Rarely mentioned but still very helpful tips and tricks for Calradian conquest in Bannerlord

After a couple hundreds of hours burnt in Bannerlord, I feel like I've managed to gather a certain list of tips and tricks that are not really mentioned all that often but still can be very useful in your playthrough and can help you fight through the sheer tedium that is Calradian conquest. In no particular order:

​

1. Never auto-resolve sieges as the attacker. Don't even think about it, not even when you outnumber defenders 3 to 1. Autoresolved sieges are hilariously in favor of the defenders: even if you start personally and do nothing for 15 minutes straight - your troops will still do a much better job and suffer far fewer casualties. It almost feels like auto-resolve models 1.6.5 sieges lmao. Therefore...
2. Always auto-resolve sieges as the defender. The odds are strongly in your favor. Personally, I've seen auto-resolve winning 200 vs 750 sieges for me - something that's almost impossible to pull off in the 1.7.0 patch.
3. Don't count on allied AI capturing towns with large garrisons (>500). It feels like AI knows how auto-resolve heavily leans towards defenders in sieges and thus even the most aggressive lords will turn into pussies while besieging large and important enemy towns. They will try to build siege engines but always fail miserably and inevitably either starve themself to death or just abandon siege altogether. Whenever you see your allied army besieging a well-guarded town - your best course of action is just force-disband them, gather them again under your banner, and lay siege personally.
4. Always build trebuchets and always move them to reserve at first. It isn't usually necessary to prologue sieges more than you have to, but if you must - never leave your trebuchet alone against enemy defenses. Four catapults defenders have likely built when you were establishing a siege camp will focus it and destroy it before you could do any damage to walls. The best strategy is to immediately move your trebuchets to reserve as soon they're built (right-click on them) and only field all of them once you've built four already. Four trebuchets will absolutely demolish all enemy defenses in just a few days.
5. Always vote in any decision your kingdom makes. This is by far the easiest way to boost your relationships with your allied clans. Supporting someone grants you a far higher relationships boost than not supporting. So, the approach is really simple: you always pick a clan that has the lowest relationships with you in this vote and spend as many influence points as you can afford. In a decade or so almost every single clan in your kingdom will have 50+ relationships with you - more than enough to get elected as a king once the old one dies. Also, this approach allows you to level up charm extremely quickly.
6. Don't be afraid to execute lords when you have to. Surely, debuffs for execution do look intimidating, but they're actually not. Negative honor and deceitful traits have almost zero influence on your gameplay. Negative relationships with clans in other kingdoms? Why should you care? Negative relationships with allied clans? See point 5. As of now, executing lords is the only way to completely wipe out the kingdom from Calradia - otherwise, the last remaining lords will always spam mercenaries and will always come back with ~100 stacks to raid your villages. So, don't be shy to execute those fuckers.
7. Smithing is your go-to way of becoming medieval Jeff Bezos. All you need to do is to craft 2H swords and smelt them - it's the fastest way to level up smithing and unlock a lot of parts. After you unlocked tier IV blade for 2H swords - just buy tribesman throwing daggers and pugios whenever you can get them (usually Battanian and Emperial cities), smelt them for easy fine steel, and spam-craft tier IV 2H swords for ~20k denars. Sell them everywhere and in a matter of months, you can achieve a dream of becoming a millionaire and never worry about money till the end of time. The only downside of this method is that you'll probably get carpal tunnel syndrome from all that excessive refine-forge clicking.
8. Stack your reserve troops in castles. Unless your castle is near borders, the possibility of it being besieged is almost zero. Thus, food surplus and whether your castle has any food at all doesn't matter whatsoever and you can donate as many troops in its garrison as capacity allows. What's important is that castles are usually very effective in terms of leveling up your troops. So, in case you're fighting a long war - it's always convenient to just pass by one of your castles and get some fresh, well-trained troops from its garrison.
9. Kicking lords from your army can be useful sometimes. Usually, it's hard to enforce a battle against a lesser enemy army just because of the speed difference. However, if you kick one of your allied lords - they will often start to chase the enemy army since they see you nearby and rely on that you will back them up in a fight. And since they're much faster alone than any army can be - they will usually catch up with enemies and thus you can enforce a beneficial battle for you. But be aware that this is a risky strategy since you can never be sure what's going on in AI's mind.
10. And finally... Allied AI is your worst adversary. It's not enemies you're fighting against. The whole Calradian conquest is a constant upheaval battle against your allies. They will always do dumb things, raid villages when they can get poorly guarded towns, leave their own towns poorly defended, and so on. Just never, ever count on allied AI achieving anything. If you want something done - do it yourself.

Submitted December 24, 2021 at 03:20AM by osingran https://ift.tt/3mrqCek