idea: fully custom equipment & rebalance of mod

[jpw1991]

Description

Many players express the desire of being able to dress their mercenaries in armour themselves.

It is technically possible. Although there are some challenges:

1. Appearance: Player armor worn by NPCs often doesn't look right. In many cases, you would have to accept partial display of what they're wearing; or worse case, what they wear appears invisible or overlapping.
2. Cost: Outfitting minions would become a lot more expensive. Full iron armor for a minion costs 1 iron bar. But a full set of player-worn iron armor costs 60 iron bars and 6 deer hide
3. Dev work: Some kind of interface needs to be created (eg. a container) where you put the items and the minion equips them

From my point of view, the biggest downside is just having to do the work involved.

I think if this were to be done, the "balance" of the mod would have to move away from quantity and instead focus on quality. Mercenaries become much tougher, but more expensive overall. And thus are more of an investment, last longer, etc. This might provide a better synergy with Cheb's Necromancy as well as Valadriel the Mad mentioned where there's some overlap.