Not even those, in the system I proposed. You could, through great
expense or effort, put together a band of soldiers to stack with you
in battle. But they would quickly be disbanded after the battle, or
they would cause trouble.
Just as undead soldiers will appear and fight for a mage in the current
system. You can't make them study or equip them with fine weapons.
This is not a direct design choice; this is a consquence of these
mechanics. If you have a rule that says "you cannot directly order
your armies, they only stack with you" then things like "teach them
pigsticking" and "give them weapons" don't really work, since they
can't be ordered to do these things.
If you want them to do such things, then you're really ordering them
about, and you don't just want to play a few powerful characters, you
want to play the men in your army as well.
Or, you could say that elite army units hang out in the town square
waiting to be hired. But then I will add code so that they go around
pillaging provinces and roughing up the locals if they don't have
anything else to do, because that is what armies that don't have anyone
to fight do if they aren't disbanded.
If the development of the men is "minor", can you do without it? Is
it crucial to the game design? Or will the fact that big armies are
uninteresting just cause you to look for expression in other areas of
the game? Perhaps equiping and training combat troops is an important
part of the game that we don't want to lose; but it's hard to have
everything.
-- Rich Skrenta <skrenta@rt.com> N2QAV