Quote Originally Posted by econ21 View Post
YLC's proposal v1.01

1. Mercenaries can only be recruited during a civil war, or by an edict
2. At the end of a civil war, all mercenaries not recruited through edicts (that have not expired) are disbanded
3. A player involved in a civil war may only recruit 1 mercenary per turn, and only up to a total number of their prioritizations per term.
4. In civil war, mercenary recruitment takes precedence over ALL other monetary expenditures in the game and are executed by the GM when implementing combatants' move orders, recruiting by player in a random order, but with priority given to players that did not recruit mercenaries in the previous turn.

(Changes to YLCs original proposal in italics.)
This is my favorite system so far. The burden of keeping track of who gets the mercs first falls on the GM, instead of the Seneschal, which prevents that position from becoming too complex. While it increases the GM's work, it isn't by a huge amount and he already has to take the save and do the moves during a Civil War anyway. It looks like a good compromise to me.