What is the easiest late crisis (and the hardest)?

[juanval]

Hello friends. Without spoilering details, could you tell me the order of difficulty of the 3 late game crisis? Thanks in advance

[X-the Unknown]

bad guys, bad guys and more bad guys :)

[The Mighty Mulletman]

I'd say noble house war then greenskins then ancient dead from easiest to hardest in that order.

[Legas]

Yep noble is both the easiest and most rewarding, undead is the hardest, but not too far from greenskin, orcs are very dangerous.

[Sir Clavius]

Yeah, noble war is easy and fun. Undeads and greenskins are both hard in the different ways..

[Abel]

I found Noble War to be actually quite difficult provided you didn't remain neutral. Defeating patrols of more than a dozen humans armed with Billhooks and Heavy Arbalests is no small feat.

[KalkiKrosah]

I only played the Noble War. It's intimidating to see such large numbers of people but you get help from the NPCs who take shots for you. And the equipment you get at the end isn't too shabby either.

I want to say the greenskin invasion is more straight forward in how in functions. They try to beat you down and brute force their way to victory with a few cheap tricks up their sleeve. The undead are just unrelenting. They just don't stay dead and their lack of fatigue means they always keep coming.

[WastedTrojan]

I felt like the Undead invasion was the easiest crisis. The ancient dead are pretty easy to kill overall and all you really need are a couple of tanks with ridiculous melee defense and the ancient dead will hardly land a hit but still stand there and focus your tanks. Makes it really is for the rest of the group to handle the flanks.

Orc invasion is the hardest imo. Nothing like running into regular patrols consisting of some berserkers, some orc young, many goblin skirmishers, many orc warriors and a warboss all over the damn map starting on day 100.

War is moderate difficulty imo, but closer to easy. The only truly difficult war contracts are the siege contracts.

[juanval]

Interesting answers. Thanks.
Another question: do you play ironman or reload saved games when you lose men?
I play ironman and I see difficult and exhausting to play lots of combats, trying to avoid deaths in order to deal successfully with late crisis. I prefer roaming the world and see how my brothers reach the 100 day after 50-70 combats.

[The Mighty Mulletman]

Originally posted by juanval:

Interesting answers. Thanks.
Another question: do you play ironman or reload saved games when you lose men?
I play ironman and I see difficult and exhausting to play lots of combats, trying to avoid deaths in order to deal successfully with late crisis. I prefer roaming the world and see how my brothers reach the 100 day after 50-70 combats.

In my case not many...

[Teut]

Originally posted by The Mightiest Mullet Man:

I'd say noble house war then greenskins then ancient dead from easiest to hardest in that order.

I agree with this.

Additionally, you don't even need to participate in the noble house war!

Towns only change owners and won't get destroyed permanently (if you activated that option), so you can choose noble war as the first crisis and have more time to build up your company.

[WastedTrojan]

Originally posted by juanval:

Interesting answers. Thanks.
Another question: do you play ironman or reload saved games when you lose men?
I play ironman and I see difficult and exhausting to play lots of combats, trying to avoid deaths in order to deal successfully with late crisis. I prefer roaming the world and see how my brothers reach the 100 day after 50-70 combats.

I play ironman only. My companies are always blood soaked, constantly fighting. I drag my people into battle after battle from day 1 going forward. If somebody gets hurt or killed ill just throw in a reserve and pick another fight. Its not uncommon for me to have a full 20 man roster before the first crisis hits. I usually have several level 11's and several famed items by the time the first crisis hits.

Constantly clearing camps means more money, more XP, more famed items and an easier first crisis. Also really helpful for power-leveling new mercs. Usually ill try to leave an area of the map untouched so when I hire an upper tier recruit (hedge knight, sell sword, raider, noble, ect....) I can give them student, buy them the short term sparring fight buff at the training hall, give them a pole arm (preferably war scythe) and find them a bunch of fights so they hit high level super fast. When I stopped playing last night I looked at my new sellsword, he had been with the company for 2 days and already had 13 battles.

[juanval]

Then, If I don't participate in noble war, it never ends?

[Teut]

Originally posted by juanval:

Then, If I don't participate in noble war, it never ends?

No, it ends eventually. But you'll get - not sure, it's been a while - 50+ days at least to strengthen your company and steel it for the other, harder crises.

(I also play without permanent destruction of settlements and think you should too. You can't always save a town from beeing erased and the world starts to feel quite empty. It feels unrealistic as well that towns don't get rebuild.)

[blindseye]

You are trying to keep all your mercs alive each fight, which is tough. There are things I have learned the hard way over time, i.e., two-handed weapons (e.g., axes, swords, polearms, etc.) are the way to go for faster take down of tough opponents like Orc Warriors and Beserkers.  I like two-handed swords for crowd control when fighting lots of enemy (they can have up to twice your numbers in mid and end game).  Two-hex, two-handed axes are awesome as they can strip shields from enemies and still hit pretty good to do damage as well.  Even so, you still need a mix of types of fighters (pole arms, archer(s), in back row, tanks up front in heavy armor and helmets (and with shield and one hand weapon for hand-to-hand).  And you have to know your weapons, e.g., Hammers damage armor, flails damage helmets and do head injuries, etc.  However, even your back row (and do keep formation) needs to carry shields and side arms when the enemy flanks you or punches through your line.  After the "tough" trait (adds extra hit points) and "learn faster", next choose" extra bags" trait (so there is no penalty to carrying extra gear) and then choose "Quick Switch" weapons (so there is no action point penalty for pulling out your shield when your enemy gets next to you, etc.).  Your hit points don't need to be the main stat, I find that stamina (fatigue, factors in weight, etc.), and initiative are just as important.  Fatigue is very important so you can wear heavy armor and still have action points to fight and not get tired too quickly.  Hire new mercs that have more levels asap, keep any that have good traits (tough, etc.) and fire immediately any that have bad traits (greedy, drunkard, etc.), but pay them when you fire them (cost 10 gold) so your other men don't lose morale.  Early on only hire one or two extra mercs after you max out the 12 fighters you are allowed per battle, and swap them in to replace wounded while they heal.  Always go to a temple and heal any serious wounds asap, or they may become permanent and drastically reduce the abilities of your merc.  Every time you are in town buy the men a round of drinks at the tavern to help boost morale, but if any get drunk replace them in the line until they sober up as their stats are reduced 25% for drunk and 10% for hangover.  Tip the bartender if you want to spawn a new enemy camp near town.  There are different types of enemies, i.e., humans, goblins, orcs, undead, dire wolves, etc., and each have different strengths and weaknesses so you have to develop a couple different battle techniques to fight each type.  There are three main story lines undead, greenskins (goblins and Orcs), and noble houses (a fight between the three houses which each control around 5 towns), and you can select the primary one during setup, when you finish that story line you can end there or keep playing open world. The bottom line is that it is basically an open world game for the most part.  Read the little quests that pop up, the are quite short but can help or hurt your mercs depending on your choice of responses.  I tend to do delivery quests in beginning while I build up team, and then fight contracts near towns in mid game, and then just attack camps in end game (as doing delivery contracts at that point you get jumped 2 to 3 times by tough groups and 2 to 3 back to back fights in a row with damaged, hurt mercs, will get some or all killed.  Use war dogs for crowd control, especially on flanks.  Each merc can carry one war dog, but also have a few mercs in backrow carry bandages to stop bleeding (or watch your merc bleed out during fight).  The war dogs with the scarves around their necks are tougher and better.  If fighting undead that have ghosts which shriek and frighten your men into panicking (a quick way to rapidly loose a battle), sick the war dogs on them and cut your way through to kill them ASAP.  Also, kill Necromancers ASAP as they revive the dead (and recently killed, even your team members) and you have to keep killing them.  And so on and so forth, great little game.

[Legas]

"fire immediately any that have bad traits (greedy, drunkard, etc)"

What? Drunkard is one of the best traits in the game, +10% damage and +5 resolve for only -5 melee attack. Probably only Iron Lungs is better.

Any trait that adds +X% damage is extremely invaluable because how rare it is to have anything in the game increase your damage.