Extensive changes have now been made to the mercenary recruitment pools / AOR. Basically, the pools have been completely restructured from scratch. Many new pools have been created, and existing pools have been broken down into several sub-pools covering only a handful of regions at the very most.

In vanilla RTW, there were 28 mercenary recruitment pools. In the latest version of RTG, there are 62 mercenary recruitment pools, which is an increase of more than half.

Each of the units available per pool are now more experienced, generally cost more to recruit, are replenished in a shorter period of time, and a wider variety of units are available to recruit.

Additionally, due to the greater number of pools (and now the greater number of mercenaries available to recruit), there is a much more focused AOR approach to mercenary availability. For example, Cretan Archers are now only available to recruit on Crete (2 provinces). This will ensure a player is forced to take control of (or move into) specific areas on the campaign map to be able to recruit these units. Hopefully this should encourage more decision making as to where the next assault should be concentrated.

Also, as a further challenge, since the rebel faction (controlled by the AI) has superior funds, it will certainly snap-up any available mercenaries in the regions it controls and use them against the player. This also applies to the other playable factions (when they're controlled by the AI).