Is there a way to take a castle without exploiting the game?

Hi all,

so I am playing this game on the hardest difficulty possible (so yes the AI can take me out like its nothing just by a stroke of bad luck). I have an army 110 men (I am focusing on charisma and leadership, I have no idea how you guys farm renown in any meaningful quantities), most of these (80%) are max upgraded units (we are talking mameluks, swadian knights...). Now I wanted to try taking on a castle of the Veigrs. I attack a castle with a garrison of "only" 120 (Its strange in the real world the besieging army would normally outnumber the besiegers and the point of fortifications was to serve as a force multiplier so you would have to have a small number of men there, but I digress...).

I test this a few times and my men get fully slaughtered each time. Ok so now I look at how people do it on the internet. These are the strategies I discovered, all very exploity or at-least implicative of games limitations:

1. set the battle size to 30 (mine is at 1000) and attack with a small but elite army
2. get a bunch of archers and kill the defenders on the walls, run out of arrows retreat, rinse and repeat
3. be a one man army, take out the archers but hiding under the wall and picking them off and then get a weapon with long range and if possible block ignore and pick the guys on the ramparts
4. some combination of 2 and 3 and then position your archers on the walls while they spawn
5. become a vassal get 500 men or so trough vassals while being a marshall (this is the only legit way I see right now)

Am I missing something?

Submitted January 22, 2019 at 01:54PM by De_Noir http://bit.ly/2FRP2cq