Mercenaries

[NYG 5]

Haven't got the chance to try this out yet, but do mercs count against your recruitment cap? Like, if I can only recruit 4 units at a time in Italia, can i recruit 4 regular units plus however many mercenaries?

[Irishmafia2020]

You can recruit as many mercs as you can afford if they are available in the mercenary pool... which is to say that you could buy 8-9 merc units if you wanted to, and they become available immediately, so you can use them to attack a city or enemy army the moment you purchase them. However, there may not be that many mercs available in the recruitment pool - especially early in the game many of the regional mercenaries are greyed out because they only become available every 10 turns (or whatever their replenishment is set too) and so you won't have access to all the merc units until you've been playing for awhile. In most cases the upkeep is high, so only really special or cheap mercenaries get kept in your regular army stack during peacetime. Also a few factions seem to have cheap or faction specific mercenary units, and Carthage has a significant discount that allows them to maintain full stacks of mercenaries if they choose to..