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GOG is having a 60% off sale on everything they sell owned by EA. Including everything made by Origin, such as the entire Ultima series.
Ultima IV is already free for anyone with an account on the site, but this is worth telling people about anyway.
> playing Mount & Blade
> Lord A gives me a mission to diss Lord B to his face and duel him
> win the duel, gain favour with Lord A
> Lord A asks me to diss Lord B to the king's face
> diss Lord B to the king's face, gain favour with Lord A
> ask Lord A why he hates Lord B so much
> both are courting the same lady
> the one I've been sneaking in to see for the past few months
You know, it occurs to me that I don't actually know a thing about Mount & Blade despite hearing about it a lot. What's it like?
^As I understand it's a Medieval Combat and Politicking Simulator. There's a demo for Warband on Steam, but personally I couldn't get past the controls.
Mount & Blade is a medieval warfare simulator set in an elseworld Europe, Calradia, so there's an excuse to change the names of places around and have a different map without introducing magic and the like. There is no objective goal in the game, although many players consider the win condition to be dominating the entire map with your own kingdom or leading an existing kingdom to victory. In any case, the world is populated by a scattering of villages, castles and towns belonging to a range of various lords from various factions. At the beginning of the game, every major faction is neutral to you, but bandit and raider factions will be hostile, making the wilderness threatening to begin with. To survive, you have to build up your own force of troops and eke out a living however you choose.
When you're renowned enough and have good enough faction relations, you can become a vassal of a faction, essentially being granted a noble title along with lands. It's then up to you to defend those lands, and it's probably in your best interests to gain more; when you're part of a faction, other factions they're at war with will treat you (and your lands) as hostile, and each property you own brings in revenue. In turn, this can be used to hire and supply more troops. If you begin a rebel faction and become a rogue monarch, however, you have the option of luring enemy vassals over to your side (along with their lands) and/or making named characters in your party ("companions") into vassals with their own armies and lands.
How you accomplish all this, if you even choose to try playing the game along those lines, is entirely up to you. And it makes a difference, because the game is both a third-person action game styled around medieval combat and a strategy game. The way you build your character, the companions you hire and the troops you choose are all important factors, but the way you play with those factors in mind is even more critical to your success. Don't have much cavalry, but you're fighting Khergits? Try to lure them into a forest or along mountainous terrain and order your troops to hold position in a high place; you'll sap all the momentum out of their horses and allow your heavy infantry to defeat them where they might have otherwise died under an ocean of spears and hooves. Fighting Nords in a siege battle? They'll always dominate close quarters siege fighting, so get a bunch of archers and crossbowmen in order to shoot them down while out of range of their (stupidly powerful) throwing weapons.
Also, the modding community is ridiculously massive and productive, and there are a host of both complete conversion mods and others that expand the gameplay in some sense. Prophesy of Pendor is a great mod for when you're experienced with the main game, although very difficult.
You lost me at "without magic".
It's almost necessary for the game to be non-magical for a variety of reasons, the most important being that its lack of magic is part of the point. Mount & Blade is only a "fantasy" game by the technicality of not taking place in actual medieval Europe; otherwise, it's a sandbox medieval warfare game. There's also the fact that it's an indie game and therefore has to choose its focuses carefully, and developing a magic system that fits (if that's even possible considering the general approach of the game) would be a significant drain on the limited resources the development team have. And really, it benefits from not having any magic because magic often provides an easy fix to the limitations inherent in a medieval setting. Mount & Blade is partially about dealing with those limitations and overcoming them, so giving players access to magic missiles or healing spells or buffs or whatever else would detract from the general sense of desperation that comes with its military campaigns.
Also, magic would be obsolete because the game has worked out how to handle things like healing and stupidly high damage within its existing framework anyway. Anything more powerful than the already dominating cavalry lance charges would be silly, because having a good polearm proficiency and hitting an enemy at full gallop with a couched lance is almost always a guaranteed kill in any case. And then you can have as many knights/lance cavalry as you can earn, meaning that if you play your resources right, first contact with an enemy on the battlefield will generally end up in a shitload of corpses (and probably not yours).
Yeah. A game without magic? Borin'.
I was kidding, Alex.
I'll give it a shot.
So...there are two Mount and Blade games with demos on Steam. Which one should I go for?
Warbands is generally considered the best. And I agree.
^^ Yeah, but still.
Okay. Downloading it.
Did the tutorial. So far, so good.
Which faction area did you choose to begin in?
Swadia.
So...you know how it said that playing as a female or peasant makes the game harder?
I took that as a challenge.
It only makes a difference during the early game, and it pretty much means you'll have a harder time winning privileges and getting nobles to take you seriously. By the time you're up and running with a complete army, some companions and the gear you want, the difference won't be significant.
Also, by being in Swadian territory, you can gain access to the insane Swadian Knights. These are considered the best heavy cavalry in the game, and unhorsed, can compete with the heavy infantry of most other factions. They have a pretty significant upkeep cost, but if you can pay it, they'll pull you through battles against insane odds. I've taken fifty men against three hundred and come out victorious because of Swadian Knights. Just keep in mind that they're at the last tier of the Swadian troop tree; you'll want to upgrade along the heavy infantry path until you get the option of Man-at-arms, which is the "basic" Swadian cavalry unit (despite still being better than most of the cavalry of other factions), when then upgrades to the knight.
How long does the demo last?
Downloading the Warband demo myself.
Something I remember from playing it myself, last time, is that having a band of around a dozen is insufficient after a while, but I simply could not get the gold to afford to hire more, or better units. I have no idea how to get more gold.
^^ Until level 7 or 8, I think? You have the full game, essentially; it just locks out individual characters once you're at one of those levels until you validate your game.
^ Winning battles, taking loot and selling it, buying businesses, owning land and probably a few more ways. The best thing to do is to find something that works for you, milk it, and investigate other sources of income in the meantime. Also, if you sign up as a mercenary captain under a faction's banner, you get consistent weekly income. This isn't significant in the vanilla game, but it takes some pressure off until you find more efficient means of income.
Experimenting around with the tutorial shows... I suck at both the melee combat in the game and the horseback combat, but I'm somewhat okay with bows and crossbows, so those it is.
Putting three points into Looting has led to me finding much more loot than I got last time I played. I can actually have an income now!
I also saved a village from bandits. (I had 5 recruits, due to a battle just before in which 8 of mine had fought 12 looters.) 14 bandits versus 5 recruits, me, and a trillion farmers.
It went well, and I got +1 honour.
Don't forget to use battle commands, which can be accessed with the backspace key. These are critical in some scenarios, especially if you're an archer character; you can have your other archers sit at the top of a hill while your infantry stand on the rise itself, acting as a buffer that your archers can still easily shoot over.
Also, if you want a lot of missile infantry, you'll want Rhodok, Swadian and/or Sarranid troops. The Rhodoks and Nords have the best close combat infantry.
That would have been helpful about five minutes ago
So, yeah, with my initial forces dead, I'm basically giving up.
It's just a fact of the game, and given your short play span so far, it should be easy to recover from that. Even easier if you go to a lord, ask for a quest and they ask you to join their faction as a mercenary.
Rockstar could make a fun Medieval game.
hahaha
I have since been captured by soldiers three times. I have not seen a single bandit group with less than 7 soldiers, and I managed to recruit two before bandits attacked me and I lost them.
I managed to recruit five soldiers since. I'm going to go back to Praven and beg the local lord who's pissed off at me to like, give me a job or something, so that hopefully I can turn those five soldiers into something actually useful so I can go and recruit more people.
Wait, stroke of luck: Went to Balanli before Praven and managed to recruit 4 more soldiers. I could hold my own against a small group of looters now.
Okay, bigger stroke of luck. Went to Veidar, the first town I helped rescue from bandits, and 14 volunteers joined me.
I'm low on funds, but hopefully, I'll find some Looters and fill up this money bag soon.
Unfortunately, no lords are at home anywhere ever. This is ridiculous.
Found King Harlaus (out on the fields).
I asked him if he had any tasks for me. He asked me to go kill some bandit halfway across the map; I suspect he just didn't want to deal with me.