On the matter of contracts, it is vital to any company to be able to find rewarding ones that are not too risky for it is a problem, a major one at that, when a merc is rigorously trained in the heat of battle & given great gear only to eat a pike in the throat.
Never take contracts too risky for your crew. Never agree to travel across half the known godforsaken world to deliver a little package for a burgher or nobleman unless you are passing that way for more lucrative opportunities. In other words, never bite off more than you can chew as the company commander.
That said, it is highly important for any commander worth their salt & gold crowns to run the numbers so to speak. Is it profitable to hire that beggar or that daytaler as opposed to a hedge knight? Is it worth giving a sniveling peasant who you found originally in a sackcloth outfit a leather jerkin only to watch it break in combat & therefore become irrecoverable?
At the end of the day, it’s about profitability & maximizing the potential recruits & veterans alike while balancing your books. Without gold, you are nothing. Without battle brothers in tow, you are simply nonexistent & merely a man with ambition or perhaps shattered dreams.
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Acquiring the perfect, or at least near perfect, contract is not too easy for most but given a thorough analysis & reading of my tomes, you will find it less difficult hopefully in time. In any case, it is best to find the Gilder worshiping royals & nobility in the South as a stratagem for a variety of reasons, which I shall enumerate shortly.
First off, those Southern leaders who contract out to us types love to throw coins around like it’s going out of style. To them, their Gilder deity espouses finding the lowly mercenary, colloquially called “Crownlings,” to do all the dirty work such as killing ifrits in their accursedly hot deserts or putting down slave revolts.
Secondly, with the right negotiator in your camp retinue, you can often get a good payout from such employers in the South. Do not be afraid to haggle & dicker over coins. It is, after all, your lifeblood.
Third, it is satisfying to feel crowns in your pocket after selling off loot to desert marketplace folk or even offloading trade goods from the cold, icy North. Hell, a variety of goods are produced in towns & cities that you can broker deals to change hands as you journey about the lands visiting a variety of locales to slake your thirst for more money. A dragon’s hoard’s worth of coinage isn’t built in a day obviously. It's built off the backs of your employees through the proper leverage of investments into various aspects of your company.
Lastly, it is ultimately up to your style of leadership what other camp followers you hire, fire, re-hire, or keep permanently. That said, it is my suggestion to always have a negotiator.