Jihads and mercs

[Doug-Thompson]

What's the downside, if any, to having inns in every province where you have Jihad markers and supplying multiple Jihads with mercenaries?

You have to pay the initial hiring cost, of course, but there's no yearly maintenance cost as long as the Jihad lasts.

When the Jihad succeeds, disband them.

I can understand not wanting to take up room in a one-at-a-time Crusade with troops of doubtful valor and loyalty, but what's the harm with adding to multiple Jihads? There's more space than you can fill.

After all, you don't have to hire everything. You can just hire troops with decent armor and weapons, and siege engines.

[Accounting Troll]

The only downside I can see is that when mercenary soldiers in a jihad or crusader army desert or die in battle, you end up with a lot of half-stregnth units. With home grown troops, the AI will transfer individual soldiers between identical units in order to maintain at least some full stregnth units.

[Demequis]

I think that's an excellent idea Doug

Your idea would also work perfectly for MedMod crusades since they are so huge you could jam them with mercs and easily accomodate your own troops.

Oh wait, except that in medmod there's a lot less mercs...maybe this is one of the reasons Wes took them out.

Good thinking

[son of spam]

Hmmmm....

I'd personally consider that a bit cheap...but...

good idea anyway

The main problem is that you couldn't keep the mercs at full strength as someone pointed out. Mercs, just like the other Jihad troops, will eventually desert from the jihad if the jihad just stands there. I guess it's really a tradeoff-- do you want to pay maintence for mercs or can you take a loss of perhaps half the merc unit or more? If it's an easily available merc unit, like pre patch alan merc or spears, then I would put it into a jihad. However, if it's a rare, high tech unit, like almughvars or knights templars (I actually had that once ), I don't think it's worth it.

[Slicendice]

Given the high support cost of Castle trained units the Jihad Mercenaries like Gazis are a cheap garrison with decent attack/defense. They are cheaper than peasants and have far superior stats than peasants. I prefer to use them to garrison Castles in lieu of Peasants. Plus if your Jihad was successful thos unit will have exp chevrons.

[Doug-Thompson]

Wow. This is a blast from the past.

Those new to MTW should know that this trick applies only to MTW1, where you could have many Jihad markers at the same time, all converging on the same province. It doesn't work as well for MTW2 any more, where you have only one Jihad at a time.

[Martok]

You know, I'd been meaning to ask if CA had gotten rid of that exploit in Medieval 2. I figured they'd had, but I didn't want to assume.