Mercenaries

I thought this game already had mercenaries . Go ahead and pay another military player and you can use his troops. Sandbox , dah. What we really need is unit diversity and new stuff to keep us interested. That's why i believe people got excited by the idea of mercenaries. 

Well, we could do away with the whole faction troops cost "something" and have the factions pledge a certain number of troops to the player depending on the player's standing with the faction, the troops are basically free and you only pay their upkeep cost, so factions will be somewhat like the player's bannermen.

To expand on my idea, prices would be very expensive per unit when -90, and very cheap when +90. I would say 4000 gold per hour per troop when -90, with a limit of 100 troops  at 0 faction standings u can pay 500 gold per hour with a total amount of troops being approximately 5000 troops. With +90 faction standings the gold per hour being 5 gold per hour with a limit of 100k troops. I believe that it should be closer to a bell curve, with the 90's being extremes in limits in gold per hour and the amounts of troops allowed to purchase  

I believe that if factions are involved with mercenaries i believe that faction standings must be involved, if a faction hates u at -90 standings they would not provide u with mercenaries, additionally, the cost per unit should be tied to the standings, ie, if u are 0 standings with the faction it should cost more then if u are +90 with the same faction. Which would make choosing which factions and the setup of your alliance much more important. 

As much as this sounds like a nice idea it will do nothing but enhance the power of the large inactive alliances with all their perma sat accounts who just generate gold and equipment for them. They already have made so much gold through the taxing of those accounts that bringing in another element that favors them and excludes new and smaller alliances just makes it so that the dwindling active player base will decline even further as new players will never be able to compete in any events.

The only way it would work is for gold reserves to be depleted by the devs and only newly generated gold would become a part of the game. Now that is not going to happen as the players will moan and moan because their cash cows will be eliminated and the smaller upstart alliances and players will become powerful due to their ability to actually play and wars will bloom. As it is now there are a few prestige players who stifle the game and thus actually preventing a much larger base of prestige buyers from entering the game.