RE: [GZG] 'Realistic' Mercenary TO&E [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

This is a good point.  There was a sci-fi story I read many, many years
ago focussing on mercenary navies on Venus after Earth nuked itself. 
One of the mercenary canons is that ANY merc unit using a nuke gets
wiped out by the other mercenary units.  The tie-in to the comment below
is that the main mercenary unit actually subcontracts another unit
because they want an edge to offset some specific element that the mercs
that they're going to be facing have in their forces.

Thus, I could easily see (and this also ties into the question posed
about using multiple, different smaller merc forces side-by-side) a
planetary defense force or whatever being faced by a merc force and a
couple of specialized subcontracted merc forces to offset parts of the
planety force.	Maybe the main merc force is mechanized infantry, but
needs some mobile, hard hitters.  So they subcontract a company of fast,
heavily armored grav tanks.  Since the defenders also have significant
air assets, they also hire on a unit which specializes in air defense.

Could make for some interesting games.	Especially if there are
conditions placed on the subcontracted mercs.  For example, if the tanks
take more than	20% losses, they cancel their contract and leave because
they can't afford to lose many tanks.  If the AA unit gets engaged by
infantry they will attempt to negotiate a surrender so that they don't
get their gun crews wiped out. 

:)

John

> Its unusual to actually game this out, as the more players, the slower
> the game (in general).
> 
> Mercenary unit composition would tend to be a "rock-papers-scissors" 
> situation when they fight each other, due to wild variances in
equipment
> and affordable losses (an all infantry force with disposable anti-tank
> weapons can afford huge losses in manpower compared to a tank force,
but
> the tankers would be receiving much higher pay to cover potential
losses).
> 

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