Welp, just crashed after undoing some pitch, so I'm now here to throw up missions twelve through fourteen.
This is the first mission where you need to assault an enemy castle. Most of the units should be obvious, save for the tunnelers right below the crossbowmen. With these guys, you place a tunnel entrance and, should they not get killed during the initial period when they're vulnerable, they tunnel underneath enemy fortifications and damage them. It takes two tunnelers to completely destroy a ~3x3 section of wall. They have a fairly limited range, but it's long enough to not be shot at from walls.
This force looks a bit small, but this fight is *nothing* compared to the shit that mission fifteen puts you up against.
Oh, and after you take over the keep, the objective is to raise 12k gold.
Enemy forces. The corner just off screen to the left is my point of entry. There's a small area where you can place tunnel entrances on the hill that's out of range of the various missile units. Once the wall was down, it was pretty easy sweep of the towers with macemen thanks to the convenient stairwell placement.
Once again, though, the starting setup of the keep was absolute shit.
No combat footage of the assault, sadly, as the game's built in screenshot function is shit (Doesn't number'em, so only one can be taken before I tab out and rename it) and the game's a micromanagement nightmare when attacking.
Whenever I start to feel bad for cheesing the game by using map edges, I think back to how badly the game handles micromanagement and decide that this game fucking owes me for mission fifteen.
Notice the change in layout, heh. Decided to mass export bread for gold production.
I also decided to show off the popularity menu (The top value in the bottom right). It should be straightforward; If you're at or above fifty, peasants join, and if you're below, they leave.
Time to kill off The Snake (Four enemy lords: Rat (Already dead), Snake, Pig, and Wolf).
Unfortunately, this mission was one of the most disappointing because of its initial promise. You need to build up a force to assault The Snake's keep while weathering frequent assaults from The Pig. However, The Pig's AI bugged out or some shit and they never left their signpost spawn. That is why I didn't bother taking a screenshot until near the end. On top of that, The Snake just sits there with his thumb up his ass.
Just to add insult to injury, I decided to max out my positive fear factor before sending out my macemen and catapults. "Good things" increase happiness and military effectiveness while decreasing productivity. "Bad things" do the opposite. It may sound like positive fear factor is overpowered, but the hit in productivity decreases happiness via reduced food production (Extra rations are my favored way for generating popularity), so the net gain in popularity is, at best, minimal and, at worst, actually a net loss.
Before.
After.
Not even tasteful.
The facial animations in this game are laughably bad to begin with...but holy shit at The Snake
This mission was on the short list of missions that I remembered fucking me over badly back when I first played. It's all about straight survival: Three chokepoints are prebuilt and the player has no access to stone save via the marketplace.
Initial move was to send all preexisting units to the first chokepoint, destroy the stairwells so the macemen won't be able to do to my men what I did to The Snake's a couple missions ago, and send all new recruits to the second chokepoint. Those little wooden spikes are killing pits that were already placed at the start of the mission and they kill the first unit to walk over them. They're great except for one thing: They cost six fucking wood each (Most buildings cost 10-20; Woodcutters cost 3). It's great for late game when you've got nothing else to do with wood but manufacture weapons, but you *really* need that wood for economic expansion early on.
The garrison worked, but just barely. Only one crossbowman and the engineers manning the ballista survived.
Final wave...Oh god...
Unfortunately, once again, the AI fucked it up and made this mission a bit of a disappointment. Instead of a massive blob, I just faced small waves that didn't even make it to the killing pits along the wall.
Oh, and that orange blob in the middle? That's a diseased cow thrown from the catapult. Causes some damage over time in the area where it lands. Probably would've saved my ass if the The Pig's AI didn't win the fight for me.
Mmm...plague
