Quote Originally Posted by deleet frans
I read a post that mentioned that you can "nationalize" your mercs in order to save money. I understand that it has to be something you can build anyways--How do I do this?
1) If it's a unit type that you can't train for yourself, you can't nationalise at all. At least not using the trick described here.
2) It works by getting two units of an identical type but both need to have suffered depletion in a battle.
3) Make sure that the total number of men in the merc and home-made unit will add up to MORE than the default unit size, otherwise they will merge to form an all-merc unit, increasing your maintainance costs!
4) Drop one on the other to make a two-unit stack.
5) Click on the stack to make the units appear in the menu-bar.
6) Click and hold on one of the icons in the menu bar, drag and drop it on the other one. If you get it the wrong way around, just do it again until the merc unit is the smaller of the two.
7) Disband the leftovers or repeat the process with another depleted home-grown unit but paying attention to item 3) even more on successive rounds.


You might find that the valour of the shrunken merc unit increases when you do this. I'm guessing that this is because the game optimises transfers in such a way that, after a merge, the cadre retains its highest valour individuals, especially its general and the unit average valour (what you see on the icon) goes up when the lower-valour ones have been removed to the other unit.

Having reduced the maintainance costs significantly, you might wish to retain the high-valour cadre, rather than disband it, since these can sometimes be as effective as a full strength unit with zero valour. This is particularly so with leftover bits of cavalry, I find.

The merc status will probably suffice to stop them auto-merging when you plop them back into a big stack, forgetting that it contains a matching depleted unit, small enough for it to fit into.