[Edit 17/12/2015 - added cooldown in limitations]

[Edit 16/12/2015 - Important section with numbers]

 

This Sums up what I said in GC. Another problem would be that we would need the Devs to sacrifice a good deal of time that needs to spent elsewhere. Also Say you had 20 cities. If you could get 30K troops per city in no time at all, the possibilities become endless. The capability for war becomes huge. With the only limits being your imagination and your cash.

Btw i don't support this idea

1. You all forget that mercs stats are terribad and a normal army will probably destroy them.

2. I find that the amounts of gold people have on servers is TOO DAM HIGH. We need a gold sink.
You say pay to win I say let them fight. If two players are rich why not have those huge armies fighting with each other until hey are out of gold. At least that will create a sure sink for the resource that is already more than abundant.

3. And then, making money takes some time as well. So by saying pay to win i think you misunderstood the post. YOU DONT HIRE MERCS FOR PRESTIGE. You hire them with gold. Cnat get that from nowhere.

4. Repeating same point again. This is not pay to win. I would like to see you having a 30k merc army that cost you 30,000,000 gold (without beer!) and with an upkeep of 10 gold per unit (thats 300000 gold per hour). 
I would like to see how people create insta armies every hour guys.
I will consider changes to the main post 

Easy to make. Mercs are a copy paste code from other units with slightly changed values on build time, stats and upkeep.

So many things wrong with that statement, I don't know where to start. First of, it doesn't matter if the Mercs aren't as good as normal, the fact they are instant, makes it better. Secondly, it won't be two players against each other, it will be way larger. Third, You can convert prestige to gold easily, without any real effort. A tome can be converted to 1B gold. That is 1B troops instantly. How is this not pay to win? A large alliance can fund this, a player can. It all comes down to who has the deepest pockets.

Having some form of tradeable troops or hireable mercenaries is an interesting idea.  Whether it would work well would depend on how it were implemented.  That said, I found your suggestion that Illy needs a gold sink to be less than compelling.

The sales tax in the market in Illy is already a bit of a gold sink, as is players going inactive and leaving unstealable resources in trade hubs.

What positive results do you think there would be for having an additional gold sink in Illyriad?

If you think of "gold" as being a unit of currency (which is essentially what gold is in Illy) such as "yen" in fact there is probably far less gold in Illy than the equivalent in yen in the real world.

The fact that some people accumulate large amounts of gold has far more to do with the diversity of playstyles in Illy than it does some characteristic of the gold economy.  That is, relatively peaceful players tend to accumulate large amounts of gold, since they spend less of it on building and maintaining armies.  (Depending on the disposition of the player -- some players who rarely war nevertheless maintain large standing armies that absorb a lot of gold.)  More warlike players go through a lot more gold, building and maintaining and using large armies.

More peaceful players who tend to accumulate gold often don't particularly enjoy war (or they would be doing more of it).  More warlike players are already using large amounts of gold building and maintaining troops; having the ability to buy troops with gold might accelerate wars, but result in longer periods of relative peace while these players rebuild their resources.

There have already been wars in which demands were made of the losing side to compensate the winning side with gold and other resources in order to end the war.  This includes, to my chagrin, the last server-wide war.  I think that policy tended to prolong the war and made it less fun for those on the losing side, as well as those on the winning side who would have preferred a quicker peace.  Having troops one could hire for gold could increase wars essentially for extortion, with people taking the chance that others would prefer to fork over a protection fee rather than have to spend on troops.  It's possible that some people might enjoy this, but I think a fairly large segment of people would find it unfun.

 

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.

Ptolemy wrote: 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...

if only.

it would be good, i think, to have an emissary quest to recruit local faction forces to one's cause, with results based on one's faction standing. this would give the quest mechanic some relevance to the game.

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.

Like say you can recruit 100 faction units from nearby factions,  i.e. you can recruit faction troops either at a city or a faction hub if these two are within certain range of one another, they're still bound by recruitment time, they do NOT recruit instantly, and the higher your standing either the more troops they can pledge or the lower their upkeep cost becomes.

That way faction troops wouldn't be limited by how deep a player's pocket is and as these troops would be basically free I think they'll be great help to new players, since getting troops early game isn't exactly an easy thing for a new player especially that you don't exactly know what you're doing and end up losing a lot to experimentation.

That and it would be a cool thing, tho not very useful for larger players i'd think, however there is still the current faction system of them roaming the land, bullying ppl, and hopefully they'll be getting more specific as to whom they'll bully in the future :)

Lotharblack wrote: I thought this game already had mercenaries . Go ahead and pay another military player and you can use his troops. Sandbox , dah.

the mercenary role has been tried by players several times, unsuccessfully. because illy requires players to support military units with cities, a mercenary company has, by definition, a base of operations that is vulnerable to punitive action. typically, "neutral" mercenary companies have managed to keep their neutrality until they accept their first major contract, after which they are de facto affiliated with one side or the other and treated as such. because faction hubs are invulnerable to player attack, faction mercenaries can operate in this role with impunity.