A Misguided Year in and Need Some Help!

[Blood Gryphon]

Thanks Blood, but doesn't that ruin my honor and generally make my companions and other lords hate me?

No sure how much it affects honor, but i know it takes a long time to change a trait/gain one so i dont believe it would have a massive effect until you done a ton of raids personally. It will pop the only companion complaint dialog but i dont think it really has any impact, like your companion wont leave. I believe you get a relationship hit to the notables in that village and the owner of the village but doesnt impact anyone else. So if these are lords you are trying to recruit at some point then yes you would want avoid raiding them.

You have to decide if these negatives are worth taking territory easier.

The other challenge I'm facing is racking up influence. While convenient to recruit wanderers, 500 a pop is kind of steep.

Thanks,

Here is an example of where i was getting my influence from as a king of a faction.

you can see almost half my daily influence was from owning settlements with built projects. The rest are mostly policies that you should think about enacting.

 

[Ananda_The_Destroyer]

Yeah it's relentless by design, but as long as you can defeat an army that they make it doable and as you get 10+ vassal it start to turn around slowly.

but doesn't that ruin my honor and generally make my companions and other lords hate me?

You'll lose relation with the notables and clans that own the villages but I don't know if it can make your own vassals get upset. Some Wanderers will say something about it but I've never seen them actually get mad and leave or anything. I would say defeating their parties as first priority but then either taking a fief to expand or raiding villages in-between while they send out a new army, both will reduce their ability to re-form. That said I usually use my party to defeat enemy parties and siege and let vassals do all the raids, but many do the opposite and report results.

Other things you can do is try to hold most of them prisoner. If you have keen sight (225 scouting) and mounted patrols (225 riding) on you character then lord prisoners in your party prisoners have zero escape chance. Otherwise, you can't get fief escape to zero but you can get it very low with some perks on a governor. You still need to defeat their initial armies and replacement parties, but then it starts to dry up.

The other challenge I'm facing is racking up influence. While convenient to recruit wanderers, 500 a pop is kind of steep.

You should be able to get it often enough from defeating parties and armies, that's why I make this my job in the faction to sweep around getting thier parties. You'll also get about 50 influence when you finish a siege.

Make sure to also pass some policies to help with loyalty and security too as you won't be able to do quests to help this much as the game goes on. Policies like forgiveness of debts, trail by jury, tribunals and a couple others are good for this.