How to Win Guide

A guide that defines a few win conditions and how to achieve them, including generally increasing your power, enabling a faction to conquer the map, or forming your own stable faction and conquering the map.

Includes general strategies for achieving these objectives, including strategies for various custom maps that I have successfully conquered.

Introduction

This is a guide to achieving general success in Native and custom maps. It also helps you to pick a goal and to devise a strategy to accomplish it.

In this guide I will cover:
Difficulty rating of Native and various custom maps
Strategies of accumulating wealth, honour, renown and exp, levelling companions, and conquering territory
How to fight effectively
Battle and campaign tactics
How to effectively manage a kingdom, including maintaining vassal relations
How to develop new strategies for new maps

This guide assumes you are playing on normal damage, normal combat speed, normal AI and "Realistic Saving". If you are playing without realstic saves then you can save scum if you need to, but you won't learn anywhere near as much as if you play with realistic saves and learn to play thoughtfully and cautiously.

This guide is a work in progress but the main methods of accumulating gold and exp are there, and all that remains is in-depth information on combat and campaign strategies and walkthroughs for various mods I have beaten

Difficulty of Maps, relative to Native

Warsword Conquest 1/10: Trolls are an easy source of early game exp, renown and cash. Each one is 1k exp, they have no ranged attack, can easily be shot to death from horseback and you get 50 renown a battle from soloing 5 of them. The legendary pistol is the most broken thing I've ever seen, firing with pinpoint accuracy and little dropoff, firing twice before needing to reload and reloading at the rate of a light crossbow and with very high damage and the ability to fire from horseback with no power draw or strength requirement. I went with an intelligence pure and dominated since armour is so light and that pistol is godly. You can train companions easily on the trolls too

Factions are split into 3 main types: cavalry types, infantry types and ranged types.
Cavalry types include the Bretons, Empire, Chaos and those undead guys. Their cavalry is good but not OP like in most mods. Infantry types include Dark Elves and Skaven from what I remember. They are pretty effective against cavalry because of their high foot speed, damage and maneuverability. Ranged types are a bit more complicated. High Elves are the bow faction and they totally suck, Dark Elves are the only ones with crossbows but they arent really a ranged faction and they suck, the only effective ranged faction is the pirates who are very accurate with their powerful rifles.

However, its a bit more complicated. Every faction has an elite unit, and the giant ones are the strongest units in the mod. Skaven rat ogres are the ultimate one because they can easily one shot cavalry, are fast and tough, and their attack is point blank. Chaos also gets a giant unit which is pretty good. The other elite units aren't worthy of note. What's more, there are 2 unit types that deserve a special mention. The Skavens and Dwarves each get a gunner type which is their second to top gunner and which carry gatling guns. They are horribly inaccurate and burn through their ammo fast making them useless on the field, but ridiculously overpowered in a defensive siege where they benefit from infinite ammo and make defensive sieges a viable strategy compared to the usual cavalry spam on an open field. There are plenty of weak factions that can be dealt with very easily allowing for large early gains, and the incredibly easy early game makes this the easiest mod I have played

Blood in the West 2/10: The Lord of the Rings mod. Similiar to Warsword Conquest in that you can solo ents early on for incredible exp gains. They don't give anywhere near as much cash but when you are a decent level you can train up your army easily and raid the elves for insane cash. There are some absurdly broken items in the stores that give huge armour or damage, and the one ring can be worn if you have 40 strength which also gives huge armour bonuses and makes you almost untouchable. Elves are absurdly broken while the orcs are pathetically weak meaning you can easily conquer most of the map using elven units. Early on the cash grind is real, but the actual conquest is easier than Warsword

Perisno 4/10: Falcon Knights are absurdly broken. They're a faction unit that is mounted, wears heavy armour and rides a heavy horse, carries a shield and a short range mace. You can easily roll over Lombard Knights with them and sell them for hundreds of thousands in ransom. You can get your early cash hunting deer, and then just join a faction as a mercenary, jump into some fights to get some exp, maybe raid some villages solo and leave after killing the villagers without doing any looting just to get your level and training skill up, then recruit lots of falcon knights, make a ton of cash and take over the map. Lots of factions are quite weak, and falcon knights are just as OP dismounted as they are mounted, with only the dwarves and elves really able to defend against them. Gear in general is pretty OP, and the bow hits like a truck. Most elite enemies including the lombard knight bandits give a ton of exp so levelling yourself and companions is easy. The legendary weapons are also pretty OP and you can take a legendary bow from one of the companions you can recruit

Native 5/10: The baseline. Contains armoured horses and effective bows that can be wielded on horseback meaning a combat character is extremely effective. Trade is poor and most bandits have ranged weapons, and sometimes even shields so soloing is difficult without amazing gear and stats. Tundra Bandits, Forest Bandits and Mountain Bandits are pretty pathetic vs cavalry, so when you and your companions are gear you can have your companions solo them no problem for good cash, exp and renown. Prisoner Management helps in the early game.

The only truly dangerous factions are Rhodoks and Nords. Rhodoks all carry tower shields, their infantry are strong, their crossbows are imo the best range units as they are well armoured, powerful, accurate and effective in melee combat. Nord infantry is slightly better than Rhodok infantry and has a throwing weapon, and their archers are a bad shot but hit hard and are effective in melee. Both factions lack cavalry so they arent too severely split up in field battles (you cant bait out the cavalry, then infantry, then archers seperately like with other factions.

Khergits are pathetic and a good choice of first conquest. Sarranids, Vaegirs and Swadians have good cavalry but the AI doesn't do mass cavalry so it ends up being weak. Vaegir infantry dont carry shields and can easily be shot, and their archers cant fight in melee, have poor armour, and dont have enough power draw to do serious damage. Same applies to sarranids but their infantry is even worse. Swadians have half decent infantry and crossbows and do alright in battle. Because of this, you can easily take half the map before you even have to deal with Rhodoks, Swadians or Nords

Gekokujo 5/10: Very similiar to Native in terms of early game money difficulties. Due to the prevalence of guns and lack of shields, being in shooting distance means you're almost guaranteed to die so you have to make use of cover, but archery is still very powerful because the AI cant block projectiles. Cavalry are still OP and can roll over infantry and archers. Every faction splits their troops into the 3 categories so can be trounced no problem on the battlefield. All castles have poor defenses against infantry and dismounted cavalry but strong defences against ranged armies. Best to just use pure cavalry. Once you get past the early game it's easy, but the early game cash and renown farm is tough.

Difficulty of maps relative to Native part 2

Brytenwalda 6/10: The new "features" are basically just handicaps that apply only to the player. Get 15 strength and 12 agility so you can get some good ironflesh and athletics, and then you should be fine. Trading silver and minerals from Wales to Mercia is easy cash but quite a grind. Businesses are too expensive for what they give initially but rents are 3x better, just dont buy uncultivated land it's glitched and actually costs you money instead of generating it. When you have all the 2k per acre land and businesses cash is vastly abundant. Early game exp is tough but you and your companions will run into bandits a lot occupying villages, and if you fail to defeat them it doesn't get you captured. Just make sure to get their ironflesh up to 5 quick so theres no chance of permadeath of your companions and do your best to kill some of the bandits for exp. Morths are easy and so long as you have armour, axes and shields there's no chance of losing. Bagaudas are a bit tougher and Unrights are really damn dangerous. Because of the wounding mechanic I suggest mainly using a bow and letting the farmers and companions fight while you pick the Morths off with your bow from the flanks. Try to use houses for cover. Either don't fight Bagaudas or Unrights, or turn off injuries in the mod options and just use the buildings to avoid their range attacks, lure them into melee to defeat them or shoot from cover

Once you get through the cash and exp grind things get easier. A well geared group of companions on horseback can easily beat the 50 men bandit squads who are basically just morths with bows and 1 or 2 bandit leaders who are actually dangerous. You find them mostly in Scotland. You can just distract the archers while your cavalry charges in, then hunt down the leaders personally. You will get a ton of renown doing this and can soon afford the special equipment for yourself and companions. After that any top tier infantry can easily conquer cities. I just trained a few hundred top angle infantry, took a castle, filled it up to 1000 top tier infantry, then started taking more castles and towns and leaving 1000 fresh recruits in each one to give to my vassals, no one even tried to siege me and my income from rents which I collected every few months was in the millions

Prophesy of Pendor 9/10: One of the hardest mods I've played. Bandits are lethal as hell and you won't initially know who is safe to attack. There's no really easy early game money. Bandits are good cash but good luck beating them. I've heard there are some good trade routes but they never worked out for me. The thing is you can be more OP as anything in this mod if you can get some of the good stuff, but it's getting off the ground that is just so hard.

I might make a guide on this mod later, but for now, if you can find a way to get over the early game then you can get qualis gems for permanent stat increases, elf training for weapon skill increases, legendary and rune weapons which are OP, and custom knight orders which can potentially be equipped with the best gear in the game and headshot for 500 damage from the far end of the battlefield with their bows. The easiest way to beat the mod is to work your way up to those things, it's just very hard when you start off with nothing

Clash of Kings 9/10: The Game of Thrones mod. Again it's hard to get off the ground. There's no really good trade routes, companions and gear are expensive, bandits are tough, and there's no way to really get OP. What's more the random events typically take stats away from you and permanently weaken you so you're under a constant time pressure to make progress before your stats all get reduced to zero. Once you get your businesses going and have a decent income it doesnt matter that the random events are gradually reducing you to zero strength, agility, intelligence and charisma because they don't drop your skills which you hopefully managed to get to a decent level, and you'll be relying primarily on your companions and soldiers. Unsullied are pretty good and although cavalry is expensive it still rules the battlefield. You can also camp outside cities with vale archers and just keep assaulting over and over provided you managed to get your engineering up to 10+4 before the game brought your int down too low. There are no truly weak factions so you just have to accumulate a lot of cash then take a castle from a weak faction and accumulate soldiers there, then use them to take more territory, get some good vassals that you can rely on, and then snowball from there.

1257AD 10/10: Early game isn't too terribly difficult, just join an army for exp and hopefully some starting gear once you leave the army. Guild master quests pay extremely well. Once you have some good cash like 50k+ then join a faction, get given a village and build a regional manor which is the main source of cash. You ideally want about 5 regional manors. The annoying part is when the AI conquers territory that causes you to lose the manor but there isnt much you can do about it. The lance recruitment system makes it hard to get the units you really want but just try to help your faction expand its borders to protect your manors and accumulate cash

The real problem is starting your own kingdom. Most of the rival kingdoms are huge with a massive number of vassals, and while heavy cavalry blow every other unit out of the water they cost an incredible 500 each in upkeep. I solved this by saving up a few million and then building a big cavalry army and taking territory which I demanded for myself. My king kept giving me them which I filled with cheap lances, and he only denied me after I had about 10 of them, then I quickly blitzed through his kingdom with my cavalry, formed a peace agreement, and gave the territories out to vassals before my cash ran out. After that I could use good vassals as the main force for further conquest. Without using a cavalry blitz strategy I don't know if it would've been possible for me to conquer my first kingdom, and this is the only mod that ever made me feel like I might not be able to win

Difficulty of maps relative to Native part 3

Phantasy 2/10: This is a very fun mod to play. Only one where I really struggled to decide on a build. Do I go heavily into int and be a mage? Int/str and get a lot of power throw so that magic missile hits like a truck? Or maybe put some points into charisma so I can heal a lot? Or get lots of agi as well so I can have a self-healing super horse?!

Side from how absurdly OP you and your companions can become, some of the available units are extremely powerful as well, the golems in particular stand to mind. There's quite a bit of early grind but eventually your bank interest will overcome your potential expenditures and you will effectively have infinite money. I didn't even mind grinding for so long because all the abilities are fun.

Light and Darkness 2/10: More of a story mod to be honest. The legendary weapons are super powerful, there are some amazingly strong troops you can get, you constantly get free stat and skill points meaning you can max out a lot of things, and you eventually get a spell called prairie fire which might as well be called GG sieges. The AI can be pretty tough as well, especially the darkness faction and their bandit parties but nowhere near as good as the player can get. A very fun mod to play and one of my favourites

Nova Aetas: 3/10: A bit of a slow start but colony building is fun and extremely profitable. You can get a lot of cash from looting various dungeons in the new world if you know where to look and have some half decent gear. The special abilities are broken, especially the one that heals you. Businesses are a nuisance because you need to spend months learning a craft over and over before they let you start that business up. Colonies are better money but it gets tedious to gather and sell their resources. Starting a kingdom is easy because you can store your starter armies in your colonies, conquer the rather easy native americans, and then invade Calradia with your premade army. Kingdom managing is extremely easy because you can bribe your vassals to make them love you no matter their temperament. Once you get sorted for cash it really is a very easy mod.

The Last Days 7/10: Another Lord of the Rings mod. This one seems much more difficult because it forces you into a faction at the start. Bandits are tough, gear is expensive and requires you to gain faction rep to buy it, and your soldiers are expensive and cant easily be recruited. From what I saw of it the gear is pretty strong though, a str/int build should make short work of it, especially since merely have a player character in a faction is a massive advantage for that faction since it means it benefits from much better wound/death ratios and battles end instantly, not to mention the benefits of a player and companions with high medic and tactics skills and the ability to potentially siege instantly and easily run down weakened lords. I never did finish this mod, might get back to it sometime, but once you get over the initial difficulty it shouldn't be too hard

Difficulty of official maps relative to Native

With Fire and Sword 7/10: The early game grind was hard at first til I realised how effective it was just selling powder from towns to castles. Money placed in a bank accumulates interest. Rents from a fief you own are actually very good. You can outfit mercenaries in custom gear and when you're getting 1mil interest a week you can certainly afford them so the actual conquest part is easy

Viking Conquest 6/10: Again, the early game is quite hard. The story mode starts off rather difficult and you don't initially have a good source of income. After you get a boat you can camp the English channel and raid Frisian trade ships for good cash, and the mercenary veterans and svear warriors that you can buy from taverns are some of the best in the same without the hassle of trying to train the really slow to train faction units. You can't just jump straight into making a kingdom because if your right to rule isnt high then EVERYONE will declare war on you. However, just being in a faction when it works out an agreement whether a trade or a ceasefire agreement gives you RTR so its really not so hard. Once you get going you will find that Svear Warriors and Veterans make short work of the enemy, and if you have a high honour rating then they rout almost immediately because they dont want to fight you. You can replace losses from the garrison generated when you take a town or castle and keep the momentum going easily

Carribbean: Blood and Gold 4/10: Killing pirate ships is easy cash early on, and once you have some good ships you can join a faction and raid trade ships for even more cash. Once you have some third and fourth rates you can start stealing 1st rates from the English using decent sword and board infantry, and when you have 6 first rates you can take the map easily enough. Problem is it's hard to get vassals to join you and help so you basically have to take the whole map solo, but repeated assaults with first rates and infantry will make short work of the various cities

So what is your goal?

Mount and Blade: Warband is a sandbox game. There's no real objective to the game but you do get a special message if one faction controls the map.

The 2 main goals are:
1) Help a faction conquer the map
2) Start your own faction and conquer the map

But you could also have the general goal of accumulating power and wealth and decide what to do with it down the line. Fortunately I have a structured way of approaching maps that covers these:
1) Accumulate Exp, companions Exp, Gear, Money, Businesses, Renown
Optional: complete quests for legendary gear if they exist in the map
2) At this point you can train up some elite troops and help a faction take the map over
OR
3) Accumulate Honour, and optionally join a faction to get a starter castle for your conquest army before you rebel
4) Start conquering territory for yourself and stealing good vassals to give them to, snowballing into conquering the map

It's up to you how far you want to go and where you set your objective. just be aware that grind = success in this game

I should note that there's usually no time pressure you can take your time to prepare for war, but if you want to back a faction then you need to make sure that faction survives, and there are some mods like Prophesy of Pendor where capturing a faction leader lets you take their legendary weapon but if the faction dies you can never get it. There's also the possibility of one faction because insanely powerful and making things harder for you later, but usually the factions actually become weaker regardless of their territory, which is an effect I can explain in a later section

Short version: As territory changes hands all the factions become more and more unstable due to the effect of handing that territory out and constant defections from and into factions, until no realm can muster a large warband of more than 1000 soldiers anymore

As such, you can generally take your time and prepare a lot for the end game

Stats and Builds

Main Stats:

Strength: Provides a slight bonus to damage and 1 HP, many items have strength requirements, important for ironflesh (HP) and power strike/draw (damage)
Agility: Slight increase to move and attack speed. Needed for Weapon Master, Looting, Riding and Athletics. Some horses have a riding requirement, especially the good ones
Intelligence: Grants an extra skill point per point, and is necessary for a lot of very useful skills
Charisma: How good you are at sucking at the game. Renown is better

item requirements:
One of the most important things to consider. 50% of a soldier's power comes from what they are using and wearing. You and your companions can be incredibly strong just from wearing the best armour, riding the best horses and using the best weapons. I recommend you always build around the minimum str/agi requirements for the best gear

Important Intelligence skills:
You get bonuses for personally raising your intelligence skills. This is +1 at 2, +2 at 5, +3 at 8 and +4 at 10. This matters more for some skills than others
Pathfinding is a 3% improvement per level. This means personally having 10 pathfinding gives you a 12% bonus in speed. This is very nice, but just having 5-10 pathfinding on a companion and using cavalry will have you outrun any lord with ease
Spotting is a 10% improvement to sight range per level. An extra 40% of your base sight is nice but not worth the points when there are much better ones
Wound Treatment increases healing rate by 20% per level. Very nice but not essential

Now we get to the important ones:
Engineering: The most ridiculously broken skill in the entire game. Justifies intelligence as a viable stat just by itself. While 10 engineer lets you build ladders in 6 hours and a siege tower in 24 hours, 14 engineering lets you build ladders in 30 minutes and a siege tower in 6 hours. This allows you to assault towns/castles with nothing but ranged units and just keep resetting the fight when you run out of ammo until you win. It also lets you instantly retake a fief you lose to the enemy. Broken with a capital B
Surgery: 4% survival per level. 10 surgery is an 80% survival chance but 14 surgery is a 96% survival chance. In other words, the difference between a max surgery companion and max surgery on yourself is the casualty rate drops by another 80%. It also let's you get one of the most important early game skills very quickly
First Aid: I'm not sure what the exact amount is but it restores health on you and your companions by a certain amount at the end of each fight. This is important because a wounded companions doesn't give you their skill bonuses, and it sucks to limp away from a failed siege with 300 wounded soldiers and a wounded pathfinder and then suddenly run into a warband and be unable to escape. Keep First Aid on yourself and so long as you don't get KOd your companions will always be 100% HP after a fight and you wont run into this problem
Tactics: I like this but rarely pick it up. It's very important for fighting enemy warbands because it evens the ratio of soldiers. Could make the difference between 12 cavalry vs 100 enemies per wave, or 30 cavalry vs 70 enemy soldiers per wave. These days I play realistic saves so I usually avoid direct confrontations like this and just siege cities instead
Training: Especially useful early on as it lets you train high level troops out of recruits. Later on your companions can cover it but you can still train your companions with this skill while you wait for more money inbetween wars. Get at least 5 of this

My favourite builds:
Str/Int:
Str 30
Agi 12
Int Dump
Cha base

The idea is to get 10 power draw/strike/ironflesh and a heavy horse so you can dominate the battlefield. Very fun to play. Rest of your attributes go into int so you can get a decent amount of surgery/engineering

Combat Int
Str varies, usually 12-15 for the best gear
Agi varies, usually 6-12 for the best mount
Int Dump
Cha base

This will get you the best equipment so you can contribute well with a bow or crossbow. You can still fight very well and contribute a lot to the kill count of each fight but you won't be a god. More importantly you get the important int skills like 14 engineering, surgery, first aid, training, tactics etc very quickly and this is massively useful at all stages of the game. Renown farming is a bit harder with this build not soloing is still quite possible. IMO this is the strongest build I have found

Pure Int
Str Base
Agi Base
Int Dump
Cha Base

In Warsword Conquest I got over 50 int with this build. Most of my skills were 14 and it made the end game really easy. It would've been a lot harder if armour wasnt so light and the legendary pistol wasnt so ridiculously OP. It's still an effective build but you have to let your companions do the renown farming. You can usually win any fight in a 1v1 and I ended up killing quite a lot of enemies on other mods by riding around their flanks and slashing but I had to be very careful not to take hits. It's a surprisingly effective build but not as easy to play as Combat Int

Companion Builds

Companions Builds

Combat Companions
Str Dump
Agi 12
int Enough to get all the combat skills maxed
Cha base

The idea here is to get them enough str/agi to use the best gear. Then get enough int for skill points to max out your current combat skill cap and training, you'll usually get them to 12-15 int with 4-5 training. Then dump everything else into strength. They will level up very fast and enable fast training of your troops. If anyone hits 30 str then either get more int for higher training or more agi for superior combat

Agi/Looting
Str enough for best armour, usually 15 then dump
Agi 30
Int Enough to get combat skills maxed
Cha base

This one is for maxing the looting skill. As usual enough strength to get the best gear, then pump agi to 30 for max looting, while putting excess skill points into useful combat skills or training. If they reach 30 agi then get enough int to finish maxing training and combat skills then dump into str

Intelligence
Str enough for best armour, usually 15 then dump
Agi 12
Int Dump
Cha base

Same as with Agi/looting but pump intelligence instead of agi. Specialise one of them in pathfinder/spotting/tactics/tracking and the other in Wound Treatment/First Aid/Engineering/Surgery (you dont need engineering/surgery on them if you took those skills yourself)

After 30 int you can dump into strength or give them more int to get their training skill to max as well

Charisma/Trade
Str enough for best armour, usually 15 then dump
Agi 12
Int base
Cha 30

Get their gear stats then pump charisma to 30 for 10 trading. After that build them like a combat companion

Note about Brytenwalda and other mods with weak horses: If you can't get an armoured horse then just give them enough riding to use a normal horse. In the case of Brytenwalda it means your non-combat companions only need 3 agi, but your combat companions should still get 9-12 agi for some decent weapon master, athletics and shield skill

Step 1: Accumulating Wealth and Power Phase 1: Gold and Exp (part 1)

So there are 2 main resources you need: Gold and Exp. Once you have these 2 resources it becomes much easier to get things done. There are several different methods for each and which works best varies from map to map.

Gold is very important for buying new gear, upgrading and paying wages to your soldiers, buying companions and eventually getting businesses to reduce the need to grind and allow you to maintain a larger army. You will also need a lot of money to recruit, upgrade and pay the large armies you will need in the late game. This of course should be obvious, but the more gold you have the easier it is to get it, not only can you buy businesses that generate gold over time, but the equipment, companions and soldiers you get can help you to get more money. Getting your first 10k can be tough though, especially when you are level 1 with poor skills, and a decent set of crude heavy armour, an armoured horse, balanced weapon, shield and high quality ranged weapon + ammo can cost anywhere from 10 to 50k depending on the mod, though 90% of the cost is the horse and armour. A decent set of mercenaries can cost 3-10k and quite a bit in upkeep

Exp is a bit more complicated. You need strength to equip the weapons and armour you need, power draw if you want to use a bow, and agility + riding skill to use a good horse if the mod includes them. There are certain skills that are especially valuable such as pathfinding, training and surgery, and since it takes much longer to level companions that yourself you can get a big headstart by getting some int early on. Training in particular is extremely important. Training gives exp to anyone lower level than you in the party. This means it's possible to train fresh recruits into second tier units without even fighting which can save you a lot of money and really kick off your bandit hunting. As you get to a higher level its possible to train up some solid units very cheaply, and train up your low level scrubby companions enough for them to equip some decent items

Exp and Gold Methods
Arena:
Difficulty 1/10
Money 1/10
Exp 1/10
Even a total loser can get 5-10 kills every other match. You can get a few levels and a small amount of cash, maybe enough to buy something important like some new recruits or a unarmorued horse and weapons. Maybe get enough money to start off trading. Even if you only hit level 2, that means you can train fresh level 1 recruits up to rank 2 which depending on the unit could be a massive improvement. When you hit rock bottom, you can get just enough cash to get back in the game by fighting at the arena, and if you're a few hundred gold off an amazing item that has appeared in the store which you just have to have, the arena doesnt progress time so you can get it!

Missions:
Difficulty 1-8/10
Money varies
Exp varies
+Relations
There are various missions you can pickup from lords, guildmasters, and in some mods taverns. I'll go through a few of the important ones:

Letter Delivery:
Difficulty 1/10
Money 1/10
Exp 1/10
Barely worth the effort compared to the arena. I only do it when I'm trying to get positive relations with a grumpy lord so I can buy a business in his town.

Taxes:
Difficulty 1-5/10
Money 5/10 once only or 2/10 if you repeat it
Exp 2/10
This is an excellent source of beginner cash. If you pull it off successfully you can get enough cash to buy a good horse and weapons to kick off your soloing or trading. If you get beaten up by the villagers then give the money to the lord and wait til you find another one that you can do properly.

Save a Lord:
Difficulty 8/10
Money: 3/10
Exp: 4/10
To do this you need good armour and weapons, good stats and to be on good terms with the faction you are against so you can bring your gear inside. It's good exp, just make sure the enemy faction is something weak like khergits and that you're up to the task or they'll wreck you. It's usually only good in the late stages of the game when you can pull it off reliably but if you fail they just lock you up for a few days then let you go

Caravan Escort:
Difficulty 1/10 - 10/10
Money varies
Exp 5/10
This is a good one to do early in the game. If you fail the penalty isnt huge but the exp is very nice. Just be sure to avoid bandits or have a big enough group to drive them off. This one is great for getting initial levels for you and your companions. In 1257AD these missions pay a lot

Bounty Hunting:
Difficulty 2/10
Money 300 per
Exp 2/10
+Honour, +/- relations
The cash is nice early on, or you could go with honour which you need to run your own faction easily. Exp is quite nice as the fugitive gives a chunk and so does the quest completion. Villagers will hate you for it but lords love you for it. On some mods the taverns give these missions so you can easily accumulate cash and exp with a good ranged weapon and a mount, just be sure to use the buildings for cover if he has a ranged weapon of his own, or you can melee him with a sword and shield if your weapon skill is decent enough to hit first

All other missions aren't really worth doing, but if you're a mercenary then the scouting missions are nice enough exp.

Bandit Hunting:
Difficulty 1/10 - 10/10
Money varies
Exp 3/10-10/10
+Renown
This depends on the mod. There are some mods like Warsword Conquest and Phantasy where you can easily solo some bandits for great exp and cash. All Native bandits have a ranged weapon of some kind so cant be soloed without good gear, even then it can be risky if you take too many headshots, but weak bandits like that can be beaten with just companions provided you and your companions are well geared which is the best way to level companions (all the exp goes to them). Then again the bandits in Perisno, Pendor and Clash of Kings are quite strong, and while the Perisno ones sell for a ton and are easy to capture with Falcon Knights, the Pendor and ♥♥♥ ones are difficult to capture and nowhere near as lucrative. One way to work out how strong bandits are is to wait for someone to start a fight with them then jump in and take a look, if you can't win the fight you can retreat safely, and it gives you an idea about how dangerous they are, whether they use shields, if they have range weapons or are mounted etc. If a mod has an infantry bandit with no shield or range weapon, or a mounted one with no shield or range weapon that you can easily dismount (by circling around the group and slashing with a long melee weapon or shooting the mounts) then you can easily get cash, exp and renown solo

Soloing is the best exp in the game usually

Step 1: Accumulating Wealth and Power Phase 1: Gold and Exp (part 2)

Trading
Difficulty 1/10
Exp 0/10 - 5/10 (if you defend villages from bandits)
Money varies
Some mods have horrible trading where you need a good trade skill and a knowledge of what village and town buys and sells each item to get a few denars a week profit. Others are absolutely amazing for trading even at 0 trade. Clash of Kings used to have a great trade route bringing iron from the Casterly Rock region to the Crownlands but they removed it. Brytenwalda has an awesome trade route bringing minerals and silver from Wales and salt from Pengwern into Mercia. I suggest you write a list of resources and the prices you see them going for in towns and villages. If you see that one area is selling them for a lot less than another area then consider trying to buy and sell some. You can also check the markets for a few hours and they will tell you if you can make a profit buying and selling something and what you can get but its hard to find a good route that way. It's helpful to travel in a small group, get a few points in inventory management, get your pathfinder and trade companions quick, make sure everyone is mounted

Mercenary work:
Difficulty varies
Exp varies
Money 1/10
This is actually an interesting one. It shuts down any businesses you own in enemy territory til the war is open and they are allowed to operate again. The wage you get is pretty pathetic. However there are a few good draws here. 1) The state pays for your men, meaning the only limit to your troops is how many you can afford to recruit, train and feed. This actually makes mercenary work much better than being a lord since the crappy villages hardly pay you anything, the state wont pay for your army and castles/towns cost you more in garrisons than they give in taxes. 2) You can raid villages and caravans without an honour loss, which is excellent if you want your own faction someday

You should try to recruit troops from prisoner stacks to save money. You will be required to go on campaign from time to time but the worst that can happen if you refuse is your companions get a nark on. This is also very effective for preserving a faction you intend to join because just being on their side is a massive advantage for them in a battle. The battle ends instantly in the campaign map time, and their losses will be much lower than without you, plus you can hunt weakened lords down easily with cavalry to keep them down, reduce their relations with their king and severely hinder a faction

Raiding Caravans:
Difficulty 1/10 - 6/10
Exp 3/10
Money varies
This is usually very good money and exp. Caravans typically give much better money than bandits and unlike villages there's no risk of being interrupted while robbing them. Sometimes their troops are tough but if you are a mercenary then you don't need to pay your troops wages so get some good heavy cavalry and wreck them. Amazing for getting a good set of gear for you and your companions so you can disband your troops and grind your companions and yourself on Tundra bandits or something til you can train up elite troops from scratch

Attacking Villages:
Difficulty 1-5/10
Exp 1-3/10
Money 0/10
So when you start a raid on a village the villagers come out to fight you if you don't have a huge army. This phase is free, there's no risk of being interrupted by the enemy. The villagers are poorly equipped and dont use shields, and the best range weapons they get are stone and the occasional hunting bow. With the exception of a few maps like fire and sword where they get guns, its easy to solo villagers right at the start with a horse and a decent ranged weapon, just be sure to take out their archers first. You can also grind your companions on them easily, just be aware that some companions don't like it so send the good companions away on a spying mission til you are done.

Looting Villages:
Difficulty 1-10/10
Exp: 0/10
Money 2-10/10
After you beat the villagers, or if they don't even come out then you can loot them. Problem is you cant move until it's done, even if a massive army is heading right for you. Plus side is they dismount their horses to fight you. Be VERY careful if you plan to use this and you play with realistic saves. Make sure you have a big army of elite soldiers (and are a mercenary so the state pays for them) which will deter lords from attacking, improve your chances of winning if they do, or allow you to cause enough casualties that you can retreat from the battle and you are allowed to "leave" instead of continuing the fight without having to sacrifice any troops. I'm not sure how this works on Native, but I know that on some mods I have lost honour for raiding while not being in a faction, but on other ones I dont lose honour when raiding if I am in a faction, but I'm not sure if you need to be a lord or if being a mercenary is fine. Assume that you will lose honour and relations, and if you want to form your own faction then you will have to honour grind a lot more later

Rents and Tarriffs:
Money 1/10 - 10/10
Usually villages give a few hundred a week if they can be bothered to pay and havent been looted, and towns/castles give nowhere near as much as what it's gonna cost you to garrison them. However, in With Fire and Sword the rents you get are super high, and there may be other mods where they are good as well. In particular, owning a fiefs in 1257AD lets you build a regional manor which is the main source of money in that game

Landlord Rents:
Money 10/10
Some mods like Brytenwalda and older versions of Clash of Kings let you buy land in towns and rent it. It usually takes 20 weeks of rent to start paying which isnt that bad, and the rents accumulate even during war. Problem is you need to manually collect them which is annoying, but otherwise it's better than businesses and can potentially turn out millions in rents. This is a long-term goal and won't help early on

Businesses:
Money 10/10
You will need these before you start any serious conquering. You wont have time to grind money and taking towns and castles doesnt pay, but these will generate cash while you do more important things. In Native your silk business will start to make a profit over your initial investment after 20 weeks, whereas in 1257AD they give almost no money, and in Brytenwalda it takes over a year to make money on them since they cost 3x as much as usual, and in Nova Aetas it takes months before they even let you start one, so bear that in mind. This is a long-term goal and won't help early on

Ransoming Lords:
Money 2/10
Difficulty 6/10
Just getting a successful capture will cost you, no one will like you for it and there's a good chance the lord will escape anyway. By the time you can do it, you're probably better just taking the honour for releasing him. Then again, if you're a mercenary with 50 elite cavalry and you see some scrubby lord with 10 soldiers out recruiting then feel free to kick his ass and take him prisoner for a bit of extra money. In Pendor you can get a near perfect capture rate, and since factions die fast in that mod, joining as a mercenary and capturing lords is an easy way to keep them alive so you can get the King's legendary weapon when you are ready to capture him

Step 1: Accumulating Wealth and Power Phase 1: Gold and Exp (part 3)

Sieging:
Money 0-3/10
Difficulty 1-10/10
Exp: 1-10/10
This depends heavily on who you are sieging. This can be some of the best exp in the game if you do it right. The idea is to find a faction that doesn't use shields or throwing weapons like the vaegirs in native, assault them using ranged troops that have the same ammo type as you and try to kill off all of the enemy range units. Exit the battle when the ranged enemies are gone then resiege and kill more of them. When the range units are all gone order your troops to hold their fire, then climb to the top of the ladder and being executing the infantry. When you are down to a few shots left go down to your troops and order them to fire so they switch to the ranged weapons, then shoot a couple of them and order them to ceasefire. Pick up the ammo they dropped then continue shooting the enemy infantry til they are all gone. To pull this off effectively you need 10+4 engineering (meaning you need to personally have 30 int and 10 engineering for the bonus). You can do it with only the 10 engineering from a companion but 6 hours pass each time you do it so you must be sure you can't be interrupted by enemy lords before you strip away all the ranged units from the garrison

Some factions, like the vaegirs have militia who do have shields, or maybe you're fighting a faction that has shields, or playing Brytenwalda where all infantry have shields and want the exp too. To do that you need to bait them into lowering their shields by taking a step towards them then quickly shooting them in their face while their weapon is raised. You have a big window of time to do it but sometimes the shield of a guy next to your target catches your shield because he had a high shield skill, it's annoying so try to do shieldless infantry if it's possible. I REALLY don't recommend you do this against a faction like the nords where the infantry have throwing weapons or you're gonna have a bad time

Bandit Lairs:
Money 1-3/10
Difficulty 3-10/10
Exp: 5/10
Usually good cash and exp but they stop generating bandits til they reappear. Make sure you and your companions are well geared. Watch out for enemies with throwing weapons and shields as they are very dangerous to the small party that you can bring. Try to snipe at the enemy from a distance. Sometimes its great cash and sometimes not. If you lose then there are no real penalties

Defending villages:
Money 2/10
Difficulty 3/10-10/10
Exp 5/10
+Honour
Like with bandit lairs theres no real penalty for defeat so its a very good thing to do on realistic saves. If you and your companions are badly geared and you dont have soldiers it can be hard to win, but if you bring troops you probably wont get much exp out of it. It's great for early game exp even if you lose, just try to kill as many bandits as you can and use the buildings as cover for sniping. The reward if you win is nice at the start of the game, and refusing the reward gives you honour which can reduce the grind for honour later

Villager missions
Money low, sometimes even costs you
Difficulty 1-5/10
Exp 1-5/10
+Honour
+Relations
Buying cattle and food will cost you but get you some honour and relations, training villagers can be infuriating, especially if you lose the bandit party after the hassle of training them but it's good exp. This is mainly something you want to do when preparing for conquest since it lets you quickly recruit troops for your starting garrisons

Step 2: Accumulating Renown and Honour

Renown is far more valuable than leadership and charisma for your army size. It doesnt make you waste stats in a useless attribute and the potential gains are much higher. I think that Leadership should add a multiplier to your army size, if it was a 20% higher army size per level it would actually tempt me

Anyway, the best way to get this is soloing. When you can single handedly kill armies of elite soldiers your renown, not to mention your exp will skyrocket. Of course, not all mods will allow this. Native and Brytenwalda bandits always have ranged weapon so kiting and shooting them just isnt so easy, for example. The second easiest way is to get companions with decent gear and a heavy horse, I usually give them 5 power strike/ironflesh and 4 riding even on my surgeons/pathfinders and the combat pure go for 30 str for higher power strike/ironflesh. Then you just charge in and destroy weak bandits like Tundra raiders in native or Bandit parties in Brytenwalda. The game doesn't really take into consideration the gear and skills of your companions when it calculates your renown gains, it treat them like fresh or tier 2 soldiers so you get an unusually high amount of renown when its just you and your fully equipped monster companions. This level them up fast and increases their weapon skills quickly as well making them a lot more useful to you

Honour is only important if you want your own faction. If you only want to clear the game with a faction, and you alrady have your businesses, your gear, plenty of cash and exp and renown and companion levels, then you can stop grinding now. I'll explain why honour is important in my section on running a kingdom, but really you need 300+ of this

You will probably end up getting some without trying while grinding other things. Releasing lords, defending villages and refusing bounties on bounty hunter missions are all good sources of honour. You can also get more honour while also grinding up village relations just by refusing their rewards all the time. You can continue getting renown after you start your kingdom by releasing lords you capture during war which will happen a lot probably

Step 3: Starting your Kingdom - The Solo Way

Assuming you chose to go on to start a Kingdom, here's where we continue

Make sure you have a lot of cash saved up, depending on the mod you could need anything from 100k to 3mil in bank which varies based on how expensive the best troops are in wages and how long it will take to win the initial wars

There are 2 main ways to start your kingdom, either start attacking territories and taking them over, or rebel against a faction you have joined. The latter is more effective but can take longer to pull off, especially if the King never refuses to give you a fief or he declares peace and no more wars start

One thing I should mention starting out is that when a castle or city is conquered it will start with a tiny garrison of troops. in the cases of castles it will gradually build up to 100 men and with cities it will build up to 200 men. After a long time they can reach 150 or 250 men respectively but then they stop recovering. An AI controlled castle or town that has previously been conquered will never fully recover it's garrison, that's why these are the cities and castles you will want to start out your kingdom

1) Starting without a faction - It's helpful if you grind relations in villages around the core of the map where most of the fighting has been taking place. This will enable you to very quickly garrison your freshly conquered castles/towns

Build up a big army of elite troops and when you are ready, start a war with the faction you intend to steal land from by threatening to attack a group of villagers. From here you have two choices, weaken the faction to ensure it cant fight you, or start taking territory and try to accumulate more troops.

To weaken the faction your troops must be elite cavalry. Seek out and defeat their lords and capture as many as possible. It's important to do this first so that they don't form a warband which will be much more difficult to defeat after you get a castle. It takes them a while to recover their troops, and the more times they are defeated the more money they lose which harms the quality of their troops and the more they dislike their king making them more likely to leave the faction

When you take a castle the remaining lords will form a warband and try to recapture the castle unless you have captured the marshall. If you beat the faction down a lot first the they won't be able to muster a lot of troops and you can probably smack them down easily. If the faction wasn't weakened first then they will probably have 600-1000 troops a lot of which are high quality. You might be able to beat them with cavalry depending on the map you are playing, but its generally easier to just ignore them and take more castles. If you have good engineering then it takes them a lot longer to siege a castle than it takes you to. When you take new castles be sure to defer the appointment of a lord, this generates a new small garrison. Take over 4 or 5 castles/towns and then start transferring all the garrisons into one of them. As the AI takes over the castles/towns that have no garrison first. As soon as they take it over, go and retake it immediately, the garrison will sometimes surrender without a fight and then you can transfer the new garrison to your capital

Your aim here is to get about 1000 soldiers in your capital by recruiting from nearby villages and transferring from castles/towns you conquer. When you do that the AI wont attack it anymore probably, and if they do you will probably win anyway. Make sure to grind up a lot of elite cavalry and units for sieging if you dont intend to siege with cavalry. Now you can easily weaken the faction by chasing them down with your cavalry. Once the faction is weakened, use your siege troops to take over the weak castles/towns and build their garrisons with fresh recruits from villages. If the faction tries to retake a fief then smash them with your cavalry. Try to get about 8-10 castles/towns

Step 3: Starting your Kingdom - The Faction Way

Like with the solo way, you are aiming for weakened castles/towns. The idea is you take advantage of the power of your faction to take your first fief and build up your main army, and then if you want to you can take over quite a bit of territory before you rebel ensuring you're already in a solid position when your kingdom begins

1) Join a Faction: Try to pick a weak faction that won't be a threat to you when you strike out on your own, like the Khergits, or an archer heavy faction that you can dominate on the field like the Elves in Perisno

2) Take your first Fief: Try to pick one close to your faction territory, maybe a castle that used to belong to your faction. Quickly build up it's garrison and train elite troops for later, the King will always let you keep the first castle/town you get.

3) Take new fiefs and build up their garrisons: Your vassals will own these fiefs and you need to build up their garrisons, because the AI won't regenerate the garrison much by themselves. Recruits are cheap in recruiting cost and wages so just use fresh recruits for this. Use your elite cavalry to drive off the AI faction, and if their warbands are too big to defeat then wait for them to break up then destroy them one by one before you continue conquering territory. You don't need to wait for the King to grant you the fief because you won't be taking "no" for an answer

4) Rebel! The king will eventually say no, so choose to keep the fief anyway and become a rebel. You can now join another faction who will let you keep the territories you own, the continue conquering til they refuse and you rebel again. Just work your way through the list of factions til there is no one left to join, but this really isnt necessary, you only need 1 fief with a good core of elite troops to expand with

5) Wreck your old faction. They will be the only faction at war with you so get out there with your cavalry and beat their armies down severely so they cant form a decent warband. If they do form a big warband then attack with your cavalry then rest to heal them, pull out more cavalry from your garrison and have another go at them til you break them. Keep conquering the weak territories, then either start conquering the stronger territories that havent been conquered before, or just ask for peace and wait til someone else declares war so you can take some of their weakened fiefs

6) Recruit Good Lords. I'll get into this more later but the core of your vassals should be "good" lords. They are the lords who love you if you have high honour, they will never betray you so they're the ones who get your castles and towns. Give them no more than 5 castles/towns each as thats the limit they benefit from, and they will follow you forever on a campaign. You will need to steal these from other factions. When your honour is high check your character information in the camp menu and write down who your friends are, then work out what factions they are in and write that down too. Now go from one to another and ask them to join you, telling them you will treat people nicely. Most will say no but keep trying. If they say they love their king then when you go to war be sure to beat them up til they dont love him anymore. If you are lucky some good lords might join you without asking if they already dislike their king, they just show up at court

7) Give villages to bad lords: Anyone who isn't a good lord is a bad lord. Only give them villages. Everytime you hand out a fief to anyone other than them they get upset and will eventually leave you, but they cant take villages away with them if they leave. These guys are good for defending against raiders, distracting the enemy with raiding, and persuading good lords to joni you because they think your faction is strong just for having lots of lords

Combat guide - WIP

Melee Combat:

There are many different types of weapon in the game and it's mods but they can be broken down into several categories:

Close range no block weapons: These are usually knives, they do poor damage against armoured targets and you cant block unless you have a shield. Upgrade immediately

Very close range weapons: These weapons usually have little to no minimum distance. They include weapons such as the winged mace and elite scimitar in Native. Thy're excellent in sieges and when you're being surrounded because you are often pressed close to the enemy and you can swing at point blank whereas other weapons will whiff when used too close. They're generally good in other roles but you usually need a weapon with at least 95 range on horseback. Elite Scimitar has a strong range and good damage in Native, and can be used with a good shield so look out for equivalent weapons in other mods. There are some 2H close range weapons, usually mallets or war axes that do heavy damage but leave you vulnerable to missile fire and make it harder to block multiple melee attacks but make it easier to keep on top of the enemy by bringing them down in 1 hit

Mid range weapons: These weapons have a minimum range but you can usually swing if you step back a bit. It's dangerous to use them when you are getting surrounded by enemies, or when you are backpedalling and an enemy rushes close, but you can usually step to the side to get a bit of distance to swing. They typically have a higher range that very close range weapons making them more appropriate as a cavalry weapon. The Elite Scimitar in Native is a very close range weapon with the range of a mid range weapon meaning it dominates both of these categories in Native but not all mod have a weapon that has no minimum range and a far max range. Look out for scimitars, military cleavers and hand axes with a good range for you and your companions

Long range weapons: These weapons are usually 120+ range but have a far minimum range. When enemies get close it can be really hard to find the room to swing unless you have very high athletics. There are some varients with 1H/2H type meaning they can be used with or without a shield but when used with 1 hand they suffer a severe speed penalty. They're very good on horseback for slashing at infantry from out of their range but often leave you vulnerable to missile fire

Spears and lances: very long range melee weapons. They leave you extremely vulnerable in melee but on horseback they can be used to poke at people from a distance. Most can be used with a shield. Enemies tend to block these a lot but they make short work of horses and can break shields prior to finishing the target with a bow

Bows: Very fast firing weapons. They can usually be used on horseback and some variants are foot only but hit harder or more accurately. Bows are very good with high power draw, surpassing the power of crossbows and with much greater speed. They can allow you to easily solo large armies if you have enough arrows in your inventory to swap over to but they require a huge investment in strength to use effectively so this typically prohibits you from getting top int skills like surgery or engineering. Nonetheless the power of this weapon is incredible enough to make a str/int build viable over a int/str build

Crossbows: Slow firing but powerful weapons. The foot variants are usually much more powerful than the horseback variants. They pack a severe punch with minimal strength investment, making them very good for an int build with just enough strength to use one of these. Firearms and slings are effectively crossbows. Slings are faster and weaker with blunt damage. Firearms are usually very slow but hit harder, and depending on the mod can either be horribly inaccurate or sniper rifles

Shields: Very useful for blocking, especially if you use manual blocking. They're also vital for defending against ranged attacks, especially when riding down archers or crossbowmen, and can be used when soloing to soak ranged attacks. You may have noticed that when you shoot at enemies with shields your shots often hit their shields even when they should've hit the target's legs or head. That is because shield skill increases the size of the shield. If you have a very high shield skills then a tiny shield can be used to catch not only all projectiles aimed at you, but also shield a large portion of your horse as well!

Throwing Weapons: Bad.

The general idea in a 1 v 1 is to block an enemy attack then swing at them. Long range weapons like spears or two handed swords won't work well due to their minimum range, they tend to whiff. Sometimes when you swing at the enemy from the same direction of them your attack whiffs and they hit you, this is called a chamber block. Through experience you develop the reflexes to immediately block when a chamber block happens

You can also feint to hit an enemy who is blocking. Just get your weapon into an attack position, when you see your enemy start blocking quickly tap block while moving your mouse in a different direction and you will instantly change to swing from another direction. The enemy will always attempt to swing rather than block from the new direction so be sure to strike quickly. If you see the enemy preparing to swing then get your weapon ready to swing, step forward then back quickly, they will predict you moving close and swing, but miss because you stepped back, then you step forward and quickly swing to hit them. This is a very good way to deal with enemies who are attempting to mob you since simply blocking and swinging will get you surrounded and overwhelmed pretty quickly.

Tactics Guide - WIP

Understanding the way the AI Kingdoms Operate (part 1)

The lifeblood of a kingdom is it's Lords. They defend the land, raid the enemy, and form war parties to conquer new lands. The power of a kingdom is all down to the unity of it's lords. This does not apply to the player kingdom because the player, being a human, might as well be a god in comparison and can easily solo the world with enough preparation. This section is to explain how the AI kingdoms work, and how it can be manipulated.

There are several types of AI Personality:

"Good" Lords:
Upstanding: Kings and Lords uphold the peace
Good Natured: Keep faith in your promises

These good lords are the best lord type. They will only rebel against a King if they love the one they want to rebel towards (I.E a player) and even then it's rare. They follow war parties for the longest time, and they gain positive rep with the player by 1 for every 3 honour. A player with 300 honour will have 100 rep with these guys. I'll get into that more in the kingdom management section. The only difference between the 2 personality types is that good-natured lords can marry a female player, and upstanding lords are sexists who won't marry a strong woman. These lords usually focus on defending territory when made into marshalls, and sometimes conquer weak fiefs. During war when left to their own devices they rarely raid territories. They spend most of their time at their fiefs but are quick to defend villages that are being raided by the enemy

"Neutral" Lords:
Martial: My sword is at the disposal of my liege
Calculating: It's all just circumstance
Pitiless: Everyone is trying to cheat each other

These lords don't benefit form a high honour score. They will rebel against a King if their rep gets extremely low, usually under -50 but it can take til -80 before they rebel. Martial lords have a higher number of troops than usual, and when they are made marshall they tend to focus on conquest. Pitiless and Calculating are effectively the same. Calculating ones won't talk to you in private unless you have more than 10 rep with them. During a war they typically raid, or try to solo capture fiefs that have weak garrisons. They will frequently return to their fiefs to recover and protect them between raids. Martial lords won't marry a female player

"Bad" Lords:
Debauched: It's better to be a wolf than a lamb
Quarrelsome: They're all bastards

These lords are scum. They rebel extremely quickly when rep goes negative, not usually lasting past -20. If you capture and release one then the next time you talk to them you get a big hit to your rep with them. When a debauched lord is made marshall he usually raids villages. They won't follow a marshall for long even if they love them and tend to spend most of their time raiding during a war.

How do you work out what personality type a lord is? Ask to speak to them in private and they will tell you their opinion on the world. If you have >30 honour then you will have 10+ rep with "good" lords and when you check your character report in the reports menu it will tell you all your friends. Provided you haven't been rep farming with lords then any lords on your friend list are "good" lords, be sure to write them down! These are your first priority for recruitment when running a kingdom

Kings have personality types as well. Unfortunately its very hard to work out what personality each King has. I know that the King of the Vaegirs is a "good" personality who gives lots of lands to his vassals, and the King of Swadia is a "bad" lord who hordes his lands to himself. If you can get a good King then he will give you a lot of land and this makes it very easy to get a starter kingdom in preparation to rebel.

You can find more in-depth info on lord personalities here:
https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php?topic=190607.0

So, how does this all play out? During peace the King and the lords throw feasts. Only lords who have a castle or a town can attend, and the host gains rep with their lords. This is the chance for the King to gain rep with his lords, and lords who throw a lot of feasts will make a lot of friends and be good marshalls who can lead large war parties for a long time. Lords with only villages won't attend or make any friends or gain rep with the King. A lord who has a castle or town but a negative rep with the host will not attend, this means that for the AI a negative rep cannot be salvaged and the lord will eventually turn rogue or be kicked out of the faction

At the start of the game all lords have high rep with their King. War Parties are huge and fiefs change hands a lot. By the time a year has passed this has all completely broken down. Lords without fiefs will gradually lose rep with their King and eventually join another faction. As a Kingdom gains territory and hands it out the King loses rep with everyone except the one who got the fief. When Kingdoms constantly gain territory, hand it out and lose it the rep with their lords grinds all the way down. During peace it can be recovered a bit by feasting but this only works for lords with positive rep who have castles/towns. This means lots of lords leave their faction and join other factions, get new territories, then get upset and leave and all you get are lots of lords who hate every King.

In the mid game war parties are becoming smaller and smaller. The only lords who ever go along with them are ones who hold castles/towns that havent been taken throughout the game but even they get bored and leave quickly. Bad lords will raid, good lords will defend and neutral lords will do a bit of both. No new castles/towns will be sieged, it's always the same ones. This is because when a castle or town loses it's garrison for the first time it will generate a small garrison and gradually recover, but never rises above 2/3 of the original garrison. The AI prioritises the weakened garrisons so it's always the same territories like Dhirim changing hands constantly

You may have noticed that some lords have more troops, and higher quality troops than others. There is a reason for this.

Lord army size is affected by a number of factors. Their renown gives them 1 soldier for every 25 renown. Unlike the player this cant rise or lower for lords, you can see it on their character sheet in notes. They also get 5 soldiers for every 1 leadership which is something you can't see. Martial character get an extra 30 soldiers, and Kings (other than the player) get an extra 100 soldiers.

This information comes from this thread: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2695884

It also says they get 20 soldiers for every castle or town they own. However, I read a thread a long time ago that I can no longer find that say it's 60 soldiers per town owned, 30 per castle, 15 per village, and each lord only benefits from their top 5 fiefs. I wish I could find this thread again and would appreciate it if someone could link it to me, it certainly seems that lords with 5 castles/towns will have a lot more than 100 extra troops.

The other thing to note is lord wealth. You can't see this except for in certain mods but lords have money too. They can spend money to recover their troops faster, and they upgrade their troops with money as well. If they don't have money they will still recruit but very slowly, and the bulk of their force will be militia. Lords get money from various things but the main thing is taxes from their fiefs. The more prosperous their fiefs are, the more money they have, meaning they recover soldiers fast and use mostly elites. This means that a faction that has been at peace for a long time will have rich lords who have mostly elites and who recover from defeat extremely fast, and a weakened faction will have poor lords running around with 50 militias when their max party size is 120

Understanding the way the AI Kingdoms Operate (part 2)

So, how do you manipulate all of this information?

There are several ways you can help a faction to become stronger, or to weaken a strong faction. Even if you don't do anything the factions will lose unity very fast. Sending companions on missions will tell you the level of unity in a faction when you look at the notes on that faction. If a faction is being unusually stubborn, such as if it's been at peace for years or a lord has been giving most of his fiefs to just a few lords then they can maintain war parties at higher levels for much longer, you might need to break them up a bit before you help your faction win or start a new Kingdom

Weakening a faction:

Remember when I said a fief never fully recovers it's garrison? If you attack a faction and take over it's castles/towns but then just abandon them to be retaken it will permanently weaken the faction. Not only will the prosperity of the towns suffer severely but the AI kingdoms will start to siege the core territories more and break the kingdom up. The lords who held those castles/towns for a long time will suffer extended periods of time without a fief and their relation to the king will suffer.

You can also attack caravans and villagers, and raid villages. This will disrupt the income of the the lords and make it take much longer for them to acquire wealth. What's more, the weaker a faction becomes the harder it is for them to defend their territories against AI lords and their prosperous villages will be raided frequently, keeping them poor

When you defeat a lord he has to spend his wealth recruiting and retraining. In addition to damaging his fiefs you can weaken him to the point where he is only fielding a small amount of elite units. He also loses rep with his king everytime he loses, and you can gain honour and rep at the same time by releasing them. As a result of this, war parties will become smaller and weaker, and will break apart very quickly. Lords will begin abandoning the super faction to join other factions which will in turn weaken those factions when the King grants the rush of new vassals new lands, pissing of his current vassals

When a faction's garrisons are weakened, it's towns and villages are poor, and it's lords are destiture with tiny armies the AI will begin to overwhelm them, retake land and break up their territories. Whether you are pushing your own faction to victor, or helping a naturally weak faction like the Khergits defeat a strong faction like the Nords to pave the way for your own kingdom, these tactics will make wars much easier.

Strengthening a faction:

Rather more difficult. Usually just keep the AI lords busy or beaten down will prevent them from raiding or defeating allied lords. Be sure to defend villages that are being raided, not so much to prevent them dropping in prosperity but to keep the enemy lords weakened and down. The weaker the enemy lords are the easier it is for allies lords to defeat them in encounters.

You can also do quests for villages and towns which, in addition to improving their prosperity, will also grant you rep and honour, enabling easier recruitment of troops in future. Likewise, defending caravans and doing town quests improves their prosperity. If your faction is taking a beating consider doing the town quests to broker a peace. Try to keep your faction in peace for a long time, maybe a year or more so your ally lords have huge amounts of wealth and a lot of elites, making it easier for them to fight a long war later. This is also a good time to raise your rep with them by feasting if you have a castle/town and a partner.

If you really have the cash to throw away you can also buy things from villages or towns and then immediately sell them back over and over. Put 10k in each village, maybe 20-30k in a town and they will be prosperous in a month or so.

As with all things in this game, you are awarded far more for offense than defense. Rather than trying to beat big war parties in a defensive siege where you stand to lose everything, try instead to beat down the enemy lords while they are seperated over and over until they can no longer defend their territories, let alone launch a counter offensive

Strategy Guide - WIP

How to Run a Stable Kingdom

One of the things that annoyed me the most starting out in this game was how much of a pain it is to run a kingdom. Whenever you give out territories your vassals all whine constantly, they won't follow you as marshall and then they rebel and take their territories with them. I went solo for a long time, but it's grindy and unsatisfying. I eventually developed 2 strategies for running a stable kingdom with effective vassals:

1) The Hard Way

Before you start your kingdom, make a big list of all the lords then go to each one and ask them their opinions on the world to work out what personality each one is. When you start your kingdom you will need to take some land, then push for a peace treaty.

The trick to keeping rep high with your lords is feasting. Give each lord 1 castle or town and the connected village(s) and then feast to get everyone's rep with you back up. I'd go with 20+ to be safe but 100 will have them follow you for a decent time. This extended peace will also let them build up their wealth. If you play a mod with diplomacy enabled then set your policies to favor the lords and you will get a lot of bonus rep from this which makes things a lot easier for you.

This is a very tedious way of playing but gets you the greatest number of lords who will defend your territory effectively from bandits and enemy raiders and produces slightly larger war parties than the easy way

2) The Easy Way

This is the quality of life way of playing. It's easier and more than effective enough so it's the only way I bother with now.

Don't get any rep with lords til you have 30+ honour. Check your friend list on your character report and write down all the names, then work out what faction they are in. Before you start your kingdom be sure to grind 300 honour.

When you start your kingdom you will need to start recruiting all the "good" lords from your friend list. Not only do they have 100 rep with you but if they lose rep it wont matter, because by releasing captured lords you get more honour and restore the rep easily and without relaly trying. Give good lords only castles or towns, and only 5 each

You will also be recruiting neutral/bad lords. These will serve to raid the hell out of the enemy and distract them for you during war, keeping them weak. Give each one a village and nothing else. They will eventually hate you and some will leave, but they can't take a village or castle away with them so it doesn't matter.

The hard part of all of this is actually recruiting the good lords

Recruitment varies on a few things:
1) The territory you control, the more the better
2) The number of free fiefs you control, you will probably end up with dozens of free villages so this is fine
3) The troops your faction had in total, be sure to put 1000 or so fresh recruits in a castle or town before you give it to a good lord, it will also prevent the fief from being sieged
4) The number of lords you have. Doesn't matter if it's good lords with 5 castles/towns or a bad lord with a single village
5) Persuasion skill
6) The lord's rep with you and his King
7) Your reason for them to join you

I can't remember which reason suits each personality type, but the only one you need is the one that says you will protect the people and it'll be gumdrops and rainbows for everyone. That's the one that good lords like. If your persuasion skill is bad, consider sending a noble companion with high persuasion from your court. This is also helpful when it's hard to track down a good lord.

If the good lord likes his King too much and keep rejecting you then beat him up and keep taking his fief and let the AI retake it. Take other fiefs and abandon them as well so the King is regranting those fiefs to his other vassals, pissing off the good one. Keep an eye on him in notes and take any new fief he is granted and beat him constantly until he hates his King and will join you.

Avoiding War:

The Ai needs to have a reason for war in order to declare war or they lose rep with their lords. Even if they don't have a reason they can declare war anyway, but only bad kings will do that and even then very rarely

Casus Belli include:
1) Border incident. These occur randomly and if a faction thinks they can take you they will try it
2) Low right to rule: The lower it is the more likely they will do this
3) Retake lost lands: If you hold a land that a faction previously owned they can declare war to retake it, even if it wasnt originally theirs. If they fail to retake the territory in the war they cant declare war to retake the same lost fief again, they basically lose the right to it
4) Because the King doesn't like you: This isn't a legit casus belli but they will sometimes declare war without a reason just because they dont like you
5) Curb a nation's power: If you have more land than a starting kingdom then this can be used. The more you go over the limit the more likely it will happen.
6) Support an ally

A faction is also more likely to use a casus belli if they are stronger than you or if you are at war with other nations already.

To avoid war, keep your RTR high, make sure your nation is strong and intimidating, and don't expand beyond the bounds of a starter kingdom until you are ready to handle multiple factions at once. If you want to weaken a faction at this point by taking it's fiefs to deprive it's lords then remove the garrison and let them retake it before you take another one. It's not a bad idea at this point to siege every garrison that hasnt been sieged yet to severely weaken factions as the Ai beats each other down more

Gaining Right to Rule and negotiating with other Kingdoms:

Aside from sending companions on missions, negotiating a treaty of any kind with a Kingdom, even a peace treaty will increase your Right to Rule

To negotiate other treaties like trade agreements, non-aggression pacts and alliances you need to first make a King acknowledge you as legit. You will need a noble companion with high persuasion for this. Here's an example of how to make a kingdom recognise you:

There are 6 Kingdoms, Kingdom's A, B, C, D, E and F. You have basically conquered Kingdom A as your starter kingdom and they own like 2 castles in kingdom B territory now. Kingdom C goes to war with you, and Kingdom B is at war with kingdom C and Kingom A. Send an emissary to Kingdom B asking for recognition, he will almost certaintly recognise you because you have the same enemies. Now you can begin working out treaties if you want to but hold off on that for now.

Kingdom C and A agree to peace with you, you are now at peace. Declare war on kingdom B and then ask Kingdom A and C to ackowledge you because you have the same enemy as them. Kingdom A will almost certaintly refuse as you have their lands but there's a chance of it, Kingdom C will probably accept but might refuse. Supposing they refuse, you check the faction in your notes and see they are also at war with Kingdom E. Declare war on Kingdom E and then ask Kingdom C to acknowledge you, they will accept

Do this until every kingdom acknowledges you and then get your peace agreements and work out treaties if you want to. All this negotiating will max your RTR pretty quickly

Native Conquest Guide - WIP

Conquest Guides for other mods I have played will be coming

Prophesy of Pendor Guide - Troops (Part 1)

WARNING: This section will explain exactly how to beat this mod, with optimal strategies that I have developed or which have been recommended to me. Half the fun of a mod is working out how to beat it yourself, and PoP is one of the ultimate challenges for players who've beaten every other mod. Read on only if you have hit a wall with this mod or if you don't care about losing the challenge.

Information about the mod

Soldiers are different from Native. Bandits are powerful and gear can be incredibly good, especially the Noldor gear. Qualis Gems allow for permanent stat gains and Custom Knight Orders can become insanely powerful. The key to beating the mod is to understand your enemies, and the many ways you can become incredibly overpowered. On the surface it seems difficult because everything is so strong, but once you start to get the good stuff you realise they're really not that powerful in comparison to what you can eventually get for yourself.

Soldiers: Every faction has normal unit and honour troops. There are also powerful bandits in this mod, ranging from the weak robbers to the aimbot Noldors.

Basic troops:
Sarleon: Their infantry are powerful halberdiers. Despite holding a long spear class weapon, don't use them or fight them like regular spearmen, they have no minimum range and regularly OHKO heavy horses. They'd be one of the most monstrously powerful infantry I had ever seen if they had shields. Very vulnerable to missiles but also very dangerous so take them out from afar or deploy them against infantry/cavalry

Their Archers are one of the less accurate archers but still hit quite hard and are well armoured, enabling them to take more hits and manage better when forced into melee combat. To compensate for their low accuracy they should be moved closer to the enemy. Excellent against cavalry when supported by halberdiers or cavalry because they can snipe riders off their horse at close range and survive being attacked in melee

Fierdesvain: Don't even bother with their archers, they have pathetic short bows that cant hurt anything. Their sword and board infantry is good, carrying short range fast axes that deal with shields fast, and also carrying shields. They're the best infantry for sieges since they can swing fast and powerfully in close melee. Their berserkers are like sarleon halberdiers, able to take out horses quickly and do a lot of damage on the open battlefield. Not as effective in a closely packed siege combat because of their slightly slower swing speed and tendency to whiff at point blank.

D'Shar: Not actually the khergits. They have an infantry that's like the Fierdesvain huscarls but not quite as good. Their blademasters are a higher level than huscarls and are a match for them on the open battlefield where they can swing their swords, and can even handle heavy cavalry. Their scorpion assassins are absolute monsters, being as good as the blademasters in a melee and snipers with their hard hitting throwing knives. They also come mounted, making it easier to get around with them. Problem is they both evolve from Bladesmen which are level 36 and thus extremely difficult to get you and your companions high enough in level to train a decent amount of them.

The D'Shar Dervish are slightly inferior to Sarleon armoured longbows. They cant aim effectively on horseback so should be dismounted. Since they come with mounts you can use them in place of other archers to get around the campaign map faster and dismount them at the start of each battle

Ravenstern: The most balanced faction. Their infantry sometimes have swords and sometimes have axes, making them a bit better than D'Shar bladesmen in a siege but inferior to D'Shar and Fierds on the field. Their archers are the most accurate but also pathetic in melee with poor armour, basically the vaegir marksmen of pendor. Their cavalry come with a mix of heavy and normal horses, usually heavy and are the only non honour heavy melee cavalry. They are actually very good considering they arent honor troops, a good disposable heavy cavalry. Their mounted rangers are more accurate than the D'Shar dervish but also more poorly armoured and inferior in melee, and should be dismounted at the start of the battle.

Empire: No stormtroopers sadly. Their infantry is subpar. Legionarries are inferior to other sword and board infantry but carry ranged javelins. Gladiators carry a mix of sword and board and 2H weapons which really makes them bad at both roles. Pikemen seem to whiff a lot and are easily outclassed by sarleon halberdiers. Their crossbowmen are their main strength, packing a hell of a punch with good accuracy. They're also well armoured and not much worse than legionaries in melee.

Honor Troops:

A lord of player with a town or castle can begin recruiting nobles, and these nobles can then be upgraded into powerful knight order troops. Every faction has their own knight orders, there are a few that might appear over the course of the game or be made by the player, and the player can even build a new knight order from scratch (which can potentially be the best units in the game)

Sarleon:
Knights of the Lion: The best heavy cavalry in the game. They're almost as good on foot with their maces as they are on horseback. Their squires are alright medium cavalry, a bit better than ravenstern horsemen. Recruited at Sarleon. new chapter can be founded if the player is a Sarleon lord or owns Sarleon

Order of the Clarion Call: Powerful mounted archers recruited from Laria. Better than D'Shar Dervish or Ravenstern mounted rangers. They're alright in melee too. Like all mounted archers they should be dismounted unless you plan to use them as heavy cavalry. They're one of the best jack of all trades units

Fierdsvein:
Lady Valkryies: Bad. They have weak horses, weak armour, and they're not that good in melee either. Don't bother. Found at Javiksholm

Knights of the Dawn: Like Knights of the Lion but not qutie as good. They're trained from Pendor nobles and start at -15 rep with you, making them a pain to acquire. Just go with Lion Knights. Found at, and spawn around Valonbray

D'Shar:
Knights of Eventide: The most heavily armoured heavy cavalry. They can be recruited at Singal. They're nearly as good as Lion Knights but start at -40 rep with you. Their helmet with cape is the best headgear in the game and I recommend farming them as they spawn around Singal for these lovely helmets.

D'Shar Windriders: Kind of like the Clarion Call but they lack heavy horses so can't be used as shock cavalry. The idea is that they can outmaneuver other mounted units but the AI lacks the intelligence to do this properly and they lose too much accuracy on horseback. Should be used the same as Clarion Call by dismounting them and using them as heavily armoured archers that are ok in melee. Can be recruited at Torbah

Ravenstern:
Knights of the Dragon: Found at Rane. Like Knights of the Lion but not as good

Knights of the Raven Spear: Found at Poinsbruk. Nearly as good as Lion Knights but trained from Pendor Nobles making them hard to get.

Empire:
Immortals: Like Legionaries but actually good. They lack heavy mounts so can't be used as shock cavalry but are better than Knights of the Lion in a siege, barely.

Shadow Legion: I haven't tried these yet but a lot of people are saying they're the best honour troops. They're not as heavily armoured as other knights and their weapons aren't amazing but they have throwing weapons like D'shar Scorpion Assassins and insanely high weapon proficiencies, making them incredibly fast, incredibly accurate and highly skilled. I got in a melee with one of these guys once and it was like a noldor tournament, he spammed feint and nearly managed to kill me. Definetly gonna give some of these guys a go

Prophesy of Pendor Guide - Troops (Part 2)

Other Honour Troops:
These guys don't start with a chapter but sometimes a lord forms it, and it's possible for you to start a chapter

Silvermist Rangers: Noldor lite. They're an evolution of the Ravenstern rangers, being weak in melee with poor armour but insanely accurate and fast firing. They depend heavily on their halberd wielding squares who surpass Sarleon halberdiers to protect them. Probably the finest archers aside from Noldor or Custom Knight Orders, just keep them out of melee at all costs

Ebony Gauntlet: Monstrously good infantry that also use siege crossbows. To say they are an evolution of Empire crossbowmen would be an insult to these guys. Probably the best troops for sieging aside from Custom Knights Orders or Noldor. Since they lack mounts it slows parties down on the map unfortunately but I suppose there had to be a trade off.

Knights of the Falcon: Bad

Knights of the Griffon: Medium Cavalry that is inferior to Knights of the Lion. They're the canon knight order for players sadly. They also require you to either have the Sarleon claimant in your party or have picked the "letter that changed your life" option at character creation to found.

Radiant Cross: Not as good as Lion Knights

So to summarise:
Heavy Cavalry: Knights of the Lion
Infantry: Ebony Gauntlet (best) or Knights of the Lion (campaign map speed, double as cavalry)
Ranged: Ebony Gauntlet (double as melee), Silvermist Rangers (best ranged dps), Clarion Call (campaign map speed, double as cavalry)
Custom Knights Order: Best at everything with enough investment, this will get a section of it's own later

Bandits: (WIP)

Robbers: The easiest bandits. Watch out for the Rogue Knights that sometimes accompany them. Can be soloed but watch out for crossbows

Forest Bandits: Same as above.

Red Brotherhood: (very annoying to solo since they come with some decent mounted archers, easy enough with good companions)

Mistmountain: Easy once you take out their cavalry, but the terrain can be hard to maneuver so be sure you can shoot out their mounts and have plenty of arrows in stock

Vanskerries: Not that good in melee surprisingly but they carry dangerous throwing weapons and can last a decent amount of time in melee. I don't suggest soloing these

Heretics: Rather like robbers but with more heavy cavalry. Their Heretic Magnuses are equivalent to knight order heavy cavalry so be sure you can handle them before you solo them.

Singalians: Like Red Brotherhood but even more dangerous. I don't recommend fighting with these

Snake Cult: Their infantry are generally poor but some of them have medium armour and heavy crossbows so watch out for those, they hurt even through Noldor armour. Their heavy cavalry are well equipped but have low proficiencies and swing quite slowly. Rarely you will see Anaconda Knights who are really dangerous, watch out for those. If not for those crossbows they would be quite an easy bandit type to solo, but all it takes it a stray crossbow bolt to ruin your day

Jatu: Horrifying. Their lancers are pretty decent with their melee weapons and well equipped, not quite as good as honor troops but numerous and far superior to ravenstern horsemen. Their mounted archers have accuracy issues but hit hard and are dangerous when pressed into a melee. These guys use nothing but mounted troops so unless you have cavalry of your own or good anti-cavalry units like Sarleon Halberdiers and Longbowmen or Empire crossbowmen to snipe the riders then you will struggle to handle them. I've seen them roll over D'Shar Blademasters and Fierdsvain Huscarls

Noldor: Have you ever seen any of that anime "Gate". You remember the scene where the heavy cavalry charge across the battlefield against the Japanese Riflemen?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjLuYDf-VAY
Skip to 5:15 if you want to see what any battle against the Noldor is like.

That's every battle involving these guys. They pull off headshots for 200 damage across the entire field reliably, they fire fast, they have the best armour, they carry swords with no minimum range and shields, are super fast and have extremely high proficiencies. Frankly they blow every unit out of the water and only Custom Knight Orders can potentially surpass them. Even Lion Knights fall before their arrowstorms. They make for very powerful friends

Bandit Armies:
One of the main features of this mod. Bandit armies spawn with 300-1000 troops, sometimes led by a hero character. When defeated they will eventually respawn but if the army is engaged when the hero has 30% or higher HP then there is a chance to catch it based on your prisoner management skill. You can then release them in exchange for a Qualis Gem, more on those later, but they're the thing you REALLY want to get it in this mod

The armies are made up of bandit troops usually, sometimes with an extra bandit troop of that type, such as the Anaconda Knights or Wolfbode Infantry. Their special bandit troops are usually honor troop class.

Wolfbode: Probably the easiest one. He spawn in the Ravenstern area. Mystmountain bandits are fairly easy, and his honor troops are foot infantry with massive axes and no shields, you had best pick off the honor troops yourself as best you can on horseback with a bow. Wolfbode himself rides a massive demon horse and is twice the size of any other man. He has a huge rune axe and a ton of health, watch out for him and try and take him out fast if you can. Their cavalry units ride light horses so try to shoot out their mounts and let your own troops handle them. Ranged units with halberdiers or sword and board infantry to back them work well here

Maltis: The Snake army leader. Spawns as the "Dread Legion". Her anaconda knights are really powerful and she also has some undead sword and board infantry who are very dangerous. Definetly one of the harder ones, just handle her cavalry and infantry as best you can and it gets easier when they are gone. Try and shoot the cavalry riders, and ride behind the infantry to shoot them in the back. Use cavalry to stop their charge and good infantry/halberdies to bring the cavalry down. While ranged units work well for the cavalry they struggle to handle the undead infantry who carry shields

K'Jura the Ravager: His honour troops arent all that just, mounted archers. Better than the normal Jatu mounted archers though and normal Jatu bandits are already very dangerous making this guy quite tough. Handle the same as Jatu, using cavalry to stop their charge and ranged units/halberdiers to drop the horses/riders

Buluga the Usurper: He's a Singalian hero. Bandits arent as bothersome as the Jatu are, a good heavy cavalry rush can break his cavalry and then it's only a matter of time til they crush their mounted archers

Eyegrim the Devourer: You can't capture this guy so don't bother. His army is also the strongest I've ever fought, with tons of heretic magnuses and undead infantry. If you really must fight them then have some strong heavy cavalry to break their charge with halberdiers to bring the mounts down, and sword and board infantry like fierds huscarls or D'Shar Blademasters to take out the dismounted soldiers and the undead infantry.

Three Seers: Also can't be captured, never fought them

Prophesy of Pendor Guide - Troops (Part 3)

Aeldarian and some other Noldor lord (begins with L): As with all Noldor they are monsters. If you must fight them then bring a huge war party with powerful lords and lots of Knights of the Lion and sword and board infantry, and prepare to suffer. People report success with auto-resolve, but that's cheap lol. These Noldor Lords can give legendary weapons when you beat them, that should be the only reason to do it because they're too hard to farm for Qualis Gems. Only way to solo them would be with a monster CKO

Various Adventuring Companies and mercenary companies: These guys sometimes appear as bandits and sometimes get recruited by a King. They use mercenary troops mostly, the most dangerous ones being Adventurers, Maiden adventurers and Rogue Knights. Sometimes they have honour troops like Syla Uzas and his Shadow Legion. Just look at what troops they have and decide how to beat them based on that. Some of them are quite easy and other like Syla are notoriously hard.

Peasant Rebellion: Walking renown blobs. They don't carry ranged weapons and mostly dont have shields. Bring about 10 stacks or more of arrows in your storage, and make sure you have a good bow and good power draw, then just ride around picking them off for exp and renown. Be aware, it can take a while to shoot 1000 of these. Just be sure to pick off the adventurers first, they're dangerous, especially Hero Adventurers, but they only get a few of them

Other bandit armies: It's been a while since I played this and there are some I have missed. I'll add new ones as I find them. I remember their was a mettenheim one and their infantry butcher cavalry but I cant remember that much. I'm playing through PoP again right now so I'll add them as I go

Prophesy of Pendor Guide - Character Creation and Qualis Gems

Before you make your character I need to go over Qualis gems. These are rare gems. One can be found in a treasure chest, and another gotten from a quest, but to get more you need to capture the leaders of bandit armies. This is dependent on you being able to beat those armies, and being lucky with capturing the hero when the battle ends (unless you save scum til you get it)

This isn't as hard as you think though, you can get them easily by befriending the Noldor, then luring bandit armies into the Noldor forest and fighting along with the Noldor. I'll cover that in more detail later.

Qualis Gems can be used for several things:
1) Get a permanent +2 to Str/Agi/Cha and 25 in all proficiencies. This drops to +1 in those stats after you do it 3 times
2) Get a permanent +1 int and the skill point that comes with it
3) Make a Custom Knight Order or start a new chapter of a Knight Order
4) Get the map to the mines
5) Make a rune weapon at the mines
6) Upgrade the rune weapon at the mines to emerald, ruby or sapphire
7) Upgrade all Companion stats by a random amount

The important thing here is the first 2. You can get 1 of each of Str/Agi/Cha or 1 int. Of course, the former is 3x better. Because of this you should maximise the intelligence you get out of character creation and always put level ups into int so you can use your qualis gems for the other 3 stats

Here is the chart for character creations: http://pop3.wikia.com/wiki/Character_Creation

I recommend: Physician, Merchant, Merchant, and Enemies. This won't maximise your intelligence, however you will get a lot more skills which is the important part, and you will start with 8 trade and some good starting cash which makes the early game massively easier. You can get more int out of physician, scholar, merchant, letter but you only get 2 more int, lose out on some good skills, and letter gives you negative rep with some faction and knights, and positive rep with the adventurer companies (presumably stopping you from attacking them for gems)

Important skills:
I highly recommend you get good combat skills. You can become overpowered as hell in this mod, and your goal in battles should be to track down and kill the strongest enemy knights with your bow which can completely swing the battle in your favor. You will start out weak but after you start getting Qualis Gems that will quickly change. It will also allow you to start soloing once your stats are high and your gear is good for some amazing renown and exp gains

I recommend: Power Draw > Prisoner Management > Riding > Ironflesh > Power Strike > Leadership > Athletics/Shield

You need power draw to wield good bows and bring down dangerous enemies fast. You need 6 for the Noldor bow. I can't remember how much for the legendary Duskfall bow (D'Shar king capture when the faction has 3 or less fiefs). You will want 10 eventually

Prisoner Management adds a 5% extra chance of capture of Heroes and Lords. This will make Qualis Gem and honour farming much easier.

Riding will let you stay ahead of enemies while you snipe them, you need it high. You also need 6 for the Noldor Spirit Horse.

Enemies hit hard, get Ironflesh. Many battles depend on you so you need the staying power

Power Strike isn't that useful since you mainly want to snipe enemies, but they are good for chopping out enemy mounts by riding parallel to them and slashing the horse's head from out of range of the enemy's weapon. Also good if you get dismounted, run out of ammo, or are fighting ambushing bandits in a town. Naturally you will need it for tournies too which are important

Leadership is necessary for the exhorbitant troop wages. I'd recommend getting this to 10 before you stop being a mercenary because custom knight orders are expensive and you are gonna be spending a lot on elite troops when you no longer have the state paying for your troops

Athletics/Shield is mainly important in tournies, though still excellent. Not as high priority

Be sure you get 4-6 mounted archery as well (VERY IMPORTANT)

As always I highly recommend Surgery, Training and Engineering, but Engineering is less important because you take heavy honour penalties for fleeing sieges so you cant just back to back siege anymore. Definetly get 10 surgery though, and maybe 8 (+2 from the book) training.

Prophesy of Pendor Guide - Early Game Cash Grind

The aim of this section is to get all your businesses, some good starting gear for yourself, and get your companions and their gear.

I recommend you decide on your companions first, here is the chart: http://pop3.wikia.com/wiki/Companions

Personally I prefer Ansen and Sir Rayne, Ansen makes an amazing medic, Sir Rayne is a trainer. For the outer circle I chose Lethaldiran as an amazing Custom Knight Order trainer, Julia as my looter, Alyssa as my pathfinder, leslie as my merchant/emissary, and Sir Alistair/Diev/Sigismund/Kaverra as trainers

I picked up Riva as my early game pathfinder and ditched her later. Her level is low so she picks up those pathfinding and spotting skills fast. I recommend grabbing her ASAP and leaving the other companions til after you get your businesses

The key to early game cash is trading. It can take a while before prices become favourable, as with all mods, but you can still make some decent cash at the start. Here are my trade routes:

D'Shar territories -> everywhere: Buy Dates/Salt in D'Shar territory and sell them anywhere else. I buy dates <100 and sell >120. Salt <200 and sell >200. Be sure to check villages for salt/dates as well

Fierdsvain territories -> Avendor: Buy flax bundles dirt cheap and sell them at Avendor for >150. Be sure to check those villages for more flax. They sell reliably at Avendor but you might need to wait a day for the prices to go back up. You can sell dates/salt while you buy the flax

Senderfall iron/tools -> Fierdsvain territories: Buy <200 Iron and <300 tools, then sell in Fierds territory. It can take a while for prices to drop this far in Senderfall so check in 3-6 months.

Laria: Oil <300, sell to Ethos. As with Senderfall it takes a while to drop this low. However, I've seen it drop to 150 a few times. Laria sometimes has cheap tools as well

Also pay for rumours in taverns and buy treasure maps, they're a good 3k plus per chest

Do this to get all your businesses up and buy your companions. Sort them out with some good gear but don't go too overboard on it, just some nice crude/normal armour of the heaviest type they can have, military cleavers (especially fine/balanced) are amazing, and gives them some shields, and the heaviest crossbows they can use in case they get dismounted. Def get everyone 3 riding at least and a good armoured horse each. I left Ansen with a normal horse and weak gear since he is an int pure but Alyssa has decent enough starting str for some good gear. Look out for Melletine Horseman bow (4 power draw) and Hawkstorm Bow (5 power draw, ravenstern territories)

Prophesy of Pendor Guide - Early Game exp grind, Noldor rep, Qualis Gems

At some point get the qualis gem from Rane, its in a hidden chest on the streets hidden in a haystack. Trade it with Finneas de Digit for your first +2 str/agi/cha. Keep paying for rumours til you get the red brotherhood hideout. Take it vary carefully, especially if you play realistic saves like me as you only get one chance. Be sure to keep your good companions at the top of your party list so they come. Leth and Diev will deal a lot of the casualties with their bows, and your other knights will do good damage with their siege crossbows. Use cover effectively as you snipe at enemies. If you get KOd you will lose this gem for good. Advance slowly towards the cave and be ready to backoff if enemies respawn all around you. When all the enemies are gone you can loot the gem from a chest at the cave (DO NOT LEAVE BEFORE YOU LOOT THE GEM)

So with a nice +4 to your str/agi/cha total the only way to get more is by capturing heroes which you will be aiming to do fairly soon. First off, you will need more exp on your companions and some renown. Go with your companions and farm forest bandits, you should get 5 or so renown per fight and some good exp. Be sure to take out the knights yourself and let your companions handle any archers. You can do mystmountains as well but be careful not to bump into things

If you get captured you can get your companions back from the taverns. Hunting these bandits is also pretty good cash

When you have a party size of about 80 it will be easier to handle the bandit armies and farm Noldor rep. Recruit ravenstern soldiers and train them into horsemen, these will allow you to move at a decent pace. Now start kiting Jatu into the forest and jumping in when the Noldor fight them. Let the Noldor shred them and you get rep. You desperately want to avoid fighting Noldor at all costs, you probably won't escape and will have to find your companions and train new horsemen.

if you end up in a fight with jatu then tank them with your cavalry and try to get around them and shoot at them in their backs, retreat when the jatu suffer about 15 casualties and you will probably be allowed to leave safely. When Noldor rep goes >0 they wont attack anymore and this becomes much easier. It will take a while but farm out 100 rep, it will be helpful later. You can also begin kiting armies across the map to the noldor. Just make sure it's one with a hero (e.g. Wolfbode)

You will need the Noldor Lord Aeldarian or the other one to be around to fight them and you want to kite the bandit army to them then jump in on the noldor side. Often the bandit army will try to flee when they see the noldor army and the noldor heroes wont chase them for long, you will need to fix them in place. Keep close to the bandit army and wait til you see it start retreating then engage it. Because it was fleeing you can immediately leave and the army will stop for a moment before trying to run. You need to hit space for just a moment to advance time then talk to them again to fix them in place. If you forward time too long then they will try to run again, or even worse they might attack you even though the Noldor army is close (Noldor wont jump in to help you)

So you need to do it for only a moment. Also the Noldor lord sometimes forgets what he is doing and wanders around a bit before moving towards the bandit army again. It can be a pain and you will probably lose a lot of men and even be captured sometimes trying to pull this off til you get the timing just right, but its worth it for the qualis gems. You will even get quite a bit of renown!

When you have >50 rep with the Noldor go talk to the guy in Laria's tavern (begins with Q). He will give you a quest to fight a Jatu army. Keep attacking the army, doing as much damage as possible and then retreating. You will eventually wear it down and win. Talk to the Laria guy again and the Noldor city will unlock in the forest (invisible til you approach it)

This town can sell the best Noldor gear, and the first few days of each month you can do the tournament, which has noldor gear or sometimes a qualis gem as a reward (you will probably need to have used a lot of qualis gems to be strong enough to win this tournament)

Prophesy of Pendor Guide - Mid-game Renown, Knight Order, Honour and Rep grind

So you have all your businesses and companions, decent gear, a gradual supply of qualis gems, and you're checking the Noldor town every month for new gear and the tournament. You should be getting pretty OP by now and you need to start thinking about the long term

Custom Knights Orders are the best troops in the game potentially and allow you to handle the bandit armies without tedious kiting to the Noldor. Normal honour troops are also pretty powerful, especially the Lions and Shadow Legion and are probably enough alone to handle most bandits if you can field enough of them. Unfortunately you need prestige to hire honour troops and CKO are expensive and time consuming to train, you will need to get used to fighting without them for a while.

Prestige is earned along with renown and is used as a currency to upgrade troops into honour troops. The cost is dependent on your honour, and a high enough honour can reduce the prestige cost to much more manageable levels. You will also need lots of renown to have a decent party size.

There are a few more things to mention here: Legendary weapons, Lord rep and village rep

Every king has a legendary weapon, and if you capture him you can release him in exchange for it. He will only accept if he has 3 castles/towns or less in his faction in total though. Around the mid-game you will see some factions die probably, so you better be ready to snatch up these weapons or lose them forever. The ones I remember are:
D'Shar king: a legendary bow, second only to the bow one of the noldor lords can give and superior to the best purchaseable bow, the noldor bow
Ravenstern king: amazing 2H sword with no minimum range, high damage and super fast speed. possibly the best melee weapon
Sarleon King: best lance in the game. I don't use lances much though
Empire King: good 1H sword
Fierdsvain King: very powerful 2H war axe

Unless you want to miss out on these you will want to get your renown up fast so you can field a decent size army, and maybe help a dying faction stay alive til you are ready to beat the king. If a faction is dying and it's king has recently been beaten you might get lucky and find him with a small army but there's no quarantee you will capture him when you beat him so you need to be ready to beat him multiple times

Unlike other mods, the "good" lords don't get rep with you just for having high honour. This means you will have to rep grind the slow and tedious way if you ever want to have some good lords in your faction, and that means feast spamming. You can't do that til you have a fief though, but if you make a list of who the good lords are then you can fight and release them constantly for rep and honour now so they can form the core of your kingdom later

Lastly, you may have noticed by most villages give 0-3 soldiers when you recruit. You should rep grind them for honour and so you can recruit troops at a decent pace later. You can't recruit from a faction you are at war with unless the people love you so be sure to rep grind some of the villages of the faction troops that you like. Definetly grind some ravensterns, and probably also some fierdesveins

I recommend you join weak factions as a mercenary then hunt enemy lords. You will get honour, rep and about 20 renown per fight if your forces are matched. This will help you to preserve dying factions til you are ready to fight their king for his legendary weapon. The state will pay for your troops so recruit any knight prisoners from prisoner stacks and look out for adventurers and rogue knights/nobles in taverns. Keep paying for rumours to spawn more armies and get those qualis gems. During peace you should rep grind villages and bet on yourself in tournaments

Frankly this is going to take a long time. You need a good stock of prestige before you can buy a decent supply of honour troops, you need millions in cash to buy up your CKO and you need hundreds of honour to bring the price of honour troops down to a manageable level. The main challenge has already passed by this stage and it becomes a bit of a grind from here sadly

The other thing to do is become Grandmaster of an order. This gives you a castle that no one else can see and various perks like free troops of that order, a place to garrison troops before you get a fief (meaning you can stay as a merc) and a blacksmith that can upgrade item quality all the way to Lordly. You can only join one faction, details here: http://pop3.wikia.com/wiki/Knighthood_Orders

I haven't done this in ages but I remember the last quest is hard. You will struggle with a weak order like Knights of the Falcon so pick a good one. If you are playing with realistic saves this is all the more important since I assume if you fail the quest you lose out on the stronghold forever. Definetly make sure you are super strong before you do this so you can handle the fights safely, especially if you cant save scum. I'll be waiting til I have maxed out my combat skills with qualis gems before I risk it.

Prophesy of Pendor Guide - Mid-Game, Establish Kingdom, work on CKO, get the legendaries

When you have 300-500 honour and some good rep with lords and villages you can start your Custom Knight Order. Just take over a city or castle, preferably Laria or it's surrounding castles and use a qualis gem to start a Custom Knight Order. Ask the Noldor for the secrets of their gear and they will tell you. Start equipping your knights with noldor swords, bows and arrows, and their noble armour. Spirit steeds are nice but their main role is as archers meaning you want to dismount them so give them basic coursers to save cash and get them around the map faster. Use Lethaldiran to train them. You can use qualis gems on your party to give them random increases to either str/agi/cha, int, or their proficiencies meaning Lethaldiran will get higher stats and proficiencies to train the knights better. Still, it will take years til they reach Noldor level or higher

In the meantime consider conquering Cez or Sarleon, then capturing another castle near your main castle before the Empire/Sarleon retakes their city and founding a chapter of the Shadow Legion or Lion there. After that it doesn't matter if you lose the castle, just retake it when you want to convert some troops into honour troops. They will stand in for your CKO til it is ready.

Keep getting those qualis gems, consider making some rune weapons by giving up a gem for the mines map and a couple more for each rune weapon. Use your knights to bring down the kings of dying factions and take their weapons. Maybe conspire to bring down some of the stronger factions like Fierdsvain (very strong) or to weaken Ravenstern/D'Shar enough that you can get their legendary king weapons

Get cash from tournies, farm more rep and honour if you haven't gotten sick of it yet, get more gems, get more renown etc until the Custom Knight Order is ready

Prophesy of Pendor Guide - Late Game, CKO vs the world

And now it's finally time for the payoff. Set your Custom Knight Order loose on the world and take over everything easily. You can recruit any lords who have good rep with you and give them castles or towns so they can support you in sieges or against bandit armies if you want.

You can do this without the CKO but since high honour doesn't give you good lord rep you will have to feast spam which is very annoying to do, easier to just take over the world in one go and then give the castles out to the few lords you got good rep with when honour farming.

All that's left now is to hunt down the bandit armies with your CKO, defeat the Noldor Lords for their weapons if you want. Farm qualis gems til you are 255 in all stats and an actual god. Really it's up to you.

I appreciate any and all advice on how to improve this section, or any strategies I've missed out that work effectively

As challenging as PoP seems at first, it really is just a long grind once you get off the ground, and the potential for Qualis Gems and CKO to break the game is too high. Personally I think CKO shouldn't have been in the game, qualis gems should have been in more limited supply somehow, or maybe made attainable only in the very late game to avoid god players emerging early. Honour troops shouldn't require a renown or honour grind to acquire, maybe make it so the player gets a few knights a week per castle/town and cant recruit more than 50 or something so the game becomes more skill > grind.

[✚ Mariel ✚]

I recommend it when you are up for the challenge!

[Misu]

Fantastic information all through-out, the behind-the-scenes mechanics were especially helpful!
Weighing between some of my choices for certain goals was a bit muddy for me, so this really did help a lot.

I read it up to the PoP section (as I don't play that mod), thanks for writing it.

[Tahu!]

*D'shar have the best slow training spearmen with throwing weapons (or) shields, Sarleon has the best spearmen for armour and being quicker to train, Fierdsvain/Ravenstern have strong 2-handers that rip apart mounted enemies while also doing great against infantry. You can also use non-max promoted troops as well to fill roles, like Sarleon man-at-arms for shield walls (promote into halberdiers), or empire armoured spearmen for anti-cav (promote into gladiators). There's so much good stuff in every faction now.

[Tahu!]

I know there has been significant rebalancing since this guide released, especially with knight orders. Valkyries are actually great if you use horse archer AI since they are maiden adventurers with better armour. Fierdsvain have the best shielded infantry and shielded spearmen, Ravenstern have great archers/horse archers who get 2-handed weapons and good shielded and unshielded troops, d'shar get pretty good everything but the easiest to train mounted troops, empire has the best crossbows with decent infantry protection, sarleon have the cheapest decent archers (with bad melee weapons) and the best mounted cavalry. Every faction does superb in one area and decent in other areas now, and knighthood orders are more flavour while all being good.

[Tahu!]

I very very much recommend it! There's an easy sure-fire method of getting 2 quallis gems fairly easy incase you wanted an early boost in character stats, or (with enough cash) get yourself one emerald/ruby/sapphire weapon of choice. Or early Knight Order. The crossbows Red Brotherhood bandits use are 39 piercing damage, and the damage and accuracy is further reduced by poor horse archery skill. As opposed to the crossbows Maiden and Falcon knights use which do 54 and are wielded by much more skills enemies. Almost all Red Brotherhood knights who wield good armour only have a lance and a bow, and without horse archer AI enabled they will almost only use the lance making them fantastic targets for early armour drops. They wear 35 - 45 - 7 - 46 boot/body/glove/head armour which makes you extremely resistant to crossbows.

[✚ Mariel ✚]

To be fair its an old guide lol. That said, the bandits have crossbows worries me, all it takes is a bit of bad luck for them to take you out. The bandits you fight up north only have very weak bows with low power draw so if you are armoured they cant hurt you even with lucky hits, which means you can solo them for high renown and cash. Maybe I'll give Pendor another try someday, but I always played ironman style so I was very risk averse in my playstyle so I wrote the strategies that worked for me.

[Tahu!]

The Prophesy of Pendor guide is insanely outdated for the current release version in 2020 (3.9.5). Starting the game with good horse riding and archery and fighting red brotherhood and robbers is fairly simple to do early game solo and makes a lot of money. Red brotherhood are mounted crossbow/unshielded 1h wielders, and have gold bars in their loot pools, which are very common with high looting skills and a small enough army. Picking up a cheap low level companion for Looting helps a ton if they have high agility, like Sara the Fox. You don't need to keep her if she conflicts with anyone once you've gotten strong enough to handle minor bandit factions on your own. Hire mercenaries from taverns, seven Mercenary Warriors are really cheap to hire and maintain. There's so much more misinformation that I can't fit it all into one post.

[✚ Mariel ✚]

I can't read that, but it's a good looking guide with nice pictures and diagrams.

[Idollnk]

Гайды, советы, как пройти Prophesy Of Pendor? Все вы найдете в этом руководстве
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1777812425

[✚ Mariel ✚]

You do but I don't know how high. I just maxed it in one go to get it out of the way