Conqueror's Blade MMORPG

The Game Room
1

I’ve gone back and re-read this before posting and acknowledge that it is haphazardly structured and likely doesn’t fully explain or cover much. Sorry. :smiley:

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I found this game on Steam about a month ago now.

Before getting into the game, lemme deal with the issue/controversy: the game’s origins and administration. The game is made by a Chinese studio, Booming Games, and marketed by a Russian company, mygames .com (broken link on purpose eh). It is free-to-play with, of course, “premium” pay-for-cosmetic-stuff-&-XP-bonus options (more on this later in the post).

I have had no problems with the game. Apparently right around when I found the game they started new servers for North America and for the most part they run just fine. I don’t worry about my information being stolen: I play games on a Windows machine that is only for playing games on Steam. The only personal information available is what I have on Steam and what Steam knows about one of my PayPal accounts. I did a review of the forums a couple of days after I started playing showed no comments about being hacked, etc. so I decided to continue playing.

The Game

The game is an MMORPG about medieval siege battles. I’m told this is a combination of Mount & Blade (a game I never got into due to the crappy graphics and clunky interface) and the Total War games.

You create a character (name, likeness) and are asked to choose a starting place, except there currently is no choice: you start in the fief of Turul Varos. There is a brief tutorial where you can try out all of the 12 different weapons available: nodachi, glaive, poleax, long sword and shield, short sword and shield, short bow, long bow, firearms, spear, daggers, etc. All characters can play any weapon at any time and yes, the choice of weapon greatly affects gameplay. Things are very different if you have a gun than if you have a sword, etc. They also teach you how to ride a horse, an essential part of the game.

And then you are off: you are a new warlord, with a small band of troops, and you will be fighting in field and siege battles with other warlords who command their own troops. There are infantry troops, ranged units and cavalry. There are a plethora of siege devices and engines: trebuchets, ballistas, flaming arrow launchers, etc. There are historically-based troops from all over the world: rattan-armored sword fighters and Russian cavalry and Italian hammerers and English archers, etc., etc.

I have been having great fun storming the castles. And defending the castles. And running down rebel camps.

And then I found out that I could leave the fief!

There’s an enormous world, with dozens and dozens of fiefs, all with their own territory and resources that can be gathered and bright back to your fief (for a fee) to make your fief stronger.

Did I mention that? The fiefs can all be controlled by a House. And taxes levied. And defenses bolstered. Because twice a week, other Houses might attack your fief and try and take it away from you. And they might get help from other Houses, form an Alliance and try and crush your House.

So the game has multiple aspects: sometimes you are a person in a town, crafting and talking to people/NPCs, doing quests, etc. Sometimes you are a Hero, leading your troops into battle in open fields or trying to take or defend a city or fortification in a fun battle. And sometimes you are a Hero, leading your troops in trying to actually take control (or keep control) of a fief and all the resources therein.

I have just recently reached Level 100, which is the bottom threshold to be able to participate in all the different types of battles (or games) and to do the twice-weekly Territory Wars.

My first Territory War

I was on back-up (15 per team at a time playing and we had like 30 of us on the team) and when I rotated in, the battle was already happening. We were assaulting. I took a squad of long-range archers around way right and put up ladders to access the top of their fief’s outer wall. Then I stationed the archers where they could cover a crossroads that led to my objective. I then left them, dropped down to the street level and ran thru the market area to the enemy’s supply point. I managed to capture it just before another guy on a horse with a squad of arquebusiers chased me down. Luckily my archers got about ⅓ of the gunners as they went thru the crossroads and I managed to get around enough corners to get away. I then ran straight at the back of their line of defense, slashing the backs of shield troops with my nodachi and trampling them with my horse before I finally was able to break thru and into my own side’s troops so I could get back to my archers. I took away 2 defenders (and their troops) from the front line for about 2 minutes and ultimately were were able to break thru and gain control of the fief. Now every week my House get tribute in the form of levied taxes on all the resources gathered in the territory (yes, we set the tax) and I think we collect a tax on the items made in the town that players buy (kit to resupply troops, artillery, etc.).

Resources

Lots of resources but only a few categories: timber, ore, cotton, food, skins. There’s a bunch of sub-categories within those, but those are the basics. The resources are used by a fief to grow the fief and to make stuff. Each fief has certain troop kits and artillery/siege engines that they manufacture OR that can be manufactured there. I found out the hard way that I cannot just make kits for my Vassal Archers: I have to collect the right resources and then take them to a fief that has the ability to make their kits. Each troop unit requires its own type of kit for repairs and resupply; you can pay bronze coins but that gets expensive.

Gathering resources allows you to do research to more effectively gather resources. There’s something else in the research tree too, but frankly I haven’t managed to unlock past a certain point yet so I don’t even know what I’m working towards in that respect. :stuck_out_tongue:

Premium accounts

The fee for a premium account is really high, like $55/quarter so over $220/year. It offers a huge XP bonus, but here’s the thing: XP in this game is worthless. It isn’t an indicator of anything, really. You have to be 100 to play all the different types of games/battles, but there are no stats that are increasing with each level you gain.

The important thing in this game is Honor, which is used to enhance your troops. A premium account gives you a +30% boost to Honor (and some nifty cosmetics, natch) but near as I can tell, that’s really all you’re getting for your $220+/year: 30% more Honor.

IMO, not worth the money at all.

Battle Pass

Season 6 was winding down just as I started playing; Season 7 starts in 10 days. Like a lot of games, a Season Pass gives you enhanced rewards, cosmetics, etc. for the duration of the season (in this game they seem to be about 3-4 months). I plan on spending the $10 for the S7 pass (if I enjoy a game I have no problem paying something for it) so I’ll let y’all know if I get hacked in the future as a result.

TL;DR

This game is complicated. There is a lot going on and I’m still a noob trying to figure it all out. I was shocked when I opened the world map for the first time, tho. It’s a really big map; it easily takes more than an hour to go from one end to the other even if you aren’t fighting or gathering resources. Right now there are 6 or 7 large Alliances that control 90% of the map; I see more new Houses and Alliances popping up a lot tho as I guess the server is getting more populated.

Oh, and the map isn’t the whole world. I’d say the part of the world that we’re currently playing on is only about 1/16 of the whole world map that is currently viewable.

Anyone else playing this? Anyone even heard of it? I’m happy to try and answer questions about the gameplay, of course.

2

Perhaps my disjointed and haphazard OP just wasn’t enough information. :smiley:

So here’s some pics, showing me standing on the wall of my home fief, Tural Varos and then pulling back to show, eventually, the world map.

Besieging a castle/fort

So here’s a description of what a siege battle is like. I gotta tell y’all: they do a really good job of making you feel as if you are in the middle of a freaking battle. NPC non-coms yelling orders, artillery firing everywhere, explosions that daze you and throw you in the air, getting knocked around by horses…

Besieging a castle/fort

When the battle/game starts, you have a chance to select 1 of 3 Warbands (small groups of different units that you specify) to take into battle with you, as well as a choice of your available artillery/siege weapons.

Your team will be on the outside, with siege towers, battering rams and various artillery pieces placed on the battlefield or on the inside with artillery on the ramparts.

If you’re attacking, you’ll have your troops push the siege towers to the castle walls or push the battering ram to destroy the front gate. Or you can run to the walls to put up ladders and try and storm that way.

The objective is to capture two or more points in succession, like a kind of Team King of the Hill game.

Once the walls are accessible melee troops fight it out for a foothold, trying to push forward so ranged units can add to the fracas. If all your troops in a unit are killed, you can go to a Supply Point and rotate in another unit of troops from your Warband.

You, as a Hero, can really flatten most of the NPC troops, which is a lot of fun. Leaping into a group of enemy troops and laying waste to half of them with 3 swipes of your sword/glaive/poleaxe/nodachi/etc. is awesome movie-magic stuff.

It’s very hard to describe how confusing and how frenetic the battles can be. Sieges are all 15v15, and everybody has their own units to command, which vary from about 16-30 troops per unit. That means there are several hundred moving, fighting individual troops in the game at all times, yelling things, running around, blowing things up and dying spectacularly.

There’s only a handful of people making videos (and at least some of them are or were paid by the studio for their time), but this guy Evo Loz seems to have been paid to try the game and review it and then just kept playing. Here’s a video he just made narrating a siege defense on the Harbor City map; it’s 15 minutes long but the first few minutes will give you the gist of 90% of what this game is about:

3

I have not heard of this game, but your review of it is interesting.

4

Because it is haphazard and poorly structured? :stuck_out_tongue:

I didn’t really intend this as a review or an instructional guide; I was just thinking about a thread to talk about the game and hopefully find someone who had been playing who could answer questions, etc. It’s an extremely complicated game; there are many seemingly independent game mechanics but in reality they all function together. At one level the game is about fief management, at that same level it is also about being a good General and marshalling your martial resources properly.

At my level, it’s mostly about learning to control my troops, improving my troops and gathering resources to help myself, my fief and my House.

Anyway, as soon as I started typing the OP, I realized that most people would be like me a few weeks ago: never heard of this game. So I figured I better do at least some ‘splainin’ but because I didn’t really have a plan for that, I just started rambling. :smiley:

I prolly should have done a better job of introducing the game with stuff from their Steam store page:

Here’s a couple of their promo pics:


And here’s some pics of me at a copper mine with a handful of my troops:


5

Not a lot of interest in this thread or this game, perhaps, but I thought I’d post about the start of Season 7, which began 1 week ago. I understand a lot more of the game mechanics now (I think) and have had my first two real Territory Wars experiences. Hopefully position will help reinforce some of what I’ve learned even if this is the end of the thread.

When Season 7 started, all Houses lost control of all their territory; everything reset to AI control. We also had to choose a starting region. The world is divided in 5 regions at the moment. As you look at the map 2 are on the Eastern side and 3 are on the Western side of the map; you can see these in my post above, although the colors are no longer relevant (they indicate House or AI control).

I was told to choose the region in the north-most of the western column three, Ostaria. This is important because for the first three weeks of the season, all the regional borders are closed and you have to physically be in a fief/village/city/etc. to fight the battle there. If you chose a different region than your House, you are’t going to do any open world quests/battles or TW with your House for 21 days. And it’s going to cost you a bunch of money to relocate, too.

Our first Territory War (TW) was Saturday at 5pm. At 4pm we all got on Discord for mustering and briefing.

On Saturday, we had the aim to take a village on the border. The AI defenses were minimal, so we were sure we could take it. We weren’t sure we could hold it.

When a House takes a territory, there is a cool down timer before the city can be attacked again. This gives the new owners some time to heal & replenish their troops and prepare for any attackers.

We took our village in just a few minutes. When you are inside a city, you are instanced and cannot see or access the world map. So you have to wait until the fight is over and then actually leave the city to see who’s out there.

We started the night with about 60 people. That’s three stacks of people/troops: 5 heroes is a squad, 20 squads is a stack.

When we left the village, triumphant and replete with plunder, we saw that there were about 80 people outside, waiting for the 6 minute cooldown to expire.

This was kind of a problem. See, we didn’t need all 60 to take the village. So 1 stack was at the village (V1), another was attacking a nearby village (V2) a third was waiting to attack a village that a different House had taken and 2 squads (including mine) were roaming around causing trouble so people couldn’t marshal enough units to attack us.

Long story short: we ended up losing V1 on our second defense but we held V2 until the end of the TW, making it ours for at least the next 4 days.

When the TW ended, our Liege told us “take a look South”.

We are in the northern-most region in the west. The central region is currently closed to players. The southern region was 80% one color. The color of our Alliance.

See, it turned out that our leadership had wanted to make a statement. The House was founded in the middle of S6 and had done well but our Alliance is huge and strong, so there was a desire to prove that we were worth having in their Alliance; that we weren’t just riding coattails. So while our Alliance went south to easily control things, we went lone wolf and went to the north. :smiley:

We heard from a few people in our Alliance that offered congratulations on taking the village and putting up a good fight for the one we couldn’t hold on to; that felt great.

As I’ve mentioned, controlling a territory allows us to levy taxes on crafting and purchases done at our village Smith, Armourer, Siege Engineer, etc. It also allows us to collect taxes on resources gathered in our territory. And we can do daily quests at the village which provide materials to improve the defenses (have better AI troops).

So we worked hard for 4 days and got the little village boosted up 1 level before the next TW.

At that briefing, we learned that the House had decided to try something new and had designated some people as group leaders; they were to fill out their 5-person squads on their own. Then we will work together in each TW so we get to know how to cooperate and work as a cohesive unit.

For this TW, we had to defend our village; we had received a Declaration of War from another House so we knew they were coming. And we had decided to make a play for a nearby city instead: they are bigger, have better AI troops for defense, make more money, etc.

We only had 45 people on for this; it was Tuesday. We left a stack at the village. I went with a stack to the city. The 5 or so loose groups harried & harassed and were ready to reinforce if necessary.

The folks who had declared war on our village showed up with 50 people to fight our 20.

While we took the city they got pummeled like crazy for almost 20 minutes of the 30 minute battle timer before finally being irrevocably overrun. Shortly after that we finished up with the city’s AI defenses and the few loose Cohort* people who joined the AI in defending against us.

(*Cohorts are like Houses but they work for the AI. During a TW, they can apparently warp to any AI controlled city where there is fighting; they don’t have to run thru the open world to get there.)

Triumphant, we used our new city’s facilities to heal and restock our troops, then took a look outside. At almost 80 people. Plus the 50 at the village we just lost.

All of our folks from the village raced over to our new city. Fights are only 15v15, so it creates a queue. If you get killed in a TW, there’s no respawn; you need to click “Leave Battle” so the next person, with a fresh set of troop units, can replace you. Within 12 minutes we were pushed back to the city center, the 2nd of 3 capture points (“caps”). In another 4 we were racing for the last cap, trying to prevent them from getting there first and starting the counter.

3 entrances to the area, so we set up shield walls either blocking the doors or directing their troops towards our waiting melee and ranged units (this is called “setting up a killbox”). We have a Battle Commander who’s job is to watch a special view of the fight and call directions to squad leaders. Our BC is relatively new but he did a great job, keeping us moving and rotating new players in so we could keep the doorways either completely blocked or at least control how fast and how many troops came at us. We held. We set up impromptu calvary charges with enemy troops confined to corridors created by shields and pikes. We set up artillery and blasted them as the came thru the gates. We set up archers and rained fire arrows on them from 80 meters away. Our heroes killed hundreds of troops and dozens of enemy heroes. And we held! The city was ours still!

So we looked outside. And saw that the cool down timer would expire 3 minutes before the end of TW. If you can start a fight, you get to finish the fight, in a TW. And now there were a full 130+ people waiting to attack the 45 of us.

So we did it all over again; it was crazy. :smiley: The fight lasted the full 30 minutes (as a defensive win will) and several times we thought we were gonna collapse under the weight of the opposing forces. Each time we managed to get reinforcements in place in time to block their approach and quickly dispose of the opposition. At least once our CB got killed out and had to wait 2 minutes before he could even be eligible to get back in the game. During those times CB2 took over and called the shots while CB1 watched the live stream of the fight on Discord.

TL;DR: we traded our village for a city.

After the fight we had a debriefing and one of the guys from the House that rules our Alliance popped in to congratulate us; he had watched the livestreams and congratulated us on a terrific performance. Our entire Alliance was very, very impressed.

And then he offered us training.

He offered to put the CB in touch with a guy who’s put together a handbook on how to call a battle in Conqueror’s Blade. He gave us the names of various people who are good with different types of weapons and troops units; they’ll teach us how to spec our troops and how to use them effectively. One of the folks in my House gave a class on using cavalry the other night. When I heard the offer for training, including various handbooks and diagrams and charts, I was impressed with the difficulty level of the game and that there’s a bunch of folks who’ve enjoyed this game enough in the past two years that they’ve actually taken it upon themselves to crunch numbers and write manuals; I love that level of commitment/interest/involvement. There aren’t very many games that are easy enough to play casually but hard enough to require in-game classes to master.

Now we’re working to build our cities AI defenses up; we know that we’re gonna get clobbered on Tuesday so were trying to prepare as best we can. I’m working on acquiring all the meta troop units and learning how to use them, getting them leveled up, etc. Doing so includes doing quests and lots of siege and field battles, occasionally an expedition to clear out rebels (and loot some crafting resources).

I don’t know how to link to our livestreams; if anyone is interested I can ask tho; TW is a lot more intense than a regular siege battle.

Any questions?

6

I’m gonna try this today.

7

Okay… that brief post is encouraging. :smiley:

Last Saturday my House found ourselves landlocked; our Alliance (who are all in the South) signed treaty with another Alliance that suddenly made us unable to attack any of the fiefs on our borders. IMO this was a brilliant strategic move on their part. Considering that they dissolved the treaty immediately after the Territory War, I think they thought it was a good idea to make sure that they were free to attack other fiefs instead of just defending against us.

The start of the TW got screwed up. Normally there is a 1-hour “prep” time before the start of the TW. During this time, people form up their Warbands (the troop units you will be bringing with you into battle) and make the trek to where the fight will be. Generally a House will then build either a Field Camp or an Outpost (or both). This allows people to resupply & heal troops after a fight and it gives Influence. Influence is necessary because more than one House might attack a fief; your House could attack and then another could come in and attack you during the fight, etc. In that case, the House with the most Influence in the territory becomes the new owner of the fief.

On Saturday, about 12 minutes into the prep time, the system suddenly announced that TW had started! We were all hanging out at a Fort, waiting, so we just dove right in and attacked. Two other Houses attacked us after we beat the AI but before the fight was declared over, plus Cohorts, but we managed to fight them off and take the Fort. After the cooldown timer was over, we defended it and then the TW was over. It was chaotic mostly because no one had any prep time and people weren’t in place when it started, but our fights were relatively small and tame today.

Yesterday the borders opened. My House only went North so we could make our statement; I relocated from Augolia back to Turol Varos, the central region’s capitol. Tonight will be my first Territory War where my House is actually coordinating with the other Houses in our Alliance; we’ll have somewhere in the neighborhood of 150-200 people on. TV is going to be the capitol city this season, so we are sure to try and take it (our Alliance held it at the end of last season, when I started playing) as soon as possible.

I think that’s still a couple of weeks away tho. I’m pretty sure that tonight we’ll just be sweeping the countryside, conquering fiefs and villages with abandon. I’ve been practicing with my cavalry. :smiley:

8

Territory Wars continue!

The Alliance that my House is part of has managed to conquer nearly all of the central region and we’ve begun creeping into the northern and southern regions as well. The Borderlands, the vast region to the east of the current active map, opens up in a couple of days. Controlling these territories doesn’t provide much Influence or Prestige, but it does give us more resources to control and levy fees/taxes on.

I’ve been granted a title in my House due to the work I put in improving our fiefs and forts and our Alliances territories. When I first saw it I lamented that it smacked of responsibility, but I was assured that it was just a reward for what I was already doing. :smiley:

Our House level will be high enough to allow us to control all but the regional capitol this Saturday, I think. Then we have to wait another week or 10 days before Turul Varos can be attacked. Then my Alliance can just ride out the rest of the season, clobbering upstarts and keeping a lid on those we deem to be a bit too ambitious, eh.

The seasonal units are fun. The Sons of Fenrir (we all call them wolves) are fun and deadly if used correctly; if used poorly they are just a bunch of semi-naked malnourished lunatics. The Berserkers are harder to use, IMO, but I’ve managed it twice now with spectacular results: 8 large brawlers with dual axes just chewing through opponents, all while yelling things like “we were born to die violently!” Shieldmaidens get released in another 10 days or so; everyone is looking forward to them.

Any questions?

10

Territory War tonight!

My House now controls more fiefs and villages than any other House except for the two we are Allied with. :smiley:

Our Alliance controls all of the central region of Ungverija, about half of the southern region of Anadalou and we have a foothold in the north (Ostaria). Our ruling House took control of nearly half of the Borderlands territories by themselves; together I’d say we control about 60% of the Borderlands at the moment.

New Houses and new Alliances are popping up all the time, tho. Some are being formed by veteran players that see that our Alliance might be over-extended trying to defend everything we have, so we are forced to mount ever-larger defensive efforts. One thing that saves us that our House level lets us attack things that now only our own Alliance can attack. This means that once we attack a large city, nobody can come behind us and attack it again; that’s nice peace of mind, eh.

I’ve been promoted from Burgess to Castellan; this puts me in the upper ranks of the House with none of the responsibilities which to me is like winning the lottery while eating pancakes in a flying waterbed.

Shieldmaidens just got released but I haven’t even fully unlocked the Berserkers yet; it’ll be a few weeks before I get the Shieldmaiden Challenges done to unlock them. Word is that they are good but that they won’t change the meta for the game. /shrug

I’m not sure what our plan is for tonight’s TW but I’m thinking that some Houses aren’t gonna be very happy when it ends at 7pm: my Alliance doesn’t really have anywhere to go except into Ostaria. :smiley:

Any questions?

11

Season 7 ended last week.

My Alliance won the season. We controlled about 40% of the total map at the end of the season and all but one two territories in the capitol region. There was a lot of back-and-forth territory grabbing in the last 6-7 weeks of the season, partly fueled by others finally getting their heads wrapped around the fact that a House can’t be just 5 or 6 friends and expect to get and hold anything.

A House is 100 people, max. And an Alliance is three Houses. On a slow night my Alliance was fielding 140 people. On a good night we would have 210-250 people on. Just from my Alliance. It’s a big map, but we aren’t the only Alliance, either. Half a dozen friends are gonna just get trampled underfoot as the cavalry runs thru the streets, eh.

Anyway, people finally started to wise up. Houses began to merge with each other and new Alliances started popping up that actually had the people to defend a few territories, or at least make a good attempt. And that means people are tied up fighting instead of ransacking the countryside, so sometimes the new Alliances & Houses would hold some. They might lose 2 but hold 1 (or vice-versa), for instance.

The upshot of this for everyone is that we all had lots of really, really good fights in Territory Wars for the last 8 weeks of the season. The fights for the capitol cities were epic, with one of the three, Augolia, not falling at all the entire season (my Alliance took and held the other 2, eh).

There was lots of drama. Midway thru a TW we had about one-third of the House leadership, including founding members, leave the House and start a new, competing one. We were actually fighting them before the TW was up (they lost).

And my Liege quit with about 3 weeks left in the season. He had gone back to school and needed to focus on that. After a couple of days we sorted it out and a new Liege took over, she did great and has been working on getting the House organized and instructed so everyone can work together even better next season.

So in the end I got a spiffy crown (cosmetic) to wear, to show off to everyone in Siege Battles, Field Battles, Fief Raids, Expeditions, Deathmatches, etc.

And we took a group picture that was submitted for the official website; I’ll post a link when they update that webpage.

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Random thoughts:

The Season Battle Pass was a bargain at $10. There’s quite a bit of cosmetics and a couple of emotes that are fun but you also get more of the season currency, which enables you to buy other cosmetics, not just for your armor and weapon, but also for your horse and for your troops. And there’s bonus XP, Honor, etc. stuff available. The Battle Pass definitely worked the way it was supposed to and created the feeling that I was getting something regularly as I played.

Which is good because: the game is a grind. Even I got burned out a bit with 3 weeks left in the season. I stepped way back for 10-12 days and then rallied as we closed it all out.

OTOH, like with the Battle Pass, the game does reward grinding. It took me weeks and weeks to unlock the Symmachean Stalwarts (the best shield unit in the game ATM). It has taken me months to put Honor points into the Unit Tree, which improves the baseline stats of units.

But, after all the work: I can kick ass on the battlefield. I have most of my troops maxxed out on level and I’ve started to replace Doctrines (bonuses for troops units that customizes them) that are below Epic level now. My stats in battles show it too: I manage to get MVP in lots of 10v10 and 15v15 field battles now and occasionally in 15v15 sieges.

The cosmetics in the game are good. They really favored browns, red and greys in many seasons, going for realism, I suppose. But it seems they’ve realized that the game was really drab and lately they’ve been adding in blues and greens and other brighter colors. I’m kind of amazed at how complicated some of them are: my Odin’s Armor set has multiple dangly bits that all move independently as I move, in addition to the cape and fur shoulders. Same with the horse amor sets: lots of dangly, streaming bits that are all animated to move with the wind, etc.

———

So I decided to stick around for Season 8.

Season 8: Dynasty will start 8 July 2021 and last until October (I think). The theme will be Chinese and new troop units include bo staffs. It looks like they’ll be adding the Pike as a Hero weapon, too, so now there will be 13 different weapons classes.

Quick note: each weapon class has two Ultimate abilities they can unlock. A Hero can only use one of those at a time, tho; I mean only one can even be loaded for use at a time. It takes Skill Points, earned as you fight using the weapon, to unlock weapon skills. It takes Skill Points and Skill Pages to unlock each of the 3 tiers of each Ultimate ability. 5 Pages for the first, 20 for the second and 35 for the last. I still have two Ultimates to unlock on the weapon that I’ve been using all season, mostly because the Pages don’t drop all that often.

The regions we are in are all going to change for Season 8; the past two season have been in these same 3 regions so it’ll be really cool to move to a different part of the huge world map.

If you are a gamer who likes the grind, who likes gradual, incremental improvement to your character, you might enjoy CB. Also if you like teamwork: this game requires more cooperation and coordination than anything I’ve seen outside of EVE Online. I gave up my officer-ness at the end of the season, but what I saw was a lot of effort being done offline for both diplomacy and battle planning. We had Power Point presentation on Discord to discuss the plan, which we would then take back to our squads and have our own impromptu PP presentations to show them what our part in the plan was. There were times when this was very detailed, with maps and diagrams showing exactly where each person’s troops should be and in what formations.

Our new Liege, in fact, put together an orientation PP and has been requiring all House members, even vets like myself, to sit thru it so we are all on the same page for terminology, etc. We have training sessions several times a week on shot-calling a battle, cavalry, etc. There’s a massive amount of effort made every week which is just amazing IMO.

Anyway, as I said, I decided to return for Season 8. Hopefully our Alliance an hold it together again and dominate the server for another few months. Maybe I’ll get another spiffy crown. :smiley:

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TL; DR: My Alliance won. The game is complicated and hard but I find it fun and rewarding, too. I’m going back again.

———

Any questions?