Editing Mercenaries (section)

===The Mercenary Contracts===

====Four Star Syndicate==== 

When you think of Mercenaries, they are often attributed as a PMC style organization. They're also the de facto military of the kingdom of Ord; the Ordric army is so small that the king usually just throws money at them until the invaders go away. The Four Star Mercs will work for anyone who can pay for it, or who are too insane to work with. They can likewise take any Mercenary models who will work for Cryx and/or Khador, This is the most 'balanced' of the Mercenary sub-factions. Their strength of utility counterbalances their lack of special abilities.

====Highborn Covenant==== 

The army of the Llaelese resistance, consisting of those few Llaelese who aren't complete cheese-eating surrender monkeys, as well as mercenaries who are willing to contribute cash to the resistance and a few Cygnaran warriors left over from when Cygnar actually had the resources to care about defending Llael. You can take any Mercenary model that will work for Cygnar, which means you have a slightly smaller range than Four Star, but you still get most of the Mercenary models in the game, and have a lot of crossover with the Four Star list. Every solo in a Highborn army gets Advanced Deployment, which is pretty damn cool. Highborn lists can also include one unit of either Long Gunners or Arcane Tempest Gun Mages and they'll count as a Mercenary unit, representing either Cygnaran forces staying behind in Llael or remnants of the Llaelese military (such as the Gun Mages representing members of Llael's own gun mage order, the Amethyst Rose, rather than being members of Cygnar's Order of the Arcane Tempest). The main attraction of Highborn lists is that you can take the ATGM Officer and have him marshal a Mercenary warjack. Giving the Mule some Rune Shots is pretty devastating.

====Searforge Commission==== 

[[Dwarf|DWAAAAAAARVES]]. 

That should be all you need to know, but if you're not convinced yet, the Searforge Commission is the company which arranges trade between the Dwarven kingdom of Rhul and the human kingdoms, and this army represents the Rhulic mercenaries that they occasionally hire to settle disputes. If you prefer, you can use it to represent the Rhulic military, although fluff-wise Rhul has never been invaded by another kingdom -- it's the Switzerland of the Iron Kingdoms. In a Searforge Commission List, you can only take Rhulic or Ogrun mercenaries, meaning that this list is much more limited than the Four Star or Highborn lists. As a rules benefit, the size of your deployment zone is increased by 4" (which is pretty awesome when most of the models in the list are SPD 4), and you get a +1 bonus to the FA of all non-character models and units (which compensates somewhat for the small selection available).

Tactically, Searforge is quite different to most other armies, being a turtle-tastic SPD 4 list in a game which is focused on speed and aggression. Dwarven warcasters are tough as nails, but they have terrible FOC scores and not a lot of magic to play with. The army has trouble dealing with some scenarios, as the enemy will almost certainly be able to take the objective before the Commission army can get there. On the other hand, assassination-based play simply doesn't work against Searforge, and most anti-infantry tech will be rendered useless, since even their small-based infantry is armoured like a light warjack.

====Talion Charter====

The Talion Charter are pirates led by Phinneas Shae, captain of the Talion. He gets to lead the Charter because he has the Commodore Cannon. Do you have the Commodore Cannon? No? Then you can't lead the Talion Charter.

In all seriousness the Talion Charter allows you to field any Privateer mercenaries. Leaving you with a list that's about as varied as Searforge (i.e. not much variation). Rules-wise they get a +1 bonus to the roll-off to see who goes first and the (awesome) ability to redeploy all solos in the army after Advanced Deployment is resolved. Talion lists are usually focused on infantry synergy; take a unit of Sea Dogs, buff it up to ridiculous levels, throw it at the enemy and hope its support models don't die.

As we may have implied above the main reason to run Talion is to field Phinneas Shae and the Commodore Cannon. Shae only works for the Charter (he won't work for any main faction or any other Merc contract) and the Cannon only works for Shae. Both Shae and the Cannon are truly awesome and well worth the restrictive list building.