Militia ain't worth it. (Spoilers ahead.)

[Null Winter]

If you spend a fair bit of money (for the early game, anyways) and several vital days of your mercs' contracts training militia (and each other for the other 4), then you can get 8 Veterans in a single location. They will promptly barely be able to win an auto-resolve fight against a Legion assault squad, losing anywhere from 1-5 of their members, requiring you to slog back if you want to reinforce them... starting from recruits again.

And the infamous deathsquad sweep after you have visited the Refugee Camp? They can't withstand it, even on the easiest difficulty; at best, a full squad of ELITES will take out 2 or 3 of a single squad, get wiped, and then that squad will continue its march with at least 1 other full squad behind it. There was only a single auto-resolve victory in my first campaign, and it left 1 Elite alive to be crushed by the full squad behind the first. Because Ernie is plot important, your militia there don't even get an auto-resolve battle check; they are simply wiped from existence, along with the time and money a new player likely wasted on them as part of the tutorial experience.

After this event, most of the Legion assault squads stop spawning, either because the PMCs wiped them out or because you captured the Legion bases/mines that the PMCs don't care about; this means that once you take them all a second time, you again don't need to waste time training militia because the Legion are rarely going to send anyone to do anything about it.

It's a real slap in the face from the devs; there's no point in doing it, because the enemy squads trying to retake sectors are either so flaccid that even clicking auto-resolve on them is a chore or they're so hardcore that only your kitted out mercs ever stood a chance. It's more time and money efficient to just grab every Legion camp to remove the sources of attack squads; an unguarded sector doesn't matter if everyone is too busy being dead to retake it.

[Karmapowered]

Agreed.

Another issue because of a questionable design decision.

Militia should also really be movable. I don't need to see them moving, but some kind of decrease/increase button per area like in JA2 should have been possible.

Training militia at the mine (for obvious reasons), and then at the port (since foes can use boats too), and then again at the city (to prevent the loss of loyalty) was never an option to me.

In JA2, it was perfectly possible to hold all the adjacent tiles (3 vanilla, 4 modded) of a large city like Drassen with only 20 militia, the max for 1 tile.

PS: patrolling would also have been good to have, especially since there are so few choke-points on the JA3 map compared to the JA2 map.

[stretch]

If you know it's coming - which is unlikely for most - then all you need to do is hire teams of mercs for a week and park them in places you know are heavily pathed during the event. Like West of Flea Town and I guess up near the diamond mine up North etc . There is a couple of places at least you can put them to catch a lot of the enemy but it needs a prior knowledge of the event to do it.
While I do not disagree with the sentiment of the comments here I don't see it being removed because it's 'unfair'. This is a possible way to take the edge off this event if not turn it entirely.

[The Great Cornholio]

Militia will continuously farm equipment for you from auto resolves and you get experience from the auto resolves when your mercs are present.

Holding towns means access to hospital and merchants. The 7.62 HP in Fleatown can keep an RPK fed.

[Lightning]

Yeah if you have enough money maintaining mercs the militia are worth it still

[stretch]

Originally posted by Karmapowered:

Militia should also really be movable. I don't need to see them moving, but some kind of decrease/increase button per area like in JA2 should have been possible.

You will never be able to move them. You cannot train militia on most tiles for a reason. It's overpowering in the players favour. If you could just bypass this limit by training up militia teams and moving them around then that would do exactly what they don't want. Even if you could not park them on tiles that don't allow training you could intercept things you shouldn't be able to. They would basically be virtually free cannon fodder if you could move them. A solo run would consist of sitting on one tile and training militia till they killed everything for you. Two highly skilled trainers can recruit and train 8 militia to max in under 2 days I think.
While I get the idea and have thought of it myself it's just such a vastly exploitable concept that it absolutely should not happen.
Just don't get attached to your militia. They are a throw away commodity and need to be thought of as such.
If you want strong militia that you can move around the map at will then just hire more teams of mercs who can do exactly this and are already in the game.
There are NPC's who will send militia to certain places for you but it's just a toy and not really useful.

[cifrelettere]

Militia are pretty cheap and easy to train and they allow you to hold territory with backup squads and such. One guy with an LMG can take on a ton of attackers because the militia will distract the enemy and keep him safe.

[['w']]

I once had 8 veterans win against 12, but else they all die after the army attacks, at least I got 400k at the bank, the counterattack is coming for them

PS Wolf and Fox training militia is a blast

[w.f.schepel]

Hard disagree. Militia IN COMBINATION with a merc (or two) can hold key spots quite nicely. On higher difficulties when money is tight, that is way better value for money than putting a full paid squad on guard duty.

Sure, militia gets wiped by a full on assault by the army. So what? Against the legion they work just fine and that is what you get them for.

[Null Winter]

Originally posted by w.f.schepel:

Hard disagree. Militia IN COMBINATION with a merc (or two) can hold key spots quite nicely. On higher difficulties when money is tight, that is way better value for money than putting a full paid squad on guard duty.

Sure, militia gets wiped by a full on assault by the army. So what? Against the legion they work just fine and that is what you get them for.

And if you already have a merc there, then you might as well have defended it yourself.

[LArc7thHeaven]

Originally posted by Null Winter:

Originally posted by w.f.schepel:

Hard disagree. Militia IN COMBINATION with a merc (or two) can hold key spots quite nicely. On higher difficulties when money is tight, that is way better value for money than putting a full paid squad on guard duty.

Sure, militia gets wiped by a full on assault by the army. So what? Against the legion they work just fine and that is what you get them for.

And if you already have a merc there, then you might as well have defended it yourself.

This. and put them on LMG so you can brrrrttt them quick

[HozzMidnight]

I mean it is worth it. 100% on your mines and then in the cities because losing those sectors is usually a rep hit. Also worth it on the couple of river islands. The death squad thing is part of the story and while they will likely wipe out most of your 8 militia squads, they won't get them all (at least on Commando) and you can build them back and future squads are not at all like the massive response triggered by the refugee camp plot mission.

edit: Hire MD to be your full time militia trainer

[LukanGamer]

ya they are, they beat typically 2-3 bad guy groups and you get the loot from the bad guys on your next visit.

[krd]

Yea, I have to say I'm a bit confused here. Just got to a point described above (spoiler alert!) and the death squads are strolling through my militia "defended" points. Tried defending with one of my squads and while they score critical shots on me, my mercs cannot even see them. Lmao, am I supposed to just lose the game here?

And what's the best case scenario here? Am I supposed to capture all those points one by one AGAIN? Uh, no thanks. Uninstall.

[sooshon]

who said you have to use your whole squad to train militia? you can hire someone with teaching skill like fox who is quite cheap and use her as a solo operator militia training squad, moving around between sectors that need reinforcement. I still agree you only need to use it sparingly and it's easy to know which couple of points you need to hold off because the enemy squads can only come from the forts (Well y'know mostly except for that one thing...). For example if you hold and reinforce that fort in the middle of the river and later on the dock upstream and to the east those can be chokepoints that can hold off enemy attacks and you don't have to worry about much else. But it will take a lot longer and be a much bigger waste of money to slog your whole primary team across the map when your diamond mine gets conquered than to have some militia there in the first place trained by someone like solo Fox or MD.

What you've discovered is that you really don't need to go to the extreme lengths of training militia in every sector you can, but you also shouldn't go to the other extreme of not training any at all.

[krd]

Originally posted by w.f.schepel:

Sure, militia gets wiped by a full on assault by the army. So what? Against the legion they work just fine and that is what you get them for.

The thing is the militia in most places are not even useful against the legion. Legion assaults would always go through the same 1-2 ports, so if it was sufficient to just defend those.

The entire point of the militia was so that I don't have to retake the cities/mines over and over again. So they were either not threatened by legion or useless against army. Pointless then.

And here's another "brilliant" design choice: limit the number of militia to 8, and don't allow for them to be moved around.