Mercenaries

[joseasoler]

• Guild of the Nine unlocks the new Mercenary Guild building for all players. It also acts as a Mercenary Guild.

• The Mercenary Guild is a new building available at Currency. It costs 350 hammers. Production speed is increased with Gold and Gems. It cannot be built until someone has built the Guild of the Nine. The owner of the Mercenary Guild can recruit Mercenaries in the city it has been built. Players that have signed an Open Borders treaty with the owner of the Mercenary Guild can also recruit Mercenaries, but it will cost them extra gold and the difference in cost will go to the owner of the Mercenary Guild. If the civilization that owns the Mercenary Guild has a unique Mercenary unit, anyone buying Mercenaries there will get that civilization's unique version of Mercenaries. The gold cost is determined by the type of the unit being hired. Mercenaries get the benefits of the leader and civilization traits of the owner of the guild, along with his racial promotion. They get metal weapons according to the owner's city access to metal resources.

• Default mercenaries cost 180 gold. Other players can recruit them for 250 gold. Its upkeep cost will be increased. Mercenaries can only use Bronze and Iron Weapons

• Dark elven mercenaries use the Svartalfar Swordsman artwork.

• Demon mercenaries use the Infernal Axeman artwork.

• Dwarven mercenaries use the Khazad Axeman artwork.

• Elven mercenaries use the Ljosalfar Swordsman artwork.

• Nomad mercenaries use the Malakim Swordsman artwork.

• Orcish mercenaries use the Orc Axeman artwork.

• Winterborn mercenaries use the default mercenary artwork.

• The Hippus Mounted Mercenary costs 200 gold. Other players can recruit them for 300 gold. Its upkeep cost will be increased.

• Magnadine can always recruit mercenaries at Mercenary Guilds using the reduced cost. Mercenaries recruited by Magnadine still start with Loyalty.

[lfgr]

Nomad and Winterborn are currently no racial promotions and don't set the UnitArtstyle. You can of course set it via python. If you do, you should IMO also set the style for mercs from other civilizations.

[joseasoler]

As long as we get enough artwork to have a special mercenary for all civilizations, I'd prefer that :)

[joseasoler]

In my last test game, a civilization with a lot of money and access to Mithril Weapons can create 8-9 units with a combat strength of 9 each turn without even breaking a sweat. This allows them to wage endless wars in any number of fronts while being able to instantaneously defend newly adquired cities.

Since this mercenary rework now seems more of a required bugfix than a welcome feature, I'm increasing its priority. Mercenary Guilds are going to be expensive buildings, I don't think that the "spawn units anywhere" is going to be a problem anymore with the new implementation. Allowing Mercenaries to only use Bronze and Iron Weapons should prevent them from becoming dominant units.

[joseasoler]

Will not be in 0.4.0. Also see https://bitbucket.org/Terkhen/extramodmod/issue/162/guilds

[Former user]

I disagree that mithril make them too strong. I've never been overly impressed with the performance of mercenaries generally - remember they come with no xp and are thus (most importantly) very slow units. They are good at defending newly captured cities, sure, but that's pretty much all they can do. Remove that from them and there won't be much they're good at. At that stage in the game, battle is ruled by collateral and super-powerful units anyway, so they're little more than warm bodies anyway.

(As an aside, I would give Mercenaries and other similarly-obtained unit - PG units, Demagogs from towns - the ability to come with xp from civics and so on that they would have obtained had they been built naturally.)

[joseasoler]

I think this is one of those issues in which the perception of single player oriented players and multiplayer oriented players is widely different. For us, when we play as a team rushing the Guild of the Nine and using it to buy units on newly conquered cities to make our conquests go quickly became such a dominant strategy that we always chose to follow Runes and rushed the Guild. Having them with Mithril weapons made conquests as easy and fast as a walk in the park.

Anyways, this issue is quite outdated. As I found that my perception about the Guild of the Nine was not shared by a majority of players (if I remember correctly they also voiced concerns about mithril not being overpowered in mercenaries as I thought) I ended up solving my issue by adding a game option that prevents the Guild of the Nine from appearing at all. It is disabled by default so everyone can play with mercenaries if they want, but we always play with it disabled.

I wrote a wide reaching proposal for the future of ExtraModMod which redesigned many points of the game, including this one. I doubt I will ever implement any of the points of it; it's too big and complicated. In fact I never even uploaded it anywhere. If I ever touch mercenaries I would follow that path instead of the one proposed here, so I'm going to close this proposal. I have created a new proposal to discuss granting civic XP and other benefits to units that usually don't get them: https://bitbucket.org/Terkhen/extramodmod/issues/304/new-units-and-xp-from-civics