I'm sure we've all struggled through problems with inventory space and trying to figure out which pouch that thing was in... well, a few of us have undoubtedly wished to be able to take a strapping young sla- ...er, hired hand and have them carry all that dense ore and bountiful spoils of battle for us. Well, that's what I'm here to suggest. A packhand would be a hireable NPC that could accept 2 pouches, and would automatically pick up items until its 2 pouches worth of stuff were full. you could then dump all of the important stuff that you don't need on this particular adventure onto them, and have them carry it for the journey home rather than going through the painstaking process of sorting it into pouches or picking which loot is most important and leaving stacks of goodies behind.
Thanks for alte to pointing this out (the strictest mode at least), but there should be 4 modes for these packhands: Collect - Collect Specified - Limited Collect - Idle. In collect they would function as described, in collect specified they would collect anything they are already holding, in limited collect they will collect only items that they have less than a stack of, but at least 1 of, and in idle they would function as if in guard mode, or halted, simply sitting idle, possibly with a little roaming room.
These guys would also be nice for non-automated farms which you don't want to worry about finding all the drops in.
I'm not sure on align or coin costs, realistically I would expect it to be less than a trained soldier, though in this game I expect that these would be far more helpful than a trained soldier would be. Perhaps 50 coins and 200 align might be a nice bench mark.
Some interesting ideas from comments (meaning alte):
- Pack over shoulder signifying if a unit has a pouch
- All units capable of carrying a pouch as suggested, or more likely snagae and citizens - This is an interesting idea, especially for adding new features such as feeding military units or increasing farmhand capacity; However, I think that it would be better to simply have a new packhand unit with snagae/citizens being jack-of-all-trade units capable of fighting, carrying, or farming, albeit worse than the units specialized in those fields.