Beat the game finally (Warband - vanilla)

Finally sealed up my first win. About 200 hours into the game. Man what a grind. I was hoping to finish my game Friday or Saturday, but those guys just take forever to grind down. Near the end, I got so sick of it, I wasn't even bothering to add troops to the garrisons usually, just immediately move on to the next target.

Take-aways for me:
1) Harlaus really is an asshole. My first start, I signed up with him because I heard Swadia was powerful. Dude gives every fief to himself!
2) Swadian knights are indeed the shizzle. Huscarls are great, but honestly for my money I'll just take the knights. They are devastating on the world map, and work fine in sieges for my money.
3) Rhodok crossbowmen are fearsome. Prepare your anus if you're going against them.
4) Surgery and training are far and away the best skills in the game. Surgery makes combat losses totally palatable, and training makes leveling new troops a breeze. I wound up having most of my party go for training 10 or as close as they could get. Engineering 10 is key for sieges also.
5) Turning your companions into lords is basically not necessary. Just get honor and hire all the good 100 relation guys. I wouldn't even bother leveling a 2nd set of companions.
6) Don't bother with non-max relation lords. It's not worth it. Once you have 4 or 5 lords, you can't even give someone a fief without them all having a temper tantrum. Not worth.
7) Tax loss efficiency is pretty messed up. Near the end of the game, my monthly income (after paying salaries) was under 10k, and my monthly "tax loss" was almost 100k. Crazy.

Things I learned along the way:
1) Mouse wheel up switches weapons, mouse wheel down switches shields.
2) Swinging your sword at their heads does a lot more damage. Makes sense, but I spent most of the game just swinging at their body, because dumb.
3) When firing your bow/crossbow, you can zoom in with shift.
4) When building your kingdom, focus on cities first. While a vassal, you can only claim the castle/city, the villages are awarded to someone else, so you can't control your income very well (since the quality of the village determines the taxes the castle collects). Cities get a lot of tariff money, and will boost you up way faster than castles (or villages).
5) Build up your rep with villages to get a lot more recruits when you come visiting.
6) When on campaign as a vassal, refuse all missions involving cattle unless you want to hate your life.
7) I'd generally avoid most quests, except for destroy bandit hideouts. The ones to hunt down enemies are usually an exercise in extreme frustration.

All in all a lot of fun, but the early-mid game is really where it's at. Once your character is level 25-30, the process of trying to take over the world is extremely grindy. I'll probably play more, but I don't plan to try to beat the game again, it was kind of more work than fun at the end...

Submitted September 26, 2018 at 01:49AM by AndyofBorg https://ift.tt/2xGThCI