I hate restrictions... in rpgs. I mean.. if I have 50 friends and 200 hired mercenaries so what..

Hey man, I hate em too, but thus your party can only consist of 6 members.


Slight Spoiler below


You also have to add the fact that you do get "Friends" with the individual Stronghold quests, at least with F-T-B-M & S

The real reason is moste likely game balance in any case if you want to play with your friends wait for NWN. you may not be a party per say but you will be able to work together or against each other at you preference.

there would be no point in having large amounts of ppl in your pary, it'll be a small army. there just aren't enough enemies.

LOL! I want to form an army too. Lead a coup on Athkatla and put all the Cowled Wizards to the sword. VIVA LA REVOLUTION!

On a practical note, I'd like the ability to have everyone in my party. :D
But that would make it too easy, so if you could play with 14 people, but the monsters were drastically more in number and difficulty, it would be a rewarding experience.

The more people you have in your party the more impersonal it gets. You are more likely to enjoy your characters and know them and develop them well than if they become some number in your army.

6 in the party is really a matter of tradition. Most of your D&D, Wizardry, such like games have always had 6 members to a party. Why break custom now? In other games, like the Nintendo-related games (i.e. Final Fantasy, Breath of Fire, etc), four was the most you could get. But 6 offers the best balance, without making the party overly big. Your traditional blend of party members should normally be 3 fighter-types, 1 thief, 1 cleric, and 1 mage.

Besides all that, if you had 250 people the area would be so full of them you could barely move them around and you couldn't keep track of them all.

Blush, my friend...
Your party size is determined not only by the intelligence of yourself, but by the power of your system, the software of the game, and the workaholicness of the workaholics at Bioware. With '200 hired mercenaries', where will the private NPC relation-feel that is the purpose of the game be? What's more - how will you ever interact with a constructed world like Baldur's Gate 2 when unrestricted to power? You could be a pink pygmy hippo with laryngitis and wings made of golden peanut butter. That would be incredibly fun. RPG's are about restrictions; they are clones of our world, whether you play them to get away from your own demented existence or not.

If you did have everyone in your party (army), you could go online and have a mega war with one or more others which also have an army of a couple hundred. Divide them into races, Dwarves v Elves v Humans v halflings v ...whatever else you can think of!