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## Armies versus Heroes: A sound military System

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RandomCasualty
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### Re: Armies versus Heroes: A sound military System

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Post by RandomCasualty » Tue Feb 22, 2005 11:09 pm

> FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1109102127[/unixtime]]
> In the long run, if you have to do things alot, you're way
> better off having your own in-house guys that you trained. If you're a kingdom, then by definition you are going to be here for a long time, so hiring mercenaries to handle your problems is stupid and unhelpful.

Who says you can't hire them for the long term? I mean modern day buisnesses don't put all their prospective employees through college, in fact tehy don't put any of them through college. It's more expensive for them to pay to train people then it is for them to just hire someone over the long term.
The king doesn't just hire them for a mission he says "Hey how about I pay you X gold per month, and you guys function as my standing army?" or maybe he just offers them land or whatever and makes them barons. I'd be just like fuedalism only when war breaks out there's no army, it's just the king and his barons.

> If your point is that basic adventuring equipment is horribly overpriced and the entire economic system makes no god damned sense and so on and so forth - that's true. But it doesn't do what you seem to think it does - which is to invalidate having the loyalty of low-level characters. Actually, as King the only thing you can do is to ingratiate yourself to enough low level characters that hopefully when some of them turn into high-level characters they still like you and protect your lands.

Well, I'd disagree. Really you should be hiring competent people from the beginning. Because the kingdom that does hire high level guys instead of trying to train them ends up with more troops and wipes the floor wtih your weenie army. By the time any of your troops get remotely near level 5, they'll already be dead.

> But that doesn't even slightly mean that The Rogue's Camp would be "better off" waiting for a Level 38 Amazon to come and save them than the first level characters who start there.

Well, no, because the rogue's camp doesn't actually pay you anything to do the quest, except some of the stuff you get when you actually finish a quest. When you pay nothing upfront, you honestly don't care who does it. It gets done and someone gets the reward. You really don't care who that is, if a 5th level could do it, great, if a 20th level does it, that's ok too. The reward is the same either way.
But armies aren't liek that. Army costs are all upfront, because the majority of your costs aren't paying soldiers, they're equipping soldiers and that's very different.
Even the king in the old Dragon Warrior RPG knew that it wasn't very economical to equip low level heroes. It's why all he gave you in gold was the bare minimum to buy a club and a set of clothes and that was only because your character was some chosen one. If he was just some random hero he wouldn't have gotten any money.
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User3
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### Re: Armies versus Heroes: A sound military System

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Post by User3 » Mon Apr 25, 2005 9:11 am

Armies are capable of being many places at once.
10 000 infantry can be in 100 different places in reasonable force and 1000 different places in enough force to maintain order in an average village -- all at once and for extended periods of time.
Four highlevel heroes can be in four places at once -- and four different places very shortly thereafter perhaps, but it's still only four places at once.
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User3
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### Re: Armies versus Heroes: A sound military System

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Post by User3 » Mon Apr 25, 2005 4:18 pm

> RandomCasualty at [unixtime wrote:1109113744[/unixtime]]

> > FrankTrollman at [unixtime wrote:1109102127[/unixtime]]
> > In the long run, if you have to do things alot, you're way
> > better off having your own in-house guys that you trained. If you're a kingdom, then by definition you are going to be here for a long time, so hiring mercenaries to handle your problems is stupid and unhelpful.

> Who says you can't hire them for the long term? I mean modern day buisnesses don't put all their prospective employees through college, in fact tehy don't put any of them through college. It's more expensive for them to pay to train people then it is for them to just hire someone over the long term.
> The king doesn't just hire them for a mission he says "Hey how about I pay you X gold per month, and you guys function as my standing army?" or maybe he just offers them land or whatever and makes them barons. I'd be just like fuedalism only when war breaks out there's no army, it's just the king and his barons.

The main problem is that mercenaries do not share any sense of loyalty to the monarch who is currently funding them. As a consequence, as soon as a richer kingdom comes along and offers the mercenaries more gold to turn on their current nation, they would quickly realize that they have the upper hand in determining the fate of your empire. I believe that this issue was covered in Machiavelli's The Prince.
In fact...
http://archive.gamespy.com/comics/nodwi ... od106.html
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Josh_Kablack
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### Re: Armies versus Heroes: A sound military System

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Post by Josh_Kablack » Fri Apr 29, 2005 1:29 am

Using actual 3.5 D&D costs:
Would you rather have 1,000 trained Riding Dogs
or
1 Iron Golem?
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
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