We all have a game that we are getting obsessed with, at least for a while.
Lately for me that game was Mount and Blade: Warband
Even through my PC can run latest games at high settings, I was more attracted to this one and I don't really know what exactly excites me about this game.
First of all I'm a big fan of medieval era, the weapons used at the time, kings, knights, royalty, duels, all that stuff. And I know that you are asking why don't you play Kingdom Come: Deliverance or Mount and Blade II: Bannerlord. Well Bannerlord wasn't been on my priority buy list, as for Kingdom Come: Deliverance, maybe it will be the next one.
Back to this game, the battle gameplay is really simple, but enough to enjoy it. Just go there, kill every single enemy. The largest army wins, or if you apply my tactic, drag the enemy in the open field and the army with the most knights wins.
But, until you recruit this army, you have to level up your character and your budget. And this is will take a while if you chose the path to not user cheats, which are included literally in the game settings.
I think I have restarted the game to fay 0 at least 10 times, until I found the right way to build your character and army without using any cheat, cause I wanted a challenge.
At the beginning every lord in the game will treat you like a peasant, even if you chose to be a nobleman without land during character creation, some of them will say you just stole your banner after killing his previous owner.
The battles in the beginning are are hard, even a band of 10 bandits can defeat you, and you will become their prisoner, for what reason, I never knew because the bandits can't do anything with their prisoners.
This may be just a feature to determine you to chose your battles, because you lose time and money, not mentioning your entire party will be killed or captured, during the time when your a prisoner.
Going further, the best strategy for long time is to buy a local business in every town you can. This will help your early and late budget, as you will need to spend a lot of money on basically everything.
The arena is yet another fast way to get some money, if you don't have any mission and you really need them, there is one in every town, but in this one you really have to fight good, cause you don't have wear any arrmor, and you only have some practice weapons that don't do too much damage.
You can do the mercenary path, you will receive weekly payment to assist military campaign for any of the factions, if you're doing good enough, you will get an offer to become an vassal, you will receive the poorest village from his entire kingdom for being loyal. You can of course conquer other castles during was and ask to hold them in their name. This is not however a great path, cause the other factions will declare war on you just because your faction became too powerful, and, with some bad luck, you will be at war with everybody and for this to be even worse, kings sometimes accuse their vassals of betrayal, making the faction week, conquered by others, can be in a worse situation than the one in the start of the game.
A longer path, but the one that everyone choses nonetheless is creating your own faction, by attacking another and successfully conquer one of their castles. This is not easy because until you can hold one, no lord will follow you, leaving you alone to face the entire army of the faction you've just attacked.
I found out the best strategy would be to improve your relationship with as many lords as possible, because after you manage to persuade a lord to follow you, you can no longer do missions for him, and the relationship will entirely depend on your rulership.
Fast forward to the moment when you have to give a new lord some land, so he can have a home, all of the others will hate you for not consulting them.
For me keeping happy all of the lords was the hardest thing in this game, learning about their rivalries, their ambitions, support their friends. But it was also rewarding, as you can assign a Marshall, and they will conquer new castle, defend your kingdom, and organize feast where you can just go and everybody will cheer your name.
You still need to manage them, cause to give you one example, they just leaved the town of Narra, which was right at the border, to attack a castle in the middle of the enemy territory, like what was on their mind, It was a castle with beautiful walls, they had some new recipe of beer?
But before leading one of the largest army's in the game, I found the most satisfying screen in this game to be when a faction is finally defeated, one big step towards becoming the king of all of the Calradia.
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Cheers,
