Mercenaries

[TFD_Quickstrike]

Due to the low playerbase, the game has essentially become unplayable. The only way to make the game playable again is by adding Mercenaries to the game. Ideally mercenary officers and commanders. The way I see it, they should be fairly easy to add into the game.

So how would Mercenary officers work.
1) Player A sets a army, Player A is a Major General, Player A automatically gets 3 Mercenaries added to his army that are the same rank, have the same heroes and the same units as Player A.
2) Mercenary Officers can not be PVP-ed
3) Once the army hits, the mercenary officers automatically despawn.

Simple and elegant solution to the problem that is lack of players and activity.

Mercenary commanders would work differently.

1) Player A is a major general, he has 2 MPS, he can spawn at least 1 Mercenary Commander, this commander spawns with 3 Mercenaries added to him
2) The mercenary commander can only spawn with 1 mp if the player has at least 1 MP. If the player has more then 1 mp, then the mercenary commander, will spawn with 1 mp to avoid cheese.
3) Player A can then assign the commander a target using the map and have the commander perform the attack.
4) After the hit the commander disappears

as for the general rules. I believe to support the early age, green ranks should spawn 3 Mercenary officers and be able to spawn 3 Mercenary Commanders, Red ranks and knights should be able to spawn 2 of each and Barons and higher only 1. I believe this will help the early game a lot. It means that small groups of active players can keep their country going. It does mean that stacks have something new to take advantage off, but that can't be helped. The game has literally become unplayable otherwise.

[Seb]

In a way I agree, early ages can be somewhat sluggish. Not exactly due to lack of leaders as such, failing countries deserve to die anyway.

But to help early SFs with slacky activity maybe instead of mercenaries, allow borrowing units from garrisons for SFs? 25-50 units for SF with 50% penalty to garrison size for 6 ticks per SF that borrows units?

[Sylvatica]

I really see some use for this in the early portions of the game when we are lacking peeps in main with bigger and better armies . Will speed up the game to

[Balthy]

So how would you deal with mvm or kickers?

[TFD_Quickstrike]

So how would you deal with mvm or kickers?

A simple check would be sufficient. If Player A sets an army, the NPC commanders would automatically be added. If the number of PC commanders is above 4, then the NPC commanders would automatically be removed. So a check has to be made whenever a PC commander joins or leaves the army.

As for NPC Commander armies, you could add a system similar to hts that refreshes every 3 ticks (which is the normal wheel time).

NPC commander armies would be slightly more complicated to implement and have more ramifications. For example. I feel that the player who spawned the NPC commander, shouldn't be able to move himself till the army he created has hit something or is somehow removed.