First time on the map, was incidentally on the domination map which meant couldn't really expand and on year 6 I was attacked and crushed.
I love the medieval unit card art style, just like how they did it with the Charlemagne DLC for TW Attila. Tempted to try this game out one of these days.
See I tried to be the villainous manor lord even selected a sinister picture but I was a fool, also farming seems like something you really should only get into in the mid game since you can get by on foraging and burrage plots, planks form the backbone of a solid economy anyways.
Haven't played this yet, but those are all classic staples of the genre. And also there's going to be one good (probably charcoal making) that's so economically efficient that you need to build your whole economy around it.
So far I've found that trading is balanced in such a way that you can't just set up an industry to fund everything, you need to be shifting through different products to avoid flooding the market, you reach a point where you literally can't export a good because there is no demand for it.
I'm really loving that this game has some challenge to it. Like I'm getting annoyed that the computer player is claiming new territories that I wanted. I tried to challenge him on one to see what happened and he rolled out with a sizeable retinue and around three mercenary units, absolutely dwarfing what I had access to.
I think clearing camps is really important, but you do have to race for them sometimes and pay attention to your units. I don't know if it actually effects anything, but I reason that calling my militia up during harvest time might make the harvest slower, and it already needs a lot of hands, so I try to go for camps in the summer and winter.
Right now I'm trying to get some arms and armor produced via blacksmith and get my first bailey set up. I had only a small deposit of iron in my starting region, which got mined out really quite quickly, so I'll have to be careful about allocating it to different weapons and armors, once I unlock that development. The retinue system is neat so far, quite expensive to get your guys together, but you can customize them. They all seem to wield polearms (reasonably good selection of these, there are some gorgeous bardiches, but only one pole-hammer besides that.) or a short weapon with a buckler. Not sure if that can be changed anywhere.
The death army for me was 4 mercs and 1 retinue which rolled me, I do think that what deep deposit you start with can make or break the game, if you have something useless like stone or deer things are a lot harder than if you had something better like iron
I disagree, if you get the cheaper deals development you don't need to produce any tier 1 goods (crops, clay, iron, stone), just buy them and have your population work the more profitable jobs (clay into tiles is a great 1 step chain)
Eventually the AI will buy all the mercs and keep them on retainer indefinitely it seems. Looks like it's a known bug though, so it might get fixed soon.
