Mystophoroi and other mercenary types removing?

Hello everybody.
First of all, thank you to everybody that worked on EB I and to everybody who's working on EBII, because your work gave me (and i hope will give me) a lot of hours of play.


I have a question-proposal about the development of EBII.
If I do not fail to understand something crucial, this could lessen the burden on the hardcoded unit limit and on the team work hours.


I do not understand the reason of having separate troop types for the mercenary troops.
That is: why having a troop type that is "Mystophoroi Hoplitai", as separated from "Hoplitai"?
If i do not fail to understand something crucial, you could use one less unit space (hardcode-limited)just using one unit.

That is, you could have a the basic "Hoplitai" unit recruitable for some factions or regions in the respective city buildings, and the same basic "Hoplitai" unit avaible in some mercenary pools (the sames in which now there are "Mystophoroi Hoplitai")
Extending this same argument to the other mercenary units that have an absolutely equal corrispective in the non-mercenary units a number of unit-space would be liberate under the hardcode-cap, or under the workhour of the team cap. As with everything in this post, if I do not fail to understand something crucial.


The main reason I can see not to accept this idea could be the fact that in this way you could mix troops from some of the units recruited in the mercenary pool with your non-mercenary ones, and even retrain in the cities the mercenary ones.

Other reason not to make this (that would be sufficent, to me) could be that the work on the mercenary units in EBII is already advanced or started.

In any case I feel (it's just an opinion) that the time and space we could save would be more important than what we loose by letting a player to mix his troops when he can both train and reclute them.

Just an idea from an EB fanboy.

I think it has to do with the different recruitment cost of mercenaries.

Not just the recruitment costs, but stats, appearance, the game would lose the flavor and maybe it would generate the clone wars syndrome. For many players, it would lose the feeling of a really epic game if all the models looked the same just because they are the same type of unit. I mean, the kind of man recruitable at minor Asia could not have the same appearance, armor looks, etc as the Carthaginians, as the Greeks, as the Baktrians. So on
That’s my opinion tough it really would be lovely to get around the hardcoded unit limits.

Yup. For an unit to be recruitable as a merc in RTW, it needs to be given the attribute "mercenary" in the EDU; from which point onwards it then automatically uses the model's "merc" skin slot as defined in the DMB, irrespective of whether it has been recruited from the merc pools or barracks and the faction doing the recruiting. (This is also used to increase the number of units that can be put under the same model for a given faction.)

Looking forward to those retrainable Merc Kretans :-)