Work Harder or Stop Being Ignorant?

[PsiShock]

So I am reading all over the place that people suggest having 40 or 50 of a specific varying kinds of top tier troops before attempting to take cities, etc etc. My question is, how the hell did someone go about getting 40-50 Huscarls? If you have a load of Fierds recruits and sit and train them/fight bandits until they hit Huscarl rank, it will take for freaking ever. I have 6 training and I'm aware a Huscarl is probably way above my level (25) but what am I missing here?

 

[Tuidjy]

Training will not work, but combat will.  Two of the best unit types for assaults are the Empire Armored Crossbowmen and the Hero Adventurers, and they both train from level 30 troops.  Level 30 troops advance quite easily in combat against lords that are still recruiting and whose special troops are not particularly dangerous.  See who is getting their asses handed to them, watch for their lords respawning, wipe them out, then bribe a lord who likes you to clear your record with their side.  They guys whom you attack without provocation will hate you forever, so choose 'jerk' type personalities (you can tell by the way they first greet you)

Also, do not stick to bandits.  If you use your companions as an immortal cavalry shield, your empire line of ranged infantry should be able to handily deal with the raiders around Fieldsvein, cultists and rogue knights of all kinds.  The Mystmountain raiders are also easy to kill, but their experience and loot stinks.  But still the best is to just hunt weak lords.

By the way, at level 25 you should be able to singlehandedly take at least three castles (Almera, Whitestag, etc...) if you have  a halberd, a siege crossbow, and crossbow skill about 300. (As long as you have enough troops not to let the defenders sally)

 

[Brother of blades]

tis was more of a question for the normal forums.

 

[PsiShock]

Is it not more off topic to post a random unhelpful response? That and strategy and troop building in one mod may not function the same as the other.

Anyways, I appreciate the response Tuidjy and I'll definitely give that a try. Thanks

 

[BetrayTheWorld]

Is it not more off topic to post a random unhelpful response?

While I understand your position, and even agree with you to some extent, you should be aware that there are many of us in the PoP community who read every single post that gets posted on the PoP forums.

So, some people are going to get irritated with people posting a new post about something that really doesn't belong, or could be found on the forums with a little digging, and creative use of the search function. I'm not implying that you didn't use search, just reminding you that it's there, and that people in the community really appreciate when you use it.

Anyhow, hope you have fun with the game!

 

[noosers]

Go check out the old popwiki and read the strategy part there. It describes the three basic approaches on how to successfully siege.

Huscarls are tough to come by - due to their upgrade path.
It takes less XP for a lvl20 to achieve it´s upgrade treshold than it does for a lvl 40 unit. But if you need to upgrade a lvl 20 unit five times in a row it still takes ages over upgrading a lvl 30 to lvl 60 unit.

Otherwise, high end troops arent needed to successfully conquer your first city or castle - definetly not as little as 50. 50´s barely enough for a fully garrisoned castle, so you better bring at least 100+ for a fully garrisoned town!

Far more important is to quickly garrison your newly conquered town/castle afterwards in sufficient numbers to ward off 1000+ head strong war parties which WILL show up 2 days after you took the location.

 

[Fawzia dokhtar-i-Sanjar]

In PoP 3, I'd recommend at least 150 high-tier troops for a garrison (50 of which should be bowmen or crossbowmen), plus training up and garrisoning more as quickly as possible.  I usually dump in a lot of my own high-tier troops, then recruit like crazy and level up a bunch more to medium-tier as back-ups to the high-tier ones in the garrison.  Also, you should put at least 40-50 bowmen or crossbowmen in your garrison.

The more high-tier troops you put into your garrison, the lower the chance that noosers' aforementioned 1000+ army will attack you immediately.  If you have a big, high-tier garrison, they will siege you after a couple of days, but usually won't win the siege and will wander off eventually.

The strategy guide in the old PoP-Wiki concerning sieging and garrisoning is still applicable to PoP 3, as are other aspects in the Wiki.  I'd recommend reading the old Wiki as well as the new FAQ as well as using the search function on the PoP forum - many of the older threads can answer current questions.

 

[faigulla]

I just get a lot of cost effective troops: from 150 to 230 troops consisting in Pendor Heavy Bowmen and Pendor Swordsmen. Armsman, Fiedsvain Warriors, Empire Heavy Infantry, all the mid to higher tier troops (usually one tier before the last tier, that is usually the most cost effective unit of a tree - not always, but usually). Notice I didn't said Pendor Armored Bowmen, or Pendor Men-at-Arms, those are the last upgrade.

It does the trick reasonably well, and when they do attack, they have to bring in at least a couple of lords for a siege, or a single, well endowed one.

 

[Gromm]

The more high-tier troops you put into your garrison, the lower the chance that noosers' aforementioned 1000+ army will attack you immediately.  If you have a big, high-tier garrison, they will siege you after a couple of days, but usually won't win the siege and will wander off eventually.

Unless one of these guys will come after you

Spoiler

Spoiler

http://img168.imageshack.us/img168/5026/marius1.jpg

Because any of them will take away your fief in no time

 

[Fawzia dokhtar-i-Sanjar]

If you have several hundred high-tier troops garrisoned, with a bunch of upper-tier bowmen, you can fight off even that.  I've done it on many occasions.

 

[Griefer]

@PsiShock - It's a good question and very specific to PoP. I'd say it's silly to require everyone to read the last 5 years of threads in the hopes of combing out the detail they were looking for. Most of what we all say on here is crap anyway. The last people any of us should be taking too seriously is ourselves   Besides, revisiting previously discussed topics and ideas is a good way to re-examine old ideas from a new perspective.


First, don't do Huscarls to start with. As someone else mentioned they are slow and clumsy to get advanced. Legionaries, Armored Longbowmen, Armored Crossbowmen, Kiergard, Ravenstern Rangers (not mounted, the foot ones), these are high quality and quick to produce troops. Huscarls and D'Shar Bladesmen/Blademasters are amazing infantry, but they take IG months to build up in any sort of number.

Second, don't take a castle or city without having a solid plan in place for how to keep it. As previously mentioned in the thread as soon as you take some land someone is going to try and take it from you. You need to have a solid castle defense force ready by the time the last defender dies. Dump them all in the castle and run like hell to gather up and start training more garrison troops. Even beyond that how are you going to protect whatever villages came with it from being raided?

At 25th level you're in for a wild ride. What you really need is MONEY. Tons and tons of money. Why? Because your absolute best option is buying a few weeks of peace. Pick your target castle or city and wait until its current owner is locked in battle. Keep an eye on where all their lords are and wait until they're either starting sieges or sitting in their castles recovering from a beating. Then jump the castle or city you want and immediately buy peace with everyone else (after declaring yourself a kingdom). Now you've only got one faction to worry about. Then it's time to scoot all over the map, soaking up Ravenstern, Empire and Sarleon recruits to make Rangers, Armored Archers and Armored Crossbowmen. When you've got 200-300 of these guys in your home then you can slow up a bit, groom some Hero Adventurers, Huscarls, Blademasters and the other big guns that take a lot of time.

One great option is having 150 Ravenstern Rangers and only leave like 20 in your castle. Let the enemy show up with his 1000 troops, then you hop in the castle and let them attack. It will be an absolute slaughter. You'll get tons of renown, XP, as well as taking a lot of steam out of the attacking faction. Coax them into attacking while you are in a good position to defend. Then dump everyone in the castle and trot off to gather recruits.

One thing's for sure. You pull it off and you won't be level 25 for long.

 

[noosers]

And esnure to fill out your party size to maximum from the garrison before you get sieged - otherwise the garrison troops won´t get any XP at all (only troops in party get XP). That way you can level up a few grunts as well as happily slaughtering half the enemies male population.

 

[PsiShock]

@Noosers
Your comment shows that it only takes a sentence or two to help someone extensively. I had no idea that garrison troops didn't level up. THANK YOU!
@Griefer
Thanks for the extensive strategy layout. I can definitely say it's the most in-depth help I've received.
@Fawzia
I had the impression that a bunch of lords wouldn't be willing to attack unless they all formed on the marshall first but I wasn't sure troops affected it. Thanks for this
@ Everyone Else
I appreciate the help guys. This is what I was looking for when I started this thread. Thank you.

 

[Ichon]

So I am reading all over the place that people suggest having 40 or 50 of a specific varying kinds of top tier troops before attempting to take cities, etc etc. My question is, how the hell did someone go about getting 40-50 Huscarls? If you have a load of Fierds recruits and sit and train them/fight bandits until they hit Huscarl rank, it will take for freaking ever. I have 6 training and I'm aware a Huscarl is probably way above my level (25) but what am I missing here?

I'm surprised no one offered the most obvious suggestion at least to me- look for whoever Fierdsvain has been fighting the longest  and track down that factions current Marshall or King. Usually they will have quite a prisoner train. Defeat them and recruit 20-80 Fierdsvain Warriors/Axemen. Take those guys into a few battles and you will lose 25-50% depending on surgery skill but also the survivors will now be Huscarls.

2nd easiest is to find some powerful enemies and kite them towards Heretic army- usually Heretics will win if freshly spawned but lose half their Demons while capturing huge prisoners. Then take them out and rescue prisoners.

I do agree with most of the advice saying that Huscarls since 3.01 aren't the best foot soldiers anymore. They had a long dominance but now not only to Blademasters beat them 1 on 1 but several other infantry mixes can beat them at a lower cost. Usually easiest is to pick two close factions and mix the 2 troop trees. Ravenstern mix well with anyone, Sarleon mixes well with Empire and Fierdsvain, D'Shar mix very well with Empire and also Ravenstern, etc. Mercenaries fill in gaps in tree or just provide useful #s to make sure your army is always near cap and training.  Pendor could mix well with anything with cheap troops but if you are trying to get alot of higher tier Pendor for the OK then Sarleon or Ravenstern is probably the easiest to mix with.

 

[ppga]

As has been mentioned, adventurers (specifically hero adventurers) are great, good melee and ranged, and are available in taverns, either as adventurers or young nobles, etc.  Also, they are available from the start, unlike knighthood orders.  My smash, grab, and hold force consists of about 200 or so hero/ine adventurers. I sent Marius and 1,200+ of his buddies packing with minimal losses (and loads of prestige gain), I love defending castles that need a siege towers to attack, especially when just about every frickin' defender has a bow/crossbow and knows how to use it!  After running out of bolts, I got bored and jumped down and sliced up their tower pushers!    And then their armies scatter away from you and you can hunt them all down at your leisure, well unless Livius Legatus brings a couple other buddies up to attack Sarleon in the meantime.

Keep them garrisoned at half cost till you need them, gallop to whatever fief is being sieged and play whack-a-mole with enemy armies.  Which is important, because those guys aren't cheap.  I find I can't really be at peace with too many factions at once, I need the loot from constant big battles!  And besides, what's the point in playing if you don't like big battles? 

Another strategy I have is to keep a bunch of high-end recruitable prisoners on hand, and then recruit them by the dozen just before you're going to have some serious battles so the morale hit is a non-issue.  That's especially useful for defensive troops, I once recruited about 50 Ravenstern rangers that way, whacked them into Arvendor which I'd just taken, took out my field army, shredded a few armies, presto-changeo morale is 99 again and Arvendor has a solid backbone of defenders.  Did a similar thing with Marleons and Sarleon men-at-arms later on.

And don't forget, once you can garrison, take a small mobile force to go rescue recruiting by freeing captives, especially in Jatu and Noldor lands, where I've seen groups of a dozen or half a dozen Noldor or Jatu with several dozen prisoners waiting to be rescued, not all huscarls, but a good way to get a mix of mid-range or better units in a hurry.  Mystmountains are good too, when they have Jatu prisoners that can be recruited, you're as happy to have them on your side as you hate having to go up against them.  And when they level up to Jatu warlords, well,  .  Because loot is related to party strength (i.e. you get less if your party is stronger), this is also a good way to make money.  I've gotten more valuable loot by defeating a smallish (20-30) coven of heretics with just my companions than I have from wiping out a 900+ 3 seers army with my hero/ines.

 

[mr48]

Hire all the companions with training skills to add to your own: Frederick, Donovan, Sir Jocelyn. Once you get Freddy and Donny past level 20, you will be able to take 20 base recruits of any faction and train them up to the level 30 troops of that faction in a matter of days. The important thing is to wait until all of them are ready to upgrade to the next stage before starting to upgrade, you want to keep each group being trained as large as possible (as few troop types as possible) as their experience from training is pooled, so the smaller the training group the slower the training will go. The total experience gained will be the same, but the lower you keep the level of the troops while you train them the more of your companions will be able to contribute their training skill, since they need to be of higher level than the troops they train.

 

[crianph]

Hire all the companions with training skills to add to your own: Frederick, Donovan, Sir Jocelyn. Once you get Freddy and Donny past level 20, you will be able to take 20 base recruits of any faction and train them up to the level 30 troops of that faction in a matter of days. The important thing is to wait until all of them are ready to upgrade to the next stage before starting to upgrade, you want to keep each group being trained as large as possible (as few troop types as possible) as their experience from training is pooled, so the smaller the training group the slower the training will go. The total experience gained will be the same, but the lower you keep the level of the troops while you train them the more of your companions will be able to contribute their training skill, since they need to be of higher level than the troops they train.

Aaaah beat me to it!

I was gonna say this but he already did sooo there. I'll just add my own little bit. The original poster's question was HOW to get the top faction troops fast enough. If you're gonna go the Hero Adventurer route, that will definitely take a looong time since you'll have to level them through combat and yeah you will lose some of them. This method is simply the most efficient. You can train up Ravenstern rangers via this method as well as most factions' top infantry and archers. Squires-at-arms are also level 20, so you can train them up via this method. As for huscarls, I don't use them so I'm not sure if their prerequisite troop (armored axemen?) are level 20. I usually stick with ravenstern or empire troops. The Dshar troop line always felt a little too weak for me. Not sure if that has changed in 3.0 since I still don't use them.

As for my training needs, I usually have a group of 10 companions. 4 of whom are the trainers while the rest are there to keep everyone happy and add variety to the group and for filling in other vital functions. The 4 trainers are Sir Jocelyn, Frederick, Donavan and Sir Rayne. Now here's the problem, Fred and Rayne hate each other so you're gonna have to get 2 more characters that they like in order to balance out the conflict. HOWEVER, these 2 characters are gonna conflict with the other trainers as well. So what do you do? To make a long story short, here are my companions:

Trainers:
Sir Jocelyn
Sir Rayne
Frederick
Donavan

Others:
Sir Roland
Sigismund
Kaverra
Ediz
Sara the Fox
Riva

There, 10 companions and an absolute training machine. I don't remember if the other 6 are absolutely needed to keep the party happy since I made this party months ago and I've written it down after reading and planning using the companion bubble. I've used it for every game since. Look at the bubble if you want the details, but I tell ya this works quite nicely. Notice that Ansen isn't there or Leslie. That's one of the sacrifices I made in order to have a training machine. Riva can take over medic skills just fine.

Training also benefits companions so all those other folks who are below the level of the trainers will benefit. As for prison trains, they are the most efficient way to replenish lost troops. It doesn't have to be a lord. A unique spawn such as an army will do. They usually have loads of prisoners.

Hope this helps.

 

[ppga]

Hire all the companions with training skills to add to your own: Frederick, Donovan, Sir Jocelyn. Once you get Freddy and Donny past level 20, you will be able to take 20 base recruits of any faction and train them up to the level 30 troops of that faction in a matter of days. The important thing is to wait until all of them are ready to upgrade to the next stage before starting to upgrade, you want to keep each group being trained as large as possible (as few troop types as possible) as their experience from training is pooled, so the smaller the training group the slower the training will go. The total experience gained will be the same, but the lower you keep the level of the troops while you train them the more of your companions will be able to contribute their training skill, since they need to be of higher level than the troops they train.

Good to know!  So that's why the last couple of guys always seemed to take forever, it wasn't just my imagination!

 

[Griefer]

Hire all the companions with training skills to add to your own: Frederick, Donovan, Sir Jocelyn. Once you get Freddy and Donny past level 20, you will be able to take 20 base recruits of any faction and train them up to the level 30 troops of that faction in a matter of days. The important thing is to wait until all of them are ready to upgrade to the next stage before starting to upgrade, you want to keep each group being trained as large as possible (as few troop types as possible) as their experience from training is pooled, so the smaller the training group the slower the training will go. The total experience gained will be the same, but the lower you keep the level of the troops while you train them the more of your companions will be able to contribute their training skill, since they need to be of higher level than the troops they train.

QFT.

I always play specific culture armies now; all Empire, or all D'Shar, etc. Saw this one in action trying to train up high level units - don't recruit that last big step until pretty much everyone is ready. You'll roll a few up a day and a few up every serious battle. It's even more efficient with the middle-tier troops. The units that only tend to advance half at a time? If you wait or or two extra days you'll pop them all up. If you advance the half that were ready on day 1, the rest will take 2 weeks to finish advancing, one or two at a time.

 

[Qnevven Zolond]

i also have an important tip about training your troops that hasn't been mentioned yet...

be careful not to transfer the units that you are trying to train into garrison - as soon as you do this all the experience they gained above their native level will be lost - this is both true to the troops that havn't reached their upgrade pitch yet and those that are already available for upgrade
if you do this you will have to start gaining experience all over again for them