Mercenaries

[Omnicras]

Lately I've been replaying rise of legends and the whole "buy a site and get mercenarys" concept reminded me. Will this game have mercenarys and if so how will they be implimented.

[Sharku]

Mercenaries can be fun, but games usually make them so low priced that they replace other units. Imo I don't think DoF should have any mercenaries. Then again they are trying to make this as realistic as possible and there are always people willing to sell their sword so maybe they will.

[Darvin]

There are a number of ways mercenaries can be implemented interestingly. One way is to sell them as high performance units with no build time, but a significant cost and limited availability. Another way is to make mercenaries specialist units with no real equivilent in any faction. This gives them a unique role that no default unit can fill (again at a significant premium).

There are other ways to implement mercenaries, but without an intimate knowledge of the game mechanics, it's hard to say which way would best suit this game.

[The Witch King of Angmar]

I think merceneries should be used early game to raid resource buisnesses.

[Darvin]

In other words mercenaries should be fast units with high firepower. I think every faction will have at least one unit that fulfills that role well enough, and mercenaries need to be less specialized if they're going to be a significant feature.

[The Witch King of Angmar]

Originally Posted by Darvin

In other words mercenaries should be fast units with high firepower. I think every faction will have at least one unit that fulfills that role well enough, and mercenaries need to be less specialized if they're going to be a significant feature.

They should remind me of Corsairs that are really fast are cheap except without the bad quality of EA.

[Darvin]

Mercenaries (ie, units from the Inn) in BFME were cheap, but high level, units that could only be built from limited facilities. They ended up being ridiculously overpowered. I feel mercenaries need to be something you can't get anywhere else, but come at a cost premium.

As for Corsairs, they were only fun in mods where they had their stats changed around a bit. In the official game versions, their melee attack was so pathetic that no one used it, so they were only useful for firebombing.

[The Witch King of Angmar]

Originally Posted by Darvin

Mercenaries (ie, units from the Inn) in BFME were cheap, but high level, units that could only be built from limited facilities. They ended up being ridiculously overpowered. I feel mercenaries need to be something you can't get anywhere else, but come at a cost premium.

As for Corsairs, they were only fun in mods where they had their stats changed around a bit. In the official game versions, their melee attack was so pathetic that no one used it, so they were only useful for firebombing.

Lol. I loved those firebombs. They were really cool, but I like the idea of hiring powerful units from seperate buildings. You should be able to buy these buildings after you have a suffucient amount of resources.

[Ryan Zelazny]

We are currently debating the use of Mercenaries in the MMO portion of the game. I believe they will appear in the Single Player campaign.

[Darvin]

The thing about corsairs is that they were supposed to be a hybrid unit, acting as either a shock melee swordsman or a grenadier. The problem was their melee attack was quite average, so there was no point in using it. It was really sad, because in mods that buffed their melee attack to the point at which their versitility was a greater asset than their firebombs, the unit was super fun.

As for Ryan's comment, it still doesn't detail exactly how mercenaries will work in the game mechanics, but I'd imagine that wouldn't even be finalized even if the devs already had them in the game.