Quote:
Sandman said:
Would you have to take the soldiers back to their home province to avoid the disband penalty? Why can't we just assume that they make their own way home, like mercenaries?
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They quite possibly spent months getting there and might take months back -- if there even is a path that doesn't involve the use of magic they don't have. Given the era, they also probably don't have much savings other than what they're carrying. They certainly don't have months of dried rations for the way home. The villagers on the way home are likely scraping by under their liege's multiple forms of taxation, the soldiers themselves -- particularly ones with substantial training (gold cost) may feel themselves above helping out with farming... oh, and there's the issue of how the ex-soldiers might deal with the local peasant women, too. A local lord is also going to be concerned about the ex-troops overstaying their welcome and taking excessive liberties for a variety of reasons, and is not going to be happy with getting stuck with the bill, either.
Mercenaries are an interesting idea, but the teleportation issue should probably be dealt with at some point -- mercenaries wandering from province to province looking for employment, say, rather than manifesting somewhere at a player's whim. A group that organized itself as a mercenary company, however, should have a greater chance of remaining as a cohesive unit -- either looking for employment together, or doing the whole 'slaughtering the locals and setting themselves up in charge' thing that occasionally happened.