Bottlenecks and Character Roles

In order to end the game successfully, you need to make it through 4 bottlenecks:

Everyday Survival
Combat Efficiency
Consecutive Skill Checks
Fighting Gwen

I try to give suggestions for a survivor constellation, featuring a single KNIGHT, a single QUEEN, and many PAWNS, which qualifies to overcome Vinland's Encounters in a somewhat strategic way.

This is nowhere near the "perfect" guide, there are probably many other attempts to beat the game which work at least as good as mine, yet many of them might require way more effort and information about the game (I am still far from knowing everything).

What this guide is about (What are Character Roles?)

Based on the analysis of the game and its Bottlenecks, which are...

1. Everyday Survival
2. Combat Encounters
3. Consecutive Skill Checks
4. Gwen

...this guide will elaborate further, how those bottlenecks affect gameplay, and how to prepare a team composition, which is mighty and unwavering enough, to live up to Vinland's perils.

Therefore we will especially regard the questions:

Which survivors should I invite to my camp?
What to do with the survivors I am stuck with?
Which responsibilities will my characters have, and how do I qualify them?



We will focus on a team composition which features:

Pawns: Pawns are Workers. They focus on gathering resources in your camp, and on consuming little of them. In general they try to survive with as little risk/costs as possible, while working for the party as much as they reasonably can. Like worker bees.

Everyone who is not a Knight or a Queen, is a Pawn.


Knight: The Knight is a Warrior. The Knight mows down his Enemies and each and everyone to threatens her Family. The Knight does not really care too much about contributing resources, as he focuses on leveling up, and accumulates combat traits. His sole purpose is to be the victor in all important combat encounters.

There is one and only one Knight.


Queen: The Queen is - just like in chess - the figure which is capable of mostly any move. Except for Combat. Because Combat is the Knights terrain. (And like in chess, Queen cant move like Knights)*. The (sole) purpose of the Queen is to solve ALL Consecutive Skill Checks. Therefore she will focus on accumulating as many skill points in all relevant skills, as possible. While this may sound similar to what a Pawn does, it is not. The Queen is supplied with all the Honey, the Worker Bees gather (Powder, Potions, ...), so that the Queen does not need to rest, not to be healed, not to stop on developing her skills in any other way. Hail to the Queen.

There is one and only one Queen. The Queen can as well be the Knight though, with slight adjustments
*The analogy is totally coincidental, lol.


Optional:

Squire:
In case you have a very squishy Knight, you might want a Squire to accompany (and guard) him in Battle. A Squire is a Pawn with a defensive Combat Skill Set (Protector or Civilian), which tries to get 2-5 Combat Traits in Order to allow the Knight to survive long enough to finish off all enemies.

Everyday Survival (Focus on PAWNS)

We will not go too much in depth with this topic. One of the reasons for this is, that I still didn't really figure out, how to deal with all those various Options, which affect the condition of your party in complex ways and are so vast in number.

Yet, here is something, that usually works somewhat fine:

For all of your Pawns, you try to make them as steadfast and unwavering as you can.

This means:
Choose reduced Condition Gains Traits whenever you can. No exceptions.
The reason for this is somewhat simple:
Pawns don't need to fight. Pawns dont need to solve Skill Checks. Pawns only need to survive and do camp activities in order to increase your wealth.

Therefore they need to:
- Consume as little resources as possible (food, powders, healing actions,...).
- Work as much as they can (if they have to pause, theys cant increase your wealth).
- Endure periods of poverty and storms. (You may not be able to supply sufficient food when expensive tributes are approaching. Same for sanity during long periods of bad weather.)

The less condition points they accumulate, the less you need to take care of those, the more resources you gain. So once this is settled, which Traits exactly should we go for?

Those here: [...] Gains -10%

Especially Fatigue, since you suffer it basically everywhere, is very useful. The -10% without downside are basically the best you can get, generally speaking. Hunger, Depression and Sickness are just as well VERY useful. You profit from reduced increases even if you do not reduce the condition at all (i.e. by feeding). That makes it universal and powerful.

If we don't get one of those, we are fine with ... Resistance:
Those offer us the same benefits at an even higher value. Yet they come with a downside. Since Pawns do not (NEVER!) need Intelligence though, if the downside is intelligence, you should totally take the trade. In all other cases, you need to evaluate, if you can effort the downside. You probably should not take +5% Fatigue increases for -15% Injury, since Pawns will not suffer many injuries. Yet in the very most cases, if you have the option to pick resistance, go take it. Especially at the cost of general XP or something like that, which you really dont care to much about on Pawns.

The next best Traits are obviously Fast [Resource] Recovery and [Resource] Losses +10%. For those most things mentioned above are true as well, except for the profit when not supplying any reduces. Therefore they are less powerful, yet still worth the choice on Pawns.

In SOME cases, you can go for +50/75/100% Skill-Experience, if, and only if your character is supposed to focus on that task especially (Probably Moira or Blod for Healing, or Eirik for Forest-thingy). Because higher skills increase wealth gains. Skills level quite quickly though, so it's not always worth the Trait slot, if you have defensive Options like mentioned above.


There are many things left to say about when to pay tribute and how to rotate on resources, as well as the important task of deciding on a building order. Those are out of the scope of this guide, and will hopefully be the topic of many other guides to come.

Combat (Focusing on the KNIGHT)

You can't fully avoid combat encounters. You will eventually face some during exploration, and especially some fights you will necessarily have to win, when it comes to the bandits and such.

Therefore you need to be able to win battles. This is the Knights only purpose in his digital Life.

Why do we only have a single Knight?
Yea, why not a full army? They wonder. The reason is this:
Combat Traits stack especially well on single characters.

Additional AP allow additional Attacks, which rely on your Accuracy, Damage and Crit. Therefore each additional Attack profits from higher Damage, Accuracy, Crit. This dependency is true for ALL four variables involved. They scale multiplicatively with each other.

This means, that +2 AP on a Character with ~5 Damage and 90% Accuracy is worth much more than +2 AP on a Charakter with ~1 Damage and 70% Accuracy.
A Character with 5 Attacks each round profits more from additional Damage (5 times more), compared to a character with 1 Attack each round.

Since level speed is a severe limitation, the Knight needs to Level up as much as he can, to gain maaaany combat traits. Therefore you should try to provide him with the time to level up as much as you can, without reducing your Queens progression.

Trait Choice should be obvious: Always go for Combat Traits (if they got no huuuuge downsides like too much reduction of AP or Accuracy.)


Which Character Qualifies for the Role of the Knight?
As mentioned above, AD, AP crit and acc scale somewhat multiplicatively with each other. Therefore it is not too much of a surprise, that crit damage scales multiplicatively as well.
This means, that Kari and Tomoe (Crit factor 2.5 each) are probably your best choice, if you go for an aggressive fighting style. Recruiting Tomoe gives Kari a lot of fighting traits btw, and tomoe herself gains +5% crit by some dialogue with Moira (iirc, maybe its Blod). Thats really strong! (btw: Insane profit from Insanity on crit damage characters, for save-scumming-optimizers.)
Comparing Tomoe and Kari, while Kari gains some more free traits when recruiting Tomoe, those are quite insignificant compared to the huge difference in combat efficiency by class. Tomoe is a Figther-Thingy, she got Eiriks Skillset, what means: Attacking for 2-3 AP, Pushing Enemies back, area effect attack. Ridiculously strong compared to Karis 3-4 AP Attacks.
If you go for Looters Build (rely on combat for resource gain) you obviously want Eustache to be your Knight: Simply because he got the Eirik-Skillset as well. While he's inferior to Tomoe in damage output, you gain the looters advantage.
Another option is Blod, since she is tanky af from the very beginning (she doesnt take crits, got lot of hp, 2ap attacks). Especially in the early game, Blod is a very reliable option. As offensive capabilities of enemies increase, she slowly loses some of her strengths. You probably want 2-3 times Damage reduction Trait, if you want to rely on Blod. Requires quite some save scumming. Downside of Blod: The allies you bring in combat will most likely die, until she finished off the combat. Fighting alone is an option, yet it cant grant you looters bonus.

If this analysis is correct, the implications are somewhat sad, story/ambiente-wise: There's not really a point in making any other character a warrior. No kung-fu-style kicking parveh, no "Unleashed Witch" Moira, no "Taste the wild" Shanaw. Would ve loved to see those somewhat more useful combat-wise.

For True Vikings:
Given you are unlucky enough to simply not get enough Combat Trait Options on your Knight, this whole thing obviously wont work out. It MIGHT require some save scumming now and then, if you want this strategy to work reliably (reliably as in: each and every play-through-attempt.)

Consecutive Skill Checks (Focusing on the QUEEN)

This section is about your Queen, the one character, that has to solve all Consecutive Skill Checks for you and your party.
During consecutive Skill Checks, you need to succeed a number of really difficult skill checks consecutively. (well, that sounds quite redundant lol)
If you fail only one of them, you gotta restart. No save-scumming inbetween. Those checks mostly occur in the later game, obviously.

How to prepare for consecutive skill checks?
Push a single character, which is your Queen, as faaaar as you can. Skill-wise that is. You wanther to have most skills and attributes close to 100 (well, you dont really need stuff like beat handling, maybe not even healing, though you will need to use healing for courage and wisdom increases.).
The Queen therefore will solve all of those consecutive skill checks in like 2-3 attempts. Maybe 4. Still far better than the 20+ you need with a lot of mediocre characters.

(Skill of 100 = 95% Chance on each of 4 consecutive Checks. => Chance of overall success: 0.95^4 = 0.81something. So if you get average dice rolls, it fails once in 5 tries.)

How to enforce a high skill character?
Try to get some skill-xp bonus in the beginning (+25% endurance/concentration are pretty much best in slot), in order to push your scavenging, exploration, stuff like that. High skills also mean high resource gains. Resource gains means less downtime. Less downtime means more uptime. More uptime means more skill checks, also means more attributes. GG!
Do not focus too much on General XP even though they are nice to have obviously.
Get the blessing from the shiny lake thingy, which improves your XP gain further.
Use Skill-Boost items late, if you can. By late I mean: To fill the last 15-10 skill steps, because progression speed decreases with skill progression. Of course use most of them on your skill-check-solver character.
Try to solve most encounters, which reward you with skill bonus traits with your skill-check-character. This might make him a capable fighter as well btw.
Try to get as many free traits as you can. You can get quite some of them by triggered character interactions each night. Choices and Survivor picks matter.
Make sure not to be Stubborn, Lazy, suffer from additional Fatigue, and dont be a Scatterbrain.
Take +10 Intelligence Traits,since as far as I know, there is no "regular" way, to "train" your intelligence expect for some unique encounters.
Use Potions. Really. From day 25 on, your skill-check-character can work non-stop. No need for healing tent, no need for relaxing, no need for tavern (except for Charisma gain of course). Just make sure to have a good Harvesting Duo and someone to craft powders at very least.


Who qualifies for being high skill character?
Since I suck at taking notes (whats the reason for the wiki to still be empty af), my answer to this question might not be accurate, but I give my best to evaluate from memory:
Since we basically do not assume to have unlimited time (maybe we have, but thats probably somewhat tedious), we want some leveling speed bonus.
Eirik (Skill-XP) and Moira (Global-XP) offer those from the very beginning. I didn't do the math yet, but I tend to favor Eirik over Moira, since you really dont care about your character level, if you in average achieve 2.5 skill points per day through increased skill-XP gain.
On the other hand, Moira profits from a high Intelligence score right at the start. As I mentioned, you need to find some non-standard way to push your intelligence, picking Moira might solve this problem to a certain degree.
Also Moira profits a whole lot from Gudruns teachings. If you can manage to get Gudrun on the tile 2 to the left, and recruit her asap, Moira probably has by far the upper hand over Eirik.
You are also able to customize those two from the very beginning, even re-starting games if you dont like their starting stats or traits. (Consider low stats a good thing btw, they help you level up faster, if you can manage to survive on a budget early on).

Kari is probably a good, maybe even the best choice, wouldn't want to bet on it though.
'Relentless' allows her to have so many useful actions in the beginning without taking breats, which really helps her skill progression. "Can't stay in place" might be a dealbreaker though, because you cant really find a reasonable way to improve your wisdom.
Some of this changes, when recruiting Tomoe: Whole lot of buffs for Kari, which also improve her progression capabilities.

Blod, while interesting at first glance, seems to be a rather bad choice, because she likes to stay at home (therefore having a hard time increasing some skills), and furthermore, does not get any useful traits from any characters ("In Love" actually makes things even worse because of the XP-Factor, "Tribe Mother" is not really... well, cooking belongs to those skills, we dont really need to master.)

Most characters you can recruit do not qualify either, because they, just like Blod, do not have access to juicy story traits. This actually seems a little bit like a flaw in design, at least for non-true-viking optimizers. Would be quite interesting to see hired survivors surpassing the family members in at least some way.

Gudrun maybe being an exception? Her Intelligence and Wisdom is basically maxed, this takes a lot of the progression pressure, yet I dont know if its really worth it pushing her Strength and such to 100 lol.

Fighting Gwen (a party task)

Alright, lets finish this guide off, to get our heads ready for some exploration and a true viking guide asap.

So given you use the above explained party composition, you run into the problem of having a very specialized fighter with many negative combat traits.
This will give you quite a hard time at the fight against Gwen, where none of your positive combat traits are considered, but all of your negative.

Therefore, in order to prepare for reasonable chances against Gwen, try to get 1-2 fighters and/or 1-2 tanks into your party (basically Blod and Eirik qualifty. So does Eustache, Tomoe, and maybe even Kari, if they are not your Knight.)

with basic stats and some Berserk- or Crit-Luck, plus some protection from Blod you should be able to beat Gwen within a reasonable amount of tries.

[Gryphon]

Some simple napkin math will tell you that unless you plan on playing a 200+ day game, there is simply not enough time to get all skills to 100. Attributes might be doable through liberal application of +10 stat traits.

[Mudtowner]

I really enjoyed reading your guide. You have a flair for describing the elements of the game. Your guide had a very fleshed out feel to the manner of speech employed.

[dimastiy90]

Wtf i just read?

[tbm1986]

(4/4)
out when it gets to crunch time for poor Solveig , booting out the Persians once Yaghoub has stabbed Eirik and Erik has dumped Pavaneh and when Gudrun offers Moira the chance to sacrifice her, I take it . That way, Kari gets happy and gains bonus traits, Moira benefits from a mentor and two lovers and the family couple get attention from outside the family. The dog is a must for me now.

[tbm1986]

(3/4)
meat tributes, I have both stations going and don't consume the resource I need to stockpile. Picking fruit in the afternoon makes up for the shortfall until the pens are online. For rope. I have 30+ hemp build up before I have anyone process at the forge.

Fourthly, I try to recruit everyone except Angelo (he doesn't loot, he kills Shanaw, he is not best or 2nd best at anything, there is family pressure to pair him up with Kari against her will and I just plain don't like him) . I do this by recruiting the pairs and Gudrun early, kicking Knut

[tbm1986]

(2/3)
Secondly, I aim to recruit the looters so that they can help me out to meet some of the tributes and when I'm desperately in need of a bandage until I get my sheep pens up and running. Because they are rather frail in battle and only Eustache is pretty punchy to begin with, I focus almost excusively on combat traits and dry to counteract the negative aspects in the bundles as much as possible.

Thirdly, resources and tributes. I only use a station once per day if it suffers from attrition. When a resource is the next tribute, I hurry to upgrade the station to allow two people to use it and increase the yield and/or reduce the prerequesite (fishing/hunting) and/or the negative effects (hunting). I then have the people best at that resource or best working together (or the best balance between the two) use that station in the morning so that they are fully rested. For fish and

[tbm1986]

(1/3)
Your strategy is interesting but I won't try it because I get a bit too involved in the story and characters to play your harsh way. The way I have developed works and requires no savescumming if on normal or easy path and you don't forget about your fire, food or tribute.

Firstly, I put Eirik, Eustache and Tomoe against Gwen. For this, I only give them combat traits (apart from Talented once) and avoid all of the traits with combat negatives. Obviously, this would not have worked prior to the patch that included the trait re-roll. After Gwen, I gave them whichever traits suited them best.

[MTaur]

I actually had Solveig in this fight. Any buff negation skill can help a lot, and she's very sturdy for a Civilian. But it was very close. I didn't go back and try to optimize or change things up, so I don't have it down to a science yet.

Do you know if equipment buffs crafted at the Forge stay active?