Hi all,

I found this out by accident. At first it was annoying but I have found a use for it since then.

First time was whilst sorting out unit types into sub-stacks. I forget which was dropped on which but both the mercenary catapult and the one I'd trained myself were depleted and there must have only been 12 men between the two of them. The game thus allowed them to merge into a single unit but it was labelled as a merc unit - so I'd effectively doubled the maintainance costs on what were previously my men!! The merge was totally unexpected and thus unintentional.

On later occasions, I've found that, as long as there's more than 6 in each catapult unit, I can make them stack without auto-merging. Then I can use the 'menu drag and drop to merge' trick to shuffle men back and forth from one unit to the other. This works for anything where the units are the same type and combined total is greater than default unit size.

Thus I can transfer men from a mercenary unit to my depleted unit and disband the 2 or 3 leftover merc men, provided I no longer require the catapult equipment itself. I think less than 4 men and it can't fire on the battlefield anyway.

Incidentally, the ability to get a catapult from an inn, without having to wait 6 years for the workshop-level build (possibly 8 more if you start with no keep) and 2 further years to train your own makes the inns very worthwhile in the very early stages of a game, IMHO.