Even small tribal nations hire an infinite flood of mercenaries

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barny

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This really becomes annoying by now. I'm fighting some small tribes in Spain and every one of them is hiring mercenaries worth thousands of gold and if you "stackwipe" these hordes, they don't lose any men, instead they just sit it out for 2 or 3 months just to be hired again.

Even worse, they often hire mercenaries somewhere in my back and start sieging occupied territories. This really needs a rework. Mercenaries that get stackwiped, should lose ever men they have and not sit it out for two months just to return.

Look at the screenshot attached and just are 21k new troops on the way. So 4 small tribes with a handful of territories somehow mobilized 100k men, probably 90k of those mercenaries. Pretty much every time they lose more than 2k men in on of these battles, it was a band of mercenaries.
 

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I thought OPMs hiring massive mercs was removed a couple of patches ago? Did it come back in by some change to income? If so we should really be allowed to take money in peace deals again, to give an alternative to sacking every city in their empire.
 
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Arheo already confirmed on his Twitter that they are working on this.
They are introducing a hard cap on max. merc armies which can be modified (for example by inventions).

I would prefer a soft cap (like forts) but this is still a good improvement.
 
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I thought OPMs hiring massive mercs was removed a couple of patches ago? Did it come back in by some change to income? If so we should really be allowed to take money in peace deals again, to give an alternative to sacking every city in their empire.
One reason might be, that it is somewhat late in the game (604 AUC/150 BCE) and small tribal nations might not have much to spend their money on until some big empire declares war on them. They can't build legions, only one of them had a sea province to build ships in, they didn't have cities to build a lot of buildings in, so maybe the money just piled up over time? I haven't played a tribe yet, so I don't know how they do finacially.
Arheo already confirmed on his Twitter that they are working on this.
They are introducing a hard cap on max. merc armies which can be modified (for example by inventions).

I would prefer a soft cap (like forts) but this is still a good improvement.
I saw that, but that would only marginal solve the problem. The problem isn't that they have 5 mercenary hordes at a time, the problem is that they hire new ones or even re-hire ones that already got "stackwiped" again and again and again. It is not so much a tidal wave of mercenaries as a game of whack-a-mole.
 
I saw that, but that would only marginal solve the problem. The problem isn't that they have 5 mercenary hordes at a time, the problem is that they hire new ones or even re-hire ones that already got "stackwiped" again and again and again. It is not so much a tidal wave of mercenaries as a game of whack-a-mole.

This has been addressed in addition to mercenary cap.
 
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My motto is they can't hire Mercs if you have already hired them.

I'd they hire them in your rear, they have to march all the way to their lands first before they can be used to siege.

And a hard cap on Mercs is just going to make it harder in the face of the mega-stable megablobs. Playing smaller nations is hard enough before not being able to hire enough Mercs to defend against the juggernauts in the game.
 
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This hasn't been fixed at all by the way. Even small nations are just hiring infinite amounts of mercenaries. Honestly what needs to be done is cut down on mercenaries massively. There are FAR too many to hire.
 
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Two things about mercenaries:

When they aren't hired, they ruin the map view. There should be an option to visually disable unhired mercs.

Second: The whack a mole analogy (see earlier post) is perfect. Once you figure out where the mercenaries are heading, it's simple to march a legion to that territory and slam them as soon as they activate. But this is a very gamey, immersion-breaking tactic, and regardless, they're back after a few more months.
 
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This hasn't been fixed at all by the way. Even small nations are just hiring infinite amounts of mercenaries. Honestly what needs to be done is cut down on mercenaries massively. There are FAR too many to hire.
What are you talking about, there is a cap on how many merc armies you can have.
 

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There is a reason you still can see a lot of Mercs about - they are limited per nation, not per war. So if you are fighting five small nations that have formed a defensive pact, that is up to five mercenary armies they can hire between them.

I haven't seen that many but it is a possibility.
 
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Two things about mercenaries:

When they aren't hired, they ruin the map view. There should be an option to visually disable unhired mercs.

Second: The whack a mole analogy (see earlier post) is perfect. Once you figure out where the mercenaries are heading, it's simple to march a legion to that territory and slam them as soon as they activate. But this is a very gamey, immersion-breaking tactic, and regardless, they're back after a few more months.
Thats a problem, but for me a pure AI one. The AI hires the mercs, when it is already too (or at least very) late in a war they are going to loose - and then they make the error to try to bring them to the fight immediately. Their is a nice army mode ("unit reorganization"), which helps to get the morale up first and fast. I use it in most cases I hire mercs as ermergency measure.
But IMO, with the upfront cost being no longer an issue, I think it should be a possible strategy for AIs to permanently have mercs around (to deter attacks before they happen) or at least to hire them immediately as safety measure, when they receive the DoW. There is no real risk - the monthly cost is a kind of insurance premium you pay for having them around - either (preferably) to secure peace or at least from the start of a war one, for the case of it going badly. That (combined with "organizing before fighting") would probably alone make medium or large AI alot harder to conquer for the human. City states OTOH have the problem that they likely get immediately completely challenged by enemy armies rolling one - so they dearly need to employ mercs permanently (if they can afford them - and here they get even help by the maintenance discount)
 
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What's wrong with small nations have the option to fight back? They should hire the mercs as soun as possible when they attecked by a much powerful enemie.
We've had this debate before. Why would a mercenary join a nation which is about to get curb stomped - and therefore, no opportunity to get paid or to get loot.

I'm actually very happy with the current system compared to previous versions. The cap is very nice, and yes, mercenaries are still stupid, but at least it feels more realistic.

What small nations would do historically is (1) have walls (2) defend those walls instead of marching their small army to the enemy. Realistically, they wouldn't fight at all if they didn't have a way to defend themselves - they would use diplomacy - either pay a tribute or be a client state. But diplomacy is currently too limited in IR now.
 
We've had this debate before. Why would a mercenary join a nation which is about to get curb stomped - and therefore, no opportunity to get paid or to get loot.
Easy up front fees, followed by doing the bare minimum to appear to be helping, while actually acting to maximise self-preservation and looting. That isn't really how it's working now of course, but it would be nice if mercs used Loyalty values a bit more or something.
What small nations would do historically is (1) have walls (2) defend those walls instead of marching their small army to the enemy. Realistically, they wouldn't fight at all if they didn't have a way to defend themselves - they would use diplomacy - either pay a tribute or be a client state. But diplomacy is currently too limited in IR now.
Fully agree on Diplomacy. Forts are sadly another casualty of armies being able to carry masses of food, so seige times don't really matter.
 
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What are you talking about, there is a cap on how many merc armies you can have.

But they constantly hire new ones or rehire mercenaries that were already beaten.

Generally it works like this:

You declare war on some smaller nation with lots of allies because they all have multiple allies (and that is FINE and well), you easily beat their levy army and start sieging them out and now they start to hire mercenaries that come marching from every direction of the map. They leave exile as soon as they touch the lands you occupied and start re-sieging them. So you send your troops back, beat them with few casualties on their side due to their low moral. They become intangible phantoms that can just march trough everything and when they leave the shattered retreat they immediately get into battle again and get "stackwiped". The stackwipe however only leads to them getting released from their service, they don't actually lose any men outside of the few from the first battle. So they march of and as soon as one or two months tick over, they are back at full strength and geht re-hired again, rinse and repeat. And if you fight 4 or 5 smaller nations, this is happening CONSTANTLY and if they can re-hire the old mercenary unit, they hire a new one, since the supply is endless.

This is not about them being a challenge, it is about them just being annoying to fight AND utterly unrealistic that small celtic tribes could or would hire mercenaries many times the number of their own warriors and could pay them not only once, but multiple times.

There are two things to mainly fix this problem: Make stackwipes actual stackwipes for mercenaries, so that they are out for years until they have rebuild their army. Reduce the number of mercenary armies available. There are too many of them anyways and they're cluttering the map.
 
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But they constantly hire new ones or rehire mercenaries that were already beaten.

Generally it works like this:

You declare war on some smaller nation with lots of allies because they all have multiple allies (and that is FINE and well), you easily beat their levy army and start sieging them out and now they start to hire mercenaries that come marching from every direction of the map. They leave exile as soon as they touch the lands you occupied and start re-sieging them. So you send your troops back, beat them with few casualties on their side due to their low moral. They become intangible phantoms that can just march trough everything and when they leave the shattered retreat they immediately get into battle again and get "stackwiped". The stackwipe however only leads to them getting released from their service, they don't actually lose any men outside of the few from the first battle. So they march of and as soon as one or two months tick over, they are back at full strength and geht re-hired again, rinse and repeat. And if you fight 4 or 5 smaller nations, this is happening CONSTANTLY and if they can re-hire the old mercenary unit, they hire a new one, since the supply is endless.

This is not about them being a challenge, it is about them just being annoying to fight AND utterly unrealistic that small celtic tribes could or would hire mercenaries many times the number of their own warriors and could pay them not only once, but multiple times.

There atwo things to mainly fix this problem: Make stackwipes actual stackwipes for mercenaries, so that they are out for years until they have rebuild their army. Reduce the number of mercenary armies available. There are too many of them anyways and they're cluttering the map.
I agree with you description of the current situation, but I disagree with the part of your solution to reduce the number of mercs (a longer cooldown for beaten ones would be ok, if the AI gets improved like I describe) . This could be cured with just making adjustments to how the AI plays the game:

 
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From an economical perspective it's ridiculous that such large sums of currency can be stockpiled by tiny, isolated nations.

Precious metals did not exist in such quantities, and they lacked the international trade to acquire significant quantities of what did exist.

Would a soft cap on treasuries fix other problems in the economy? (Such as money becoming irrelevant in the mid-late game for large powers)

- Treasury greater than X months of income suffers exponential decay.
- Tech could increase X.

It'd simulate the inflationary effect trying to stockpile a finite source of precious metals.
 
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Imperator mercs nearly a complete legacy from EU4 like many things. Mercenaries are infinite manpower resources like the old EU4 mercenaries and they can scale with pops to ridiculous numbers like the 1.30 EU4 mercenaries.
 
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