So I’m playing Mount & Blade Warband, and thus far it’s been extremely fun. However, I’m really having trouble figuring out what the best balance of skills and statistics is for my character.
My current army consists mainly of Rhodock crossbowmen and sharpshooters, with a line of nord infantry and a few swadian knights to screen the archers from enemy infantry. I’ve found that the best way my PC can help is by tanking for the archers, either by distracting the enemy’s front line on horseback and leading them on a chase while my archers whittle their numbers away, or if the terrain is appealing by simply getting off my horse and laying about wildly with a 2-handed sword until everything that isn’t filled with arrows has been neatly chopped into pieces.
Right now my statistics are 11 STR, 20 AGI, 6 INT and 7 CHA. At this point should I still be throwing points into AGI (and occasionally STR) to further boost my infantry skills, or should I give it a rest in favor of raising some of the leader-only CHA and INT skills?
Depends on what you want to do: If you prefer being a complete badass in melee combat, keep cranking up that STR and AGI. If you prefer the over-arching “run an empire” part, get your CHA and INT up.
Personally I always enjoyed having as large an army as my CHA would allow full of Nord infantry and Rhodock crossbowmen to do most of the killing, while I rampaged around on horseback with a lance.
Well I’ve wasted almost 10 levels in STR and AGI so far, so I think I’ll keep on that and try an empire building guy next time- thanks for the feedback!
I don’t know if you’ve tried Warband yet, but they seriously nerfed lances and mounted combat in general: they’re now piteously ineffective unless you practice a lot, and at least for me, archery and unmounted melee are now equally or more effective.
Oh yeah, definitely playing Warband. I didn’t actually notice much difference with lances except that you have to aim, which IMO makes it much more fun.
Also, you can turn on cheats, go to the character screen, and push ctrl+x a bunch of times to level up really fast if you want to restart a character and bring it up to your current level.
My understanding of lances in Warband is that in multiplayer you have to press a key to couch the lance, making it much more tricky; in single player you can set it to work like this or to automatically couch like in pre-Warband. You still have to aim it with the mouse, which is tricky. I haven’t really gotten the hang of it, but I’ve gotten much better at ride-by swings with a big ol’ sword of war.
You can turn on a few cheat codes, but if you really want to cheat, you can “export” your character into a text file, edit your stats in the text file (even to the point of maxing everything out), and “import” your edited character. It’s a lot faster than the codes. It’s pretty fun for dicking around in single player mode.
Oh, and if you really really want to goof around, you may want to check out the TweakMB utility. You can raise the skill cap up to 15 (it’s normally 10), alter how maximum army size is calculated, whether your named companions bicker with one another, and a bunch of other simple things.
Man, I’m gonna want to start a new game now. I kind of messed up by my old custom-tweaked module with troop editor (different utility); I tried to make my Swadian Knights switch over to blunt weapons, and ended up kind of disarming them.
Aww, I finally joined the faction I wanted, and they gave me a crappy fief in the middle of enemy territory that promptly got re-taken.
Ah well- I’m married to one of the Rhodock marshall’s daughters so I probably won’t bother to rebel, but I’m highly tempted to blow off the “follow general X” quest I’ve been stuck on for 15+ days and just go around taking castles in revenge until I get some fiefs back.
