Heres another little quick tweak: Number of mercenaries that spawn in towns.
Open up scripts.txt and find:
update_mercenary_units_of_towns -1
6 6 3 1224979098644774912 648518346341351443 648518346341351461 2136 3 1224979098644774913 360287970189639706 360287970189639713 501 3 1224979098644774912 90 1224979098644774913 2136 3 1224979098644774914 3 8 501 3 1224979098644774912 91 1224979098644774914 3 0
The
3 8 is the range of the amount set whenever the script triggers. You can change it to whatever you like. It recalculates the mercenaries every time, not add to them, so you can't get multiple types in the same town.
The type of mercenaries being added are the numbers in blue, it's a range between
360287970189639706 (watchman) and
360287970189639713 (mercenaries_end). The actual range is between the first number and the second number minus 1 (so it never actually puts mercenaries_end in as a mercenary, it's just a placeholder for where mercenaries end at). Adding in mercenaries without the module system would prove difficult though, since adding troops to the troops.txt list would change all point of reference and screw up the game. You could edit it to include troops close to the list easily, though - by reducing the first number in the range by 2 it would reference farmers and townsmen (so it'd be 360287970189639704 360287970189639713) This is your best bet other than editing the current mercenaries to suit what you wanted. It would not, however, count them as mercenaries in the wage checks until they leveled up to Watchmen - but that's not really a big deal since they are cheap anyway.
and Lord Kinlar - I'll just explain it all
The first red number is who can trigger the dialog and who is speaking - 4095 is anyone with the npc talking (so it comes up top), and 69631 is anyone with the player talking (so it's a dialog option for you). That blue 0 is the dialog state (start). The green 4 is the number of lines of code to follow. The blue code is what I mentioned earlier (checking if one of the heroes then checking if they're in a castle). The red lines of code are first getting the honorific for the troop, and then storing that honorific as string 5, or {s5}. Thats how you get the "Yes, boss?" and "Yes, sir?" type things, differing between the companions. The 71 is the number for the dialog state that follows this one (member_talk). And that last 0 is the number for how many lines of code come after the fact - after you click through the text if its them saying it, or after you chose that option if its you. It's 0 here because nothing happens after the text comes up. All the dialog entries follow this structure.
It's MUCH easier to read in the module system, though - I have been using the .960 system to "translate" what things do exactly, which is very similar to the 1.003 (not quite, though - you have to pay attention to the text files to spot the differences). Once the 1.003 module system comes out, the editing of text files is no longer necessary - you can just edit the module system .py files and then compile the text files from them. Editing via the text files is kind of akin to reading machine code instead of a scripting language (although not quite so ridiculous).