War... war never changes.
We begin today in the city of Ortysia, exactly where we left off last time... and it's time to smash some Western Empire faces.
Right out of the gate, we toss 1871 troops against our mighty enemy force of... 40?
Listen, I never said it'd be fair.
Our second party of enemies is another mercenary group - Chandion of the Eleftheroi. They pose no real danger to us with the mere 36 units they bring to the table, but I've found that any little parties I can take out helps in the long run. One less group of seasoned vets to join a larger army and ambush us.
Which does happen a couple of minutes later. We're sieging Lageta, and all of a sudden a force of 1100 is marching up to pin us between the city walls and their army. Generally, when this happens, the enemy force has a few little skirmishing parties that are uncoupled from the main force - this helps tie up our forces by sacrificing an army of theirs long enough for the main force to join a battle.
So, we'd like to avoid that if we can - and I leave the army to take care of some of the skirmish parties.
We manage to catch them without too much hassle. They're both mercenary companies, but together they put us to a nearly equal balance of power. Added to this, my army is going to be suffering the penalty of Disorganized for 5 hours - much longer than this battle will take. I'm not too concerned about this right now as parties of Embers generally have more bark than they do bite... but it's something to keep in mind.
I notice on a review of the video - I actually win this fight without even giving commands to anyone but the infantry unit. If this was a battle with an actual army that wasn't comprised of fairly weak units... I'd have been in trouble.
Even so, we lose all of 10 units, with 14 wounded, and it leaves us able to upgrade 35 troops to higher-tier soldiers. Heck yes.
Of course, taking out 100 or so troops is valuable, but things are still not looking great for our army, which is about to face around 1400 units.
So, we decide that discretion is the better part of valour, and head out of that mess. There's a chance that if we tossed our lot in with the army that we'd bring enough balance to squeak out a win... but it'd be a tight matchup and I'm not exactly ready to lose to the goddamn Empire again.
A stream of units coming down to smash my ally army confirms my suspicions, reinforcing that leaving was the correct move.
We take a moment to hit a nearby town and do a bit of trading, resulting in a tidy 14,000 Denars in our pocket. And, with a bit of time on our hands, we do some smithing which results in some nice new part schematics for later use!
We also take some time to review and update our skills. We're pretty focused on Intelligence, Social, and Endurance this playthrough... so we add a few more points to Int, bringing it up high enough that we can continue to snap up a ton of Stewardship and Medicine experience.
We finally rejoin the war effort in defence of Thractorae Castle, which the uppity Empire has decided to try their luck at taking.
It goes poorly for them.
And we get to walk away with some named character to ransom! Always a nice little payday for those folks.
Immediately after this dust-up, we get a notification that Ortysia is under attack. Which is completely unacceptable. Ortysia is the line in the sand. Nobody takes this goddamn city without my say-so.
They manage to take the city, but they aren't able to hold it and we flip it right back to our side a scant few days later.
It's at this point that I've made a decision. Professions
It's time we abandon our Mercenary ways, and finally settle down for some Vassalage... at least for now. (See, @incublus, I told you we'd settle down with a kingdom soon!)
We swear to pay homage to our King, and in recognition of our new oath and our value to their cause, King Derthert - long may he reign - gives us a gift.
The first part of this is 6 new highly-ranked cavalry units. A single Vlandian Champion, and five new Vlandian Knights. Both are pretty solid heavy cavalry, so this is a great gift so far.
Our second part of the gift is a new Two-Handed sword, Sentinel, and a Spear Wall Banner.
The banner ends up being worth about 7,000 Denars, and the Two-Hander ends up being a whopping 20,000 Denar. It's a good sword, don't get me wrong... but shit, 20k? You know I'm selling that blade.
Finally - it's not officially part of the gift, but we do get a nice little surprise as the newest member of the faction:
Ortysia, the city we've spent blood and sweat defending twice since coming back to our homeland... is ours!
Finally, for the first time this campaign, we find ourselves as the owner of a fief. We're right on the front-lines of a war, but hack, that's not so bad. We know well enough how to garrison a city to make taking it a challenge.
This provides us with a few new tabs, one of the important ones being the Manage Town interface, where we can guide the build order of city projects.
With this new base of operations, we decide to just go full-on crazy and we purchase the local Oilpress:
And immediately also set up a caravan from town.
I stupidly fall for the trap of choosing to form "a better caravan" which, from experience later is a waste of money. Stick with the default 15,000 Denar caravan, as the 'better units' provided by this method are never replaced once they die. So you end up paying 7500 Denars extra for a few units that may provide a tiny bit of protection in the first battle they get into, but nothing after that. Totally not worth it in the long run.
I don't want to leave you on a downer note though - getting a city, an oilpress, and a caravan all in one swoop as a fantastic victory for our Clan, and leaves us in a really great place for the future.
Until next time friends, Happy Gaming!
Check out the video! The link is below.
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