Too expensive honor troops
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Enough food, and a baggage train or five will help you keep your morale stable long enough till you conquered the opposing army. You don´t travel around with such armies for long or the whole time, you merely gather and use them when you need them.
Which means, you kite the offenders close to your main power base, run in, get the troops out, jump them suckers, kick their lame arses and win the fight.
I play on maximum difficulty and 150 batttle size ever since Mnb .891 though not with realistic save as I´m a paranoid saver ever since a Stalker save went corrupt.
Which means, you kite the offenders close to your main power base, run in, get the troops out, jump them suckers, kick their lame arses and win the fight.
I play on maximum difficulty and 150 batttle size ever since Mnb .891 though not with realistic save as I´m a paranoid saver ever since a Stalker save went corrupt.
ericmyrs
Regular
Honor Troops too expensive. Bah, the cap isn't prestige, but payday.
Relatively shortly after getting a walled center, I am now in a position to field a 200 man all KHO unit army. IF I had the income to pay for it.
Which I don't. Which is probably a good thing. As a 200 man party of Knights of the Dragon/Dragon Drakes would wreck anything short of a tough unique spawn.
Relatively shortly after getting a walled center, I am now in a position to field a 200 man all KHO unit army. IF I had the income to pay for it.
Which I don't. Which is probably a good thing. As a 200 man party of Knights of the Dragon/Dragon Drakes would wreck anything short of a tough unique spawn.
tingjonki
Recruit
You support your army by having owning the villages around the walled city and improving them as well as enterprises in every cityericmyrs said:
With this you can easily support 160 honor troops with one city while still making money every week, also you could only take them out during wartimes to keep their unkeep low and when at war you could intercept caravans and get them to pay you ~2,500 for leaving them alone
bobknight
Sergeant at Arms
I have taken out maltise with about 150 ebony gauntlet troops(about 80-100 knights, rest are hammers).
I have taken out sylaz uzas with similar number of silvermists.
You just kite the bastards to the nearest mountain, and then sit them on top of a peak. They are pretty defenseless when they are crawling up the hills to get to you. Just reload when you run out of arrows.(or not, I didn't really need to with the EBKs, they club real hard even when the snakes reached the top).
Some knighthood orders are really weak and do not deserve a slot in your kingdom, in my opinion the following have a distinct disadvantage or are outclassed by another order:
Clarion Call: Their issue is loadout, some of them get lance+ bow, which means they are useless in dog fights. Their bow is also pretty crappy and their armour relatively weak. Not strong enough to fill any role. They are pretty much only good where the jatu are good, which is terrible.
Radiant cross: The plaguewardens are awesome because crossbow infantry rules, but the knights have dumpy armour and crappy skills.
Ravenspear: you'd only use them if you can't access to all of the better lance cavalry (Lion, dawn, eventide, shadow legion), worse in every way.
The Griffon are arguably one of the weaker order as well due to their low skills and relatively ****ty equipment, but given they are the only pure cavalry you can field as a pendor king without qualifications(ie. they start neutral towards you), you haven't much of a choice. If possible, much better to field Dawn/Eventide.
Rest of the orders are all very good at their respective jobs. Even the silvermists are very strong in the same way that ravenstern rangers are. The reason you want to use them is because you can upgrade their stats to the point where they have pinpoint accuracy with their longbows (+skill means more damage and more accuracy). Even despite the fact that they use longbows intead of comp bows, their damage output can still eventually outpace rangers and their accuracy/ROF is much better. This makes them better archers IF you are willing to invest in them.
Regarding upgrading cost: it is rather expensive but there are three ways to fix this:
1. grind honor early: noldor is the single best way to do this. During the befriending quest, get yourself a ****ton of gladiators or berserkers and auto-calc the hell out of their patrols. I find that an army of 200 gladiators can usually net me a similar number of noldor captives (even on max diff) because their stats are comparable. 200 captives means 200 honor and 200 renown. Just drag around a couple of hundred of these until you are ready to befriend, you can easily get the renown cost down to reasonable levels with this technique, it also earns you tons of renown. (this by the way, is one of the reasons why i always put a few points of trainer in all of my heroes and i max it on the high level ones). Once you have befriended them, you can just insult them to get the relations to negative if you want to attack them again.
2.Grind renown early, also a good thing to do anyway. just take your companions(and no one else), go slaughter a bunch of adventurers or whatever and voila! tons of renown. Similar strategy to use on knighthood renown quests. With a companion of 20 (I max persuasion. its actually easier to do with a smaller party size) and reasonable equipment, you can get 10 renown for every bandit group you kill. It's kind of stupid how much renown/exp you can get in a really short time by just patrolling around your holdings and murdering the hell out of common rabble.
3. Use the order quests early and get yourself a ton of free knights before they are out of reach. I find the 'challenging quest' to be only doable prior to you declaring independence, afterwards you have too much responsibility to run around for 20-30 days with a handful of troops. However, you can accumulate a huge number of troops this way without much fuss at all in the early stages of the game. You can always upgrade them later. Similarly, you can always just start a bunch of orders in your castles and just collect the auto-generated troops once every week or so. In the last 3 or 4 full solo run throughs I've made (no lords), I haven't had to really think about buying knightly troops at all because I make a point of starting as many knighthood orders as i can afford.
Another thing to keep in mind is that surgery goes up to 14, not 10. You lose about 20-30% of your troops when you have 10 (I Believe the base survival rate is 25%, 5% per level means your troops have about 25% chance to die at level 10), however, you only lose about 10% at level 14. This makes a huge difference when you have almost 100% elite troops. The only caveat is that you have to max INT and do surgery yourself to get the extra +4 bonus. It's almost always worth it though, 66% less losses means you have a net gain in terms of reserve renown after almost every significant battle (assuming 30%+ casualties for 55 renown, assuming 200-500 party size, normally you'd lose 18-45 guys, now you only lose 6-15 guys. At a cost of 10-20 renown each, the cost went down from a maximum of 900 renown to a minimum of 60).
I have taken out sylaz uzas with similar number of silvermists.
You just kite the bastards to the nearest mountain, and then sit them on top of a peak. They are pretty defenseless when they are crawling up the hills to get to you. Just reload when you run out of arrows.(or not, I didn't really need to with the EBKs, they club real hard even when the snakes reached the top).
Some knighthood orders are really weak and do not deserve a slot in your kingdom, in my opinion the following have a distinct disadvantage or are outclassed by another order:
Clarion Call: Their issue is loadout, some of them get lance+ bow, which means they are useless in dog fights. Their bow is also pretty crappy and their armour relatively weak. Not strong enough to fill any role. They are pretty much only good where the jatu are good, which is terrible.
Radiant cross: The plaguewardens are awesome because crossbow infantry rules, but the knights have dumpy armour and crappy skills.
Ravenspear: you'd only use them if you can't access to all of the better lance cavalry (Lion, dawn, eventide, shadow legion), worse in every way.
The Griffon are arguably one of the weaker order as well due to their low skills and relatively ****ty equipment, but given they are the only pure cavalry you can field as a pendor king without qualifications(ie. they start neutral towards you), you haven't much of a choice. If possible, much better to field Dawn/Eventide.
Rest of the orders are all very good at their respective jobs. Even the silvermists are very strong in the same way that ravenstern rangers are. The reason you want to use them is because you can upgrade their stats to the point where they have pinpoint accuracy with their longbows (+skill means more damage and more accuracy). Even despite the fact that they use longbows intead of comp bows, their damage output can still eventually outpace rangers and their accuracy/ROF is much better. This makes them better archers IF you are willing to invest in them.
Regarding upgrading cost: it is rather expensive but there are three ways to fix this:
1. grind honor early: noldor is the single best way to do this. During the befriending quest, get yourself a ****ton of gladiators or berserkers and auto-calc the hell out of their patrols. I find that an army of 200 gladiators can usually net me a similar number of noldor captives (even on max diff) because their stats are comparable. 200 captives means 200 honor and 200 renown. Just drag around a couple of hundred of these until you are ready to befriend, you can easily get the renown cost down to reasonable levels with this technique, it also earns you tons of renown. (this by the way, is one of the reasons why i always put a few points of trainer in all of my heroes and i max it on the high level ones). Once you have befriended them, you can just insult them to get the relations to negative if you want to attack them again.
2.Grind renown early, also a good thing to do anyway. just take your companions(and no one else), go slaughter a bunch of adventurers or whatever and voila! tons of renown. Similar strategy to use on knighthood renown quests. With a companion of 20 (I max persuasion. its actually easier to do with a smaller party size) and reasonable equipment, you can get 10 renown for every bandit group you kill. It's kind of stupid how much renown/exp you can get in a really short time by just patrolling around your holdings and murdering the hell out of common rabble.
3. Use the order quests early and get yourself a ton of free knights before they are out of reach. I find the 'challenging quest' to be only doable prior to you declaring independence, afterwards you have too much responsibility to run around for 20-30 days with a handful of troops. However, you can accumulate a huge number of troops this way without much fuss at all in the early stages of the game. You can always upgrade them later. Similarly, you can always just start a bunch of orders in your castles and just collect the auto-generated troops once every week or so. In the last 3 or 4 full solo run throughs I've made (no lords), I haven't had to really think about buying knightly troops at all because I make a point of starting as many knighthood orders as i can afford.
Another thing to keep in mind is that surgery goes up to 14, not 10. You lose about 20-30% of your troops when you have 10 (I Believe the base survival rate is 25%, 5% per level means your troops have about 25% chance to die at level 10), however, you only lose about 10% at level 14. This makes a huge difference when you have almost 100% elite troops. The only caveat is that you have to max INT and do surgery yourself to get the extra +4 bonus. It's almost always worth it though, 66% less losses means you have a net gain in terms of reserve renown after almost every significant battle (assuming 30%+ casualties for 55 renown, assuming 200-500 party size, normally you'd lose 18-45 guys, now you only lose 6-15 guys. At a cost of 10-20 renown each, the cost went down from a maximum of 900 renown to a minimum of 60).
pino_warrior
Recruit
bobknight said:
Nice read
For point 3, I was independent and I did twice the challenging quest. I went windriders and I battled maybe 10 times before I had 145 renown already. Just fight as marshal against another bunch of armies (marshall), and best if outnumbered (3:2), but you can still easily win, because your elite units will kill those fodders.
This how I got 110 windriders, 120 dustriders, although broke.... Recruitment costs was 1000 denar, I thought I could get them free after the challenge.
Green Berets aint trained in a day. It takes years, so be glad you can get Elite Knights this quick. Their powerful units, and much like everyone else has said, its for balancing reasons. Not to mention it just wouldn't be wise at all to have an army of honor troops as you couldn't pay for them all. You would put more into them than what you would get out of them.Khaine said:
pino_warrior
Recruit
I find the Windriders pretty strong, especially the dustriders who usually come with a lance. The windriders go sword shield and arrows, so if you charge and deflect their charge while letting your riders hitting them = usually easy win with little loss.
you could use a horse nerv, similar to the one i made, that way you would balance the game out so that horses are no more the OP stuff one wouldnt stand a real chance against...
Bravado
Sergeant
They're mid level honor troops that can't be compared to KotEG or Shadow Legion, however they don't need Pendor Knights or any knight for that matter, and that's their biggest plus.bobknight said:
Training them becomes much easier if you're lvl 41+ yourself with high training and surgery. Having companions above lvl 30 with high-ish training also helps in getting a lot of maiden adventurers (from maiden cavalry and below). If you can get a stack of about 50 maiden adventurers, you should get 1-2+ maiden nobles every night.
bobknight
Sergeant at Arms
The problem is with only able to train these 'mid level honor troops' by end game (level 40 hero, level 30+ companions). In my experience, I don't get those levels until well past day 600. I still think that Falcon knights are better if trained from Maiden adventurers.
Bravado
Sergeant
by "mid level honor troops" I mean they're better or equivalent to most of the honor troops other than the cream (like kotEG), so they're better than almost anything else in Pendor.
Maiden cavalry is lvl 30 and maiden adventurer is 40. Training them from anything less than maiden nobles is too easy between Jocelyn, Boadice and yourself.
Maiden cavalry is lvl 30 and maiden adventurer is 40. Training them from anything less than maiden nobles is too easy between Jocelyn, Boadice and yourself.
legione
Regular
Khaine said:Actually it's very funny thing that everyone tells to attack uniques with order troops because quality > quantity, and now I am reading to not bring order troops against uniques, because they will be meat like everything else
I think that this is the real important point of all the speech. You are right and centers the point.
The POP dev said "ok, honor troops are very powerfoul, let's try to limit them" and they introduces the min renown cost.
For me, it was not a good idea, because the result is that the normal player will not use Honor Troops and will Marchall and zerg the powerfoul spawn. It is sad because Honor Troops are very cool, and because CKO are a great idea.
One solution can be "you cannot bring with you more than 40 Honor Troops together" but this create some other problems.
Anyway, min renown cost is not a solution for me.
The "14 surgery is too OP" is not an answer.
Warband give you to create different kind of characters: int based, agi based, char based, str based. So it's not good that "a str based cannot bring honor troops because they will die, an int based character can do it because he can use OP surgery".
Second, there is a basic chance of 25% that a troop get unconscious with a blow, and a 4% for each point of surgery.
This means 69% at 11 Surgery (Companion surgery 10 + your Character surgery 2) (str based character, for example)
This means 82% at 14 Surgery (your Character surgery 10) (int based character).
This means that with 100 losses, a normal surgery party will loose 31 troops, an "OP" surgery party will looses 18 troops. I don't think it is enough to say "14 surgery is OP". Loose 18 troops means loose 180 Renown.
So, Honor Troops are too precious to use them in battle. Min Renown cost 10 means that the normal POP player will use them in really few battles, and this FOR ME is sad. Please, read carefully: "FOR ME". It is my opinion, not the great truth of the universe.
Luckly, this is NOT a problem. The normale POP player will simply use few Honor Tropps, and will use a lot of Pendor Troops to zerg, Ravenstern Ranger and Fierdsvan for siege, Ravenstern Horseman and Pendor Knights for tough field battle and will have a great time with this mod, and will have a chance to fulfill the prophecy, even without that fragile, super-expensive, mega-exclusive Honor Troops.
Peace and love to all.