Relative frequency of Mercenaries for Hire

I'm thinking of adjusting the availability of mercenaries for hire for different races - Dwarves in particular have a much lower BR of troops available than elves or humans, and that doesn't seem right.

What are the general principles that affect the relative frequency of each type of mercenary? As I see it there are probably three things that would affect availability:

  • Training Ability: Twice as many dwarves can become heavy infantry as humans can. This implies there should be twice as many Dwarven Heavy infantry as there are human Heavy Infantry.
  • Diversity of Troop types: Humans have Light Infantry and Heavy Infantry, while that entire pool of dwarven warriors goes into Heavy Infantry. That means that, contrary to the above, Dwarven Heavy Infantry availability should be the sum of Human Light and Heavy Infantry availability.
  • Finally, there's demand to consider. Perhaps the best way to control for demand is to force the total wages or BR of troops available to be the same for all races for a given market class. Thus elven garrisons and armies would consist of fewer, more capable soldiers.

Does this sound reasonable?

I’ve definitely added up types of mercenaries from the same training / availability categories before when one type isn’t available in a particular market (ie, vikings have no crossbows or slingers, they all get rolled into bowmen because any recruit qualified for crossbowman is qualified for bowman). This can lead to some weird results (lots and lots of bowmen), but worked OK in practice.

Tangentially related, I think dwarven crossbowmen are underrated in terms of listed BR. I was doing math on them recently and the formula in Battles gives them a BR around 6 when I run the numbers (weaker than Elven Longbowmen at 7, but much stronger than human crossbowmen at 3, which makes sense; they have 4/3 as much HP and 3/2 as many attacks as human crossbowmen, and when we multiply that out we get that they should be about twice as good), while Campaigns has dwarven crossbowmen listed as BR 3.5. I still don’t think that that will resolve dwarf aggregate BR being too low, because there just isn’t a very big variety of dwarf units compared to humans or elves. I’ve been working on that over at https://wanderinggamist.blogspot.com/2016/10/domains-at-war-dwarf-units.html , with more to follow, but didn’t think all that hard about availability classes or BR when I was writing that.

Those are interesting ideas, I love the idea of the Dwarves having an OGRE.