Mercenary Guide

This information on this page is fully or partially outdated, and may no longer apply to Shadowbane in its current state because it was written in 2003. See Patch History to stay up-to-date on changes.

Felony's Mercenary Guide
by: Felony, Guild Leader of the Fallen Angels

I. Preface:

I write this as the Guild Leader of the Fallen Angels which I started back in 1998 in a game called Ultima Online. Our guild has never had large numbers; our maximum being approximately 20-25 people (mid-Shadowbane). We have always preferred to maximize our strength through the synergy of the people we had available. When we moved to Shadowbane, we decided that with the numbers we had (5-6 people), we would never be able to compete with the guilds that could field 100+ at banes, yet we still wanted to leave our mark in the world. One thing that was VERY important to us was not wanting to lose everything we had worked so hard for because the game's mechanics were such that it rewarded numbers over skill. Also, quite a few of us were fathers, husbands, wives, etc and didn't have massive amounts of time to commit to defending a town that would be baned every few days given the open-PvPing play style that we enjoyed. There was only one option: Play the game in a fashion that the developers never dreamed possible.

As an ongoing student of history I have always been fascinated with the military aspect of warfare and in particular of the writings of Sun Tzu. I read and re-read "The Art of War" many times and wanted to see if I could adapt some of the principles to Shadowbane. As it turns out, some of them were quite successful and hold very true today. Some of them are:

Sun Tzu (544-496BC)

"Let your plans be dark and as impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt."

"If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles."

"Regard your soldiers as your children, and they will follow you into the deepest valleys; look on them as your own beloved sons, and they will stand by you even unto death."

“The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy's not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking, but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable.”

“All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near. Hold out baits to entice the enemy. Feign disorder, and crush him. If he is secure at all points, be prepared for him. If he is in superior strength, evade him. If your opponent is of choleric temper, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak. That he may grow arrogant. lf he is taking his ease, give him no rest. If his forces are united, separate them. Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected.” These and more are some of the tenets that FA tries to follow in the game of Shadowbane.

I won't clog this guide with past Shadowbane stories of how we utilized our methods to get where we are, since at most it would be nothing more than a nostalgic walk through a game that has evolved so much over the years that those tales wouldn't be relevant today. Instead, I will describe each maxim with the hope that the readers will understand that little of this information has come as epiphanies, but rather by setting goals and working through many trials and errors. There are a few "golden rules" I consider when deciding to walk down the path of a mercenary company and there are many "suggestions". All I am doing is showing you how FA has maintained its neutral role and still been successful, even with limited numbers of people with limited amounts of play time.

The Shadowbane community has come a long way from how it used to treat the idea of mercenaries. In the not-so-recent past, the hiring of mercenaries was said to be “dirty” or a sign of dishonor among a majority of the community, but now it is viewed a bit more liberally. As I try to explain to many decision-making guild leaders, “No one remembers the last guy on the wall defending the city against a hundred people; only that the city fell.” I also try to explain some of the advantages to hiring mercs. One being that you never have to return a favor since it is a simple contract, and no return favor is owed upon its completion. Merc guilds will also be in the conflict for longer periods than allies, and can bring consistent numbers of people. In other words, if a merc guild says it will bring a full group, give or take a couple, then that is usually what you can expect, for the duration of the contract. I have witnessed many one sided alliances, and others are rarely balanced. You can always count on mercs being there if the money is right.

Mercenary Advantages:

• Fight whenever, wherever, and for whoever you want
  
• Completely a-political
  
• Not subject to as much burnout
  

Mercenary Disadvantages:

• No assets
  
• More difficulty gaining equipment
  
• No political identity
  

II. Mercenary Golden Rules

1. A merc company can have NO assets that are known to outsiders at any time: This includes tagged cities and gear rolling cities that people have knowledge about. Once someone knows you have something that can be taken away, they will do just that. Not only that, but if you have a tagged town, if it gets baned (and it WILL get baned), the merc guild will now have to spend its time defending; taking precious time they could have been using to fulfill contracts. My suggestion is to own rolling cities if you must, but limit the number of people on them to only one or two people who have the sole responsibility of getting gear for the guild. Even when my long-time guild members asked me if we had cities (we may or may not have had at the time), I always responded “we have the ABILITY to get gear”. Another good suggestion is to work out contracts to get one of your ICs placed on a rolling city of a nation you are currently working for. If you do this often enough, there is no need to be worried about being removed from one city since you have backup places to roll. All you need to do is bring your own resources and do the job.

1. Always make VERY specific contracts. One of the biggest pitfalls facing most merc guilds is the fact that they take "generally subjective" contracts that cannot be measured. In FA, we make sure everything is VERY specific, so there is little room for debate whether we were successful in an endeavor or not. One of the contracts proposals I receive most often is, "I would like you to grief guild x". We can see the big problem here. What do you mean by "grief"? Do you mean camping cities, rolling xp groups, crashing their banes? And if you did mean all of those things, then over what period of time? Also, how do you measure each of those things to know if you, as an employer, received a good return for your investment? Now if I start to narrow things down for the employer, usually he starts to see that his investment may not be such a good choice and may want to get at his targeted adversary through other means. For example: Let's say we worked it down to "I want FA to camp X guild for one week starting tonight. Moreover, I want FA to camp X's capitol each night for two hours per night at prime time. Also, I want FA to camp the guards for one hour each night and destroy all of their attempts at leveling." All of that sounds specific and grand, correct? Well here is what I respond with. "What if X guild decides to do the smart thing once they see their tree camped and either rebind to another tree and let us sit there fighting their guards for two hours, or log in other toons to do other things? What if we camp guards to kill X members specifically and they go level somewhere else?” As you can see this is usually not a good contract to take since it is very subjective and even if you followed through with everything in the contract, the employer may still feel unsatisfied since his target would have probably felt little pain. Better contracts consist of the following: deranking mines, claiming mines, bane defense, bane offense, and other espionage contracts which I will discuss later.

1. Never allow ANYONE to post on the political message boards, other than one guild member assigned to keep neutrality. This is another HUGE pitfall for guilds that start as mercenary companies. People will always take pot shots at the "scrubs" that were helping or being paid to help another nation, and what will happen 99% of the time, is that someone from the merc guild will fire off an inflammatory response which may seem right at the time, but may be very foolish in the long-term. This will cause potential employers to lose interest in you and more importantly might cause employers to drop you for causing them embarrassment. I generally stay away from VERY subjective topics on message boards such as: skill, numbers, allies and enemies. I have found that most people who argue these things are usually right in what they truly believe (what they say and think is honestly how they perceive the situation to be). Saying something contradictory is akin to impugning their honor; not a good business practice.

1. Never "switch sides" no matter what the short term reward. I have been offered 100 times my original contract to switch sides in a fight and back-stab my employer, but this is a foolish risk. Not only will FA never be hired again by the first employer, but the one who paid us to switch probably will never hire us, because we might do the same to him.

1. Pay attention to external guild conduct: We have a "no or limited response" rule in FA. If anyone messages one of my members with any type of challenging remarks, they are to ignore it. This ties in closely with the message board conduct for members. If you see any of your members demeaning anyone else for whatever reason, you must remove him from the guild immediately. Even if he is God's gift to pvpers, he will hurt your guild in the long run.

1. Be a guild of averages. FA is not a guild of superstar duelers or 1 versus 1 super pvpers. We ALWAYS work as a team and listen VERY well. Some of our members are average and some are above average, but together we are much more than the sum of our parts. I will take ten average people who work together extremely well than 10 “super pvpers” who all have egos and are unwilling to listen.

1. Never defame another guild or guild leader. This is a VERY hard one to follow for many people, especially if they have been wronged. I will, at times, hang out in nations' vent/TS servers whose leaders/people are constantly bashing the nations they are at war with. FA has very easily just either fought against or with said nation, but I have built up a rapport over time, such that each nation's leadership knows that I will not give out nation secrets to other hiring clients and I will not take part in bashing a nation or its leadership. There are guilds out there that I personally dislike for one reason or another, and some that I think are still struggling to learn the game, but should this never be brought up, unless you don't mind losing customers.

III. Best Practices

• Guild Size: A mercenary guild tends to work more efficiently with one to two groups of active players. The largest advantage of this is the greater ease of controlling and communicating during a fight, against the advantage of much greater numbers. One group is ideal for the mercenary company. If a merc guild finds itself with enough people to have two groups, it should split its force. Twenty people on one target is a waste of resources in battle. The idea of keeping the guild small is to help control its effectiveness in fights and politics. Also, it is more difficult to weed out a spy from 40-50 people than from 10-15. Finally, this smaller number helps with keeping moral up and encourages the guild to grow tighter and become a unit instead of just a group of disjointed players.

• Spec groups: The importance of spec groups is to increase effectiveness. Any nation can mass recruit and arrive to a fight with double their opponent’s numbers and win. But when the disjointed, mass-recruited nation has its force wiped from the field by 10-20 people, the psychological damage to that guild is undeniable. When designing a spec group, all must be considered. But before a spec group can be decided upon, you must first decide what you want to accomplish with that group. Is it survivability, damage, or support of your contractor’s forces? I cannot stress enough how important it is to understand the synergy between races, classes and powers. The questions that should be asked are: Will “x” work with “y”? What are the advantages and disadvantages to this group? Do the pros outweigh the cons? Over time, new spec groups will need to be created to compete with the ever changing dynamics of the game and the nations on the server. Skills and powers are nerfed, buffed and downright altered from time to time. Guilds start noticing that a particular spec group is doing incredible damage and will either try to replicate that group or defend specifically against it. If, for example, you made a mental- and magic-strong group, that was working wonderfully, but one of your key powers got nerfed or the guild you were going up against had all mental and magic resistances, your capability would be lessened. Better to have another set of characters under a different spec to beat this guild than try to continue with a group that has little chance of success, even if you have the best players around running them.

• Guild practice sessions and meetings. To keep your guild honed and ready for action (and worthy of top dollar contracts), you need to not only run together for contracts, but regularly practice strategies and tactics together. Whether you go out to level at one of the few r7 regions rife with pvp potential, crash a bane, fight at mines, or just go out to grief, group practice sessions are integral to keeping the teamwork strong and the skills honed. After each pvp bout, take time to review how the battle went, what could be improved upon, what went exactly as planned, and how you would do the battle again if you had the opportunity. Once or twice a month, the whole of the merc guild should get together to reassess current strategies; are they working, what can or should be amended, what must be avoided, are there any issues that need to be overcome. What is your current mission statement? Are you following that mission and are you living up to the reputation you intend to have? Are your desires and goals current and attainable? Have they changed? These things need to be discussed and understood by all members so as to have a solid front and strategy when facing the enemy.

• Espionage: For Merc Guilds, espionage is a viable and effective method of gaining information, and the upper hand, in a battle. Infiltrating the opposing guild takes a bit of time and effort, but sometimes the value gained from that effort is very useful. In general, we do not use this method, and prefer to spend our time in training or on contracts. If your guild is strong enough, coordinated enough, and built well enough, the little bit of extra information that espionage can gather can be worth the time and effort spent acquiring it. IV. Service Fees/Contract Offerings: A merc guild must know the economy of the server they are playing on, know what their services are truly worth, and charge accordingly. They must also be specific and detailed in their services offered and the fees required for those services. If either party, the merc guild or the hiring guild, feels they did not get a fair exchange in the contract, the true neutrality of the merc guild may be compromised.

There are many types of contracts that can be negotiated.

• Bane warfare: while it is up to personal preference, we have found that mutual satisfaction in bane contracts is had by giving a value per person the merc guild can bring during prime time (banes starting at 7-9pm central time). Banes happening outside this prime time require different negotiations as many members are not as able to guarantee their presence due to non game commitments. Our contracts normally consist of our guaranteeing a particular number of individuals to partake in one bane for as long as is required to take down the bane stone or the tree. If multiple banes are going live at the same time, we will bring our numbers to whatever bane or banes they want for a two hour block of time, where we are and who we are fighting is up to the hiring guild, but at the end of the two hours, our contract is fulfilled regardless of bane outcome or how long they had us running from bane to bane. If the hiring guild wants us for multiple banes in one evening, then after that two hour period a new contract is initiated

• Mine contracts: When we are hired to take a mine for a guild, our fee is normally half the resources from that mine for the first cycle that they own it. Since the value of mine resources varies depending on the current local economy, and there are so many different types of resources to be had from one mine to the next, this payment method seems most fair to all involved. Often, we have the hiring guild take one of our Prospector characters into their guild so we can claim the mine without the need of bugging the client for a prospector all the time. Another aspect of mine contracts comes under the auspice of guild griefing. We have been hired in the past to burn a nation’s mines every night, just to make them defend for an hour. We would “lock down” the enemy and force them to send anywhere from fifteen to twenty five people to different mines, just to sit and guard. This is useful if a bane is thrown during that time as well as for general griefing purposes.

• Retainer contracts: We offer the service of not fighting against a guild in any fashion in one week increments. This protects the hiring guild from us becoming an extra difficulty at any banes they are involved in throughout that week. During that time we are free to take other contracts, but promise not to accept any that directly go against the guild we have a retainer with. Upon cessation of that contract, we are on a first come first serve for new contracts, and may well be fighting against the guild that had just retained us the week before. If a guild wants continued protection from our guild, they must contact us immediately after the first contract is up to renew. During the time we are being retained, other contracts with that guild may also be created, including but not limited to bane assistance, mine contracts, and enemy guild griefing.

FA offers a 100% money back guarantee. At the end of a contract, our guild leader meets with the hiring guild's leader, if that guild is not satisfied with our performance, or if we are not satisfied with our performance, we will refuse payment or only accept partial payment for our services (if we were not up to par with our combat or could not bring the numbers we had promised due to non game issues, even if the hiring guild was satisfied). Our contracts, how satisfied our customers are, how effective we are in our jobs all create a reputation for our guild. If dissatisfaction occurs, reputation decreases and the fee's we can charge for our assistance decreases. We make it our priority to make sure our services are the best money can buy, and our customers are satisfied at our performance, discretion, and neutrality.