationships. We discuss more about this topic in our Rhetorical Style and loyalty guide.

Can I Refresh the Legion Recruitment Page or Retrain Soldiers?

The biggest problem you’ll face with your Legion recruits in Expeditions: Rome is that no one levels up at the same pace. Completing quests tends to award all characters with the same XP. Unfortunately, most tactical battles only give full XP to those who participated in the fight; characters that didn’t join in will only receive half of that amount.

Consequently, your unique characters might be at Level 10, but your other Praetorians are still at Level 8. Thankfully, there are a couple of ways to alleviate this experience disparity.

The first method is by save-scumming to refresh the recruitment page in your Barracks. Again, make sure that someone with the Recruiter perk is assigned to the Barracks. Then, exit the camp, set the game speed to 3x, and press the Play button at the top of the timelapse bar.

When you see that the tent icon is closer to the left of the bar, new Legion recruits are about to show up. Save your game and re-enter the outpost. Check if you like of the characters and recruit them.

Ideally, if you’re Level 9 or higher, for example, you’ll want Legion recruits that have already unlocked top-tier skills in a specific class’ tree. If you’re not happy with the pool of characters, just reload your save.

The second option involves Centurions. Even if they don’t join your party’s tactical fights, Centurions remain close to your main character’s level. As such, you can dismiss characters as Centurions and hire them as Praetorians. This costs a bit of denarii, but you should have an almost clean template to work with. Rehired soldiers will have the following quirks:

• They will have 0 XP for that particular level. If your main character is close to leveling up, try to hit that rank first so that the Centurions’ ranks also increase.
• They will only retain the skills they had by default when you initially hired them. You can assign the remaining points as you see fit. You can see an example in the image below (a level 9 character with only two skill points spent).

That’s basically what you need to know about how Legion recruitment works in Expeditions: Rome. Remember to keep an eye out for specific perks and options when recruiting Centurions and Praetorians, and if you need more generic troops closer to your level, don’t be afraid to demote certain soldiers. For more tips, consider heading over to our Expeditions: Rome guides hub.