Smaller Mercenary Companies (1.35.*)
This mod cuts down mercenary company sizes to 20% by modifying their spawn sizes and adjusting their min and max caps (along with other balance changes).
Historically, mercenary companies very rarely numbered in the thousands of men. They usually had dozens to a couple hundred men at most. Now there were definitely mercenary companies that were huge in size, with the Great Companies being reported to have had at least 10,000 men in their ranks, but these are few and far between.
From an immersion and realism perspective, EU4 does a poor job at implementing mercenary companies simply due to the numbers they have. Being able to recruit a 10,000 mercenaries in the late 15th century when a lot of countries at the time struggle to even field 10,000 men (both men-at-arms and levies) is not acceptable. Mercenary companies simply were never as large as levy or standing armies.
This mod tries to make a compromise between gameplay/balance and immersion/realism, with the end goal that instead of using mercenary companies as supporting armies, you will now have to use them as supporting units IN your armies.
The total development of your country determines how many units spawn once you recruit a stack (varies by mercenary company). For example, the Independent Army has this spawn setting by default:
Another example is the Gallowglasses, with this setting:
This mod lowers the values of regiments_per_development of ALL vanilla mercenary companies to 20%.
Changes are based on the average numbers of mercenary companies historically. Gone are the days of 30-60k mercenary stacks.
- Changed the minimum number of units from 4 to 1
- Changed the maximum number of units from 60 to 12 (down to 20%)
To make the mercenary companies still worthwhile to get:
- Removed the professionalism penalty when recruiting mercenary companies
- Lowered base recruitment cost of 10g to 5g
- Lowered recruitment cost increase per tech level from 4% to 2%
- Lowered initial recruitment cost (based on months) from 48 months to 24 months
- Lowered time required to get back to full manpower from 120 months to 60 months
These changes result in mercenary companies that are slightly more expensive than normal stacks/units in terms of recruitment cost, but will still cost more in the long run due to higher maintenance costs.
Definitely no. This changes how mercenary companies are used fundamentally, and no changes to the AI have been made to accommodate this. In general, mercenary companies still give the most value in the early game when manpower is an issue, but quickly lose their usefulness when you are able to field and maintain standing armies. Also, they are now meant to be ‘attached’ to your main army as supporting/auxiliary forces, not as groups that operate independent of your forces.
Feel free to tweak this mod to your liking. I documented the changes I made as best I can in the mod contents.
This mod makes the most sense and is most balanced when used with Responsible Warfare by Zemurin since it tones down the scale of warfare to realistic and immersive numbers. The smaller mercenary companies of this mod pairs extremely well with the smaller army sizes brought by Responsible Warfare (who would’ve thought).
