Prophecy of Pendor - Early Game Guide

I love PoP and think it's the best thing since Sliced Person, but the early game is bloody brutal, especially if you're used to kicking ass and taking names in M&B vanilla. So I wanted to write an early game guide to share my experience and hopefully help someone else get into the mod without as much agony as I (and many others) experienced.

Character Creation - Questions

When you start character creation, the game hits you with a bunch of background story questions. My advice is to answer these however you like, building the backstory for your character that interests you and helps get you into the story.

However, these questions have serious impacts on the game, most critically whether you can create Knights of the Griffon chapters with just money, and something called the Rumor Interval which sounds irrelevant but is the most important thing ever.

For a deep read on the subject see the wiki https://pop3.fandom.com/wiki/Character_Creation

Or for a quick "Just give me the right answers!", answer every question however you want except where you see either of these two options:

Left you to fend for yourself
and
A letter that changed your life forever

Select both of these options and let's get on with it.

Character Creation - Stats and Skills

You know what you're doing here. The only thing I would add for PoP is that you must put points in path finding, and prioritize increasing it when you go up levels later, because you need to be able to outrun bad guys on the campaign map.

Or you will lose a lot.

Early Game - What the hell do I do now?

Right off the bat, PoP can be a total nightmare. The most important thing to know is this: If it's chasing you on the campaign map, run away - it's sure it can beat you, and it's almost certainly right. On the other hand, if it runs from you, you can probably whack it.

Next, you need to understand that right now, it's basically a waste of time recruiting villagers like you would in a vanilla M&B playthrough. They will die like flies in combat and you will train them up far too slowly for them to matter.

The short term solution to this is to hire mercenaries in a tavern:

1. Adventurers - these are the best choice available early on. They'll be expensive, but they start off almost as powerful as knights, with good equipment, and when they DO upgrade, they upgrade into Hero Adventurers, who are one of the best units in the game.
2. Mettenheim or Barclay troops. These foreign mercenaries all grow up into totally badass units. You can select upgrade paths at random and still do well. They also upgrade into units that don't suffer the "Mercenary cost penalty".
3. Mercenary [whatever] - these are all okay at their jobs. Expensive, but capable. An OK third option.
4. Melitine Free Brother - these guys are alright, but their upgrade tree is fairly mediocre up until the legendary Grim Banana, which is death on a horse, but will take you half the game to train one.
5. Everybody in between
6. To be avoided: Jatu Outcast rider (upgrades into a good unit ultimately, but it will happen too slowly for you in the early game), Singalian Spearman (meh)

The long term solution is to get some high level companions in your party with good trainer skill. The fastest way to do this is to find either Sir Jocelyn or Sir Alistair and hire them. They both go for 5k, but they're level 32 and have 5 trainer skill.

The wiki page on companions has all the details: https://pop3.fandom.com/wiki/Companions

​

Side option - Trading

I personally do not enjoy training in M&B at all. It's fundamentally about the murdersports for me, so I'm not down with the buying low and the selling high. But you can kickstart your campaign doing it. There's guides around, like this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/mountandblade/comments/402z2z/pop_trading_guide/

Who to kill

If you're not into trading, the thing to do is go and murder a bunch of a dudes. Your early game targets, in rough order are:

• The Forest Bandits and other bandit groups near Marleons and Sarleon. The green parties.
• The light blue mountain bandit outcasts in the Ravenstern lands to the north
• The orange mountain bandit groups in the same area
• The Vanskerry groups in the Fierdsvain lands

Basically when you get bored of each group, move onto the next and see if you can whack them. The loot and experience gets better as you go up this tree... in general.

Mount and Blade for Hire

As soon as you have a handful of troops and maybe a companion or ten, is to do a quest or two for a lord, and keep asking him for more quests. Quite soon he will offer to hire you as a band of mercenaries. Take him up on the offer. Becoming a merc has the following massive perks:

1. Your weekly wages will be paid basically in full by the lord instead of out of your own pocket
2. You can get involved in factional warfare right away, which is where the real fun begins
3. As soon as you do this, you effectively join that faction, however temporarily, blanking out any negatives you have with the major factions.

So while you're a merc, the following tips apply:

• Join battles only when your side looks like it's going to win anyway. Early on you can't swing those suckers on your own. Not yet.
• If you manage to capture any lords, immediately ransom them. You've got nowhere to stash them anyway and it's good money.
• DO try and capture their king, early and often. 27-30k gold in your pocket each time feels nice
• Use your money to get an enterprise in each town. You've played M&B you know how that works. Money is a constant problem in PoP - so do this diligently and early.

Once you have a bunch of money in the bank, a party size of a hundred or so, all the companions you want, and are feeling a little masochistic, you can speak to a king (any king, so long as they don't hate you), and join their faction as a Vassal.

But that's the subject of a Mid Game guide.

Submitted January 23, 2020 at 10:22PM by LudicrousIdea https://ift.tt/37nox9N