Mercenaries and Privateers

[Don Doggy]

I am a real fan of the Roving-Clan mechanic to recruit stronger mercenaries and form privateers earlier. That's why i made a custom faction based on recruiting mercenaries, earning lots of gold and being very good at pillaging.
It was pretty much the first time i really played with mercenaries and must say i am rather underwhelmed. During the early game the mercenaries are pretty good and still reasonably priced. During Era 2 and up, the price rockets up, while the units grow weaker and weaker by comparison. This is due to the fact that you can't outfit mercenaries in any way.
This means that you can't do anything but sell your outdated mercenaries.
So, Mercenaries are expansive, weak (even with doubled health) and do not catch up with the game-progression.
Any way to retrofit mercenary units would really improve their viability.

Next up is the privateer-army itself. During early game, there are still roaming armies, so a well planed army of privateers can be mistaken for a regular roaming army. As the game goes on, these armies die out and the only other way grey armies will appear is by empired making privateers.
The problem here is that the research for that is so undesireable, that hardly anone researches it, so that everyone knows the one empire all those grey armies belong to. Maybe one should couple the research to one of the military-buildings or add another bonus, to make more empires actually have that technology.

So, in conclusion, the mercenary market is really only usefull for heroes and very early units (where you can hardlky afford them) and the privateer armies are much less incognito than it seems on paper.

I know this is not an issue many of you will have, but i just wanted to voice some thoughts i gathered when playing around with different traits of the game.

Thanks for reading and Amplitude: "keep up the awesome work!"

[Also, in case a Dev is reading this: will there be a coast/marine-addon in the future?]

[NoGas]

Sort of off topic, but it was a bit funny how every was hyped to get more balance out of the game with maritime combat.

And we picked up infiltration instead.

[articulate]

My biggest beef with merc armies is how they can't have a hero attached to them. Who's to know whose hero it is anyway, and heroes add so much in the late game that it IS an issue. Couldn't these heroes have gone rogue, can't an army have a mercenary captain?

[Don Doggy]

I guess the problem with the heroes is that minor factions never produce roaminmg armies with heroes, so up until era 3 everybody will instantly spot a roaming army coming from a Roving Clan. But yeah, this further decreases the viability of mercenary armies. In the end they just cost a whole lot of money and get destroyed by a small, well equiped regular army.

[Baywatch]

They are very good early and then fall off a bit towards mid game I find. But, they pick up the pace again towards late game when you can pump them out at a reasonable pace. Of course they aren't as good as a fully decked out unit but, they aren't terrible considering they have twice as much health as they normally would. I also tend to play with strategic/luxury resources less abundant than they normally are so I'm sure that's a big factor in my opinion of them.

The only problems I have with them personally are they can't reinforce eachother, one unit always seems to flood the market for awhile around mid game, and they can't get a hero which imo is a huge wasted potential for some interesting minor faction heroes.

Really anyone who plays against the Roving Clans and thinks a huge neutral stack roaming around in their territory and sacking their cities is AI controlled is more than a tad slow. Allowing them to have heroes won't make it anymore obvious than it already is and if you want a particular group to remain incognito you could always just not give them a hero. Just have them negatively impact diplomacy when used against the AI and they'd fit right in.