Keeping in mind that with a sandbox game like this everyone plays it in a different way, I think for your main character charisma is far and away the most important stat, and leadership the most important skill. Sure in the field it's pretty easy to slaughter the AI, but if you are outnumbered by enough a few extra points in tactics isn't going to save you from being overwhelmed, and more importantly sieges generally come down to pure attrition where numbers are king... it all depends on what your goals are.
As far as kingdom management goes, I usually play using the Sword of Damacles mod. It adds an entertaining end game, new units, updated campaign map, mercenary factions, player owned kingdoms, laws, edicts, and lots of extra screens to help with kingdom management.
Which is too bad, really. I too rather like the idea of becoming as much leader and diplomat as sword-wielding warrior, but having to do everything "by hand" (like travelling to and fro my castles to ferry my troops around) really kills that part of it for me.Originally Posted by caesarbear
EDIT: Sword of Damocles looks interesting (and most importantly with a better interface). I'll give it a whirl over the weekend. Thanks for the tip Sepiche.
Conveniently, having more leadership and more troops reduces the odds of your support guys mixing it up, when they're stuffed at the back of a deeper bench. Synergy.
Hmm, I seem to be having an issue with the size of my party. It says I have 50/58 members (room for 8 more) but I can't hire anyone else; it always says I'm full. Has anyone ever come across this?
how many different types of soldiers do you have
Don't ask me about the specific game mechanics, but I think there are some parameters beyond basic party size. I do know there are limitations on how many troops of a specific type you can have (you may also be unable to upgrade some troops even though they have enough XP).
I believe this "feature" was removed in a patch. There used to be a limit on max units per type.
Are you sure you don't have 50 soldiers with 8 wounded at the moment?
Oooh, Sword of Damocles looks awesome.
Ok, spent way too much time with Sword of Damocles and I haven't even managed to get to the good part. I've flailed around for about a month, in-game time, before I figured out a strategy I think will work.
The problem: Your cheap and powerful starting troops can't be replaced until you found a country of your own. Your starting army is not powerful enough to take a fortress, even if you pad it out with farmers. Upgraded farmers turn into mercs which quickly become very expensive in upkeep.
The solution: Money. Pick a faction you don't mind pissing off and loot their villages. The goods from a village should net you about 2500 monies which is plenty. Do that a couple more times and you have enough money to both cover your expensive upkeep AND hire an entire army of mercs from one of the merc factions. You might need to do a mission or two for them.
It looks like this was probably the case. I was able to hire some horsemen and archers but no more infantry. Hmmm. No bother, I'm concentrating on getting NPC's to fill out my party now since they don't die as often. I just got myself a little village and I'll continue attacking caravans and rival lords until I can field about 100 troops. After that I'll ask some friendly lords to come with me to take a castle.
Are there any known crash to desktop issues with Sword of Damocles? It keeps crashing on me in battle; no idea what's causing it, and I've never had problems with core M&B or the Prophecy of Pendor mod.
Try turning down the graphics, that fixed it for me.
I've had two crashes when trying to load save games but they loaded normally on a restart, and once when trying to look at the tavern mercenary troop tree at the strategy advisor. I've also seen a bunch of error messages in game where it appears random quests were supposed to trigger but they didn't affect anything as far as I can tell.
It's not perfect but it's pretty stable.
I hope the mods still work in warband; the M&B mod scene is one of the best in PC gaming today IMO.
It worked! Thanks!
Ok, so I started the game up last night and was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to pick up. I really liked how you could move around in the game world quickly (big fan of fast traveling). However, it 'seems' that the game is pretty repetitious. As in, go to villages to recruit troops and perhaps a quest. Village quests usually involve get me this or that. Go to the lords castles and get mail carrier quests (sometimes collect taxes, or get this fugitive, etc.). Rinse and repeat. The combat was fun. But again, it was really rinse and repeat, not tactical. Drive your horse past enemy and swing at the right moment.
It was a living world alright, but nothing focused. Just a lot of squabbling. Oblivion had interesting mini-quests (loved the painting one), but this game seems less so. I completely understand that this is a different game that appeals to different people, but I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing anything.
I know that someone mentioned castle sieges are awesome, but on the whole, the gameplay reminds me of a grinding MMO. And, for me, I do not like doing the same thing hour after hour. You can basically shut your brain off with this game and go through the motions it seems. Note that I did love Spaceranger 2, that is a bit grinding also, but the quests were varied and fun, and I guess I thought maybe this game would be almost a fantasy version.
Maybe I need to play with a mod? I really like the 'sound' of the kingdom management stuff, perhaps their is also a mod for varied and interesting quests??
Jorune
ps. Gamersgate has the game on sale for $5
It seems the mod added too many new items/textures and the game just can't handle it.
I know what you're missing. You forgot to say "WOOOOOOOO!!!!!"
Exactly. If you enjoy the, well, game you might find it fun! "Man, Conan sucks. All he ever does is fight hordes of foes and pile up bodies at his feet. Total grind. Yawn."
I think you trying too hard to make M&B a RPG. It really isn't, for many traditional RPG aspects.
M&B is mostly a simulator/sandbox. It's like a flight simulator, landing and takeoff is the game. M&B: Riding your horse and hacking and slashing is the game.
A couple of specific things:
1) combat gets more nuanced as your opponents get tougher. Timing your swing, dodging arrows, and controlling your horse speed all at the same time become more complicated once you're taking on more than looters. Hell, protecting your horse becomes an issue. I'm sure the knights of yore considered the constant sword practice to be MMO-grindy, too.
2) managing your army gets more complicated as you start to take on mixed-arms forces. That 100% heavy infantry force that worked so well in the beginning starts getting torn apart.
3) running around trying to put out fires in your kingdom of choice while still prosecuting an invasion into a target nation is challenging- doing the little quests isn't.
4) I don't think I really did any quests for a long time, and even then, I pretty much only did my faction quests (part of being a good vassal). No herding cattle for villagers required.
If you find the basic combat to be too boring, try creating a horse archer character. Man, that takes some practice (and skill points) to manage. But the fun of thonking an arrow into the neck of charging knight is pretty unbeatable.
Did you raise the difficulty to full damage for you and your companions, and increase the Combat AI from the lowest level? M&B is different when the enemy can do the same things to you.
Bah! Heavy Nord infantry is the future!
I recall one (of many) memorable moments in M&B where me and my heavy infantry/archer force of 25 held the line against roughly 80 Sea Raiders. I ordered hold fire after we had dispatched the first wave. Waited until the next wave came close enough and ... it was, sniff, a thing of beauty. When M&B gets too easy for ya, go on foot and fight like a man. Or a woman. If that's too easy, only use twohanders and hunt Forest bandits for a while.
I do use a few house rules, one of them is that I don't sell armor or weapons to villages since that really speeds up the economy breakdown.
Here's the released mods forum from the M&B site if anyone's interested:
http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/board,63.0.html
I haven't even played a fraction of them, but there's a lot of variety to be had. Some just expand the base game, some are more story/quest oriented, some are total conversions.
What Stepsongrapes said.
It took me quite a while to figure this out too, but tt's all about living in the moment and enjoying each battle. If you're not enjoying riding around and slicing your blade through someone's face, then this just isn't the game for you. There is no real end-game.
For the most "pure" experience, I suggest the 1257 Edition mod. It's a more realistic and austere mod, but I found it to be perfect for the pure fun of battle, and rather well balanced too (specifically it gimps the overpowered Swadian heavy cavalry).
Agree completely. No plate mail really makes for a more interesting game. Anyone tried the RCM version? (RCM = Real Combat Module)
A very good point.
With difficulty up, riding around without a shield becomes a lot more dangerous, when one well placed arrow can take you down (as you would suspect in real life). Instead, you have to depend on your troops and isolate targets, rather than charging at a cluster of enemies.
Huh? What?
Oh look, I can post! Yey.
I'm sort of a m&b fanboy. I'm 30, and have been pc gaming for a long while, so I tend to get bored fast with games. I found m&b and it struck a chord with me, bought it immediately, and it's always been on my desktop for me to fire up for 30 min or so, jump into a battle, and kill bots. I think a lot of the map/features you see now in the 'core' game were sort of tacked on features. I found the game when it was in .808 on the main page so played that version for a while...but when I found the forums and links to the .9's there were a bunch of new features, bigger map etc.
Anyway the point is, as other people said here, that all that stuff is really the sandbox for getting into the battles. I think if you don't enjoy the mechanics of fighting in whatever method (and there are many ), then the game will grow old. It's about as sandboxy a game as you can find now a days.
For those of you who missed it, you can play the warband expansion online now if you have a m&b key. Just look on the taleworld forums for a download link. There are a lot of little changes in warband, but at the heart it is still the same game ( I haven't tried to get my hands on SP beta yet ).
But yeah, playing real people in the game is great. When I played original m&b I was really unaware of all the great little things going on in combat. I didn't even know there were different swing directions to block. Anyway I honestly don't think there is an online melee game out there that comes to close to great fights I've been having in warband.
I have some videos up of myself dueling (player organized 1v1 fights) some of the players in beta that I've been putting up. This is my last one vs a very talented player in the beta... it's on my own map though so is a little non standard. I think this gives a real taste of the infantry gameplay in warband and hopefully will entice you guys to check it out at:
the you watch tube site with /watch?v=kajtlvz1ze8 (can't link due to being post number 1 :) )
The dev team has been really responsive to player changes in beta, though they are nearing release now so probably will be skipping out on anything radical, I think the people here at qt3 would still be able to give some really accurate feedback.
Anyway, I full confess that m&b turned me into a super fan boy even though I tend to be really really cynical about games now a days. If you like this puppy SP, try the warband beta, it'll only cost you time.
You ordered? I played through the tutorials, I didn't even know you could actually order your troops around. They just seemed to go off and do there own thing. I was always pissed that my 3 cavalry mercs would charge ahead and get themselves killed before my main mob got into position to attack. Where can I learn about controlling my forces in combat?
Jorune
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote