Some Points on Vlandia in General

[Rhunin]

1 - I don't know if this is just an oversight but a highly militaristic faction would not be arming it's Men-at-Arms tier soldier without shields if they are arming their Recruits fresh out of the farming fields with military grade poking sticks (spears).

Vlandia's early game seems to have a big survivability issue because their front line is not that unless getting charged down by horses as unless it has a bow it has a spear.

2 - A heavy cavalry renowned faction should have villages focused on stables ie villages that produce midland palfry's or some other horse, likely saddle horses as atm unless I've overlooked them, they have no cavalry production/purchase centers except in towns.

3 - Why is it SO expensive to buy a crossbow (20k before, 40k now) and yet I can make a wage 2 archer that is toting one around and all it costs me is 25 to upgrade him?... Something doesn't add up ;)

Throwing this out there now that my points have been made, but I don't expect any changes to come from me saying this in the near future, the game has other areas that need the attention more but I noticed it and felt the need to bring it up as I love the franchise and this game is definitely going places!

Long live the western Horse Lords!

EDIT - this is more of a tip to everyone else, you can hire mountain bandits from your prisoners, then follow their upgrade paths until you get to Knights, the Vlandian special recruit tree.

[Rhunin]

Wouldn't you know.. The moment I say "unless I've overlooked them" I find one by Charas, but still for them to get ALL of their horses from one of their frontier territories... It doesn't make sense that they would have their MAIN deal be so easily lost, especially when there is more fertile lands to the north

[☭ Calabresa ☭]

Vlandia always seems to do just fine in the early game, usually expanding and becoming one of the strongest factions early on, the other being the Khuzaits (at least in the 3 campaigns I played).

Also you can only buy anything of note in Towns, not Villages, which are just for grain, food and minor stuff like that, so just imagine the village stable owners go to towns to sell their produces.

Well, since it's very easy to make money in the game, at least for now, 40k is even cheap for a good crossbow, but troops die all the time, if everytime a Crossbowman died you had to pay20-40k, you'd be a lot poorer a lot faster.

[Rhunin]

Vlandia as a faction yes, because they auto do every battle and just spam combat statistics at people rather than actually using their spears without shields to fight hordes of archers as everyone runs around with, I was meaning as a player using Vlandia in battle mode, they are very squish against even looters, let alone everything else like other armies.

Every faction has villages that produce livestock, resources, and population that are then sent to the cities for produce(counting horses), manufactured goods, and prosperity in that order, I found one settlement that produces Midland Palfries and it's just north of Charas Vlandia's desert town.

The stables in the towns are for storing, not producing, there are not large pastures inside the walled cities that the horses graze on, those are in villages and they are brought from there to the markets in the cities. But you CAN go to said villages to buy the horses, just check out Khuzite territory, they have like 5 horse villages.

I was also just mentioning that the premise of the crossbows costing that much did not make sense for tier 1 archers to be using 20k costing gear, not that we should be paying that much or that crossbows should not be expensive, just maybe make the first tier of archer be hunters with hunting bows instead of levy crossbowmen with 20k machines that they barely even know how to operate, ya know? ;)

[☭ Calabresa ☭]

Originally posted by Ɨ Rhunin Ɨ:

Vlandia as a faction yes, because they auto do every battle and just spam combat statistics at people rather than actually using their spears without shields to fight hordes of archers as everyone runs around with, I was meaning as a player using Vlandia in battle mode, they are very squish against even looters, let alone everything else like other armies.

Each faction has its advantages and disadvantages. Vlandia has a very strong cavalry, the best one in Bannerlord, but not the best infantry. You are not supposed to be relying on them during a battle, instead you should focus on having as much cavalry as you can, using the infantry as support to your crossbowmen.
That being said, you can always hire other faction's infantry troops or even mercenaries to complement your cavalry better. In fact, the strongest army of the game would consist in having something like Vlandia's cavalry, Battanian Archers, Khuzait's Mounted Archers and Imperial/Sturgian Infantry.
You have to take that into consideration, each faction has something they are really good at and something they suck at. That is the cavalry for Vlandia, which is very strong, and the infantry, which is weak.

Originally posted by Ɨ Rhunin Ɨ:

I was also just mentioning that the premise of the crossbows costing that much did not make sense for tier 1 archers to be using 20k costing gear, not that we should be paying that much or that crossbows should not be expensive, just maybe make the first tier of archer be hunters with hunting bows instead of levy crossbowmen with 20k machines that they barely even know how to operate, ya know? ;)

Makes sense to have archers come before crossbowmen in the troop tree though, even if very weak ones.

[Buck Fell]

You're right about Vlandia's lack of local horses even though their lords are mounted knights.

So you can make a pile of money taking Aserai horses from steppe bandits or buying them at villages for less than 1000 and selling them in the major Vlandia cities for a fortune.

So for my part i'm glad they have no horses.

For their infantry I find survival of the fittest to be a good model. Map the recruits to 6 or something. Get 10 of them or so, chase down some looters and tell group 6 to charge. Whoever survives gets to do it again. Those that rank up can then be footman.

You can do the same kind of thing to the footman till you have infantry. The advantage is that you don't risk 1 infantry because their support on either side was a crappy recruit.

For larger fights, just place the recruits a bit ahead of the footman and infantry. Think "human shield".

[Rhunin]

ACTUALLY Vlandia has the best -shielded-* infantry as well because they use the Pavise shields which are the largest shields in the game, it's just that you look at their units and the ones that BECOME the cavalry, don't get a shield until tier 3, then at 4 they become LIGHT cavalry, so that is 2 stages of recruit quality units that no other faction has to deal with, what Vlandia does lack that most others have on the other hand is mounted archers or skirmish troops, they have the strongest fortifications in the field (pavise with crossbow) and the strongest shock troopers (heavy cavalry) they don't do well in drawn out engagements (heavy cavalry hits one and done when fighting other lighter units that can attack and withdraw over and over) and their infantry is outmatched by most others, especially Battania's

So their tier 2 infantry tree start not having a shield is just pure oversight or carelessness of those soldiers leaders, you aren't going to have a large military by culling the weak in that way.

EDIT : added -shielded-* as just infantry was too vague

[Rhunin]

@belthize doing it in that method is one way to do it, however the game is in Early Access, I can easily do a workaround by exploiting the fact that auto-resolving fights with looters NEVER kills soldiers on your party, therefore you can throw numbers around, my issue is that if it is not fixed it will continue to mean that if a Vlandian lord is beaten and must restart with base level recruits, he will be 2 tiers behind compared to most other faction lords in getting his footing IF the player is around and decides to not auto-resolve, forcing the Vlandians to bring their shieldless footmen against Sturgian Woodsmen (also tier two and yet have both projectiles, shields, and decent melee weapons)

Vlandian Footmen without shields feels like Russia in WWII sending out 2 men with one gun and one spare clip saying "kill them with the weight of your bodies" (Enemy at the Gate reference)

[Rhunin]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2054929670

Proof that Crossbows are not supposed to have 20k as a base price, this mission says that the AI could do SEVEN crossbows for 9108, there has to be a multiplier on the crossbows in the market that shouldn't be there such as the equation being (Base Price)5 x (Prosperity) = (Crossbow Price) and that 5 shouldn't be there.

NOTICE I have no clue how the equations work in reality, but that was a representation of my point.

[☭ Calabresa ☭]

Originally posted by Ɨ Rhunin Ɨ:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2054929670

Proof that Crossbows are not supposed to have 20k as a base price, this mission says that the AI could do SEVEN crossbows for 9108, there has to be a multiplier on the crossbows in the market that shouldn't be there such as the equation being (Base Price)5 x (Prosperity) = (Crossbow Price) and that 5 shouldn't be there.

NOTICE I have no clue how the equations work in reality, but that was a representation of my point.

Isn't that because they are stolen?

[Rhunin]

They want you to bring them crossbows so they can make more.

EDIT : You are providing the money to your men to go out and buy the crossbows in your absense.

[Young Erusean Officer]

The Cavalry factions have an unfair advantage in AI vs AI since they can attack and defend faster the other factions can. They can also run faster when they need to. So the Calvary factions are always endgame, they basically decide where the fights happen and when unless something goes very wrong.

[Rhunin]

@Young Erusian Officer their downside being (in real life) that they have to feed those horses, whereas in the game atm, they use the same food cost as any other soldier so they aren't limited by food lines like they were in real life, at the moment you are very much right

EDIT : My party is consisted of 10 Random High Tier Cavalry, 30 Light Vlandian Cavalry, 40 Imperial Veteran Archers, and 20ish Sturgian Recruits, I have not noticed a food cost increase when I got my 30 Cavalry from infantry or any food cost for the 100-200ish horses in my inventory I keep for movement speed or for creating new cavalry units, my food cost should be exorbitant, and yet it's not.