Caution: Merc Catapults WILL merge with ones you built

[EatYerGreens]

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.

[antisocialmunky]

I think the exploit is called 'nationalization.'

[Zarax]

Personally I hire only "foreign" units as mercenaries, makes sense with the way I modded the game...

[barocca]

this bug was fixed in Viking Invasion? yes/no?

[EatYerGreens]

this bug was fixed in Viking Invasion? yes/no?

I've only recently begun my first full campaign and I'm not up to the required tech level for home-built catapults yet. Merc ones have been available but I've not had cause to hire any.

So, basically, I've yet to verify whether this is fixed yet.

For the record, this is MTW European retail version with the matching VI expansion applied, straight from the box. The opening screen says v2.01.

(the patch to fix 56-yr old king death is still pending as I'm awaiting an answer to a question I posted on the forum about whether it's safe to apply when a campaign is in progress).

[EatYerGreens]

There is another thing I've discovered about merc units, which I'm finding slightly annoying at the moment. Situation is as follows:-

1) Merc unit is not a type your faction is able to train, so replenishment or blending into your own units is not possible anyway.
2) The unit suffers losses in battle but after a defeat, say, some are returned to you as prisoners. So the unit is now split into two halves.
3) You move the halves into a common province, planning to merge them the following year.
4) The game refuses to let you merge the two portions, even though they started life as a single unit.
5) Similar situation when there were two merc units of the same unit type which get depleted sufficiently to merge into a single unit. Again it won't allow them to merge.


In some ways, the behaviour as in item 5) is probably realistic, given that they'd be fighting for their own shares in ransom money and so forth, so one of the two generals in charge refuses to accept a merger.


Interestingly, with merging my own units, I sometimes find that it is allowed but 1 man gets kept separate, even when the bigger portion is still at less than its default strength. The common feature I've observed is that both of the generals concerned have developed V&V characteristics of some kind. It won't allow you to merge that oddball/reprobate (of whatever description) into non-existence within a better unit!

Then again, I guess if he is left behind as a 1-man unit, he can then be disbanded...

[EatYerGreens]

I think the exploit is called 'nationalization.'

LOL, that's a good word for it.

[Advo-san]

EXCUSE ME!!!!! If I have a merc unit among my forces, does this have a different cost?? p.e. a unit of home-made militia sergeants has a different annual cost than a unit of MS-mecs?

[Advo-san]

...I ment MS-mercs... I suppose MS-mecs would have been funny, non-medieval though...

[Eternal Champion]

Yes, Merc units cost more to support. That is the trade off, get units quickly and some you can't build for more money then building them yourself. That's why a lot of players only hire mercs when they are ready to send them into battle.

[Advo-san]

Dear God..... I ve been paying them for 2 centuries.... I knew something was not right with my economy, I knew it!!! Enough is enough! They 'll be saked in notime! Aaargh!!

[mfberg]

Keep track of your enemies, the units you disband go into the merc pool and if the AI decides to hire an army you might be facing the generals you have trained.

mfberg

[Marquis de Said]

I have never seen the AI hire any merc units. Has anyone else?
AFAIK the AI's merc units should have the same merc symbol as your own, and I've never seen one in AI armies.

[Procrustes]

I have never seen the AI hire any merc units. Has anyone else?
AFAIK the AI's merc units should have the same merc symbol as your own, and I've never seen one in AI armies.

I've never seen the merc symbol on ai armies, but the ai sure does seem to build a lot of inns. Also, every now and then I'll notice that the ai is fielding some unit that the faction can't make - like a unit of FMMA mixed in a Turkish stack. I've only spotted it a couple of times, and I wasn't sure if it was a merc or or some old left-over from a bribe.

Either way, if the ai does hire mercs it does so only very rarely - I think it's mostly a feature for the human players.

[Procrustes]

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.

Odd. Doesn't work on my copy - VI, patched. You sure you've got the vanilla version, and the patch was done correctly?

Best,

[EatYerGreens]

Odd. Doesn't work on my copy - VI, patched. You sure you've got the vanilla version, and the patch was done correctly?

Best,

Good point. At the time I wrote that, I think I was still in unpatched v1.0 land.

(I have to be more careful about referring to it as 'vanilla MTW' these days because I now note that some people refer to 'vanilla' when talking about MTW:VI but without any mod applied...)

I now have the VI expansion in place but have yet to reach the stage where I'm in a position to test to see if this trick still works.



As I said earlier, with VI in place, I now have problems with merc units which get split into two lots - one batch withdrawn or routed and one batch of returned prisoners - after a defeat. I can't merge the two split portions back into one, even though they had a common origin.

[Procrustes]

As I said earlier, with VI in place, I now have problems with merc units which get split into two lots - one batch withdrawn or routed and one batch of returned prisoners - after a defeat. I can't merge the two split portions back into one, even though they had a common origin.

Yeah, I've seen that, too. I don't know what to do other than not loose or to not pay the ransom for merc armies. Mercs have a lot of pros and cons.... I think they add a lot of flavor to the game.

[EatYerGreens]

They certainly do. It also allows you to 'test drive' units which may be peculiar to a faction you haven't tried yet and see how they perform, relative to more commonly seen types.

Mercs are of particular value to the Byzantines, since the Turks and Eggies, next door, pile up units at an alarming rate in the opening years of a campaign in Early (I've yet to attempt starting in High or Late and don't know if you're given castles and so forth, from turn 1). Meanwhile, you only have Constantinople in which to train troops, for the first 6 years (or 4 years, if you can call peasant units 'troops'), so it's difficult to keep pace with the opposition's numbers without resorting to mercs.

Generally, I won't bother hiring units I can train myself - such as pez, UM, spears. It would have to be a dire emergency for that and I make sure such a thing never arises anyway.

A merc catapult very early in the campaign is great because, should you need one to pull off a siege-break that soon into the game, chances are you're not teched up sufficiently to build it yourself. If you are, then you would likely be too busy churning out early phase troops to secure your territories and can't afford a 2-year pause to train one. Siege gear sometimes has to wait for quieter times....

For those with budget woes, the general rule is to look at the hiring price and the maintainance costs. The hiring price is normally half that of training your own (if you are able to train that type at all) EDIT- but the annual maintainance cost is doubled -ENDEDIT, so divide the amount you save on purchase by the annual running costs for an idea of how long you can afford to keep them. If your home grown replacements are going to take a few years to reach the province and take over from the mercs, you'll just have to take the financial hit.

I keep telling myself that I'll hire, attack, then demobilise the mercs the following year but invariably end up hanging onto them. This is partly to keep the numbers up in the stack, partly so that they can be treated as tactically expendable relative to my home-growns but mostly because they possess some combat quality which is lacking in my default types, or I'm not teched up to produce an equivalent yet.

Of course, throw in some factors like kills inflicted, prisoners captured, pillage money and demolishing buildings for cash when you think it's unlikely the province can be held for long, then they certainly earn their keep.


@ Advo-san
yup, having them around for centuries and not doing anything with them beyond discouraging AI invasions does seem a tad wasteful. If they are units you cannot train for yourself and you like their capabilites then fine, hang onto them. Otherwise, get shot of them as soon as your home-trained ones arrive in the right place.

Depleted merc units will have such low maintainance costs that it's easy to say 'what the heck?' and hang onto them. This is expecially true if they have accrued high valour, through repeated battle experience. Hang onto these ones, if only to stop another faction snapping them up and using them against you.

I used to just dispense with them, thinking they were too small to have much of an impact during a fight. However, in a recent battle, a remnant of 8 Druzhina cavalry managed to rack up about 60 kills/captures in a single battle, for the loss of only one man. With the general's bonus they'd started at 3 or 4 valour and gained a further 2 by the end. They were out of my sight for much of the battle, funnily enough, so I forget what I'd initially ordered them to chase and they may have attacked things independently afterwards. Probably caught some routing archers...

Even if you don't intend to make them fight, depleted cav units also make excellent scouting units for a stack with a spare slot, since the AI often does not perceive half a dozen cavalry as much of a threat and won't attempt to engage them. Also, when the field seems to be empty of routing enemy but the timer's still busily counting down, you need to be able to search the fringes of woods across a wide area and quickly, to spot and root out the last of the concealed defenders. The cav may not be strong enough to engage but you only want your tired foot troops to have to march to one place, not back and forth and all over the place, doing the actual search.