Mission 12
So apparently after getting their asses kicked the enemy has retreated north and is now trying to secure the vital iron supplies there. My orders are to form a new army and chase them in the area far to the south of my last engagement, at least according to the maps. Yeah, makes perfect sense. Also, the briefing makes note of a bridge east of my position, which "will make the defense of my base easier". Thanks, briefing. After 11 missions the game apparently still assumes that I wouldn't know such an obvious chokepoint if I wasn't told about it.
My starting forces. Not bad, not bad at all. In this mission I have to face 3 enemy towns - one in the north, which is "protecting" my nearest iron deposits (well, not really - the only way to mine that iron is to build the mines on the other side of the mountain), there's one to the east, the approach to which is pretty much a meat grinder and a real pain in the ass to assault, and one in the north east which is the actuall main base and can only be assaulted after dealing with the second one.
The last two of those are pretty much unassailable for me at this point (see that "meat grinder" comment), but I should be able to eliminate the town to the north, thus completely eliminating the need to care about my defenses not in the bridge chokepoint area.
The aforementioned iron deposits. The enemy town is north of those.
And the first line of enemy defense - pikemen and archers, with axemen in reserver. The pikemen are wusses against anything on foot, but those archers can really turn the tide. So, plan A is to move my axemen and archer support north in order to distract and kill those pikemen and annoy the axemen into attacking while simultaneously outflanking them with my knights in order to kill the archers behind their lines. Lets see how that goes.
Okay, so far so good.
Crap! More archers! And one of my knights has mistakenly started attacking the axemen, thus making the whole squad uncontrolable!
Maybe I can salvage this. Light cavalry gets the order to do what the knights were supposed to do.
...and they fail completely.
The knights finally start doing what they were supposed to be doing in the first place, but it's too late, especially with the extra axemen on their way.
Yeah, plan A didn't work so well. Reload!
Okay, plan B. I'll try to ambush the pikemen after drawing them out with the archers. The longer and straighter lines of enemies that should appear after that should be much easier to kill. The cavalry raid against the archers is still on the table.
All right, an opportunity to try that cavalry raid again!
... aaand it fails in the exact same way. Luckily, the enemies are acting dumber this time, by which I mean they try to move a second squad of archers ...
... and succed where my plans have failed by walking them right into those knights.
There's apparently a third squad I'll have to deal with.
And fourth. This would be a good opportunity to demonstrate the "charge" order. You see, the infantry units can do a "charge", which is incredibly useless most of the time. The way it works is that you lose control of your unit for some time and in exchange it starts running in a straight line in whatever direction it is facing until it hits any other object in its path or a predefined time is up. Then it just stops and forgets any orders it may have had before the charge. Oh, and if your unit reaches the enemy, it starts attacking as it normally would. There's no "charge bonus" or anything.
The obvious way this can work against you are the possible clusterfucks. If there's so much as a rock on the way, you're screwed. Also, if there are ranged units in the area and you don't execute this pretty much perfectly, then the short-but-long-enough period when your forces are standing around and not accepting any orders yet is a time when the arrows will probably kill a lot of them (the arrows/bolts are many times more damaging against stationary targets). It does sometimes pay to do the charge, though. First of all, when properly executet it allows you to cross a short distance quickly. This means that, say, the guard towers have a much lower chance of actually hitting anything (and those things are deadly), and ranged units can be dispatched quicker. In this case there's both the guard towers AND archers to consider, so it's one of those rare occurences where the charge is actually a good idea, as opposed to just a viable or a horrible one.
Okay, so that's the enemy town. As you can see, I caught them with their pants down - hardly any building even has a worker, and that included half of the guard towers (the other half had one rock each in their stockpiles). Anyway, here are the barracks, the storehouse and the inn.
Here's the school.
And here are the ruins remaining after my forces were done with them. I don't need to bother to destroy anything else, and I believe I can trust the enemy civilians to die of hunger on their own.
While all of that was happening, my own civilians weren't wasting any time. I already have my own school and inn, and I'm in the process of getting construction materials to build more. Stone goes first.
The location of my future gold mines. Yeah, I don't think gold's going to be a problem in this mission either.
The survivors of the assault. That was a pretty low price to pay for destroying an AI.
The bridge mentioned in the briefing. It does make a good chokepoint but seriously, why did they feel the need to tell me that?
Anyway, now that the northern enemy is neutralised I enter the economic phase of the mission. Lets take a look at my available stocks.
Hmm, I have a large amount of flour. Right, that's going to be usefull, especially since to make bread out of it I have to build a bakery, and to build a bakery I have to build a mill, and to build a mill I have to build a farm, thus providing me with flour anyway
. The KaM tech tree is pretty dumb that way - you can't construct a building to process raw materials without constructing a building gathering said raw materials which, like most things about KaM, is kind of retarded. The only reason I can think of for this kind of dumbassery is that the makers of this game didn't want people to get confused by the oh-so-large number of possible buildings and decided to force the "correct" order by making a tech tree out of something that made no sense as a tech tree. Why this convention wasn't dropped after the tutorial level the world shall never know.
The other supplies of note are respectable amounts of gold (also with enough raw materials for 100 more chests, but no place to process them without constructing a gold mine first), reasonable amounts of food and enough weapons to equip any five tier 2 soldiers of my choice (or 5 archers and 5 tier 1 militia if I'd be so inclined).
The wood shortage should not pose a problem in the future. Since my food situation is good enough, I decide that my next step should be constructing the weapons workshop for the future.
The construction process looked like that, by which I mean everyone was just kind of standing around most of the time (which would be pretty realistic if that road was being constructed in modern Poland
). Because of my many builders and the fact that the streets here were only 1 tile wide the whole area quickly turns into pathfinding hell for the haulers and subsequently the whole process takes way longer than should be necessary.
Ultimately, the workshops and the roads are finished, and I order the barracks to be built to store whatever they'll produce.
With the barracks complete I need to divert my attention to the falling food supplies. My first step to augment them is to build some wineries. Wine may suck as a food source for the civilian population, but for the soldiers it is enough to get completely full, and it's very quick and easy to produce.
The next step are the farms - with them I can start making flour and thus bread, and also pig meat and skins, which get transformed into sausages and leather armors.
Of course the game just had to throw me a curveball. The sixth of my planned farms would land on uneven terrain, which is apparently too uneven to level it during construction. Not one to surrender so easily, I order that area to be paved with stone.
Well, fuck. Hey, I wonder where's the closest place I could build this farm.
Okay, this makes sense. Well, not really. Still, I order the farm to be built one tile to the east from its original planned position. Then it hits me - "Hey, that guy just levelled the terrain while preparing this spot - I wonder if I could build that farm over there now".
Aaand there goes unlevelable terrain. While this makes no sense I realise that I'm playing KaM, so I just go with the flow.
Some time later, the bread production chain is finished. The next step is to build pig farms and finish the sausage and tier 2 armor production chains. In the meantime, I notice something on the minimap.
Okay, so that's an enemy swordsman. While he's there alone and obviously by mistake (notice the lack of a flag) this could be a sign that the enemy armies will start preparing to attack soon.
Sure enough, many more appear soon. By this point I'm mildly bored by the lack of military action, so I decide to try and kill them all.
Yeah, that was a bad idea. One reload later, I'm back to my pig farming business...
... and the enemy starts to gather a second squad of those swordsmen.
Okay, that's just 3 guys, I should be able to take them on.
And I was. Still, the AI apparently decided that this begets retribution.
Okay, that was a close one, but it could have been much worse if the AI were to be allowed to finish gathering that second squad and then strike with that.
{moments later}
Uh oh.
Oh, they're not attacking just yet. Well, this could have been bad.
Okay, what the hell? They keep that big squad in reserve while attacking me with 3 guys?
And they charge to their deaths. I wonder what that was about. Also notice that not only have I used the free armaments to train axemen, I've also started making my own armors and shields.
Yep, with those 4 workshops my military will soon stand on its feet. Now, the last little matter is the gold.
With all of the really important buildings finaly constructed, all that remains is continously improving the infrastructure, mining stuff and starting the processing of iron all the while increasing the numbers of my tier 2 soldiers. It would all be pretty boring, but luckily the AI is considerate enough to provide me with some entertainment.
So, okay, that was a full swordsman squad attack. But what's that following them?
It would seem that after being repeatedly beaten back by tier 2 troops the AI decided to get in on that action.
The sheer numbers were enough to almost overwhelm my defenses. If they'd keep this up, I may have a problem.
Okay, it seems they've finally decided that axemen aren't that awesome when under their control.
Okay, that's new. I was attacked by swordsmen before in this mission, but never by hungry swordsmen followed by haulers.
Hmm, all those haulers. Killing them may cause the enemy to retaliate, not killing them makes this a missed opportunity. Decisions, decisions...
Yeah, letting them live just wouldn't really be "me", you know?
And here comes the retaliatory force.
And they're dead. On the economic front I've designeted an iron mine and a connection between my road network and the enemy road network in order to mine their coal in the future.
But really, who cares about that crap. Lets have a look at the enemy fortifications.
Okay, that wasn't much of a look. Still, it enables me to tell you something about them WITH A VISUAL AID.
Yeah, that about covers it. After those last ineffective melee charges only attacks the enemy has changed their strategy once again! This time they would ineffectively charge me with crossbowmen!
Bored with waiting I've decided to check if I could take the enemy positions with my force of 40 axemen and 40 archers.
Yeah, apparently not. I change my plan to include 80 axemen, and get back to waiting.
Once again, the enemy changes their strategy - this time they start amassing halberdiers and archers.
Strategically placing my own archers on the bridge allows me to ensure that they never finish their preparations while, for some reason, never annoying the halberdiers into attacking.
My iron processing district is finally finished. Tier 3 troops will be instrumental in taking on the last base, but for now I'm still going to rely on tier 2.
After waiting for a long time I have those 80 axemen, so it's time to seriously attack the eastern town.
Okay, plan A. Lets just walk right in and see what happens.
My archers have spotted some knights and light cavalrymen loitering beyond a small body of water, so naturally they decided to attack them.
It turned out to be a fatal mistake. Okay, plan B - I'll position my troops to do a proper wave attack and also leave one squad to protect the archers agains the horsemen.
This also didn't work out so well. Plan C - I'll first lure the horsemen with my archers and kill them, and after that I'll take on the actuall town.
This plan ends with many of my archers dead from a surprise visit from extra archers and crossbowmen. Okay, screw it. Plan D - first I'll try to outarcher the town and then I'll go back to plan A, but this time try to do my best not to annoy the horsemen and see what happens.
Success! Well, my forces did get decimated, but at least the town is in ruins. Now lets do some scouting.
Right. Proper scouting will have to wait until I get rid of those horsemen. That body of water will be useful in doing just that.
Okay, the coast is clear (sort of - there are still those bowmen and crossbowmen to consider). Oh well, lets try to just ignore them.
Okay, so they've managed to kill the scout - but the guard tower is empty, so this is a prime opportunity to get some more intel! Lets try again.
And again.
And again.
And again.
Hey, it worked! There were some close calls with those guard towers, but luckily a fast moving scout is hard to hit. Now, lets see what's still in store for us.
Ah, the enemy town.
And a tower inside - it finally managed to kill my scout. Still, now I have enough intel to decide that I'm not attacking without at least 40 steelclad melee troops and 40 crossbowmen. Now, it's time for a long wait until I have enough equipment to train them. In the meantime, I've decided to do some other projects. For instance, connecting the road network of that freshly razed town to my own, which entails building a stone road through a stone bridge.
Yeah, that makes sense, especially given that digging and leveling the terrain is one step of that process
.
My plans suffer a small setback when the food runs out. Apparently training 80 recruits who count AND eat as civilians (read - 3 times as much as actual soldiers) without having equipment for them wasn't such a great idea. I solve this problem the way we solve ALL our problems.
With alcohol!
Anyway, short period of food shortage later I finally have my troops ready for the final assault. I dedide that my front troops should be the axemen, as a stone launched from a tower kills a steelclad just as well as it kills those guys. Let the enemy deplete their supply of stones on them.
Anyway, the final attack is launched.
Them enemies sure do love those towers. I don't have enough troops left to waste them on a storm, so I decide to use the crossbows on them. Suddenly!
Yeah, I've learned my lesson the last time they pulled this.
And the surprise pikemen/halberdier counterattack is gone.
The enemy barracks are exposed, so I take advantage of that.
Haha, stupid tower! How do you like it when the horsemen are numerous and armed with steel? Not very much, I'd wager!
The towers are gone. I wonder what I'll find that way?
Another tower. Right. Oh well, lets destroy that and move on.
Yeah, like I said, been there, done that. I have some swordsman to repulse that second surprise halberdier wave.
Finally, the last (?) tower is down.
Okay, so the crucial buildings are razed. Why isn't this mission finshed yet?
Okay, that makes sense. Somewhat - why haven't those guys joined in on the counterattack? Pah, lets just kill them and be done with this.
Done. Finally. Seriously, this mission took twice as long as it should, but here it is - VICTORY!
BONUS!
Mission 13
In other words, a massive counterattack is incoming and I have to stop it at a conveniently placed chokepoint.
These are my forces. The enemy forces are similar, only much more numerous - except for crossbowmen.
To the north and to the south the enemy has this little crossbow emplacement. I'll just replace their crossbows with mine.
Obviously, that worked.
And that's it for mission 13. Some comments would be appreciated.
