Tips - Perfecting Hardest Difficulty

I've been figuring out max difficulty for a while now, and I've got a few tips that I think are handy for anyone trying to follow that route.

Stat Allocation

On hardest difficulty, you cannot be a one-man-army. Even with the absolute best armor in the game, a single siege crossbow bolt to the head(at best, two) will instantly take you down, and rout your army. Even if you pump 100% of your points into strength and health, you'll be looking at two headshots at most.

That doesn't mean you don't want the best armor in the game, though. Without it, a normal crossbow - or even a cheeky sea raider with a long bow - can take you down with one unlucky shot.

So that presents our first requirement: 10 Strength.

Without it, you wont be able to equip the best helmets, and as your head is your most important weakness, that's crucial. This means the difference between being oneshot from full health or not, I really can't overstate its importance. You also won't be able to use the Siege Crossbow, which is probably your most important tool for sieges. It alone will get you 20+ kills per siege, upwards of 60 if you just take along lots of bolts.

Next up is Agility. Agility makes you a much better fighter in general, but again, being in the middle of the fight is asking for a bolt to the head. So the objective is to get this as low as possible. However! Armor for your horse is just as important - perhaps even moreso - than armor for your character. Your horse is a much larger target, and when it goes down, you will almost certainly follow. With that in mind, the objective is to be able to ride one of the heavily armored horses; chargers and the like. Unfortunately, they all have a minimum requirement of 4 riding, which means 12 Agility.

Now, there are some ways around this. If you create your character correctly, you can get 4 riding even with only 7 agility. In my opinion, that's the ideal stat allocation, saving you 5 attribute points.

Third, and most important, is Intelligence. The reason Intelligence is critical is because of the way Surgery works.

Basically, you start with a 25% chance of a downed soldier being Wounded instead of outright dying. Every point in Surgery raises that chance by 4%; level 1 is a 29% chance, level 2 is a 33% chance, etc.

What you should realize is, because of how this skill adds up, each additional point becomes more valuable than the last. Getting a companion 10 points in surgery gives you a 65% chance for a downed soldier to become Wounded instead of Dying, meaning each one will last 2.14x longer than the default. But getting Surgery to the player maximum of 81%, theoretically just 4 more points, means they instead last 5.26x longer. The player getting this skill makes it more than twice as effective! The first point is worth 5.5%, but the final point is worth 30%!

Compare this to the effects of Iron Skin, where getting an additional 5 points simply results in an additional ~15% more health.

So you can easily see why maxing Intelligence is very important. Goal: 30 Intelligence.

Finally, Charisma. Charisma is a bit of an odd duck, because unlike the other skills, its effects can largely be substituted for with other aspects of the game. Leadership, for example, reduces the cost of your troops, boosts your morale, and allows you an additional 5 troops per level. But each of those effects can be replaced; troop capacity with Renown, Morale with Food, and Cost with...well, more money. This is still a relatively important attribute, but less so than Intelligence for sure, and you'll definitely want to max maxed important skills like Surgery and Tactics before entering into the sort of giant battles where the extra troops Charisma can get you will help.

So I'll just go ahead and settle for, as many as possible after maxing Intelligence.

Skill Points

Now what about the skill points themselves? We've already determined that Surgery is an incredibly valuable skill to have on your character at 10, but what others share that amazing value? The other medical skills? Engineer, perhaps?

Engineer certainly is worth consideration. It works very similarly to Surgery in terms of how it adds up. The trouble is, it's simply not as valuable of a bonus. Still, I think it's worth considering the fact that a maxed Companion can build a Siege Tower in 30 hours, while a maxed Player can build one in a mere 6 hours. This is compared to the 0 Engineer build time of 90 hours; again, for a mere 4 additional points, you're getting a 500% improvement over your companion. But...is it necessary to build a siege tower in 6 hours instead of 30?

It also reduces the cost to build improvements on your towns, but frankly, the cost on those is rarely the most important factor.

Ultimately I'll leave this one up to you. It very much depends on whether you think nearly instant sieges are worth it.

Pathfinding

While many people don't think putting 10 points into Pathfinding is worth it, I'd argue the opposite. Pathfinding is a skill where even a tiny advantage over your target or the person targeting you means a tremendous difference. When the king's army of 600 lancers is chasing you, do you want to face them alone? Or be able to escape to a nearby town instead?

This is also very relevant for chasing down your targets. Simply by being able to chase down the lords with smaller raiding parties and defeat and capture them, you can turn a long war into a short one, and Pathfinding is crucial to succeeding in that goal. I'd definitely suggest full investment.

Tactics

Tactics is a skill where you won't really obviously see the benefits, but they'll exist, and on max difficulty, they'll become pretty obvious, but only mostly in the later parts of the game. This is in large part due to Lanchester's Laws.

Basically, Lanchester's Laws explain how a small numerical superiority can result in a large change in the course of a battle. For example, send 20 soldiers against 15 identical soldiers, and you can expect to win the fight with 14 soldiers surviving, rather than 5 if you were just subtracting one from the other.

The same plays out in large battles. Starting the fight with even a small numerical superiority can result in huge difference in the course of a fight, and the larger that advantage, the more sweeping your victory. The way this functionally plays out is, you square the numbers of troops each side has, subtract the smaller from the larger, and then take the square root of the remaining troops. For example, if you have 107 troops to their 100, you'll win the fight with an average of 39 troops remaining. This can also play out against you, however; if you have 95 to their 100, you'll lose while they'll still have 32 troops remaining.

However, if you had 14 Tactics in that battle, that 32 for them will become a narrow victory for you, instead. Just a few points in tactics results in a net difference of 52 troops! (32 more lost for them, and 20 saved for you)

With that in mind, it becomes obvious that maxing your Tactics is very important to maximize this bonus, but it only becomes relevant in the part of the game where the number of troops on the battlefield is limited. So to conclude:

Max Tactics after maxing all other important skills. But definitely max it.

Trainer

This is the final Intelligence-based skill that is valuable on your character, largely because of a simple fact; at higher difficulties, your companions will die faster, meaning they will level up slower. This is especially relevant for companions you dedicate to non-combat-related skills.

This skill alone means the difference between having sufficiently-upgraded companions at day 200, versus day 900. It also makes a tremendous difference in the time required to replace your forces if you face a tough battle, which means a tremendous difference in the midst of a war. If you fight off the King's army and lose a hefty chunk of your troops, being able to field medium troops instantly rather than having to hunt for bandits to level up your recruits can mean the difference between stopping a siege and needing to take back a town.

Honestly, I'd rank this skill as third important behind Surgery and Pathfinding. If you can't avoid a fight, or prevent your losses, then the least you can do is make repairing the damage as easy and quick as possible. That, combined with the more rapidly acquired power from training up your Companions, makes this skill particularly relevant, especially for players who aren't willing to play for 2000 days.

Also, seeing as this skill becomes more powerful the more points you invest, I'd definitely suggest investing as many points as possible.

Leadership

This is the final critical important skill, but once again, only near the end of the game. This one is for a multitude of reasons, all related to the previous reasons. For Lanchester's Laws, the bonus troops mean the difference between success and failure. For saving gold, this will be much more relevant than Engineering, especially when you start to garrison cities with miniature armies. For Morale, this is...convenient, at the very least. Getting your charisma to 30 and your leadership to 10 will mean a default army size of over 100, which alone is very practical, at the very least.

Less Important Skills - But still Important.

There are other skills that are worth investing in, but usually only in the 1-5 point range. Those include:

Prisoner Management - Enough to capture a few Sea Raiders in the beginning, and a few Lords at the end.
Inventory Management - Enough to carry your loot in the beginning, and your food in the end.
Shield - Enough to catch even the sneaky arrows that try to headshot you over your shield.(not really sure on this one, suggestions welcome)
Ironflesh - Enough to ensure you don't get oneshot even through your Great Helmet. Siege Crossbows OP.
Persuasion - At least one, to unlock the ability to persuade Lords. Not super important, but nice to have.

As for the rest, they're more or less useless. Take them only for personal preference or style points.

Most Common Issue - Renown

For me personally, the most common issue you'll face isn't winning battles, it's building Renown. You need Renown for a lot of things, including expanding the size of your army, but in the lategame, with a huge and well-equipped army, most battles won't actually give you any. Essentially, playing safe isn't considered particularly heroic. Who could've guessed.

But there's a solution to this, and this is a large part of why that armor and horse are so important. Leave your entire army behind at a town or castle, get a Lance of some sort, and go Sea Raider Hunting.

Sea raiders, especially in the later parts of the game, will come in large war parties, and taking one on with just your Companions will often give you the maximum amount of renown. They're also quite dangerous, however, so it's important to first exhaust their supply of throwing axes and javelins. Then, take out their archers, unless you want to have to ride around them in circles for half an hour per battle. Then, just use your lance to take them out one by one. Not only will you very rapidly build renown, you'll also power-level your character to an absurd degree, often getting upwards of 10k experience per battle.

Even better, you'll grind your Polearms skill up like crazy. In the beginning, fully expect to be getting +5 or +6 proficiency per lance strike. With 500+ polearms skill, points in Agility quickly become much less important, if not completely irrelevant.

This is also an excellent way to start a game; by fighting small groups of 5-15 sea raiders, the player can very quickly accumulate a decent set of armor and weapons for them and their companions, plus get their first 15 levels in very short order. I recently did so in less than five ingame days.

Conclusion

There are plenty of other things you can do to improve your play. Manually putting archers on a hill, for example, or coordinating your cavalry so they don't get encircled. But for the most part, those you can figure out as you play, without needing to plan ahead for them. Keep these things in mind and it should, at the very least, help you a fair bit.

Thanks for reading.

Submitted January 26, 2020 at 02:38PM by EndlessArgument https://ift.tt/2Go3OGO

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