Board Thread:Suggestions forum/@comment-26486187-20160921055808/@comment-26172435-20160924123457

Recneps wrote:

Beauhunt III wrote:

Recneps wrote: Beau, did you read my comment? They can't become a cheap and overpowered army. You have to provide their gear. When you provide gear, it takes gear. You could get more, better units by selling the stuff to make the gear, instead of using the gear for NPCs. Compared to suiting Elves in Mirthril, you could suit up mercenaries at a fraction of the cost; They will be the cheapest army to suit up compared to all the others. No, not in mithril. They'll be much less in coins, but that is not the dominant cost. The mithril is. If you can afford to equip cheap, easily-dying NPCs in mithril, you can easily afford 46 - with minimum alignment - extra for the swapping to a ranged weapon, and 150% health.. It'd be much better of a unit for the extra cost of the coins that a bandit pack drops.. And if it weren't mithril, you can get units already equipped in it. Let's take Dwarven-level armour. You can pay 6 coins and 24 dwarven steel to hire and armour a mercenary.. Or you could pay 30 coins and 0 dwarven steel to hire a Dwarven Warrior. That's 24 more coins. One costs 6 coins and 24 steel, the other 30 coins and 0 dwarven steel. That means that, if they're the same cost, one steel is the same as one coin.. However, one steel is not the same as one coin. Let's say you sold it to a Dalish Blacksmith, which can be found fairly close to the Iron Hills, where'd you go to hire a Dwarven Warrior. Going by minimum pricing, you could get 3 coins for the coal and iron to make one steel.. Not counting the fuel used for alloying. That means that you could sell the materials for the mercenary's armour for 72 coins. Add that to the 6 coins to hire the mercenary, and you have 78 coins of value in each Dwarven-armoured mercenary. With that, you could hire 2.6 Dwarven Warriors. That means that the net value of 26 Dwarven Warriors is the same as the net value of 10 Mercenaries, with the same armour and not counting weapons for either.. That means mercenaries are, in fact, more expensive. ... which makes heavily armoured mercenaries an unattractive alternative to hired alignment-requiring faction troops, for those with sufficient alignment. Same holds for leather or fur clad mercenaries, albeit that there are much fewer faction aligned alternatives for a cost-efficiency comparison. So, the argument to use them as relatively cheap and effective alternative when leather- or fur-clad in early game holds, in a way.

On the point of sell-swords not using armour: aye, but I think it would make sense to distinguish between mercenaries of two different backgrounds. There are professional sell-swords and renegades with decent gear of their own and no outspoken deathwish. Next to those you have the ones that have absolutely nothing to lose and just sell their services to survive to whoever wants to hire them. This implies mercenaries could simply come in at least two variants: cheap ones with low gear and expensive ones with better gear.

If they'll be added (I don't know if the mod team & Mevans feel this would be fitting in both game and lore), I fancy the starting points brought forward in this OP above others (like those in this thread: [Endorsed] Mercenaries). Imo, it would be plausible mercenaries could pop up in many an inn and tavern, also in biomes like Breeland, Rohan, Dale and the Lone-lands. Check the thoughts I posted in response to these threads, both offering ideas on where mercenaries could 'present' themselves:

[Closed:Expired] Of the living spaces of Bandits and Traders (AKA Random Cottages)

[Endorsed] Toll booths