Mercenary System

[Spirictum]

I have attached the pic with the most annoying merc problem I've found: They are there in the list, but the icon to hire them is missing. Is there something that I didn't see or it's really a bug?

And about mercs, I would like to put here all my thoughts about them:

First of all not a bug, but a reconsideration: There are too few mercs in RFCE. My policy towards merc is the simplest of all: Hire ALL of them. Their cost is not high and having them is always better. And when your army is big enough to forget about one or two extra mercs, you have enough money to not even feel the merc upkeep, so why not hire them as cannon fodder? Not to mention the specific ones, that you will always hire, just because they are better then the units they replace.

Now the bugs: About the messages, for me it's totally messed up. In the beggining it seems ok, but after some messages it gets crazy. You have Mercs available at a cultured province, but none to see in the merc advisor, mercs leaving the pool when there were none (and it normally happens some turns after the merc available message appeared - in a cultured province - but no merc showed on the merc screen) and mercs showing on the merc advisor without any message at the beggining of the turn for cultured provinces.

Besides that, Mercs can come at a good range of levels (the best I hired was lvl 6) but without any XP, and when they appear at your city their level drops to 1 but the upgrades remain. Imagine that Egyptian merc on my attachment was hired, and I have a Great General at Marseille (I really do), so I could put it on the merc and I would get 4 extra upgrades for it, besides the ones it already has. It would become the most fearsome unit in the game.

 

[Spirictum]

After that turkopole merc left my pool, things started to work again, I hope this gives a hint to the rfce team.

 

[Spirictum]

And now is the Welsh Longbowmen.

Just after it appeared the icon to hire disappeared. I've seen this with England on Beta 13, but at that time 1.0 was being released so I didn't say anything about it. Probably after they disappear (like that turkopole example above) things will go normally again.

Btw, no screen appeared telling me I could hire them, nor did Wales got enough culture on the last turn.

And for my Basil II (the hired Highlander on the pic), he came with Combat 1,2,3,4,5. I put Basil on, more 4 free upgrades: Leadership, Combat 6, March and City Raider 1. My best unit so far.


A suggestion to this matter: When correcting this bug, the display for mercs available to hire on a region could be like this error when you don't have enough culture. That would show you which mercs you will be able to hire if you increase your culture soon enough, a lot better then how it is now, a shot in the dark (and maybe just a bugged message like most of the time). So the hand to contract could only appear after you have enough culture (and enough money of course), but the mercs could appear right away just for show.

 

[AbsintheRed]

Ehh, doesn't sound good :/
3Miro was the one who made the whole new mercenary system from scratch a couple months ago
I'm totally unfamiliar with it, and didn't really want to get into that too
I guess I will have to do it though, but it will take some time...

EDIT: In the meantime, if anyone have some motivation to look into it, that would be great
Even a small help is appreciated

 

[AbsintheRed]

And for my Basil II (the hired Highlander on the pic), he came with Combat 1,2,3,4,5. I put Basil on, more 4 free upgrades: Leadership, Combat 6, March and City Raider 1. My best unit so far.

This isn't work as intended
If mercs have some promotions when you hire them, they shouldn't remain on level 1
Your 5 promotion guy should have been level 6 (at least 26 xp), so the 20 free XP from your great general should have boosted him only 1 level further

A suggestion to this matter: When correcting this bug, the display for mercs available to hire on a region could be like this error when you don't have enough culture. That would show you which mercs you will be able to hire if you increase your culture soon enough, a lot better then how it is now, a shot in the dark (and maybe just a bugged message like most of the time). So the hand to contract could only appear after you have enough culture (and enough money of course), but the mercs could appear right away just for show.

Seems like a good idea

 

[Spirictum]

What about more ship mercs? For now there is only Barbary Corsairs (for Cordoba, Arabia and Ottomans). Genoa could use some merc ships, as well as Venice and some other catholic nations (mostly on the mediterranean, but as time goes on the Atlantic could have theirs too).

And the glorious Byzantine could finally get their so special weapon back: the Dromon. For me that's the most important part on this topic, how can a medieval Byzantine not have the Dromon?

This is my stub for it:

Dromon (only available as a mercenary unit)
5 (slightly better then the War Galley, but still poorer then the Gun Galley)
1-2 First Strikes (Greek Fire)
4 (like all ships up to Holk and Carrack)

The Greek Fire was a state secret for the Byzantine and died with them (or at least nowadays no one knows for sure how they used it). Being a merc means the higher upkeep for having them and the restrict knowledge for producing them (only available at core provinces, that had access to their schematics). No one should have access to these mercs besides the Byzantines, even having those provinces (they should still be able to flip, but only this way someone else could have them).

They should always come with no upgrades (not a merc waiting to be hired, but a built ship waiting to be comissioned), and should disappear from merc pools around the 12th century. As not all Dromons used Greek Fire, those not using it should be treated as normal War Galleys (that Byzantines, as any other nation, can train in any coastal city after Lateen Sails). Also they should be able to have the Barrage upgrade, so well trained (better equipped) Dromons would be able to put their Greek Fire (in the primary and secondary siphons) to cause collateral damage to other enemy ships.

After that Fireships were being introduced to different navies, but that may need a topic about the Naval Units Tree. Fire Ships and Hellburners are examples.

 

[urban]

I love Sprictum's ideas. I've also had the problems with not having buttons to hire mercs. I'm wondering if it is a screen resolution thing? I'm playing on my 1600x900 laptop. Next time it happens I'm going to try to plug into my higher res monitor.

I also love the idea of more naval mercs.

 

[ezzlar]

Byzantium already has the greek fire animation for the war galleys!

 

[Spirictum]

Thanks urban, it's good to know that my ideas are being appreciated. We could use more mercs at all, but mostly more ships, like in SoI. About the icon, I don't think it's related to resolution. It only happens with specific Mercenaries (Turkopoles and Welsh are the only cases I witnessed).

Good to know we already have animations for the Greek Fire in the game ezzlar. I play with Low Res, so no animations for me at all. With that the only job would be changing the model and animation to the Dromon Merc, and use another for the normal Byzantine War Galley without the Greek Fire animation.
Special Dromons with Greek Fire (merc unit, hired in few provinces only for Byzantine)
Normal Dromons without Greek Fire (normal War Galley unit, trainable anywhere possible)

I finally got 2 pics to show the bugged merc message system. I've been trying for a couple of games, but multiple cities on some provinces were making the certainty of the bug questionable. But not anymore:

Cyrenaica and Egypt have only one city (Cyrene and Alexandria) both with more then enough culture (56 and 139 respectively) and the Merc advisor shows a single merc in Jerusalem (didn't notice him earlier, so he probably came without a message).

 

[Spirictum]

About that Welsh Longbowman, they continued on the pool up to the time of Pistolier, and then they vanished, making it possible to hire mercs again, exactly as I presumed.

So the problem is probably with certain types of mercs.

 

[AbsintheRed]

Here is a pic about this

As it's clear now, too long names (for even one of the mercs) cause that all the buttons are unseen for the player
I already fixed another small issue a couple days ago, which was also connected to mercenary hiring and mercenary appearance
So I guess (hope?) this is finally solved for good

About the merc messages:
I separated it.
Now we have a different message if the merc is in a province where you don't have enough culture
(it wasn't as easy as it sounds )
It might give some clues about this one

 

[AbsintheRed]

After a couple rearrangements and small changes:

I also added a province line to the mercs in the Available Mercenaries section
Thoughts?

 

[ezzlar]

How do I see the specific merc bonuses in the merc screen? Or do I have to enter the civilopedia?

 

[Spirictum]

Great job absinthered, I can't wait to see these changes on my rfce.

BTW, this merc screen pictures you showed here is edited right? I presume that if you have Normandy and Orleans you are either France, England or Burgundy (less chances for Spain and Germany), and I've never seen those mercs at those provinces with those civs (it would be nice if it was possible though).

 

[Spirictum]

Long time, but I thought it was time to talk about mercs again.

3 things I would like to consider:

1st: The merc messages are still bugged. The addition of the message absinthered created was awesome, great job! But the messages that appear when you have nothing to hire are still a problem of RFCE 1.1. I've ended a game with Genoa, and I've seen lots of messages saying I had mercs to be hired in Ifriquyia (in 1.0 this happened a lot too), but I never have mercs to be hired there. I wonder if the messages appear when a merc is available in the province, even if your religion (or civ, not sure what's the rule) doesn't allow you to have it (in the case of Ifriquyia I'm talking about those Corsairs that only Cordoba, Arabia and the Ottomans can hire). And of course those messages saying some mercs left the pool when there were none are still happening as well (I guess it's related to these invisible mercs too);

2nd: Mercs are still reset to lvl 1 upon hiring. This is the "Mercenary General Exploit". Hire a lvl 5 or higher strong merc (anything replacing a Knight can do it, but almost any merc of lvl 5 or higher is an option) put a GG on it and BOOM! You'll give it 4 additional upgrades and make it a real monster. Good thing RFCE doesn't allow 100% Withdrawl, because this GG exploit would be perfect with it.

And the first non problem, just an opinion
3rd: The number of mercs is low IMO. With Genoa (UP: Half merc costs) I hired less then 10 Condottieros, a single generic Musketman outside Italy, a single Swiss Pikeman, a few Stradiots (in Greece, ~5) and in the last few turns a Zaporizhian Cossack (Ukraine) and 2 Lipka Tatar (Estonia). That's barely 20 mercs, most of them in the last half of the game, and only a single generic merc. In the beggining I had to live without an UP, and after my first Condottiero was available my UP was useless. Actually mercs never damage your economy. There is no nation in RFCE that can be slowed in tech because of mercs.

The number of mercs I hired in my entire game can be available to the player in both SoI and DoC in 2-5 turns. I've already seen 10 mercs in the merc pool of DoC. I think the number of mercs should be dramatically increased, like in SoI and DoC, but if this is not the intention, at least the UP of Genoa should be changed: There is no advantage in having a Half Merc Cost UP in RFCE as it is now, specially with one that doesn't have access to the early generic mercs.

 

[merijn_v1]

In RFCE1.1, I increased the number of UM you can hire. But I didn't change the number of regular mercs. I wanted to do that after 1.1, but I forgotten. I'll increase the numbers this weekend.