Mercenaries

Well everything pretty much comes back to limitations.

DanSavin wrote: You say pay to win I say let them fight. If two players are rich why not have those huge armies fighting with each other until hey are out of gold.

That's right. Fight until they are out of gold. Not fight until the superior strategist wins. Your idea would reduce it to a gold brawl.

DanSavin wrote: And then, making money takes some time as well. So by saying pay to win i think you misunderstood the post. YOU DONT HIRE MERCS FOR PRESTIGE. You hire them with gold. Cnat get that from nowhere.

Completely wrong. I can sell a 75 prestige scrap in Centrum for between 20,000,000 and 25,000,000 gold. I can instantly convert cash money to prestige, instantly convert prestige to gold, and instantly convert gold to troops. That's the very definition of pay to win. It removes even the slightest element of skill from a game.

DanSavin wrote: Repeating same point again. This is not pay to win. I would like to see you having a 30k merc army that cost you 30,000,000 gold (without beer!) and with an upkeep of 10 gold per unit (thats 300000 gold per hour).  I would like to see how people create insta armies every hour guys.

$3 USD = 20M gold = 20k instant troops? If I'm besieged, I don't care about upkeep. Those troops will all be dead in 5-8 minutes. There are a lot of players who would happily pay $20-50 to break a siege. For tournaments, I'd just move a city near the square, and troop bomb it with cash. I don't even know why you'd bother paying upkeep on ordinary troops, when you can just poof armies into existence with gold, via prestige, via cash.

Whatever game you want to play, I don't think it's Illyriad.

I understand what a gold sink is.  That said, I don't see why Illy needs a gold sink.  I played during the great gold exploit, and tbh in some ways I think the game was more fun with more gold flowing around.  Note that I am NOT advocating exploits, just saying that I don't see a compelling reason to try to pull gold out of the economy; this has actually happened and I didn't notice a bunch of people talking about how much better the game was afterward when there was less gold.

Im considering rewriting the post having all the weak points you guys showed me.
For now tho im reading the comments and trying to make the idea more interesting and viable :)
So please if possible comment on things you dont like or like.
Thanks

Was it not mentioned that troops might be a tradable commodity at some point by the devs?

I think mercenaries would best be tied to factions, rather than as purchasable from your own cities.

Pay rates and stock might be determined by the troop's quality, the amount of trade at that faction's hubs, how many active armies the faction has in the field, and your standing with said faction. Perhaps even seasons - hungry northmen willing to fight for a coin are easier to find in winter when supplies are scarce, while the more luxurious mercenary outfits would rather spend them tucked up somewhere warm with a nice glass of wine.

You would pay a lump sum for the troops, but might also have to pay for their (presumably high) upkeep while they journey from the faction hub to your city, where they join your standing army as commandable troops.

Geographical limits would also help mitigate the 'I instantly bought an enormous army and now have it in my city ready to go' problem. Even if you're a wealthy trader looking to hire a large mercenary army, you might need your traders to search far and wide to accommodate your needs, and take into account travel times as one might consider build times.

Certain hubs would offer almost no goods trading (as they currently do), but they might market mercenaries from several different factions, or belong to a warlike faction who consistently puts out high numbers of troops for purchase. Perhaps mercenaries themselves could be a commodity, with players making profits by selling them between hubs with low/high demand, or even to other players.

By tying the mercenary pool to some factors that are within player control like trade hub wealth, and whether to suppress faction numbers by actively attacking their armies, it might avoid the problems of having an endless supply of instantly available mercenaries to purchase.

I'd argue that this should go hand in hand with a revision of Faction Hubs being currently impregnable. Assassins should be able to target traders, thieves to steal resources, and obviously, more military actions should affect them.

Now, the trading of player units might operate by the same token with trade of units being tied to hubs, but I feel like player army trading would need to be subject to some stricter regulations to avoid potential abuses. Things like an army morale system, or reduction in troop effectiveness/increases in cost/upkeep for buyers, or maybe that one has to sell troops directly to the NPC factions who can then release them into the market as they see fit.

Perhaps player troops could be sold on loan, so weeks-long missions would be not only disastrously wasteful in terms of gold, but also infeasible as contracts end and your mercs now happily turn tail and walk home.

Like others who've outlined the problems with the OP's suggestion, I don't believe it would be fair to have sufficient means in game for alliances to overpower strategy with sheer weight of numbers & gold, which is why I think the player merc market need such restrictions. But if they really want to win one key battle while their merc army - cobbled together from hubs up and down Illyria over the course of a few weeks - burns a disproportionately huge hole in their coffers, more power to them.

It would be an exciting change with far-reaching - and maybe disastrous, if poorly implemented - consequences for the Illyrian wargame. Nothing says 'you're finished' more than an army of.. er.. these lot..?


Edited by Shûl-nak - 18 Dec 2015 at 01:21