Just want to add something about this. The statement that the Merc force had superior equipment is quite misleading. They gambled on having 10 or so extremely well equipped cavalry, and everyone else had very poor gear. It is also likely that they only had 1 spawn worth of the good gear for each of those cavalry. BRD on the other hand, had moderately well equipped 1200 troops. In other words, we spent more money equipping an army, as opposed to spending a smaller sum to equip a single commando strike force. The gamble for the Mercs paid off big time and was very well executed and it shows the problems with the current system. We should have guarded our spawn, that is true, but if you think about it, we had about 44 or our players able to spawn in (10 or so were unable to join as they were getting kicked out). If 10 of our 44 players had spawned with some of the long spears we bought and held our spawn, we would have essentially been attacking the village with 34 players and few or no polearm players... at this point the heavy cav squad of Mercs could have executed many effective cav charges against our infantry that would be quite vulnerable to cav. Our spawn was quite far from the village, so in order for even the archers to engage they had to run quite a way. We likely would have picked off the cav one by one and won the battle, but the cost might have been 300-500 troops from the heavy cav charges. In the end, we lost very few troops, and the Mercs got to keep Emerin. This battle was very useful in terms of showcasing many of the current issues with the current form of strategus, obviously we would have liked for a different out come, but we did learn a lot from it.
