DavidMills
Recruit
Hey guys. To those who created this mod, thank you very much. I just played through vers. 4.55 before the latest non-save game compatible update in late April. I'll tell about it in this post.
I played on full damage, normal AI, usually slow combat speed and 50 army size. I consider that to be a fair and relevant difficulty setting. I didn't use any cheats, and I didn't do much reloading. I did a little bit of saving and reloading early on to make up for the lack of detailed instructions about what was going on. This was my first time with this mod.
I chose Adenians, with enlightenment. My char focused on using a bow including on a horse. I started out after about 25 days attacking Curaw. In retrospect, fighting the guys with Marksmen wasn't ideal. I took Ismirala castle once I found out the hard way that you can't build stables in a town, and then broke the back of their offense by defeating their 500 man pack of aggressive lords in the field.
I essentially didn't use homeland units until the invasion, and I mostly never used mercenaries. I ended up taking over all of Calradia, wiping out all 5 native kingdoms, by about day 195. I did this by, right from the start, before even attacking Curaw, my first town, gaining units by attacking lords and castles and towns that had prisoners and hiring them. Plus, native units are easier to upgrade. The invasion came about 30 days before a full year was up, on day 235.
So, I was essentially a runaway freight train of defeating enemies and having more units at the end of a battle than at the beginning. I combined that with using archery to kill 65-90 units, personally, in most seiges, after ordering my troops to stand still.
A good way to make money was to make a regiment of 15 guys or so and have it stand next to me (wish there was a way to _really_ make regiments stand still and not run off like they are on crack after any and all armies that they see), and take over a castle or town with 500 or more guys in it. You only have to fight 110 units in the main battle, and then your regiment, which has no prisoner limit, can take the overflow of the 300+ prisoners that result.
I used the Jeremus group of heroes. Jer healed, Bashetur learned engineering, Deshavi learned pathing, spotting, and tactics, the Ymira learned to trade, and the other guys learned to fight melee, and everybody learned training as well as they could.
I ignored badboy. After taking over Khudan and Nelag castle, the Swadians declared war on me. I finished wiping out the Vaegirs, and it was downhill (in a good way) from there. Vaegir marksmen are in a class by themselves in terms of making seiges difficult, and also I eventually got more skilled with better armor. As a side note, I found that using a strong helm was better, in practice, than one of those cool new hoods with masks. I had most of my heroes use hoods, but I would get killed in 1 shot too much.
I mostly focused on str, getting my power draw to 8 for the mwk war bow, and then taking it to 10 relatively early. I took my int to 15, which was enough to have about 7 towns. There doesn't seem to be a reason to keep castles. You don't lose the ability to use a castle to upgrade, or to have it count towards attracting nobles, if you give it away. And, when you give away castles or towns, you can garrison units there for free, which is good when you have thousands of heavy cavalry and magnates.
I ended up with about 120 boundless knights, my faith troop. In the version I was playing, you can only get a faith troop with an event. I think that instructions on making faith troops should be clearer. I don't think that making faith troops is something that a player should have to experiment with or otherwise figure out.
Towards the end, about 30 days before the invasion, I experimented with edicts. I think that it would be more fun and useful to have clearer instructions on what the edicts do. It doesn't help to be told that nobles will like me 10% more if I don't know what _that_ does. My guess, based on the result of my edicts, is that a 10% better relations with nobles gives each noble building a 60% instead of 50% chance of recruiting each day. The edicts, as I figured based on some forum posts, and the beta nature of things right now, were buggy. I did the holy war tree with royal supremacy. I should have been making more faith troops, but I made less. However, I started getting 50 nobles a day (on avg) instead of 20.
I think that something as important as the fact that fiefs you don't own still help attract nobles, is something people should be told in clear instructions for the mod. In the reports that I've read of people playing this mod, people seem to take something like 1-2 kingdoms before the invasion, which seems to not be all that good an idea.
Between taking over all of Calradia and the invasion, I ran around with just my 9 heroes (I had Young Chief), all with blunt weapons, and in plate mail, and made money, gained experience (particularly to get them higher level than medium cavalry and medium nobles), and gained morale and recruited some prisoners. I kept a few magnates to allow a chance for a faith troop event, and at each midnight I would go to a castle where I had put a lot of troops and I trained them. By the invasion, I had about 5000 heavy cav and heavy noble cav.
When the invasion came, I had about 20 lords following me, of maybe 50 or so total. It was a bit like herding cats. There are various potential bugs and clear difficulties with getting lords to follow you. The strategy map is buggy, in that, if you have too many lords, their names aren't clickable and they run down off the screen. If you tell your marshal to tell your lords to come and start a campaign, nothing happens, that I can tell. I basically ran around and individually told lords to follow me, and that worked.
Then, I gave each lord about 200 heavy cavalry or magnates (noble heavy cavalry), so they had around 300 troops each. The invaders came to Khudan. I defeated them in one real life day, and about 4 game days. I have not gotten a message that I have fully won; there may be a centurion hiding still, and maybe you have to kill all of the legion mercs, or maybe there is no message. My game crashes from one particular group of mercs (not the final group), so I am not sure yet. But the invasion is defeated. I get no messages of any enemy sightings anywhere.
Here is how it went down:
Khudan was under siege when I arrived. I went in and put down the attack, which obviously was easy since it is just one group of 100 enemies.
Then, I attacked the guys who were there. Much of the bulk of the legion was nearby, attacking Shapeshte village. I caught 2500 legion enemies with 8500 of my guys. The drawback was that, since most of my army was from my lords, most of the units who actually fought in the battle were pretty weak, and about half were not cavalry. The enemy legionaires were mostly knocked out, so that made things easier, which I realized later. Because the troops that took part in the battle were mostly weak, I participated in the fighting, with arrows. I was careful and didn't get too hurt. Essentially, if the enemy isn't using ranged horse units, it is pretty doable to not get injured much when you don't want to be. That fight took a while, of course.
Then, I attacked their main force, which was about 8000 of my guys (one lord was off picking his nose somewhere) on about 15k. That is when I ran into an skirmish where the enemy had exclusively Centurions. Wow. In the first skirmish, all of my guys went down, and I went through all 135 arrows, picked up 40 more off the ground, and ran out of those. I probably took out about 40 centurions, and then I realized that I could just retreat (my horse was also almost dead), but I was still at half life.
Then, before the next skirmish, was was not given the option to "leave," so I fought again, but this time only half of the enemy was centurions, and I defeated them and won the skirmish, although I had heavy losses. I did one more fight, and it was much easier - I maybe had 2-3 guys get wounded or killed and defeated the enemy. But, there were over 15k enemies and I was hurt and I wasn't looking forward to doing this 40 guys at a skirmish at a time, and I was able to "leave," and I did.
Then the fighting got a bit more chaotic, and I had a breakthrough. One of my lords got attacked and was fighting 4000 enemies. When you jump into a fight like that, the lords following you don't hop in also. And I had about 700 of my own troops, with 120 boundless knights (faith troops that are stone cold killers) on top, and then all magnates underneath, with Jeremus hiding at the very bottom. So now, instead of all sorts of crappy units taking the field, it was mostly my knights. With tactics skill, the battlefield advantage was 0 (as opposed to negative), even though it was 4000 on 900. So, I realized that I could pump up the battle size to 100, put it on fastest speed, and just stand there at the start point, and my knights would charge in and take zero casualties every fight. So, I took down all 4k enemies in an hour or so of real time.
After that, I was able to do that a bit more, and then just use the autoresolve feature soon after that, to take down the rest of the legion in only a few real life minutes.
On a random note, I think that the treasurer is buggy. I had all 18 towns with guilds, and I kept losing massive amounts of money trying to invest.
I hope that this helps. Thank you very much, once again, for making this mod.
I played on full damage, normal AI, usually slow combat speed and 50 army size. I consider that to be a fair and relevant difficulty setting. I didn't use any cheats, and I didn't do much reloading. I did a little bit of saving and reloading early on to make up for the lack of detailed instructions about what was going on. This was my first time with this mod.
I chose Adenians, with enlightenment. My char focused on using a bow including on a horse. I started out after about 25 days attacking Curaw. In retrospect, fighting the guys with Marksmen wasn't ideal. I took Ismirala castle once I found out the hard way that you can't build stables in a town, and then broke the back of their offense by defeating their 500 man pack of aggressive lords in the field.
I essentially didn't use homeland units until the invasion, and I mostly never used mercenaries. I ended up taking over all of Calradia, wiping out all 5 native kingdoms, by about day 195. I did this by, right from the start, before even attacking Curaw, my first town, gaining units by attacking lords and castles and towns that had prisoners and hiring them. Plus, native units are easier to upgrade. The invasion came about 30 days before a full year was up, on day 235.
So, I was essentially a runaway freight train of defeating enemies and having more units at the end of a battle than at the beginning. I combined that with using archery to kill 65-90 units, personally, in most seiges, after ordering my troops to stand still.
A good way to make money was to make a regiment of 15 guys or so and have it stand next to me (wish there was a way to _really_ make regiments stand still and not run off like they are on crack after any and all armies that they see), and take over a castle or town with 500 or more guys in it. You only have to fight 110 units in the main battle, and then your regiment, which has no prisoner limit, can take the overflow of the 300+ prisoners that result.
I used the Jeremus group of heroes. Jer healed, Bashetur learned engineering, Deshavi learned pathing, spotting, and tactics, the Ymira learned to trade, and the other guys learned to fight melee, and everybody learned training as well as they could.
I ignored badboy. After taking over Khudan and Nelag castle, the Swadians declared war on me. I finished wiping out the Vaegirs, and it was downhill (in a good way) from there. Vaegir marksmen are in a class by themselves in terms of making seiges difficult, and also I eventually got more skilled with better armor. As a side note, I found that using a strong helm was better, in practice, than one of those cool new hoods with masks. I had most of my heroes use hoods, but I would get killed in 1 shot too much.
I mostly focused on str, getting my power draw to 8 for the mwk war bow, and then taking it to 10 relatively early. I took my int to 15, which was enough to have about 7 towns. There doesn't seem to be a reason to keep castles. You don't lose the ability to use a castle to upgrade, or to have it count towards attracting nobles, if you give it away. And, when you give away castles or towns, you can garrison units there for free, which is good when you have thousands of heavy cavalry and magnates.
I ended up with about 120 boundless knights, my faith troop. In the version I was playing, you can only get a faith troop with an event. I think that instructions on making faith troops should be clearer. I don't think that making faith troops is something that a player should have to experiment with or otherwise figure out.
Towards the end, about 30 days before the invasion, I experimented with edicts. I think that it would be more fun and useful to have clearer instructions on what the edicts do. It doesn't help to be told that nobles will like me 10% more if I don't know what _that_ does. My guess, based on the result of my edicts, is that a 10% better relations with nobles gives each noble building a 60% instead of 50% chance of recruiting each day. The edicts, as I figured based on some forum posts, and the beta nature of things right now, were buggy. I did the holy war tree with royal supremacy. I should have been making more faith troops, but I made less. However, I started getting 50 nobles a day (on avg) instead of 20.
I think that something as important as the fact that fiefs you don't own still help attract nobles, is something people should be told in clear instructions for the mod. In the reports that I've read of people playing this mod, people seem to take something like 1-2 kingdoms before the invasion, which seems to not be all that good an idea.
Between taking over all of Calradia and the invasion, I ran around with just my 9 heroes (I had Young Chief), all with blunt weapons, and in plate mail, and made money, gained experience (particularly to get them higher level than medium cavalry and medium nobles), and gained morale and recruited some prisoners. I kept a few magnates to allow a chance for a faith troop event, and at each midnight I would go to a castle where I had put a lot of troops and I trained them. By the invasion, I had about 5000 heavy cav and heavy noble cav.
When the invasion came, I had about 20 lords following me, of maybe 50 or so total. It was a bit like herding cats. There are various potential bugs and clear difficulties with getting lords to follow you. The strategy map is buggy, in that, if you have too many lords, their names aren't clickable and they run down off the screen. If you tell your marshal to tell your lords to come and start a campaign, nothing happens, that I can tell. I basically ran around and individually told lords to follow me, and that worked.
Then, I gave each lord about 200 heavy cavalry or magnates (noble heavy cavalry), so they had around 300 troops each. The invaders came to Khudan. I defeated them in one real life day, and about 4 game days. I have not gotten a message that I have fully won; there may be a centurion hiding still, and maybe you have to kill all of the legion mercs, or maybe there is no message. My game crashes from one particular group of mercs (not the final group), so I am not sure yet. But the invasion is defeated. I get no messages of any enemy sightings anywhere.
Here is how it went down:
Khudan was under siege when I arrived. I went in and put down the attack, which obviously was easy since it is just one group of 100 enemies.
Then, I attacked the guys who were there. Much of the bulk of the legion was nearby, attacking Shapeshte village. I caught 2500 legion enemies with 8500 of my guys. The drawback was that, since most of my army was from my lords, most of the units who actually fought in the battle were pretty weak, and about half were not cavalry. The enemy legionaires were mostly knocked out, so that made things easier, which I realized later. Because the troops that took part in the battle were mostly weak, I participated in the fighting, with arrows. I was careful and didn't get too hurt. Essentially, if the enemy isn't using ranged horse units, it is pretty doable to not get injured much when you don't want to be. That fight took a while, of course.
Then, I attacked their main force, which was about 8000 of my guys (one lord was off picking his nose somewhere) on about 15k. That is when I ran into an skirmish where the enemy had exclusively Centurions. Wow. In the first skirmish, all of my guys went down, and I went through all 135 arrows, picked up 40 more off the ground, and ran out of those. I probably took out about 40 centurions, and then I realized that I could just retreat (my horse was also almost dead), but I was still at half life.
Then, before the next skirmish, was was not given the option to "leave," so I fought again, but this time only half of the enemy was centurions, and I defeated them and won the skirmish, although I had heavy losses. I did one more fight, and it was much easier - I maybe had 2-3 guys get wounded or killed and defeated the enemy. But, there were over 15k enemies and I was hurt and I wasn't looking forward to doing this 40 guys at a skirmish at a time, and I was able to "leave," and I did.
Then the fighting got a bit more chaotic, and I had a breakthrough. One of my lords got attacked and was fighting 4000 enemies. When you jump into a fight like that, the lords following you don't hop in also. And I had about 700 of my own troops, with 120 boundless knights (faith troops that are stone cold killers) on top, and then all magnates underneath, with Jeremus hiding at the very bottom. So now, instead of all sorts of crappy units taking the field, it was mostly my knights. With tactics skill, the battlefield advantage was 0 (as opposed to negative), even though it was 4000 on 900. So, I realized that I could pump up the battle size to 100, put it on fastest speed, and just stand there at the start point, and my knights would charge in and take zero casualties every fight. So, I took down all 4k enemies in an hour or so of real time.
After that, I was able to do that a bit more, and then just use the autoresolve feature soon after that, to take down the rest of the legion in only a few real life minutes.
On a random note, I think that the treasurer is buggy. I had all 18 towns with guilds, and I kept losing massive amounts of money trying to invest.
I hope that this helps. Thank you very much, once again, for making this mod.
