add 'upgrade outdated mercenary' button
- Thread starter QzY
- Start date
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Call it Refit Mercenaries? I think the reason they dont have this option and probably dont want to is because you arent meant to rely on mercs for long term warfare, they are supposed to be a short term thing that comes and goes.
The problem is that if your nation is far ahead in tech, you have to deal with the same mercenaries everyone else does, rendering your technical advantage moot. After hiring a mercenary you should be able to "refit" or "retrain" for cash and time to basically teach these brutes the ways of proper warcraft and trade pikes for arquebuses, or fancier pikes.
Even for short term, you shouldn't have to be hiring lancers if you could be giving them wheellock pistols.
Why? It was extremely uncommon for Mercenaries to have access to state weapons. Their weapons and training were part of the hire cost.
Right, which is why you spend more time and money to train them in addition to their original hire cost.
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You don't hire mercenaries to be the best troops, you hire them as cannon fodder, you should ask the visconti family how outfitting mercenary troops better than your standard army goes for you. They were fairly expensive and what would likely happen if you trained them is someone would offer them a better deal then they would take those lovely shiny new weapons and training and go fight for someone who offered better wages.
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I would like the ability to upgrade mercs who are out of date compared to mercs I could hire at the time, since I often retain a small mercenary army full time in the new world doing seven cities and fighting native uprisings, since their ability to recover isn't tied to my manpower, so going to war doesn't mean my colonial garrisons won't heal.
Having the ability to upgrade mercs I just hired to be inline with my own superior troops does seem like a bad idea though.
Having the ability to upgrade mercs I just hired to be inline with my own superior troops does seem like a bad idea though.
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I'm not sure if it's a bug, but you can actually recruit better mercenaries if you select an outdated unit type and then reselect your new unit type when they are in the queue. It can be pretty handy in those situations where you just upgraded your unit type, so you can recruit men at arms mercenaries instead of being stuck with medieval infantry for another year or two.
Nop, just hire new mercenaries, they are supposed to be used to the job and go their own way drinking and spending their ducats. State is not going to upgrade them, they would just find a new crew. Its a fancy button but we don't need it.
Also it would ruin balance, mercenaries should not be available in huge quantities. Actually, once hired mercenaries should have some demands (the longer they are in servise more outrageous these should be), they should do the war, some fights, get paid and they should leave It is stupid that they can be used as regular army and kept practically forever.
There could be a thousand way to improve mercenaries, even build a DLC around them.
Also it would ruin balance, mercenaries should not be available in huge quantities. Actually, once hired mercenaries should have some demands (the longer they are in servise more outrageous these should be), they should do the war, some fights, get paid and they should leave It is stupid that they can be used as regular army and kept practically forever.
There could be a thousand way to improve mercenaries, even build a DLC around them.
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It's really inconvenient to hire new mercs and then ship them out to my colonies on the other side of the world. Where I can't hire mercs.
Recent changes have seen a big shift from manpower to money though, so having mercs around for a long time seems to become more and more common.
For that reason I wouldn't mind a button, space permitting, that would take away the tediousness of upgrading my mercs when a new troop type is unlocked.
If it would draw those upgrades from the merc pool it would limit the amount that can be upgraded at once and prevent upgrading in places where mercs can't be trained at all.
The price for my laziness could be the upgrade tanking my morale like regular troops so it takes longer than manual replacement.
As far as colonial merc upgrades go: I can only imagine the restriction is there for a reason. Being able to upgrade there would just be a cheap way to circumvent a mechanic.
Think we need mercenary DLC, there's too many stupid things and unused potential there.
Maybe states way back in history only hired mercs as temporary shock troops, much like the AI nations do, but i've had a standing army of mercs 60 regiments strong for the last 100 years in-game. It makes a lot of sense for the player to have the option to re-fit these regiments as an option.
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