Do Event-Obtained Troops Cost Upkeep?

[Caduceus]

Meat shields at the front line to cut them down or time to invade the water.

[thejeff]

Too many militia can lead to routing. 75% dead or routed and the whole army will flee.

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

As militia aren't especially durable...
Take one low pop (500 or so) low income (3-7 gold) province. Move your militia in there, and pillage, plunder, overtax, and (if you've got undead/demonic priests) turn some pop into ghouls, with the goal of zero population. If you've got low admin fortresses, or they're nowhere nearby, you'll have the perfect dumping ground for all your militia to die of disease, without managing a battle. Not quite as quick to take out that upkeep hit, but lazy elimination.

On certain maps, I do find those free militia especially handy for patrolling my borders and preventing those assassins from 'friendly' countries coming in.
40 is about an even chance of detection, 80 is near spotless, and 120 might even catch glamoured units reliably.

[Edi]

Event militias have the same monster id as one of the recruitables, so yes, they cost upkeep. Roughly 1 gold for every two militia.

[DonCorazon]

Argh thats what I thought...these bums are draining my treasury. I plan to ship them off to a particularly dangerous province. Mwahahaha!

[jaif]

I tend to toss a commander onto them, couple them with a few decent troops, and use them to take indies on a secondary front. Later in the game, I use them to make a nuisance for someone else.

If your army is big enough, then they make good cannon fodder.

-Jeff

[NTJedi]

DonCorazon said:
Argh thats what I thought...these bums are draining my treasury. I plan to ship them off to a particularly dangerous province. Mwahahaha!

Yes the milita event has been previously discussed on the forums and the vast majority agree it's a bad event.
What's really bad is when they land in a province where there's also another army and the end result can be starvation/disease.

The milita can land in deep secure provinces as well where killing them might take 8+ turns of marching. The milita event means you pay more gold upkeep, you need to feed more units and you have a ton of low morale weak units.

[Rathar]

Drowning them is also fun.

Equip item which allows largish army underwater, march underwater, put all the militia in the leaderless box.

Poof!