Mercenaries and what you can do with them

[macsen rufus]

Well, despite thinking I'll try this after I'd got more of my modding out of the way, I did actually fire up a Turkish/Early/Hard GA campaign when I got home from work, and have played through to around 1107AD.

Another thing that made me a bit nervous was the fact that there were a number of years that went by in the beginning that didn't have any Mercs at all. None. For the first 5-9 years I had zero Mercs in my Inns (must have been the bad beer and ugly women ).

That's because they're all hanging out with Hassan i Sabah, the Old Man of the Mountains, in Syria, a-toking and a-poking with his hookahs and hookers I had way more mercs available than I could afford to hire, so snaffled up a few Druzhina and Faris units, plus a couple of Bulgarian Brigands and armoured spears and kicked the Egyptians out of Antioch and Tripoli (GA homeland for me), during which I managed to accidentally drop their sultan on his head and wiped out the faction. They re-emerged pretty quickly, and left me having to regain Tripoli by jihad, for an extra couple of points. The jihad was pretty poor at that stage of the game, mostly catapults and peasants.... but it did at least give me some reasonable governor candidates. But you can't expect a lot with zeal pootling along at 20%.

I also (re)discovered that down that way CAMELS are a fort-trained unit as well

To be honest, though, when your armies are mostly merc, it doesn't make a huge difference which faction you play, so I don't feel deeply deprived. Generally I quite like horse-archer factions, but as I'm buying rather than training, it seems ... strange

I'm now the richest faction, and my sultan gained "Steward" virtue, then promptly died - and left the sultanate to his "straight-zeroes" elder son - I didn't prune the vine in time, I'm afraid, the vintage is ruined Of course, being richest only applies on one side of the ledger - the income. Despite massive farm-building programmes, my outgoings are pretty high, too.

Anyway, I'm poised to push on towards Egypt (I think I snapped up Palestine before I quit last night...), then I shall have to turn my attention to the Purple Ones on the northern border, as they are the main threat on the GA points. If I can kick them out of Asia Minor, they'll suffer a huge hit. I'm currently one point ahead thanks to the jihad