Mount and Blade General

It's more than just numbers, it's quality. You haven't made up anything if you lose a bunch of mid tier infantry and archers, and replenish their numbers with recruits.

Well I've also been in a few more fights since then and been able to upgrade others pretty quick. And it's not like I'll be hurting for money for a while, considering how much money I've got.

Long as your battles are giving you more cash than you spend on upgrades, you should be good.

We're starting to see a surge of mods I, at least, find to be good ideas. I grabbed Native Expansion, SWC, and am now grabbing Calradia at War, which seems to be another faithful expansion to the game that ups the uniqueness of the factions and the danger of bandits.

This is going to be fun.

Had some financial difficulties after setting up a new thing in Sargoth, but after a tournament win in Swadia I'm doing pretty well again.

Yeah, seven thousand is okay for a start, but it won't get you very far in the long run.

I started a new game as a Swadian named Francois de Suno in Calradia at War. It's going well so far other than initial cash flow issues. Which I'm going to solve with quests and such.

I'd imagine getting a castle and villages and stuff would alleviate my financial difficulties some. I don't really want to commit to making my own kingdom yet, though.

Well, you could always just join a pre-existing Kingdom. Businesses always help as long as you build profitable ones.

Yeah, I know. But I may eventually want to strike out on my own.

That's always an option in different ways. You can rebel when your Liege decides not to give you land you want. You can decline to actually join in the wars, so you don't factor into them other than holding land. In which case you can profit from the land then request to be released. You won't keep the land that way, but it's a decently safe way to potentially upgrade some land and make it supportive to your future campaigns ahead of time. Stash a school in each village and they'll slowly build up relation with you. Eventually you'll have loyal people who'll give you boatloads of troops.

We'll see. If you conquer a castle, do you get its accompanying villages too?

Conquer it in your own name as an Independent Lord? Village is yours. In someone else's name, it's entirely up to them. Usually the village and castle get split between separate Lords in those cases.

Okay then, that's good.

I may end up swearing myself to a king eventually, but for now I just want to keep being a sellsword. Maybe raid caravans and the odd, isolated village if I feel like it.

Why not? It happened in real life when mercs were between jobs or just bored and looking for a relatively easy score..

Probably the biggest reason countries switched to national armies instead of filling their ranks with massive hordes of paid warriors.

Yeah, I remember that. The problem would be picking a village that is really far away from a castle. There's like two in Vaegir territory, though, way up north.

Good places to hit, not far from Sea Raider territory.

There's a mistake on the game's Tropes page. I forget if I fixed it or not. The level scaling entry claimed your party size determines the size of raider bands. It's false. Your level determines the size of raider parties generated by lairs. So if you raid while you're high level, you'll have a shitload of bandits making life hard for the enemy Lords trying to find you. And hard for you, too, I guess, but win or lose, you're far faster than any Lord in finishing a battle.

I like large sea raider bands. They make all those points invested into Inventory Management worthwhile.

Indeed. And they're your best bandit unit for leveling up quickly.

Calradia at War is pretty awesome. It has a knockout cam so your army will still "fight" after you fall, and it doesn't have the wound system of Brytenwalda, so you're not personally penalized for getting knocked out. I put quotes around fight because they don't think on their own. They just carry out their last orders from you before you fell.

I love Swadian cavalry. Get the right terrain and avoid spearmen, and they'll trample anything for you.

The bandit groups in Calradia at War are boosted. Each one has three types of warriors. The basic bandits from the vanilla game, and two upgraded or mercenary tiers. I was scared to see what the Sea Raiders got. For a low level infantry group I'd imagine their Woad Raiders and Elite Woad Raiders would be horrific, but my Swadian men at arms, knights, and grandmaster knights are rolling right over everything still. I occasionally lose a man at arms or knight, but for the most part it's all one sided.

So I signed up with the Vaegirs last night to go to war against the Khergits, but after being stopped from raiding a village and from besieging a castle I ended up captured after a battle. That battle did go pretty well, though; we gave way more than we got, killing 69 out of 105 or so at the loss of around 27 or so of our own men. I actually wonder if we might have won, if I hadn't been knocked unconscious.

Anyway I was able to pretty quickly rebuild my army by travelling cross-country from Vaegir to Swadia to Rhodoks and back again through the Nords, but by that point they made peace, and my troops are upgrading fairly quickly. I also won another tournament with the Vaegirs and Sarranids.

I'm about ready to go Sellsword and join the Swadians in an anti-Khergit campaign. I've pretty much cleared out every major sea raider infestation up north for now, so it'll be a while before it's profitable to hunt up there again.

Okay, now the Vaegirs are at war with the Nords, and I went a month with them during that war. I won a few battles and successfully raided two villages, in addition to winning a tournament. I'm now at maximum party size again with a good number of new units, and I'm debating whether or not to raid those northern Vaegir villages right now, or I could go into the Sarranids and Khergits to make more enterprises with some of my thousands and thousands of gold.

I may also start two other games in Star Wars: Conquest and Last Days of the Third Age.

edited 2nd Sep '16 11:17:09 AM by theLibrarian

I've joined up as a Swadian sellsword. Raiding Khergit and Nord territories. Sort of. In this run I understand the military value of the underclass, so instead of raiding villages, I'm just hitting enemy Lords. And freeing them for the relationship points. No reason to make enemies when I might change sides after the contracts are over.

I'm running a mix of Swadian cavalry and Rhodok infantry/missiles. It's working really well for me, except for the whole fighting Khergits thing.

RE: lady conquerors

I did this a long long time ago but iirc I married some bro and had my liege grant them the castles and stuff then declared independence and then rode up to the hubby and immediately convinced him to join the cause and give me all his castles.

Alright, I swore myself to the Khergits because they asked me, then almost immediately after joining fought with them in a war against the Sassanids. Won three battles in it (one over a village with like 300 or so men against around 200, then one against a Sassanid army that had just raided my village, then a siege on a town that the Sassanids took back at the very end of the war), now just focusing mainly on building up my village. I've finished building a Mill and have 72 men...but I'm basically out of money xD Didn't really help me that I ordered a Manor built after I finished the Mill, then found a Book Merchant in Tulga and bought a book xD

I don't really know what to do at this point. I don't think I've finished the book yet and unless I camp and speed-read it I won't have enough money to pay my men.