Conquering Calradia

[kittehs]

What is the fastest way to conquer the whole map ? Those who have done it how long it took you ?

For me it was about 1200 days. The late game was not fun at all. Boring siege after siege. It frustated me so much I never tried the player kingdom thing again, even with Diplomacy mod.

 

[manekemaan]

Try a mod that makes it harder, like Prophesy of Pendor, or something else.



In the end, when you are good, you will always become better than the rest. Thats just the way it is.

 

[kittehs]

Try a mod that makes it harder, like Prophesy of Pendor, or something else.



In the end, when you are good, you will always become better than the rest. Thats just the way it is.

I actually want it to be easier.

The problem with late game is that is not fun. You could win any battle, siege any city and yet it takes hundreds of hours of playing to finish the game. Just repetive grinding like a MMO. The early to mid game is fantastic and I wish the ending kept that feel alive.

 

[annallia]

I know how you feel and to top it off the ending thing is kinda... cheap. Of all the mods I have played none of them really did anything to change this, if anything the only thing I have ever found to help even a little in this regard is to never put any points in tactics. Without it the late game battles can get slightly more interesting though you do still tend to steamroll people.

 

[bakters]

What is the fastest way to conquer the whole map ? Those who have done it how long it took you ?

  Without trying to race to the finish, I did it just under 400 days, but I know of other player who could do it in 300-ish.  It depends on luck to some degree, though.

For me it was about 1200 days. The late game was not fun at all. Boring siege after siege. It frustated me so much I never tried the player kingdom thing again, even with Diplomacy mod.

  It's not so bad if you do it much faster.  I do remember blitzing Rhodoks during last game I finished.  One of the best times I had in M&B series.  But I do believe that to make it fun, one should not increase the battle size above default max (150).  You do get involved in melee at every siege during "storming the keep" stages.  With high battle size they don't work any more.

 

[bakters]

Well, I decided to go at a kind of brisk pace again, so since you asked how people approach this task, let me say how I go about it.

1.  The build
    I went with INT based archer.  STR-18/AGI-15/INT-Max/CHA-6.  STR-18 for a Strong War Bow, AGI-15 for decent Riding and Horse Archery, CHA-6 for Leadership 2, and the rest goes into INT.  I plan on having high Pathfinding and Engineering, because they are necessary for Blitz (I tweaked Prisoner Management, so I don't have to sink points into it).

2.  Companions.
  I went with Jeremus and Ymira group, plus Bahestur, Alayen and Firentis.  Jeremus and Ymira are strictly non-combat units.  They have three shields on them, and are never sent into battle.  Both of them cover all three medical skills, and any extra points go into Tactics, Engineering and Training.  I didn't raise their combat skills at all.  The rest of companions are STR-12/AGI-12.  With them I focus on combat and training, with extra points going into party skills.  Training is a priority, though.

3.  Economy.
    I decided to not start Enterprises.  The idea is that I should be able to capture a town for myself before they would start turning a net profit, and later on money should not be a problem, since I plan on taking no lords. 

4  Strategy.
    Early on I hunt bandits.  I level up myself and my companions, get them on armored horses, give them siege crossbows, then I join as a mercenary.  I'm currently at this stage.  After the contract is done, I should have a decent army, and enough Training points to start my own kingdom.  I went with Rhodoks, because they were at war with Sarranids, whom I need to weaken.  I'm planing to start my own kingdom in Barriye, but for that to work, I need bigger army and better companions.

Well, that's the gist of it.  We'll see how it works... 

 

[heckani]

What is the fastest way to conquer the whole map ? Those who have done it how long it took you ?

  Without trying to race to the finish, I did it just under 400 days, but I know of other player who could do it in 300-ish.  It depends on luck to some degree, though.

For me it was about 1200 days. The late game was not fun at all. Boring siege after siege. It frustated me so much I never tried the player kingdom thing again, even with Diplomacy mod.

  It's not so bad if you do it much faster.  I do remember blitzing Rhodoks during last game I finished.  One of the best times I had in M&B series.  But I do believe that to make it fun, one should not increase the battle size above default max (150).  You do get involved in melee at every siege during "storming the keep" stages.  With high battle size they don't work any more.

300 days?! 400 days?! How the......What difficulty do you got? My is currently 144% and that seems pretty unrealistic what you´re doing there without tweaks or cheats.....holy mother im amazed!! 

 

[bakters]

My difficulty is 102%.  Everything maxed and battle size at 75 (not enough RAM to max it for more than several battles and this motherboard won't take any more).

BTW - I'm at day 93 and I already taken and defended Barriye.  1100-ish Sarranids showed up, and it took me several reloads until I found a way to beat them.  They had two other wars, FFS!  They shouldn't be able to mount such an offensive!  Whatever - more renown for me.

As far as tweaks go, I tweaked bows to shoot a bit flatter, Coursers to have more maneuverability, Cattle follows you and I increased bandit party sizes by 100%. 

As far as Cheats go, I healed my horse a bit (several times in total) when I was low level and I was soloing those big bandit parties.  I never healed myself, though.  What's more important, I often use Ctr-T to see the map.  This one sped me up the most, I guess. 

I'm not sure what I think about this cheat.  Racing is already depending on luck a lot, so I argue with myself, that if I use it then part of the luck dependency is gone, but if you call me a cheater, I'll accept.

Edit: I forgot that I modded Right To Rule, so I don't have to worry about it, and I modded Prsoner Management too, so one point in it is enough.  I might try another run without those tweaks if this one goes OK, although without bigger bandit parties. 

 

[heckani]

My difficulty is 102%.  Everything maxed and battle size at 75 (not enough RAM to max it for more than several battles and this motherboard won't take any more).

BTW - I'm at day 93 and I already taken and defended Barriye.  1100-ish Sarranids showed up, and it took me several reloads until I found a way to beat them.  They had two other wars, FFS!  They shouldn't be able to mount such an offensive!  Whatever - more renown for me.

As far as tweaks go, I tweaked bows to shoot a bit flatter, Coursers to have more maneuverability, Cattle follows you and I increased bandit party sizes by 100%. 

As far as Cheats go, I healed my horse a bit (several times in total) when I was low level and I was soloing those big bandit parties.  I never healed myself, though.  What's more important, I often use Ctr-T to see the map.  This one sped me up the most, I guess. 

I'm not sure what I think about this cheat.  Racing is already depending on luck a lot, so I argue with myself, that if I use it then part of the luck dependency is gone, but if you call me a cheater, I'll accept.

Edit: I forgot that I modded Right To Rule, so I don't have to worry about it, and I modded Prsoner Management too, so one point in it is enough.  I might try another run without those tweaks if this one goes OK, although without bigger bandit parties.

The reason why this game is so perfect, is because it can be played in so many ways, with so many mods, tweaks, cheats, native and ways of playing it ))))

It´s pretty cool that you can do it that fast! And you decided to use these modifcations, or cheats or whatever i dont really mind.

I like doing it as hard as possible, even getting very frustrated but also very happy when moving cattle. But the reason I dont want to make it follow me is because thats not what you do in real life either. The horses are behind the cattle, and you have to be very skilled to keep them together, or one or two might wander off.

Ctrl-T is dont use that as I´m not god. I know how hard and important vision is. Especially in modern days, but we didnt have satelites or a GPS, so I dont use it.

Same goes for others thing, but that doesnt make your accomplishment smaller! I just love doing it the hard way

However I remember in the original m&b demo, many  years ago, I´d keep ctrl-H, 1/4 damage, 1/2 damage, 30 battle size and take over anything XDDDDD

I could barely beat a lord if i was playing fair. But after I stopped doing that it made me a much better player both in SP and in MP.

Big respect for your raced game! Thanks for sharing this! DDD

 

[bakters]

Oh, and of course I also use Diplomacy; 4.3, to be precise, and now I think that's it. (Edit: Oh, one more thing.  I modified relation loss when assigning fiefs, so lords don't get indicted for treason all the time, and I will not recruit any lords myself.  I plan on taking the whole thing for myself! And I don't do anything which decreases honor too, and I don't take "Rescue Prisoner" quests, because they are too easy and nonsense overall.)

Now, back to the issue at hand, why use those or any other tweaks?  My approach is, that this is just a game, but it's not a very good game.  Brilliant, but incredibly uneven.  I try to smooth it out, so it plays better.  For example, normally I sell prisoners to Tavern Keepers.  I would use it this time around too, but it just didn't work with newest Diplomacy version.  It makes it run so much smoother, when you don't have to chase Ransom Brokers throughout the whole Calradia.  If you can't do it, the game itself doesn't become even a tiny bit harder, just more annoying. 

The thing is, though, that up to now I never discussed my games on a public forum, or at least not in details.  I played for myself, without comparing anything with anybody, but once you run against the clock, there is a way to compare your achievements.  So I will finish this run, and then I'll go for a clean Diplomacy run again, just to see how much slower it will all go.  (Looting instead of Prisoner Management and it should go fine.  It's gonna be annoying later on, when I'll have to manually sort through heaps of crap you tend to get with high looting...)

Of course assuming I'll not burn out again.  If so, I'll take a break.

 

[Woopzilla]

The way I go about playing is always pretty the same in terms of heroes/stats/skills I use.

I've conquered all of Calradia twice now for myself (both around 500-600 days) and once for King Harlaus (900+ days - because I can't guarantee to be marshall all the time). Now I'm in the process of doing it again with the Diplomacy mod and have 40 lords under my command with a total army size of just over 10'000 men (though you'll never get them all to assemble in one group since the empire is so large).

To speed things up, Surgery is the single most important stat to have behind Wound Treatment. Get a hero to go pure INT for level 6+ Surgery and get at least 5 surgery on your character to get a +2 leader bonus to it too.  My support heroes are always 10 STR (for Siege Crossbows + other combat stats), 9 AGI (for level 3 Weapon Master) and the rest into INT for getting all the skills (you'll have plenty of extra points to put into shield/athletics/ironflesh/etc for the support heroes).

隐藏: Hero and Character skills setup

My heroes are usually:
Deshavi (Medic - Surgery/Wound Treatment)
Nizar (Scout - Path Finding/Spotting/Tracking)
Lezalit (Engineer - Engineer/Tactics)
Klethi + Matheld (Optional for just pure combat).

I don't pick up Jeremus/Ymira because I like to go around raiding villages that don't have my chosen faction culture. These heroes all get on well (maybe not if you send one or two of them to collect Right to Rule, but RTR isn't hard to get. By the time you rebel, your faction will have made war and peace so often that you'll easily have 30+ at the time of rebellion).

My characters like huge armies... so I usually aim for 15 STR, 15 AGI, 11 INT (+1 INT from reading a book and + 1 Surgery from another book. This nets you level 5 surgery for a +2 bonus leader bonus despite only having levelled up to 11 INT) , 29 Charisma for huge amounts of leadership (and the +1 leadership book - don't read until you get to 9 leadership). You get bonus leader points at level 2 (+1), 5 (+2), 8 (+3) and 10 (+4).

This should make it far faster to conquer many castles in a row since you won't be repeatedly spending time to rebuild your army. You can just move from one castle to another.

I make myself Marshall and have a campaign going permanently. Lords that suffer heavy losses during battles or sieges get sent to recently captured castles/towns to protect them and rebuild their armies (give them an order to 'Go to'). If something 'good' happens (they kill a weak enemy or so) they will say "I followed your advice and profited much" and you get a relation bonus on top of them defending/rebuilding their army, which is quite nice. This basically means you'll have a constantly large army in tow by giving the lords a 'break'.

Or, you can leave the job half finished while having an AI be the Marshall. Go around decimating the troops in each castle and then retreat (if you get a high kill:death ratio then you will still receive more morale than you lose) and your Marshall will mop them up due to the AI's nature to instantly rush for castles and towns with less than 60 defenders or so in them. This stops you from having to clear out every single defender. It's fun to just go around killing things and seeing a '<Your Faction> has taken <Castle> from <The Poor Chumps at war with You>'.

In my current game, I'm actually letting the AI do all the conquering... I've not sieged anything in this game since I've become faction leader and I keep getting more land by remaining on patrol around the borders. My Marshall has gone from 800 renown to 1005 renown (Nuwas). I did recently acquire Grainwad after stamping out the last Swadian resistance and he had a whopping 1500 renown... however, he seemed to be doing a poor job at marshalling despite scaring off even other King's armies with his 320+ man army. For some reason I think that 'pitiless' lords like Nuwas do a better job at being aggressive... but this is just purely ancedotal of course.

In terms of edited gameplay: Yea, I've edited things such as fief assigning in TweakMB to no longer cause faction wide rebellions... which happen just because every obnoxiously greedy lord decides that he deserves every single fief in existence with his measly 245 renown. But I have no trouble finding lords when I rebel as can be seen in my current game. Fief assigning now ranges from a min of -1 to a max of +2 relation changes.

I also increased the hit of saying 'Surrender or die' to -2 and letting a lord go free after butchering his men to only +3. I hate how everyone loves you for killing them all and then essentially saying 'Hah, you're not worth taking prisoner since you're not a big enough threat'. I also tried to play a 'bad lord' who raids and refuses to release imprisoned lords and raids peasants/caravans/villages left, right and centre while also causing war provocations. Yet, I struggled to ever reach into the negative honour scale... so I ramped up the negative hits for dishonourable actions to stop everyone loving me all the time despite having never met me before.

 

[bakters]

Concerning all those mods and tweaks I used to use.

Due to recent 1.153 ****up I decided to start anew, so I made a fresh 1.143 install plus Diplomacy 4.2.  I honestly didn't know if my tweaks made the game easier or harder, I pretty much always used them, but now I can compare. 

Untweaked game is muuuuch easier.  I mean, no comparison.  Due to mainly one reason - arrow speed.  They miss me by a nautical mile now!  And it should go faster too, because I decided to not try to sell prisoners.  You always lose a lot of time chasing Ransom Brokers, which I won't do now.

(And of course I don't do any cheats now.  Fresh install, no cheats - them's the rules.)

 

[Udutont]

I have never 'completed' the game because I tend to get bored long before the end. I think that the furherst I got was 2/3 of Calradia in 375 days. As regards the speed of conquest (in game time) wihtout using tweaks then I think it depends a lot on how much you reload. If you reload a lot then you can be reckless in combat, limited visibility is much less an issue etc. However, constant reloading makes the game more tedious to play and it feels kind of cheap IMO.

 

[bakters]

Actually I like those difficult times when you have to think hard about how to win, and reload several times until you find the best way.  I learn fastest this way.  For example in my current game I joined barely alive Khergits as a mercenary.  After a moment they bounced back at least in numbers, and we attacked Swadian Halmar.  I reloaded this siege about 5 times while trying various approaches.  Those high level Swadians always got us on the streets or in the keep, but finally I found a way to beat them.  It was fun.

What I hate in this game is peace time.  And it's really brewing in my game, where I'm supposed to start my own kingdom soon.  From experience I can expect around a month of it, and it should start within two weeks from now.  Wrong time, and I can't really wait much, if I want to be fast...  Well, I'll probably fire all Khergits, load up with Swadians and go for it anyway, but I will reload a lot, I suppose.

 

[RomaGoth]

Actually I like those difficult times when you have to think hard about how to win, and reload several times until you find the best way.  I learn fastest this way.  For example in my current game I joined barely alive Khergits as a mercenary.  After a moment they bounced back at least in numbers, and we attacked Swadian Halmar.  I reloaded this siege about 5 times while trying various approaches.  Those high level Swadians always got us on the streets or in the keep, but finally I found a way to beat them.  It was fun.

What I hate in this game is peace time.  And it's really brewing in my game, where I'm supposed to start my own kingdom soon.  From experience I can expect around a month of it, and it should start within two weeks from now.  Wrong time, and I can't really wait much, if I want to be fast...  Well, I'll probably fire all Khergits, load up with Swadians and go for it anyway, but I will reload a lot, I suppose.

I hate peace as well. Pillaging and plundering are the way to go.