Mount and Blade General

So! In the original game there was a mod called Star Wars Conquest. It involved the Rebels vs. the Empire vs. The Hutt Cartel. You could be a droid, a bounty hunter, a Force user of either stripe, or a bunch of other things entirely. It was only for Original.

Cue me, just now, looking at the workshop bar on my Steam Game page for Warband. First thing I see: Star Wars Conquest. For Warband. It came out midway through this month, So if any of you Warbanders are interested in playing in George Lucas's Universe, go grab it off the Workshop or see if it's on Taleworlds yet.

So I picked up the game during the Summer sale and I was wondering what the best way to gain new land is. I only just became a vassal (for Swadia) and my 64-size army doesn't seem enough to take anything significant. So far I own a single village that gets raided every other week because Swadia needs to be at war with a minimum of 3 kingdoms at any given time.

And is it worth being wed with another's house? What benefit is there to that other than a relations boost?

Help your liege during wars and hope that he gives you something if you help take a castle or something. And yeah, your villages being constantly raided during wars is annoying. Hopefully Bannerlord fixes it.

edited 28th Aug '16 7:43:00 PM by theLibrarian

Yeah, you won't be doing much actual conquering by yourself until you can lug around 100 dudes. It takes an awful lot of time to get there, too.

Of course, if you got a good relationship with your fellow vassals, you can ask them to follow you and put your respective forces together. Then you can go out and conquer castles in your lords name without having to wait for the marshal to get off his butt. Doing so significantly raises the odds of being assigned more land, both because of the significance of your contributions and because there's more land to hand out.

Bleh, I made the mistake of attempting to press the claim of Swadia's pretender, with an army size of 75 and no charisma to speak off. It went well for a while because I captured a couple of castles far from their actual seat of power, so I could pick away at them from relative safety. But now the king has had enough of it and came at me with his vassals and about 1100 dudes. No point in trying to defend against that.

I assumed that as long as I kept picking away at them, Rhodocks or the Nords would seize the opportunity and distract Swadia's main force with an invasion of their own, but as soon as I got my rebellion going, the entire continent decided that world peace is actually a pretty swell idea and no one attacked anyone for some reason.

Back to square one, I guess. No Girl Power achievement for me any time soon. The war itself is pretty profitable, though, so I think I'll hold on onto the pretender for as long as she'll have me. Once she ditches me, back to playing mercenary.

edited 29th Aug '16 7:12:40 AM by Kayeka

Really the main problem with keeping up a large army in the game is just keeping them all paid. Trading is all well and good but you may have to get into a hopeless battle or two to cut down your numbers.

Well, keeping them all paid, fed and happy, though paid is definitely the most challenging of the three.

I personally found that having several enterprises helps quite a bit. Also, nothing wrong with dumping some men in your castles for a bit, where they'll cost only half upkeep. That should give you the opportunity to do some trading or chase after tournaments.

True. What sorts of enterprises? I normally just do trade and sell loot that I get from battles.

Well, the kinds that you can set up in a town, you know? Talk to the guild master, ask him about buying land for profitable enterprises, and pick whatever it is you want to set up. I usually end up with breweries because dye works are generally too expensive for too little gain in the short term.

It's always a bit of a long-term investment. Usually, it takes about 10-15 weeks before the business has paid for itself without your involvement, but it takes quite a bit shorter if you take a more active approach and buy and deliver the raw materials yourself.

Ah, okay. I didn't know you could do that, I just knew you could build stuff in your villages.

Yeah, those Enterprises are serious boosts for you. I'm so happy Star Wars came to Warband. Those enterprises should help in getting the Brotherhood of Darkness set up in Hutt territory.

And I learned the serious trick to fighting "hopeless" wars: be agile. You're not an in-game Lord, you're a whole different kind of animal with a different set of strengths and weaknesses.

You: You can recruit from any village or town anywhere. Even enemy territory, if you can maintain good relations with the lower social ranks. Your strength and weakness lies in your SOLDIERS. So build up relations everywhere and make sure you have serious income. That's all.

Them: They're Lords with a code of honor. They are not allowed to recruit more than a basic bodyguard retinue from any land but theirs. Their LAND is their strength and weakness. Without it, they can only field thirty or forty troops.

How's this translate to your battle strategy? Make friends everywhere. Friends with Lords so they might release you after the fight's lost (or even let you go without one if you can talk your way out). Friends with Ladies so they can help boost your relations with Lords. Friends with towns so you can set up enterprises and make slightly more money from trades. Friends with villages for a chance at much larger or stronger groups of soldiers when you need to replace losses.

Once you have friends, what's next? Fight a two prong war. turn as many enemy lords to your side as possible, and use those troops to distract the enemy. You don't stand up fight the enemy like your allies will. Don't worry about holding land. TAKE the land to keep it from them, but fade out and take your troops with you when they come to take it back. Use your own attacks as a distraction so your allies can sneak attack their settlements and then wipe out the survivors when you can corner them in smaller numbers. If you do the job right, you can wage a guerrilla war that sees you turn a superior enemy into a fallen Kingdom.

edited 29th Aug '16 7:11:26 PM by Journeyman

Okay . . . if what I just saw on Raxus Prime holds true for every city-world in SWC, there aren't any enterprises in the Warband version. That sours it a bit for me. Still a good game, just not as good.

So Warband is an improvement over vanilla in every way...except that the enterprises were taken out XD

Pretty sure he's talking about a mod. There are enterprises in native Warband.

Made some headway with my Swadian rebellion, though in the wrong direction. The Kerghit Khanate declared war on me, so I switched my focus on them instead, hoping to force a peace treaty. No peace so far, but I gained some territory in the Vaegir lands the Kerghits conquered. Even managed to beat Sanjar Khan himself while defending a siege, so that's one doomstack less for a week or so.

I should get some of my... I mean my queen's vassals together and take one of their cities.

Something I've learned today: Don't use two-handed weapons on horseback. You get a 35% damage penalty for using a two-handed weapon one-handed, and you don't even get to use a shield like with a bastard sword.

Ah, okay.

Wish I could play Warband, but my Mac mouse is not good for games where you scroll through a weapon wheel with the mouse. Switching from your sword and shield to a bow in the middle of a melee is not conductive to life.

Can't you just rebind the keys on that one? You can rebind pretty much everything else.

edited 30th Aug '16 9:59:34 AM by Kayeka

Eh, I'd have to look.

I regularly use two-handed swords on horseback - they still run off my much higher two-handed skill and they have better reach than one-handed weapons.

edited 30th Aug '16 12:39:41 PM by Balmung

Yeah, that worked. I've moved the weapon switching controls to the up and down directional arrows since the game uses WASD.

Speaking of that...I can do that on Jedi Outcast too.

edited 30th Aug '16 1:22:01 PM by theLibrarian

Yeah, I was talking about Star Wars Conquest. It's a Star Wars mod for the game. So when you get bored of Calradia, you can totally switch to the Galaxy Far Far Away and take a lightsaber to Jabba the Hutt or do an epic duel with Emperor Palpatine yourself.

Alright, started a game, been going pretty well. Nearly won a tournament even, but the game for some reason gave me a bow, while the game gave my opponent a sword and shield. I did manage to win a melee fight though, and have commissioned a mill and bakery to boot.

Then my game quit randomly, but hopefully I didn't lose all of my progress.

That's why the autosave feature is recommended every time. It saves whenever you enter the map from camp or a settlement.

Outside of some mods, every tournament round is completely random within limits. Generally speaking you're not going to find equipment loadouts that don't match the local combat style. Swadians won't have missile troops on horseback in their tourneys, for instance. They simply don't have that kind of unit. You WILL find a lot of them in Khergit tournaments. Horseback is the only way those guys fight unless you're dealing with tier one tribesmen who were unlucky enough to spawn without a horse.

But I was in a Nord tournament!

And yeah, it saved my progress. Now if only I can find these forest bandits that Sargoth's guild master wants me to kill...

OH! I was wondering why you had a bow instead of a crossbow. Yeah, makes perfect sense. The Nords DO have an archer line using bows, you know. They're not as famous as the Huscarls, but that's mostly because they don't excel in their field the way the Huscarls do.

The Vaegirs are where the bows are at. An army consisting of Nordic huscarls backed by Vaegir sharpshooters and protected on the flanks by Swadian knights is the epitome of the game. Throw in a screening force of Khergit horse archers and a secondary missile force of Rhodok sharpshooters, and you've pretty much locked down the game.

Yeah, a few times I've played I've done my best to make an army that plays to each country's strengths.

I do think, after the Nords are at peace, I could become a vassal for a while or something, and then wait for a country to be whittled down to like one castle before I conquer it and declare independence. Or maybe I could just be a sellsword until that happens or something.

I'm playing a female character, so I couldn't become a vassal to anyone who had lands to give out.

On the one hand, it was kind of annoying to continue playing sellsword until I (thought I) had enough manpower to support a pretender or claim a castle for your own. On the other hand, it's quite refreshing not having to deal with being granted villages and castles all over the map that are impossible to protect from raiders.

Another advantage of being a mercenary is that you can keep a side from "winning" too much simply by signing up with whoever they are in opposition to. Stick with one nation too long, and they'll grow pretty much unopposed, which means that by the time you want to claim your own crown, you'll have to deal with a mega-blob with doomstacks out of its ears.

If any one is going to unify this country, it's going to be me.