A soft mercenary cap suggestion

[nikkythegreat]

I recently saw a teaser for 2.02 of a Mercenary Cap. Although I love having a Mercenary Cap I didnt like the teased method. This is mainly due to two things.
First is that its a hard cap I believe soft caps is better for gameplay. Second is that its based on Mercenary armies, I do not like how an army of 3.5k would have the same weight as an army of 24k, both of which are not that rare on the map.

I proposed this version of the Mercenary Cap:

It should be based on a proportion of the Mercs compared to your own army. This would be based on the number of Cohorts and exceeding such would give some penalties to upkeep and the like. Base Mercenary cap would be based on your country rank while technologies, Laws, Traditions, and Heritages would increase it as well.

City states 50% Mercenary Capacity
Local Powers 25% Mercenary Capacity
Regional Powers 20% Mercenary Capacity
Major Powers 15% Mercenary Capacity
Great Powers 10% Mercenary Capacity

Carthaginian Heritage +5% Mercenary Capacity
Roman Heritage -5% Mercenary Capacity

Penalties for exceeding the limit
200% Mercenary Upkeep
100% Hiring cost
-50% Military Experience


So lets say Carthage is Major Power with 60 cohorts, Carthage would have 20% Mercenary Capacity ( 15% for being a Major power and 5% for the Heritage ) thus a maximum of 12 Mercenary cohorts could be hired before taking penalties.

So if Carthage hires a total of 18 Mercenary cohorts. They would exceed the capacity by 6 thus gain ( 6 / 12 ) 50% of the Penalties or +100% Mercenary upkeep 50% Mercenary Hiring Cost and -25% Military Experience.

In the given set of numbers City States, absent any modifiers could have Mercenaries that are 33% of their total force before having any penalties.

 

[IsaacCAT]

I like your idea of a soft cap better than a hard cap.

But instead of all those numbers, I would like better to give the player a reason that can be easy understood not to rely too much in mercs armies. To be it progressive, I will increase the price of mercs for major and great powers while decreasing it for small powers.

Now it is a flat 100. Mercs should know better how to negotiate their prices with larger empires who should have more money.

 

[ohmka]

Actually the issue of mercenaries isn't with big empires, but mainly with small tribes/states, that have banked money for decades (at least in single player).
These can then hire all merc from the area when they need to fight there one life-time war.
A soft cap wouldn't really deal with this issue, I like your idea but it would mainly impact larger empires.

In the end the issue lies in the possibility to accumulate money forever, which isn't realistic at all.
One solution could be to simply add an inflation mechanism in the spending:
Something like (0.2% x current money)/month, leads to ~2.5% inflation a year.
In practice it makes impossible to bank more than 40 years of revenue, which seems reasonable.
And maybe add a growing corruption modifier for everybody when having too much money in bank.

 

[IsaacCAT]

In the end the issue lies in the possibility to accumulate money forever, which isn't realistic at all.

But we need to bank money for great works.

I like the idea of inflation, but in ancient times that was the result of debasing the currency not because overall sustained demand or a savings glut.

My suggestion for too much savings is to increase corruption, this way the families will drain the state of its money. The player can counter this by fighting corruption, the AI not so much, they will be out of money soon. Thus, corruption will tick upwards +0,1/character whenever the state treasure is above 1 year expenses savings.

 

[ohmka]

I like the idea of inflation, but in ancient times that was the result of debasing the currency not because overall sustained demand or a savings glut.

True... But one can imagine that having 50 years of tax in your treasury might lead to some not so reasonable spending from the state, and a devaluation of the money value?

Regarding Great Works, the T3 pyramids are around 10000 gold I think, which is 20 gold/month of "inflation" cost.
This actually doesn't feel too excessive I believe...

An easy "fix" would be to make Great Work cost money every-month during building instead of a big chunk of money and nothing afterwards?
An intermediate is also possible, like 10% of the total to start the project?
It would also make it more realistic...

I love the corruption thing too (hence why I suggested that at the end), but I'm afraid the AI would just end-up in a corruption spiral.
Also it doesn't fix everything since it wouldn't scale with the treasury value: sure everybody gets 100 corruption, but it "only" increase wages by 100%.