AI Mercenary Spam Still an Issue

[Darth Lupinus]

I just started a game playing as Florence. Unlike previous patches, many of the northern Italy states start at war with Verona and its subjects. This isn't a problem, in fact, I like this update. However, by December 1337, Verona has acquired 20 units of mercenaries and all but completely decimated the attacking armies of all five attacking nations. There should be a limit on how many mercenary units a country can hire at one time.

The war details screen doesn't appear to accurately allocate the mercenary forces in the troop counts shown for each adversary, instead, it only appears in the total opposition troop count at the top. It would be beneficial to show how many of the opposing forces are mercenary troops when we hover over the troop counts, as well as displaying them in the counts for the specific nation that has hired them.

Additionally, how is the Morale of Mercenary units calculated? Is it tied to the standard Morale of the hiring nation, the home nation, or do they have their own morale calculation? It seems that Mercenary units start with a higher Morale value than regular troops which doesn't make logical sense given that regular troops are actually fighting to defend or expand their nation's territory, while mercenaries are not invested in the outcome other than getting paid.

[tonypa]

I think the large part of the problem is huge range you can bring in the mercenaries from:
mercenary_range = 500
this cover pretty much whole europe so you can hire, train and transport thousands of men from other side of the continent.

The value is then increased by other modifiers like country rank etc.

From my testing good starting value would be 50. This means you are only able to hire mercenaries from your own region, and in case of rich area like Italy where other states hire them too, you should run out of available gangs pretty soon.

The other value I find unbelievable is that mercenaries are somehow able to carry with them supplies for full year. Unlike any other army that needs constant food resupplies.