Recent content by direstorm

Kalarhan, I beat the battle before I made my first post. I hope your advice helps newbies who are stuck who dig this thread up in the future.

CeltiberoCaesar, thank you for your reply. Overall, I feel that the developers did a great job with the Mount and Blade Viking Conquest DLC, but I also feel that the battle of Aescesdun is a rare example of bad design. I'm sure it was a lot of fun to design and develop this epic battle, but as the player, I feel left out. It is not an epic challenge; the winning strategy is to send your troops into the meatgrinder, then sit in a corner for a few hours and play some other game with M&B alt-tabbed. This is an epic fail on the part of the design team.

I understand that this is a finished product and you are unlikely to revisit it.

Hope you all have a happy new year.

Kalarhan, I'm not looking for an easy mode. I tried bumping my difficulty up a bit and it seems to be exactly what I expected. I will probably bump it up a bit more in the future now that I know how to play. Under ordinary circumstances, the difficulty is fine.

You'll also note please that I beat this battle -before- posting on the forums. I'm not saying wah, I lost, game is too hard, make it easy. It has an easy mode.

Campaign battles don't use the ordinary battle mechanics. That's the first thing to keep in mind. Ordinarily, if I get low on health or my troops start being stupid, I can pull back. I lose some renown, sure, but I get some health back, my troops regroup, and my horse recovers its full health. Now, this is the important mechanic for this battle.

In this battle, I can't do that.

For ordinary battles, and for the other battles in the campaign that I tried (I finished the campaign since my first post) the mechanics are fine. For the battle of Aescesdun, and only for that battle, the mechanics of campaign combat are broken.

This battle is not like other battles because ordinary battle mechanics don't apply. Check out the save file I posted if you want to take a look at it. Use whatever difficulty you like. I get that you're an elite, hardcore player or whatever and you can kill all 1600 enemies by yourself. Give it a try, see what happens.

Those are the settings I had it on. I'm also using False Uthbert's armor from the duel on the farmstead, which means that in the majority of cases even if something hits me I take no damage. However, the occasional 1 and 2 damage hits add up over time, and my pony takes much more of a beating than I do. So like I said, I do fine for the first few waves, but then my horse dies. At that point, my role as a flanking skirmisher is pretty much done. Anything I do which could expose me to damage tends not to work very well if I do it for an hour straight.

I imagine this fight looks pretty similar on higher damage settings, just the cutoff point at which "do anything and you lose" happens probably occurs faster because you're taking more damage.

Having friendlies take more damage than enemies do would turn this battle into a nightmare, because first your troops get ground into paste, then your allied AI will -lose- instead of fighting on even ground (or with an advantage).