I am requesting advice on how to contain Vlandia.

[MagicManSlim]

Vlandia is getting too powerful in my game, and they did a real number on Battania in the last war. I have limited time to stack the deck against them.

I can field up to 120 troops and I currently work as a mercenary for Battania. I tried raiding a village but my doctor (literally the only one Ive ever found) gets upset so I stopped.

I feel like only a coalition between the Aserai and the Khuzaits could smash them apart.

Attached is a link to the map. Vlandia is in a sort of pincer shape.
https://ibb.co/ZKLHDmh

[Action Man]

As a mercenary, your options are limited.

Engage their individual clan parties and take them prisoner. If you have the right perks, they cannot escape. Hold enough and they'll want peace eventually.

Leave your doctor in a settlement, then go raid. I don't think they care if they aren't actively part of your party.

I *think* the companion with decent starting Medicine that doesn't have "Kind" is the Healer, a Battanian companion.

What's that green banner in the bottom right? Is that one of your clan parties? I'm guessing it's a caravan, seeing as it's so far away from Battanian territory. The UI is covering up the name.

[TruXurT]

Same as everyone else. Get both scouting and riding 225 perks that together reduce prisoner escape chance to 0, capture all their lords and then just roll over them.

Of course if you are a mercenary now with a party of 120, you can't really have that many prisoners, so actually just focus on getting their smaller parties wiped out and keep releasing the lords to build your charisma and relationship with them. Alternatively trade them to Battanians. As a mercenary your job is not to wipe factions. You are in it for money/loot/experience for yourself and your troops, charisma and renown.

Once you are a king with a party of 400 or even 500 and more, then you can actually capture entire faction and pretty much do what you want. Granted that most likely at that point other factions will attack you too, but hopefully your kingdom will be strong enough to deal with that.

[Cuddle_Rat]

Don't beat em, join em. King Derthurt is a benevolent ruler, yes...benevolent, I promise he's not holding a crossbow to my head right now, heh hehehe...

[Ruffio]

How much you can help contain a faction in the game depends on your clan tier and party size really. Early on you can't really do much. If you make it a goal for your game to contain a faction you should always join whatever faction at war vs that faction as a merc, and do what you can.

If your goal is to preserve Battania, your best long time goal is to just take it all over for yourself. Either by join as a vassal which imho is a pain in itself as you get limited to what you can do as you beholden whatever ill doings your king end up do. Or by take it all for yourself and keep recruit the Battanian lords to your own kingdom.

In most games Battania will be run over and reduced to rubble because of being at war almost constant with one of their neighbors.

[tbloyzz]

Always join a faction that Vlandia is currently at war with. Look out for sieges and bigger troop movements. If you are lucky, you can lead a siege defense, which will grant you tons of prisoners including lords in one battle. But you can also patrol near gathering points of vlandian armies or sieges and pick off smaller reinforcements one by one. Just do not get too close to the army. A nice side effect may be, that these armies will also lose their sieges due to lack of reinforcements. In essence, you do guerilla tactics and try to make every strike matter. You will lack the numbers for anything else.
Do not join any army when fighting Vlandia. Since Vlandia has a very strong mix of units (Knights, Crossbows and Sergeants) You will most likely be on the losing end and even if you win, it will take you too long to recover your losses in numbers (granted that a party of 120 does not take long to rebuild). You will also get only a small amount of the loot and the prisoners, considering you potentially low contribution to an already unlikely victory. The same applies to offensive sieges.

[Ruffio]

Originally posted by tbloyzz:

Always join a faction that Vlandia is currently at war with. Look out for sieges and bigger troop movements. If you are lucky, you can lead a siege defense, which will grant you tons of prisoners including lords in one battle. But you can also patrol near gathering points of vlandian armies or sieges and pick off smaller reinforcements one by one. Just do not get too close to the army. A nice side effect may be, that these armies will also lose their sieges due to lack of reinforcements. In essence, you do guerilla tactics and try to make every strike matter. You will lack the numbers for anything else.
Do not join any army when fighting Vlandia. Since Vlandia has a very strong mix of units (Knights, Crossbows and Sergeants) You will most likely be on the losing end and even if you win, it will take you too long to recover your losses in numbers (granted that a party of 120 does not take long to rebuild). You will also get only a small amount of the loot and the prisoners, considering you potentially low contribution to an already unlikely victory. The same applies to offensive sieges.

Yeah, so much this... Joining an AI army is always bad imho.

It's better to join in on a ongoing fight if you think the numbers in your favor. If he turn his party into 120 fians that would be a good force multiplier though that should get plenty of kills. The big part that come to contribution in a fight and how much of the spoils you end up with.

[kharille]

I usually weaken a side using maxed out cavalry. You get to chase their units and take them apart. Theres a lot you can do in a day as long as you can catch up with enemy units.

[Duuvian]

If your Tactics skill is really high you can sometimes win battles that you would be rolled over in the fight scenes. The damage vs bandits in simulation is kind of nice if you want to spend some time escorting caravans to level troops and companion skills in the simulation battles, but for this the non bandit targeting perks would be better. I do think it checks the opposing tactics skill and some of the NPCs have a good score so it probably won't always work. If you don't mind reloading the game if the simulation fails it might be worth trying if the skill is high. It goes up pretty quickly when doing the simulation battles.

[boiling pie]

The only way to stop Vlandia is to take out their towns. Nothing else matters.
As long as they have the land, they will continue to regularly yank out these 1200 men armies. Defeating their armies does only contain their expansion, which is not enough. Nor is imprisoning their lords. Once I had 50 of their lords imprisoned and it didn't change anything.
Over time, they will only produce trash armies, but that doesn't help, because they can still take towns and castles. You need to destroy their power base.

[TardWrangler]

This game has an extreme bias for how the Ai percieves village raids in war. If you raid 15 villages, they will act like they are losing badly even if they have taken 2 of your towns. This is why you would see people complaining on reddit about owing a bunch of tribute despite merking a faction whom raided a few villages

You can "force village to give you recruits" which will likely initiate a battle. Afterwards, click "raid village" and the raiding bar will already be like 3/4 of the way full

[MagicManSlim]

Originally posted by TardWrangler:

You can "force village to give you recruits" which will likely initiate a battle. Afterwards, click "raid village" and the raiding bar will already be like 3/4 of the way full

This is powerful knowledge.

[MagicManSlim]

Originally posted by Duuvian:

If your Tactics skill is really high you can sometimes win battles that you would be rolled over in the fight scenes.

If you don't mind reloading the game if the simulation fails it might be worth trying if the skill is high.

Yeah see, I'm having difficulty with getting it high. I will take your advice about using the auto battles as a mechanism for raising tactics.
Also, I was not aware I had the option to re-roll a battle. I guess I thought the results would be the same.

[MagicManSlim]

Originally posted by boiling pie:

The only way to stop Vlandia is to take out their towns. Nothing else matters.

I don't know how Im supposed to use this knowledge. By the time you're in a position to constitute an actual threat to other lords, Vlandia is well on its way to steamroll everyone. This is based on a sample size of 2 games :|

[Action Man]

Originally posted by MagicManSlim:

Originally posted by boiling pie:

The only way to stop Vlandia is to take out their towns. Nothing else matters.

I don't know how Im supposed to use this knowledge. By the time you're in a position to constitute an actual threat to other lords, Vlandia is well on its way to steamroll everyone. This is based on a sample size of 2 games :|

Are you playing Vanilla?

Usually one of the in game checks against AI Faction advancement is rebellions. The AI is horrible at managing fiefs not of their own culture, and the AI is extremely against any policy that would actually help.

You could try instigating rebellions, but this is a much longer task. You would have to sit outside the fief, buying up all the food. For potentially weeks. The garrison needs to starve out so the militia outnumbers them by 2:1 (I think that's the ratio), and loyalty needs to be low (below ~20?).

Once a town rebels, take a hostile action against them, and you're at war with them. Then siege and take the fief. A bit harder as a mercenary, but you can use this to help Battania pick up some more territory.

They're going to be just as bad at managing it.

[MagicManSlim]

I started a new file, named it "Battanian Supremacy" and then put my efforts into battania. So basically I chased bandits and cleared out bandit camps as soon as possible, I focused on resolving most village and town disputes, resolving requests from lords, and I sought to alleviate the scarcity of goods by trading continuously. I basically tried to push as much advantage onto the battanians as I could while setting up a sustainable cash flow.

I'm not sure if it was working, because the Battanians have lost Llanoc Hen castle, Rhemtoil castle, Ab Comer castle, Uthelheim castle, Flintolg castler, and Druimmor Castle. They did capture Nevyansk Castle and Veron castle. Actually that sounds like more of a loss than anything.

This time, Battania is getting swallowed, but from a more "everywhere by everyone". The losses are split up more or less equally with the neighbouring cultures.

It's day 157 on the file, and I've managed to set up a caravan, Got a scout and quartermaster, and can field 46 troops. Clan level 0.8.

I don't think it makes sense to become a merc until you can field at least 60 troops.