I guess the mercs get bonuses whenever they decline a counteroffer (or rather, seal it with bullets). Also, in LCS, all your members are ideological warriors, so it'd feel a bit odd to have a paid mercenary practicing diseobedience or such...
I assumed that the basis of the game was to justify your means with the end results. Including war crimes. Innocent war crimes committed for the greater liberal good.
But it would feel out-of-place, in my opinion, to have the player control groups of people with very different motivations. If mercenary hiring is added, at least it should be abstracted so they wouldn't be directly controlled by the player.
I never meant actually hiring them. I simply meant bribing them off if they came to kick your ass.
Oooh...
Well, mercenaries are just people, and anyone's subject to corruption...
Of course it would also really depend on the mercenary. Being an independent mercenary gives them the privilege of choosing and biasing their jobs as they see fit, and they have the resources to do whatever they want. A merc from a firm, however, has restrictions and doing something that angers the firm (Them not getting paid.) would likely have ramifications.
I guess the entity that is actually supplying the mercs is a firm, which would coincide with the Conservative alignment of the mercenaries since they work for a psuedo-corporation, but that would be a bit confusing when things are more liberal since at that point a mercenary firm likely couldn't operate, and anyone needing mercs would have to rely on freelance mercenaries, so they would have weaker mercs.
On a side note, would entire existence of the LCS be corruption? Because depending on the player, the LCS tends to use conservative means to create a liberal end, it's just that they pander whatever they do into being liberal. I guess it would really depend on the individual activists, since they probably all are in it for different reasons (Some might be genuinely insane, some might be corrupted, some might be stupid, some might be oblivious, etc.).
For the record, some of this is just thinking out loud.