PoP is difficult as advertised, but not in a fun way

Prophesy of Pendor isn't fun.

Vanilla Mount and Blade became too grindy and uninteresting for me, so I decided to look into mods. It came down to two obviously, but Floris was described as "Vanilla+" so I opted for PoP.

I come from games where Losing is Fun, but Mount & Blade losing isn't fun. It's a grind that spits in your face and is invariably less interesting than Not Losing. Companions cost thousands, more grind. Without a host of companions with Trainer, it seems like troops take ages longer to train up to just being footmen in PoP. More grind. Of course I knew to avoid sea raiders and maybe even "tundra" raiders (which have plate armor in this??) due to basically being elite troops, but there are extremely armored mounted units placed among random bands of even looters and forest bandits, sometimes 3 or 4, which even footmen have an incredibly difficult time killing; they kill a good chunk of my force every time. More grind. There are roving bands of small, elite units that travel very quickly, making it difficult to simply try recruiting a horde and grinding on smaller groups with a high Pathfinding skill. Cool, run into a group of 20 knights that were colored the same as every other faction, but were hostile and faster than your group of 30? Restart. You don't even keep 1 companion. More Grind.

I'm not getting it. I had heard that the game, unlike Vanilla, had a very nice redesigned early-game, which was distinct from mid-game, which was distinct from late-game, but I'm not seeing the progression. I understand that PoP is advertised as being harder to start in, but this is just... stupid? I left Vanilla because it was flat, plain, and grindy, which is uninteresting, but PoP seems even worse in that respect.

I am loving some of the QoL features, Arena seems worthwhile now, the worldbuilding is more interesting, the added gear + weapons are nice, I like the fantasy elements, quests seem a bit better, and I do like seeing "raider" variety, but holy shit... it does not come together for an better experience. I think a big part of that stems from how ridiculously difficult it is to raise troops.

And the voice acting and sound effects are terrible. I am 99% sure that they're considered funny, meme-y, etc by players after hundreds of hours, but they alone made me want to quit before I'd even played an hour.

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So I give up trying like this.

How do you start?

Submitted July 27, 2017 at 06:16AM by mbbird http://ift.tt/2v1V7gV