Mercenaries

 

Sorry for quoting the entire text, I don't know how to do a single part. So the part I'm quoting is the part between the IMPORTANT-Read This Please.

1. Getting 30M gold is not overly difficult. And beer is relatively cheap. Price is around 80 gold per beer. So for 30K troops it would cost around 32.4M-34.8M(depending on if it is one beer or two beer to make). Again, if you are being sieged, upkeep doesn't matter since you would send them to be killed, by having them destroy your sieges for you.

2. There is no real value defending your city from a direct attack, since all it will do is take some basic res if they win, and reveal the type and number of troops you have if they lose.

3. Why would rich people kill each other, purposely? Can you guarantee they will fight each other? No, you are just guessing.

This is my hypothesis, based of off information gathered in GC, AC, forums and the views of certain militarised players. PvP in Illy favours the defender, with all the work required behind breaking a siege is scouting, than clicking a button that sends troops to kill. For setting up sieges, you need to coordinate with your allies, sending troops so they arrive at almost the same time, for most effective use. This can mean waking up at odd hours in the night, or have to do it at work. That is more complicated and stressful that scouting and clicking a button. While sitters can help, it requires a certain measure of trust. Giving the ability to instantly create troops with a high upkeep would be a huge drain on gold if you sent them to set up sieges, way easier to break sieges. Knowing that your opponent can create their pop's worth in troops instantly for less gold than it takes to create cav units would make sieges less happy in sending sieges, they might even decide not too. Mercs could cause less PvP overall, and any that do favouring the ones with the deepest pockets, not those with the best strategies. This is a possibility, not saying it is true, or guaranteed to happen, it is an possibility.

Namely armies of 100, 1k, 10k, 100k able to accept one set of orders and then another when they return.  Then make players bid on it.  The market will set the price, in peace 1k per troop may be common, in war I'm sure it will explode to like 100k per troop.

It also provides for a use of for faction standing since having a 50% discount on troops would be huge.  You could also add extra things such as each hub has an amount of troops related to the size of trade in the faction.

I remember seeing something about faction cities at one point.  If those get added then they would also be part of it.

This would mean having traders in hubs all over becomes more important.  

  

However, being able to "recruit" faction troops at hubs (the good old fashioned way) is a really good idea, they would cost gold and/or other basic resources to produce them, so here is your gold sink. 

Faction troops having different stats than those of the players and the ability to recruit those for gold and resources directly without resorting to t2 resources I think would offer some more depth to the game.

The cost and production time OFC should be somewhat similar to those of regular troops, meaning when you strip down say t2 cavalry to it's actual gold cost, the faction counterpart would be within that range, if not higher, since those are extra troops that you can recruit outside your barracks, same for production time.

Just a comment on the "meaning when you strip down say t2 cavalry to it's actual gold cost, the faction counterpart would be within that range" part, maybe have the faction troop costs tied to the market prices of their player counterpart troops t2 res requirements? like whenever the average price of say saddles rise or drop in the market, the faction cavalry unit price would adjust to that, that way their costs will always be somewhat relevant.