[0992] Unit costs: mercenaries and rangers

I still think champions should get a raise as they level, something on the order of .2 gold per level.

I think part of the reasoning for such a high gildar cost is that the champions are not doing it for the money. The champions get a higher station in your empire / kingdom which comes with them having a lesser cost. The mercs / rangers are doing it only for the money and they know they are front line cannon fodder and want to get their money quick so they can retire quick.

No, this is a bug. The "haswages =0" tag got removed in the latest updates. 

9 gold a turn for the Knights of Asok, fucking ridiculous.

Hehehe... are the knights wearing golden armor... Dear goodness... must have low rider horses with golden rims... That is excessive on the gildar front.

Thanks for catching that.  Presumably it's been noted, and will be fixed before release.

If it's simply a matter of adding a line to a file in a certain location, can you point me to the correct one?

CoreMonsterUnitTypes.xml

Most every unit has this:

<HasWages>0</HasWages>

It's a simple Boolean value. For some reason these two weakling units and the underpowered Knights of Isuck are missing it. I think they solved an issue with one thing that made the game start checking for wage costs for monsters.

For some reason, mercs in that file has:

<WageOverride>2</WageOverride>

I'm not sure what that refers to.  Replacing it with

That fixes the wages for that unit. If that be the case, this is deliberate. But why is it 4.5 gildar per turn then? It should be 6 for a party or 2, if it is not per troop.

No idea.  As you point out, that makes no sense.  It is figured per unit for each hunter and merc.  They're also not that much better than basic city units, which makes their cost seemingly out of sync.  Granted, mercs/hunters are generated outside city queues, so they take in effect no time to build, but they're just too expensive to do considering how poor their values are.

Replacing that line with:

<HasWages>0</HasWages>

causes no change to the merc cost per turn in the game I'm playing.  Unless it will only affect units that haven't yet been created.

You have to start a new game to see changes.

Also, you might have to run it in admin mode to see the changes... depending on where you installed FE

So would

<WageOverride>0</WageOverride>

be effectively the same as

<HasWages>0</HasWages>

if no wage tag for the unit has been previously set?

It should, yeah.

I like that I have to pay the Mercenaries, Hunters, and Knights of Asok, but I agree that the amounts that I have to pay for them is ridiculous. 4.5 gildar for something on par with the basic militia units I can train at the beginning of the game? No thanks. 9 gildar for Knights of Asok? I can train my own Knights who are almost as good (or just as good, if I have the ability that grants Warhorses) and they cost less. Only advantage from the Knights of Asok is that I don't have to use up part of my supply of horses to train them, yet with the small unit size and high cost they really aren't worth having. If they came clad in full Champion Plate Armor with Champion Pikes, well, that would be a very different story, but they seem to be made to be a vaguely elite mercenary force for someone who has skipped researching much of anything in the Warfare Tree (and perhaps the Magic Tree) to use in support of a hero army or two.

Maybe if Knights of Asok, Mercenaries, and Hunters were more consistently available relatively early in the game the cost for having them would be understandable (because then the cost for them would be consistent with the power they provide), but as it stands now they tend to become available late enough in the game (at least, in the games I've played) that I can easily enough produce my own units of equal or better quality, which cost me less in the long run than the Knights and Mercenaries and Hunters, and usually last longer (especially in the case of Mercenaries and Hunters).

I have always been a proponent of stronger units from camps, but the devs seem to want them to be weak. That is fine as long as they don't cost anything. If we have to pay, I want real bows, armor, swords, abilities.

To me this is the real issue, these units are way too costly to research and are underpowered.