New Player Strategy (Story Mode)

Mount and Blade: WarBand
DLC: Viking Conquest
Story mode Strategy Guide (New Players)

Prologue:  First off I would like to thank everyone that has given their time to create this game we know as Mount and Blade. The game has provided hundreds of hours of entertainment to me and many others around the world. Few developers allow the fan base to add and customize their product however a player wants. For that I give thanks.

This guide will be edited on occasion to reflect current game strategies.

Creating your Character:  Each decision you make for your background affects your base stats for your character. If you say you are a merchant you will get an increase to Charisma. If you say you are a squire you will get an increase to Strength. This is important because you cannot increase your base stats after character creation. Your level will multiply your base stat, but you can’t add any more points.
Starting Country: Regardless of where you start the story will be the same. The only difference where you go to recruit men. One country has Spearmen while another country has Vikings etc. Some are better than others so try each one out and see what you like.
Bandits and Thieves:  Bandits and Thieves will be the first groups you hunt down. They walk very fast so chasing them usually they will get away. If you have a small group (8-10) members you will attract them to you. Starting out this is all you can do for loot and to raise your reputation.
Loot: You are expected to share your loot with your group. At the loot screen if you select distribute as common you can take what you want and give the rest to your group, or you can select claim all the loot for yourself, or leave the loot on the ground. If you claim all the loot for yourself you will get a -5 to the moral of your men. If you pick what you want and leave the rest for your group, depending on how much you take you can receive between +5 and -5 Moral.
Vassal: You will have the opportunity to become a vassal in the starting country. This will make your life a little more complicated further in the story line. Once you are made a Vassal your fief will be your primary location for recruiting men. You will have a high reputation that allows recruitment at a fraction of the cost anywhere else. So if you want a certain unit type select the country where they come from.
Making Money:  The first thing that comes to mind when playing Viking Conquest is to raid and pillage right? You can do that but every lord you pillage will be after you and will cause negative reputation with everyone else. Trade, bandits and quests are money makers starting out.
Buying Equipment:  The story mode you will be rewarded several items that will help you along. I would not buy anything big at first. You will get rewarded things like your first ship etc in the quest lines. So save your penning for a Happy Widow.
Trade: Travel around a bit and get a feel for the prices of goods. Soon you will know what is being sold cheap and what isn’t. At one town furs are 35 Penning and another 346 Penning. Just travel around a bit.
War Parties:  If your faction goes to war and all you have is thirty men you can still participate. Just follow another lord around and when he goes into battle join him. You can collect some pretty nice pieces of loot for a new character.
Productive Enterprises:  If you have good relation with a town you can buy land and start a business. A Bakery, Iron Works etc. In addition to your fief income you will get income from your business. In theory you could have a business at every port in the game and get coin from each every week.
Refuge: Don’t build a refuge at your starting country. Wait till you are further along in the story. If you have a single ship the capacity is lower than your group capacity. So if you know you will spend a lot of time in a country build your refuge there. Then recruit men from your fief and ferry them to your refuge. There is no limit on how many men you can have in your refuge.
Quests: The storyline quests do not have to be completed in a certain amount of time. So you can go off and do other things like trade etc with no penalty. If a quest is harder than you can handle either come back to it later, or reduce the difficulty setting in the game menu to push through.  This is a game, meant for entertainment. If you are not having fun while playing what is the point. Don’t get frustrated because you are stuck on a quest.
Save:  Save your game often. If you are going to complete a quest hit save before you go in. If you notice the quest is to hard go back to your save and do it later. Save! Save! Save!
Recap:  We have covered basic strategy for starting out. I do not claim to be an expert and this is in my experience the easiest way to start the game. Below is a recap on what we have talked about.

1. Save
2. Keep your group size low to attract bandits. (Chasing Bandits Sucks)
3. Save
4. Start trade between towns.
5. Follow a lord around when your faction goes to war.
6. Save
7. Create a Productive Enterprise.
8. Don’t buy anything expensive.
9. Save
10. Recruit troops from your fief.
11. Use Refuge to collect troops in countries you are at war with or the story takes you.
12. Save!

First player's guide

Do not swear fealty to Frisia in the story. I did this and was at war with myself for half the story until which meant I needed to leave the kingdom, but first I had to pay off Frisia to be at peace with me and I forked over 18k gold. Also of note is if you swear fealty you're going to need to break your oath at one point to progress in the story.

Thanks for the guide.

Just FYI, you spelled "morale" wrong. "Moral" is like "the moral of the story".

As in native, the best way to get started is with tournaments. Standard tournaments you can only do once, but if there's a feast going on in a town, you can participate over and over again every few daylight hours until the feast ends. In addition to the payout you get by betting on yourself repeatedly, you have a chance to get a special prize as the victor, which can be anything from a sword to a suit of mail armour. These are very worthwhile. If you're lucky there'll be a feast going on in Dorestad right at the start of the game, it's happened for me several times.

Once you get a ship, it's worth sailing around and exploring the various special sites, like the Roman Ruins, the Mystic Circle, etc. Some of them you'll find difficult as a starting character. Others are pretty easy, and most of them give fantastic money and equipment rewards. Hint: try checking out Odin's Cave.

Later on much of your money will come from selling slaves; you'll get much more for them if you sell to the slave merchants that can be found occasionally in mead halls than those that can be found on a town's streets.

Get a priest or gothi into your main group. You can talk to them to raise your army's morale at any time. Always claim first share of any loot - if there are a bunch of mail coats, swords, helmets and things that you can sell off for a chunk of cash, take the lot and then pay the preacher to make your men happy again, you'll always make a very large profit doing this.

florinteal said:

As in native, the best way to get started is with tournaments. Standard tournaments you can only do once, but if there's a feast going on in a town, you can participate over and over again every few daylight hours until the feast ends. In addition to the payout you get by betting on yourself repeatedly, you have a chance to get a special prize as the victor, which can be anything from a sword to a suit of mail armour. These are very worthwhile. If you're lucky there'll be a feast going on in Dorestad right at the start of the game, it's happened for me several times.

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If you can win.  I still have trouble making it through all 8 rounds (especially in the beginning,) which makes betting not worth the effort.  It's still good experience/practice, but ISTM that anyone who's comfortable enough with their chances  of winning to make betting worth it probably doesn't *need* 'new player' advice anymore :p

florinteal said:

Once you get a ship, it's worth sailing around and exploring the various special sites, like the Roman Ruins, the Mystic Circle, etc. Some of them you'll find difficult as a starting character. Others are pretty easy, and most of them give fantastic money and equipment rewards. Hint: try checking out Odin's Cave.

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Story mode sends you to Odin's Cave anyway, and I'd actually recommend waiting on the other sites until after you've done that.  I did one of them before going there in one of my starts and didn't get the 'special' at the cave - not sure if that's because I had the 'special' from the previous site already or something else was going on,

Managing your teammates usually nets you a tournament win. You'll still face losses when the game gives you ass for weapons, but your winnings will far outweigh your losses.

You didn't get the reward from the site because your inventory was full, the storyline is irrelevant to that. However it's specifically worth going to Odin's cave before the story sends you there, because it's easy, and it has a different encounter and a particular reward if you go prior to the quest.

florinteal said:

You didn't get the reward from the site because your inventory was full,

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No, actually it wasn't.  I did receive *something* - two normal swords.  Admittedly uncommon weapons, but inferior to the one I'd already found at another site (which in turn was inferior - albeit barely - to the ones I've seen recovered in other LPs.)

I'm not sure why I jumped first to the assumption that it was because I'd already received a 'special weapon' elsewhere, though.  Classic correlation fallacy on my part, as there were a number of other things that could have resulted in the difference.  So in retrospect I'll take that back and agree that it's probably worth going there before the story sends you there. 

As for tournaments... 12 tries and only one victory in my last round.  I did go deep in most of the attempts,  but that would only make the losses more expensive if I were betting (though, if I was losing early most of the time that one win would have been profitable.)  A good chunk of it is due to not being very comfortable with the weapon ranges in general (and spears in particular.)  So while I'd agree that the tournaments are always worth trying, new players should probably hold off on betting into them until they've gone through a couple to judge how the odds are. 

If the game gives you a spear and shield, you're better off dumping the shield and using the spear two handed, since you can then use swing attacks which have a huge arc and are much more forgiving than the thrust. Same with the staff and shield. If all you get is a seax, you may as well just charge the enemy and spam attacks; sometimes you can win via higher attack speed alone. I don't know, I wouldn't say tournaments are that difficult to figure out. I'm not very good at the game and it didn't take me too long to work out how to wangle a victory most times.

florinteal said:

If the game gives you a spear and shield, you're better off dumping the shield and using the spear two handed, since you can then use swing attacks which have a huge arc and are much more forgiving than the thrust. Same with the staff and shield. If all you get is a seax, you may as well just charge the enemy and spam attacks; sometimes you can win via higher attack speed alone. I don't know, I wouldn't say tournaments are that difficult to figure out. I'm not very good at the game and it didn't take me too long to work out how to wangle a victory most times.

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if you are a new player fighting on a tournaments with a team:

Use the F1 key to control them.

Double F1 will make them stop near you (hold my position).
Hold F1, move mouse (aim), release F1: it will make them move to that position

This way you can form a wall, make them fight first while you go to the side (flank) and attack the enemy from a surprise position. For example, this way if you have javelins you can move behind them and attack from the back and they wont have the chance to use a shield!

F1 + F3 will release your teammates to charge/run to kill/ the enemy.
F1 + F2 will make them follow you around.

If you have a shield and feel confident you can even be the one setting the trap, while your team will do the flank attack.

If the battle has several teams fighting you can even wait while the npcs kill each other, keep your team safe for the ending!


TLDR: you are the team leader. Dont let them just run wild. Control the field.

If you start with a less than desirable weapon, you can always pick up weapons you have better proficiency with, from those who fall in combat. My favorite are the Axe/Shield and Sword/Shield set, since I have higher one handed stats. You can also pick up an extra shield and put it on your back to prevent enemies from getting high damage criticals (red log messages) on you from behind.

The best approach for me has been to do the F1/F2 combination and have my teammates follow me around and holding our ground until the other teams finish each other off. Usually one or two stragglers will come our way, which get easily dispatched by our number superiority, and usually helps in the end. The surviving team then come to us and we can finish them off easily because they usually are short one or two by this time.

hello. I have a problem. I decided to give letter do Danish and then i should become vassal of Northymbre. But i declined the offer and now I´m stucked in story. I can´t become vassal of Northymbre anymore. Is there any way to repair this ?

notakvalyy said:

hello. I have a problem. I decided to give letter do Danish and then i should become vassal of Northymbre. But i declined the offer and now I´m stucked in story. I can´t become vassal of Northymbre anymore. Is there any way to repair this ?

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Update to 2.021 and load your savegame before declining become vassal. In 2.021, you cannt cancel this quest.

well, i found that there is sotryline cheat which restarts The Aliance quest, so i don´t need to load old save

You should NOT bet on tournaments unless you're prepared to lose or load.
1.) Some arenas are worse at positioning teams than others, but even if you're not fighting all three other teams of 6 instead of them attacking each other you will commonly enough end up with a team of spearmen who crumple like a wall of tissue paper in a hurricane.

2.) The disadvantage of the spear- the biggest disadvantage (not taking your skill into account) seems to be the AI's ability to chamber block+ripost, which you can't block. The overhead strike is safer, though a bit trickier to land a stab. Or you might want to lose the shield and get more strike options-if you're not worried about blocking.