This being my first post, I'd like to thank the EB team for crafting such an excellent mod. I've spent countless hours playing it in the weeks since downloading it, and I really appreciate all the effort and planning that's gone into this project. It's a brilliant piece of work.

I guess one of the only things I'm not completely happy with is the recruitment system. It's much better than vanilla RTW, but it still can't model the raising of legions to throw against Hannibal, or a horde suddenly emerging from the steppes.

I'd like to share an idea that I had for a mini-mod.

The "mercenary" recruitment model

In a nutshell:

1. Do away with the MIC system.

2. Use the mercenary system to model the raising of an army:
a) units available only in appropriate provinces (or regions*);
b) faction-specific units hireable only by that faction;
c) appropriate costing for the unit-type**;
d) unit availability that reflects traditional army composition and historical manpower reserves.

* I don't know whether mercenary recruitment pools can overlap, but it'd be great if they could. You could have one pool for the whole of Italy (which would contain regular troops), and another for each of the provinces within it (which would contain levies).

** Levies would be very cheap to raise but ruinously expensive to maintain (to reflect damage to crops, etc). You might need to script the disbanding of levies for the AI. Regular soldiers would have a lower ongoing cost, but a higher initial one (to reflect training, etc). Mercenaries would probably fall in-between these two extremes.
If my Pahlav campaign against the Seleukids has taught me nothing else, it's that the AI is not shy about recruiting through the mercenary system - this might just work. I'm not sure whether the AI is as keen on disbanding units, but scripting might be a way out of that problem.

What do people think?