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Felinoid posted:You can't just go to a merchant and purchase peasants for a county. Well, I mean, if you could, I don't think they would be called peasants, and the games would probably not be as fondly remembered.
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Jul 25, 2023 13:38
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Economic Matters We need to talk about the Advanced options, which are found under the Options menu at the top of the screen, and then the Advanced selection. The only other one of the Options which really needs any explanation is probably Game Speed; that impacts speed of armies etc. moving on the map inbetween turns, but also how fast the battles play out. Here's how Lords2 describes them:  Advanced Options (0:29)  There's also a Fight humans only? option which just means auto-resolving automatically against AI opponents and is mostly just a multiplayer option, so not particularly relevant here. The description of Army Foraging and Exploration is accurate, and I'll be using all of the advanced options in the future but we're leaving them off for now. Advanced Farming is true as far as it goes; it just doesn't go far enough. Some clarifications to add: - On Army Foraging, if it is off armies just don't consume food at all. - Under default/basic farming, which we have for this scenario, mundane weather and fertility don't exist and aren't displayed if it's not on. Major events like flooding can still happen, but it will never be sunny/cloudy/etc. Fertility/crop rotation are irrelevant. - Weather affects cattle as well albeit to a lesser degree, and since it's off under Advanced Farming, it's not just grain that is impacted. - Advanced Farming also turns the efficiency feature for industry on, so we don't have that either. This is basically never mentioned in forums such as GoG/Steam, at least that I've seen, when discussing the option. It's far too important to just overlook. The general consensus of players is that Advanced Farming makes the game easier due to increasing the maximum grain yield. The truth of the matter is more complicated than that, and more along the lines of 'it depends'. For this Rose scenario though, we're just going to look at Basic Farming. - The mechanic of serfs maintaining fields did not survive the jump to Lords 2. - Up to 10 sacks of Grain are sown in each field in winter, regardless of the farming setting. There is a 12x yield on Basic Farming, with 120 sacks harvested in autumn per field. Unless you lose a field for some reason, if you have enough farmers there you will get the 120-sack yield every autumn, like clockwork. - Labor requirements are the same for each season; 60 farmers per field or 2 sacks per farmer harvested, 6 farmers per sack sown. - As in Lords 1, Cattle are all about the herd crowding. They are automatically distributed equally over all fields dedicated to cattle, and all fields have the same crowding level. In Lords 1 you could have a mix of crowding levels in your fields, but that will not happen here. - One cow = low crowding, two cows = average, three cows = overcrowded or massively overcrowded. This is also familar. - Low crowding is less than 11 cattle per field, requiring 2 dairy maids/animal to maintain the herd and 4 for optimal growth. - Average crowding happens from 11 to less than 21 cattle per field. 2.5 dairy maids/animal to maintain, 3.67 for optimal growth which is half of the growth possible on low crowding. - Overcrowded herds have at least 21 and less than 31 cattle per field. 3 dairy maids/animal to maintain, 3.4 for optimal growth. A much narrower range, and growth can only be about a quarter of average crowding, or a seventh of low crowding. - Massively overcrowded herds are anything over 31 cattle per field. They require 3 dairy maids/animal, and the herd will shrink. It cannot be maintained much less grow. - Cattle provide normal rations for 10 people; a sack of Grain provides the same for 6. Dairy works the same as before, with each head of Cattle giving enough for normal rations for 5 people. - On a per-peasant basis then, basic farming allows for each farmer to produce 2.75 rations. Yield is 660 rations annually on a per-field basis. - For Cattle, average crowding is again best. Dairy yield will approach 420 rations annually on a per-field basis, and each peasant in dairy farming can approach 2 rations produced. Overcrowded fields can get almost as much as grain per field, approaching 630 rations, but rations per dairy maid drops to 1.66. On Low crowding, only approaching 210 rations per field, and the rations per maid is highest at 2.5. Strategic Conclusions - No matter how you slice it, grain is just plain better, both per field and per peasant. Cattle are not impacted as much by negative events such as flooding or drought though, as you can re-distribute them to other fields. They're basically reduced to a risk management/diversification role. Worth having until you've built up a surplus of grain, but after that reduced to a minimal amount if any. - Regardless of the cattle/grain investment, with Advanced Farming off labor needs are consistent from season to season. There's no need to specialize counties, and the rest of the labor force can work in industries without the need to reallocate each turn. Without efficiency being a factor, switching labor from stone, iron, wood, castle-building, blacksmithing, or field reclaiming is seamless and can be done as circumstances dictate. Single-Screen Management A major change in the UI for Lords of the Realm 2 is the ability to control a county completely without even looking at the details for the town center/county level if you choose to. This is a big usability change from needing to go into county level in the Lords 1, then find which of several sub-screens you want to access to do what needs doing. In some cases though, the level of control available is not as granular, so if you're really into micro and making everything just so, you'll still want to use it. Let's dive in:  Fields will always be controlled from the main view, much as with taxes and rations. The three icons at the bottom are used for Fallow, Grain, or Cattle. Not shown is the ability to reclaim barren fields, which we'll get to when we actually run into barren fields. There are appropriate sound effects here; mooing for cattle, wind for grain, and nature sounds for fallow. Slider Shenanigans (2:11) The video is not at all essential to watch, but I think will probably help a lot of people get a sense of how the different game controls impact each other. There's only so much of that I can communicate through screenshots & descriptions, though I'll do the best I can.  Returning to the right-side panel, it's time to explore this section. - At the top of this is the Labor Allocation Slider. Dragging the figure to the left towards the bread & cheese puts more people to work in areas of food production; dragging it towards the right shifts more of them into industrial activities. What exactly they do depends on what you have active; this is where turning industries on and off and assigning fields comes into play. - Below the slider actual county production is listed. At present, there are no fields set to grain but only cattle, so we have only cattle shown on the left or food side below the slider. Wood is the only industry that is active, so we have only that on the industry side. Clicking on the cattle or wood or anything else that might be displayed here will bring up a detailed pop-up on that activity.  Clicking on the town center itself brings up this display. It's a visual and interactive representation of how many peasants are involved in what type of work, as opposed to the Lords1 method of slider adjustments. - Top-left is the stone quarry. If there is an iron mine in the county instead, that will replace the quarry. You can pretty much count on the other areas staying where they are. - Top-middle is grain farming; nobody is there right now but that's where they would be. - Top-right is quite occupied and is where the dairy maids occupied with cattle herding are. At the moment this is clearly where the bulk of the peasants are. - Along the right side, the castle builders will be shown inside the castle structure if there is any of that happening. - Left-middle is a representation of a barren field, and is where reclaiming work is done. - The small plot in the middle of the display is for idlers. No work is done there, and anybody shown should be moved into something more useful. - Lower-left is the blacksmith, where weapons are made for the army. - Lower-middle is for wood chopping. We have some people at work there.  Each figure represents a number of peasants, and we can drag-select a box around them to tell them to go somewhere else.  The cursor changes to this rudimentary figure, but they don't actually move until you click in another work area. Until then, you can change your mind. Afterwards ...  Cursor returns to a question mark, the peasants are transferred, and the wood area is a little emptier, the cattle area a little fuller. On the right-side panel, the slider has shifted a bit, and there's been a modest change in what we are producing; less wood, more cattle. To make it more obvious, we'll use the same method to shift a larger amount of dairy maids into the wood-cutting zone:  The shadows of dairy maids indicate that more are needed to properly care for the herds; the red outline on the cow in the right-side panel tells us the same thing. At this distribution, we'll have animals dying due to neglect, and also bring in a lot more wood than before. This drag-select and move method is the most precise method of moving people around, but we can also just use the slider and avoid the town center screen entirely:  Drag it all the way to the left, and we have maximum growth in cattle and some extra. There's a couple of figures sitting on their behinds in the middle of the town with nothing to do. The bluish outline serves the same purpose as the red one did, to indicate a labor problem; in this case we're trying to put more workers into the cattle area than it is possible to have work there with our current number of cows.  I turn the Blacksmith and Quarry on from the main view, then return here. We're now producing stones and bows, but less wood. Lords 2 has automatically divided up our industrial labor pool between the newly-activated industries. Using the slider again ...  As we increase the amount of industrial labor, it adds to each of them. This is a 'smart' system; it's trying to distribute proportionally, but the number of blacksmiths you may observe is quite low. That's because we're making 3 Bows, and don't have enough wood to make more. Extra peasants then are added to making wood and stone, rather than just throwing them into the blacksmith area wastefully. Tip: You cannot use iron/stone/wood that you are producing on the current turn/season. It only becomes available the next season. I tend to check the Treasury screen fairly regularly to see how much we have available for use.  I complicate matters further by buying some grain and setting a couple of fields to be sown. Here, we don't have enough workers for the fields but more than enough for cattle.  Dragging the slider back and forth, I set everybody to work on food. There still aren't enough to fully satisfy each area. Lords 2 is assuming, I think based on the fact that most of the labor was in cattle previously, that I want to keep it that way. If I move some peasants from cattle to farming and move the slider some more ....   Now it's trying to keep them proportional. We have enough farmers to plant grain while still growing the cattle herd. It's also possible to go too far with this, and lean it too hard into farming so that the cattle area ends up short. Tip: The general workflow here is to turn on the industries you want, and then if necessary move peasants around to get the right proportion. Often you can avoid this screen entirely and not bother with that. Then use the slider so you have enough working on cattle/farming and the rest get the work you need done, tweaking by moving people around again if you need to. Finally, let's look at some details in the various work areas:  If you watch the video, you'll note that I bring up some of these pop-ups by clicking in the town center, and some by clicking in the panel on the right. You can do it either way, allowing you to check on specifics without opening up the town center at all if you wish.   Not all resources require the same amount of labor either, which is worth keeping in mind. Stone is appropriately labor-intensive.  Blacksmiths in particular can really churn through resources fast, and usually you won't want a huge amount of them. Here there's so few that nothing will actually get done, but a bit more and they'd start producing. You don't get 'partial' weapons or anything else, you need enough to finish the task. Blacksmiths also get this dedicated screen so that we can choose what weapon to build by clicking around at the various ones displayed. - Bows cost 0 Iron and 13 Wood. - Pikes; 3 Iron, 6 Wood. - Armour: 18 Iron, 4 Wood. - Maces: 4 Iron, 4 Wood - Swords: 10 Iron, 3 Wood - Crossbows: 10 Iron, 6 Wood Tip: Bows being the only weapon that doesn't require Iron is crucial; it means that even in starts like this where Iron is hard to come by, you can still produce Bows and then buy the iron to make pikes or maces, or just buy those weapons outright, depending on needs. The higher iron cost of Swords, Crossbows, and Armour makes them even harder to justify particularly in the crucial early stages of a scenario. This whole way of managing the economy is something I'm ambivalent about. It works quite well, but also manages to be confusing if you're trying to figure out how it works. In a sense it's too smart for it's own good; excellent once you know what's going on, but not obvious at first that it's really just trying to help you. It's an imperfect implementation, but I highly, highly respect what they were going for here. Consolidation and streamlining of the UI, multiple ways of accomplishing a task, and allowing a relative minimum of micromanagement if the player desires and is ok with a fairly small amount of suboptimal results. I've played a lot of more modern games that didn't try nearly this hard and managed to make things much more difficult; I'm sure many readers of this have as well. The other part is it gets really finicky if you want everything 'just so'; precise micromanagement really isn't encouraged here. I'm curious for those of you who have played before; how many of you worked out how all of this worked? Past me sure didn't, to my detriment. After two episodes of explanatory blather, next time we'll get to actually playing the Rose scenario.
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Jul 25, 2023 17:23
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Something OP forgot to mention about labor management: Double-clicking your idlers will automatically assign them to food production until the minimum worker quantity is reached (i.e. the absolute minimum workers required to maintain your dairy herd and the minimum workers needed for your grain fields); I haven't tested which it prioritizes in the event of a labor shortage, though. I always liked taking people off jobs, setting them to idle just long enough to auto-assign them like this. It makes the issue Sage had with the slider misemploying his peasants a lot easier to handle, and ideally leaves you with free workers you can use as you see fit (and if you want more dairy maids, well, just drag them over like normal). edit: Also, double-clicking an industry in the town screen removes any workers beyond that industry's labor capacity (i.e. the guys sitting around when he assigned everyone to dairy), and sets them to idling. Very convenient; makes shifting your workers around as needed really easy. CptWedgie fucked around with this message at 18:24 on Jul 25, 2023 |
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Jul 25, 2023 18:12
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Interesting. OP didn't mention that because OP didn't know that :P.
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Jul 25, 2023 19:57
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Strategic Sage posted:Interesting. OP didn't mention that because OP didn't know that :P. I am surprised, I learned it early as a kid, huge quality of life right there.
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Jul 25, 2023 20:15
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Turns out it's even in the manual, so I feel extra-stupid now. *shrug*.
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Jul 25, 2023 20:38
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I think when I first played my entire first session was futzing with the town center to try to figure out how it worked. Reverse engineering is something of a passion of mine. Also, something to note: armor makes knights. The rest is pretty self-explanatory, but that took teenage me poking at it to find out. E: Knights are generally not worth it, but the limited bunks in a castle garrison shift the equation a touch. Felinoid fucked around with this message at 01:06 on Jul 26, 2023 |
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Jul 26, 2023 01:04
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I actually spent quite a bit of time futzing about with it also, but double-clicking would never have occurred to me. It's just not a game where double-clicking is used for ... well, anything else I can think of.
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Jul 26, 2023 09:25
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Now things are starting to come back to me, I remember this game much more vividly than the first. After wondering how I got my head around the economy as a kid, it turns out the sequel had much more straightforward mechanics. I like that they left in some of the more advanced mechanics in as optional as well.
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Jul 26, 2023 10:11
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I'm not exactly sure how I learned the majority of the UI mechanics in the game, honestly I think it was partly trial and error, and the rest being suggestions from my older sibling, as we tended to play the game together quite often at that time. Some things I definitely didn't learn until I was an adult, things like the double-clicking I didn't really get until I watched a playthrough about...8 years ago? and noticed that the player was moving workers around that was quicker than how I was doing it and so I experimented some more. Only other big thing I didn't truly understand until I was older was how some of the military units operated compared to the others, since my go to composition growing up was about half of the army would be ranged attackers (with a 65-35 split archers-crossbows) and the remaining half would usually be all pikes and whichever mercenary group was available at the time (unless it was one of the ranged mercenaries, in which case refer back to the ranged split for the overall army construction)
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Jul 26, 2023 11:18
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Felinoid posted:I think when I first played my entire first session was futzing with the town center to try to figure out how it worked. Reverse engineering is something of a passion of mine. Knights are expensive but getting a decent core into an army once your economy develops is incredible. I remember it being pretty easy to break the AI using knights to pull units out of position or to distract archers. And of course they are great for flanking and killing exposed ranged units. I always did the core of entirely macemen + archers until late game, adding in small groups of knights later on when I had excess iron. Don't know if I ever bothered smithing the other weapon types, so I'd only use them when mercenaries were around.
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Jul 26, 2023 14:41
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Aces High posted:my go to composition growing up was about half of the army would be ranged attackers (with a 65-35 split archers-crossbows) and the remaining half would usually be all pikes and whichever mercenary group was available at the time (unless it was one of the ranged mercenaries, in which case refer back to the ranged split for the overall army construction)
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Jul 26, 2023 16:33
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Gully Foyle posted:Knights are expensive but getting a decent core into an army once your economy develops is incredible. I remember it being pretty easy to break the AI using knights to pull units out of position or to distract archers. And of course they are great for flanking and killing exposed ranged units. The expensive part is what I'm talking about. They're not worth it resource-wise. A knight takes 18 iron and 4 wood. A maceman and a pikeman takes 7 iron, 10 wood combined, and can be split to do different things. When army size isn't an issue (and I usually had more people than I knew what to do with, due to turtling), that is a hell of a savings. Knights basically just made up the small melee portion of castle garrisons for me, since having someone who can move fast and hold a line is handy for filling choke points at a moment's notice, so I can have more archers on the walls.
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Jul 26, 2023 18:21
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Aces High posted:my go to composition growing up was about half of the army would be ranged attackers (with a 65-35 split archers-crossbows) and the remaining half would usually be all pikes and whichever mercenary group was available at the time (unless it was one of the ranged mercenaries, in which case refer back to the ranged split for the overall army construction) This is very, very close to what I did. I was fine with them not moving fast, I just liked pikemen because I wanted my soldiers to stay alive.
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Jul 26, 2023 19:57
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In 1999, I was 12 and my life savings were about $50. One day, even though the only computer we had at the time was an apple laptop, I bought two games out of the bargain bin at Radioshack for $22 all up. They were MS Flight sim 95 and Lords II. Bang for buck, this ended up being one of the best purchases I ever made. I think we knew pretty much all the tricks, but this might be because my dad ended up playing a lot. He played through the campaign, I think the start ultra simple approach worked for him.
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Jul 26, 2023 21:56
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Rosy Beginnings: Winter 1268 - Autumn 1269 'Buy these goods my lord?' As Lords 2 starts in the winter and we have 101 Cattle and 0 Grain, we want to get started on farming right away. Somebody pointed out doing this in the Quaintville scenario, and going forward it's pretty much going to be standard practice, just a case of how much. While we're here at the trader, I'll pick up something I neglected to do before and note the prices for weapons. Sale price is of course half these: Maces - 20 crowns ea. Pikes - 26 Bows - 32 Swords - 46 Crossbows - 48 Mail (Armour) - 88 Once again, Bows are best value for ranged weapons, maces for melee. I can see buying pikes perhaps as they aren't that much more. Anything else? Make it yourself or do without, really, unless you're printing so much money that you don't care about the price. But if that's the case, you have lots of counties and can produce plenty of weapons yourself anyway, so ... Buying the materials instead - stone/wood/iron - is much more viable IMO because they're cheaper. And then throwing more labor at the blacksmith to get weapons out more quickly. But early in a scenario, when time is of the essence and labor is limited, buying weapons is still worth doing.  Buying Ale for your starting county when beginning a scenario is just what you do - a universally good idea and we'll be doing this pretty much every time.  I had to experiment with the double-click method a while to see how it worked - thanks again for those who pointed it out. If you have extra dairy maids but not the maximum, say it was +6 cattle or whatever, double-clicking does not kick them out. So yanking some out of the fields and cattle as idlers and then double-clicking on the idlers to fill the food production spots is basically the first step in my workflow here. I've set three fields to grain at this point.  Not shown: double-clicking on farming or cattle when they have more than they can use does indeed kick out the extras, and this is a big efficiency + QoL win indeed. After adding another grain field and futzing about, I was able to get +1 in Cattle and 32 sacks of grain planted.  There are 12 fields to begin here, which is the standard amount but as we will see it's far from universal. Four set to grain, three fallow, and one cattle here; the other group of four are all cattle as well. My approach is to maximize the current herd at average crowding, so I want to get to 104 cattle and stay there, just under 21 animals per field. Then gradually convert the other fields to grain. Long-term, I'm aiming for two-thirds grain, one-third at most cattle. But I'll keep the extra cattle for now so we can feed ourselves while we build up the grain. Also note the graphic for the town center. There are three versions of it, upgrading as your county develops.  A clearer view in spring without the snow everywhere. Also, grain fields change appearance with the seasons. The others do as well, but grain is where it's most noticeable. Another 245 Crowns are spent for the maximum happiness gain from Ale.  We're also now starting to get a bit of extra peasants available for industry, so we are now producing a whole 11 Wood this season. Yippee.  With Exploration off, we can look at what our opponents are doing anytime we want. Both the Knight and the Baron immediately garrison their castles.  Summer Rations. Even using the double-click idlers method, often there will be enough dairy maids to grow the herd when I want to keep it stable. Tweaking this to have the people eat one cow and a little less grain holds the herd at the desired 104 level.  Annoyingly, moving people around elsewhere will sometimes slightly throw off the food situation. I didn't move any dairy maids at all, but we're still back to +1 so I'll make another ration adjustment. Taxes are at 3% now as we're approaching maximum happiness so we don't need the full boost from zeroing them out. I'm also building all the maces we can with our starting iron.  Summer fields. The grass changes texture and the rows of plants are more pronounced.  With happiness now maxed out, I raise taxes to 7% in the autumn. They'll stay there. I also purchased 25 more Grain for 100 Crowns as our population is high enough that the cattle alone can't feed them, so we need a bit more to get through to the harvest.  Switching now to Bows. 3 is all we have to wood for, but we're cutting enough that this amount will grow.  The grain grows tall now, and autumn colors can be seen in the countryside. When the harvest is brought in and a new year arrives in winter ... not spring like it was counted in the first game ... it's time to think bigger thoughts. Tip: Knowing the scenario you are in, having exploration off, or sending a small scouting army out if isn't are important to knowing when to expand. The general answer to that though is as soon as possible without crippling your starting county's economy. Excessive turtling will put you behind, but if you can grab a second or even a third county, then build them up together, your victory will be assured. In this case, I'm going for the Iron Mine in the middle county, and I want 150 soldiers with weapons to do it with. I'm sticking very simple for this scenario, 1 archer for every 2 macemen and nothing else.  Buying 22 Bows and then making this Mace purchase nearly drains our treasury, but also gives us the weapons we need.  The happiness hit will be manageable as well, costing us only a season and a half of taxes.  Suspending all industry, we have enough peasants left to farm a fifth field and part of a sixth while maintaining the herds. There are 93 Crowns left, 37 of which will go to pay the army for this season. Similar mechanic there as before; if you go an extended period without paying your troops, they will refuse to fight. This is a bad thing.  Blah, blah, blah.  A band of mercenaries shows up, and it's a pretty good one. This might be the cheapest one; it's definitely on the inexpensive end of the scale. Also a lot more than we have at the moment, having just spent our savings. The steward informs us that 'a band of Scottish mercenaries is available for hire, my lord'. They actually bothered to put different lines in for the different kinds.  By summertime we're running a profit again, and putting every spare peasant on wood-cutting duty. We're going to want to build a castle in the new county we're about to conquer. Our starting supply of stone will be enough, but we to kill more trees.  Autumn 1269. It's time to relive the people of Poncapoag of the burden of conducting their own affairs.  I like how neutral counties defend themselves with a force known simply as 'the people'. They may outnumber us, but with this many peasants it won't matter. Poncapoag (3:57)  Attacking neutral counties doesn't involve taking a castle: there isn't one. You get a field battle instead. Here we have some rocks, a bunch of ponds, forest here and there, and there's a variety of paths you can take. Practically speaking it really depends on what the AI army decides to do.  As we group up at the top, you can see more pathfinding at work; they are headed for the southeast corner and have split up trying to get around that sizable water area. If you are fast in these circumstances you can ambush some of them while they aren't together, particuarly with fast units like macemen. That can backfire if you aren't really careful though, and if you don't have better multi-tasking/APM than I do it's probably best not to bother.  This is one of those cases where there's more setup than action, thanks to the AI. There are definitely people who know way more ways to cheese battles than I do. My approach is pretty simple: kill the archers, including crossbowmen if they have any, as quickly as possible. Their peasants are shielding them from the north, but they will just continue to think that's a good idea even if you don't approach from the north. They tend to pick a location & formation and then stick with it no matter what. So we will approach from the west instead, taking the long way around. Another method is to inch our archers forward until they are just close enough to shoot at their peasants, but not close enough to shoot at the archers. We could also split up our macemen, some to guard the archers and some to attack theirs, and do both. Keeping it simple this time, we just take everyone on the scenic route.  I move slow enough to keep everyone together as much as I can, as the swordmen can't keep up with macemen otherwhise. Once we get close enough that we can hear their archers shooting though, it's go time.  Some of our soldiers get hung up on the 'coastline' naturally, and the AI shows it's lack of awareness as most of the peasants don't engage right away, even with their archers being slaughtered literally feet from them. Basically the way it seems to work is that each group of units has it's own logic, and are completely oblivious to what other units are doing. Unless they perceive a threat to themselves, they are perfectly comfortable just chilling out.  Here's where they mostly break formation, realizing they should probably fight back now. By this point a third of the county defenders are dead. It can be a little finnicky getting all of our men into battle. I was clicking on enemies most of the time, and some of our soldiers would just hang out behind the line. An order to move to open ground near an enemy often works better. It's something you get a feel for. It becomes one-sided very quickly here as neither peasants or archers are in any position to stand up to our macemen and swordsmen in a melee, plus our archers pick them off from a distance as well. Unfortunately I accidentally clicked-through the after-battle video, but we'll see all of them plenty.  We lose 38 men, about a quarter of our army. 'The people' are no more. After giving us the same flag-raising we saw previously, we are returned to the main view and have a new county to manage.
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Jul 27, 2023 22:34
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My favorite battle music.
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Jul 28, 2023 17:52
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County Differences It's time to note a few particulars about our conquest of Poncapoag - Only eight fields instead of the usual twelve, and all are overflowing with cattle. - Happiness is decent and taxes are too high, but those are solvable pretty quickly - They're not actually using the iron mine or anything else industrially, as there's just more than enough people to handle the over-crowded herds. - Note the amount of soldiers we had to fight was exactly a third of the population total; 216 compared to 650. Down from half in Lords 1, but they also got archers as well. That's just a tweak to the existing mechanic basically. - Look closer at the town center also. The graphic is somewhat different for it; there's a church there now. There's one in our first county as well. This happens when you reach a certain population, but I think there's a slight factor relative to the number of fields you have also.  Now that we have a county without a castle for the first time, we can observe the initial building cost for a wooden palisade. It's not bad; our starting supply of stone is enough, 400 wood, 200 builder-seasons.  Now we have a structure - not yet a castle - appearing on the map immediately. You have to look very close, but there are small piles of wood and stone near it. How much there is depends on how much you have in storage. The side panel indicates the castle construction also ... and that we need more wood. None of the building can happen until all of the materials are in place.  Here we can see that Poncapoag, along with being short on fields, has no wood-cutting potential at all. That bottom-middle area has no trees, and nobody can work there. This is quite uncommon, perhaps even rare.  Back to Wampanoag, we put as many peasants as we can into cutting more wood. They say none is needed for the castle builders, but that means in the current county only, not your entire kingdom.  This is how much we actually need. Ok, we'll have 58 Wood to spare after one more season of cutting. That's solid.  It's Winter of 1270, beginning our third year in Rose. I turn half of the fields to grain. We'll lose cattle due to the overcrowding and labor diversion, but I think it's worth doing that. We need to get grain going before the population gets so high that I can't feed them with the cattle. It's a judgement call how aggressive to be with this. Note the '100 Seasons' listed on the right by the castle. That's as high as it goes with nobody in there working on it. For some reason they didn't want to put never or infinity or something like that.  I also start producing a few bows. Only four to start. In general my approach is to bring in a little more wood than I'm going to be able to use each season, so that we're improving our store of both weapons and material at the same time. Naturally we'll planting grain in every field that doesn't have cattle at this point.  After pondering a bit, I decide to transfer 200 Grain. Again a judgement call where you just get used to how much each county will need over experience with the game. This is a case where having Advanced Farming off and having reliable grain harvests every year makes me more confident in doing this shipment than I might otherwhise be.  The Steward narrates the text displayed; 'this transport is moving goods from one county to another'. Amusing that they put that in, but didn't bother with the many county names or even what goods are being moved. It will take a few seasons as it did in Lords 1: supply carts have a movement allowance of 10, so they move slower than armies.  Our rivals put out some more troops once every few seasons, but so far they are all just headed for their castles, not for expansion.  By summer our recently-acquired county is starting to eat into the remaining grain supply, and mostly recovered on happiness. The dairy maids and cattle herds are still in a bad state.  A trader arrives in autumn, and we sell off excess cattle. That also means buying a small amount of grain with a bit of the proceeds in order to keep everyone fed, but we're only one season away from a harvest and will be able to set up for a larger plant in the winter. Long-term picture and all that.  With the labor freed up we can mine some iron and build the castle.  The Steward announces that 'a castle has been finished in the county and is ready to receive a garrison'. As this message informs us, they actually have already been given a starter one. 50 Archers are given for free with the completion of the castle, and we'll get more if we upgrade it. We lose no bows or peasants for these 50 soldiers, they are just conjured out of thin air. I'm not sure why this is a thing, but it's always mildly annoyed me. Regardless, we have both counties profitable, self-sufficient, and defensible now. We are approaching three thousand Crowns with 500+ coming in each season, and it's time to turn our attention to other matters.  Our remaining army is sent towards the Knight, to soon be joined by additional conscripts. It won't be long until our enemies decide it's time to expand, and I'd just as soon not give them the chance.  Flooding in Wampanoag means one fewer field being planted this year, but we have a thousand grain and growing there so we should be able to keep up with the growing population anyway.  I spend the treasury dry again, buying 20ish Bows and over a hundred Maces. This is a little bit smaller of an army than I'd optimally like to have, but it should be enough to take down the Knight.  Having an extra county puts us at the top of the pecking order.   All the more reason to punch him now before he turns that cash into soldiers.  We're slightly behind the other two in happiness, thanks only to the recent conscription. Having more people of course means more taxpayers and in the long run, more soldiers. Gaining this kind of advantage is plenty to guarantee victory if you don't screw up. Next time we'll go about removing the other two nobles from Rose.
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Aug 5, 2023 00:11
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*shrug* The free troops never really bothered me, to be honest; I was always just relieved that I didn't need to spend any resources (weapons, population, happiness) on recruiting them, and never bothered questioning where they came from. Honestly, that "extremely high taxes in newly-conquered territory" thing always bothered me more. It's like whoever set those taxes is actively trying to provoke the population into rebellion. This is not helped by the fact that being conquered is one of the biggest single hits to happiness a county can experience, second only to excessively-huge conscriptions.
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Aug 5, 2023 00:51
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The free garrison is one of the fastest ways to expand once you get the ball rolling. For 800 wood and a bit of stone you can make the 2nd castle and get 150 archers which would normally take 1950 wood and 150 population to make. Slap some fodder in front and you're ready take another town, rinse and repeat.
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Aug 5, 2023 01:18
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Finishing Up Rose Our first barren field to deal with. It certainly looks the part.  There are two options for a barren field; reclaim on the left, or do nothing on the right.  As a field is reclaimed, more and more of it will fill in with proper plants/grass. You can't change it to grain or cattle until this process is completed.  The third and final visual stage of a town center; a windmill has been added. There's also the gradual process of more villages showing up.  Weapon production is increasing, and we've assigned the maximum number of peasants to the reclaiming work. It takes a full year, four seasons, at 200 peasants per season to reclaim a single field. This is quite a bit higher than the labor requirement for Lords 1.  Autumn brings with it the attack on the castle in Houton.  There's a bit of a fun complication when they dump the boiling oil on the battering rams, destroying them before the gate is broken.  We resort to Plan B, with our macemen hacking the gate themselves. This is slower, and they're getting shot at the whole time, but our archers soon take care of the ones on the nearby towers at least.  We lose about 20 men in the process of finishing the smashing job, bursting in to quickly eliminate the crossbow and archer reinforcements.  We're able to grab the flag before their last few swordsmen go down.  Macemen take the brunt of the losses as usual. Bye-Bye Knight (0:18)  We're ahead of you there already; they like to say this when you take your third county, but fairly often two is enough.  The Petulant Child ... I mean, Knight ... is defeated.  Lots of Cattle and no Grain is par for the course for the Knight & Baron. It's one of the main reasons they are the weaker pair of opponents. I am biased against the Knight as being the worst of all, largely because of his juvenile attitude and arrogance. The Baron at least presents himself more reasonably. We'll need to buy or import some grain here, most likely buy just because it's cheaper, but otherwhise it should be pretty straightforward to turn Houton around. Last but not least, the Baron.  Timing is everything. If these mercenaries were available when I was building up to attack, I would have hired them. You can use them a lot more frequently in a more turtle-style approach, but I'd just as soon not have to conquer extra counties because I waited long enough for my rivals to expand. As it is, we're sitting right about at a thousand Crowns for the moment. Weapon production is starting to scale up more for us, particularly with the low material cost of Maces. I don't want to wait though. We have 62 Bows. I buy 50 Maces to go with them, and get another army going in Wampanoag. They'll take some time to join up with the other army.  Say it with me everyone! Not just once, but twice in the winter - one for each of two different counties.  Houton now provides extra wood to make sure we don't run out and can produce weapons more quickly. This doesn't really matter at this point, but in a longer scenario it would. More flooding in the spring. I'm already getting sick of heavy rains turning into a deluge, and we're still in the early stages of the campaign.  The Baron sends out a medium army to stop us from taking his only county of Waverly, but it's too late.  Save your bluster for somebody who cares. I'm just passing through anyway.  Autumn, 1272. Pretty sure you can figure out what happened next.  There are times when boiling oil is used well. This is not one of those times.  A different siege victory video shows a top-down view of smashing through a gate with a ram, then bursting into the castle.  Old news - this was the striking for the crown part.   We ignore more flooding and all other county management matters. There's only one thing left to do. The Baron's army must be defeated to achieve victory. Now that they have no more counties, that army does literally nothing. It's frozen in place, and we can take as much time as we need to. With the 100+ reinforcements added, our numbers are back to a reasonable amount.  We're a little outnumbered, but the Baron has half peasants. This will be no trouble. The battle itself is not worth showing, which is unfortunate. It was a bridge battle ... in which the Baron hid in a corner and stayed away from the bridge. But we'll have legit bridge battles at some point I'm sure. This tactic did allow him to protect his archers for a time, and we lost a little over a hundred men, but the outcome was never in doubt. Rose Victory (0:19)  Another new video. That struggle is now over.  And one for the Baron.  After the same coronation blather as always, we are informed that we are headed to Ireland next. That's a significant step up in challenge from Rose. For now though, we'll just celebrate another victory.
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Aug 7, 2023 04:07
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The biggest problem with the Knight's "ALL THE CATTLE" food thing is the fact that he doesn't have room for them all. As in, 240-ish is around the point at which you're hitting massive overcrowding no matter how much of the county you're dedicating to pastures... made worse by the fact that the AI always keeps like half the arable land fallow, so the overcrowding is doubled. If you're gonna go cow-heavy, about 150 or 200 is probably the point where you should stop; any more is impractical. So yeah, I always hated farming (because I hated seeing numbers that're supposed to be high go down so I tried for "all your people are fed by dairy"), but at least I had the sense to not sell my grain supply so I at least had that as a backup. Sometimes I even farmed! ...okay, yeah, it wasn't very common or very much, but still. Yeah, like I said, I liked this game, but I was never any good at it.
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Aug 7, 2023 04:45
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If I remember correctly, you can trigger the boiling oil vats to tip over by smacking them with a melee unit. I think you can kill them with archers too, but that typically doesn't end up happening even if it's technically possible.
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Aug 7, 2023 05:12
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Dirk the Average posted:If I remember correctly, you can trigger the boiling oil vats to tip over by smacking them with a melee unit. I think you can kill them with archers too, but that typically doesn't end up happening even if it's technically possible. You totally can, but they have a lot of health, so it mostly happens in one of two situations: 1) If the defenders quit the first set of walls in larger castles to take up a new position farther back, the oil vats do not retreat and can simply be shot to death with enough time. 2) if the defenders end up accidentally using the oil vats for cover, so the oil eats all your arrows while you're breaking in, and it's taking a while for reasons unrelated to sudden fields of burning oil. Killing them with archers also just completely defuses them. They don't actually have a death spurt, so the melee unit thing is probably a scripted counterattack.
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Aug 7, 2023 06:26
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What Happens If You Lose? We've won two scenarios, and I'm taking a brief diversion here to examine what failure looks like.  Summer, 1273 in Ireland. We can see that our new opponent will be The Bishop, saving The Countess for last. To reach this point, I spent five years being passive and just feeding everyone but not expanding or putting a garrison in the castle. There was a question earlier in the thread about whether peasants will really defend your town centers if attacked; I'm pleased to report that on this point at least my memory was correct. Auto-resolving this battle results in losing badly. Fighting it out would result in losing less badly, probably being able to take most of them with us depending on terrain, but peasants suck so this is pretty much a hopeless situation.  The loss of a mere county results in the Steward reading this message to us. Lords of the Realm II Videos The modern versions of the game don't like to play the video clips that come next. This compilation is not mine but was uploaded by Wabe28. Full video is five minutes, it's queued up halfway through to the point where the 'losing a scenario' scenes start. Some are the same as when we defeat another noble. Others ... not so much. The first one is quite depressing, as we are locked in a cell with rats and a skeleton, and the guard cheerfully/sarcastically waves good-bye as he shuts the door. Apparently we are not to be well cared-for, or probably even cared for at all, but left to rot away and starve. Or perhaps fed minimally to prolong our suffering. Take your pick. This is my favorite one; there are a couple of others which show scenes of us about to be beheaded or hung instead, more direct approaches. Suffice to say, losing does not end well for the player-character noble. However, it is not a campaign fail condition; there is no such thing.  Same as the events move on apace/victory screen, except a much different message. Following this, we are simply dumped back into the Ireland scenario from the beginning to try again. It's a better-luck-next-time mechanic; we must win each scenario to convince Lords 2 to let us move on to the next one.  One final note of amusement. If you hit Esc from the pre-battle screen, it brings up the 'Exit the game, my lord?' dialog. Decline it and you're back to the same place. Esc again and decline a second time, and this happens. The game is basically soft-locked. No soldiers, the county is completely different, no option to fight the battle with the up or down thumbs at the top, and we can't click on anything anywhere. 'deciding how they will fight this engagement'? Closing the game is the only option. Once I managed to get out of this screen somehow and the enemy army simply moved away/retreated with no battle taking place. I couldn't find any way to replicate that however. Safe to say there's definitely some bugs in this area.
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Aug 10, 2023 14:17
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The player losses are all faceless of course while the enemy losses have their images, thus giving the player more a feeling of it being them. Alternatively it is always some body double getting the bad while you scamper off to plot once more
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Aug 10, 2023 14:38
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Out of curiosity, if you upgrade an existing castle to a bigger one, rather than just going straight for the bigger one, do you pay the full price of the bigger one or are you refunded some of the cost of the cheaper one?
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Aug 10, 2023 14:46
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PurpleXVI posted:Out of curiosity, if you upgrade an existing castle to a bigger one, rather than just going straight for the bigger one, do you pay the full price of the bigger one or are you refunded some of the cost of the cheaper one? If I remember correctly you only pay the difference in materials, which can give you a refund on wood when you upgrade to a more stone-based castle.
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Aug 10, 2023 14:59
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PurpleXVI posted:Out of curiosity, if you upgrade an existing castle to a bigger one, rather than just going straight for the bigger one, do you pay the full price of the bigger one or are you refunded some of the cost of the cheaper one? The materials for the old castle get applied towards the next one, yeah. Most of the time, this is just functionally a discount on the next castle in terms of stone/wood, but if you go from a Motte and Bailey to a Norman Keep, you actually do get the extra wood added back to your stockpile. ef;b
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Aug 10, 2023 15:02
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There's data on the CD that include voice-acting for specific opponents if they won the campaign that for some reason never gets used. The Knight sounds BAFFLED that he won.
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Aug 10, 2023 15:26
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Robindaybird posted:The Knight sounds BAFFLED that he won.
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Aug 11, 2023 01:48
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I suspect that his angle was more along the lines of maybe ruling a county or two and being appointed as a general under the new king. Winning was always going to be a long shot for him.
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Aug 11, 2023 05:05
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I think you all are giving the Knight *way* too much credit. Impressive really. The idea of him having any long-term vision or plan is ... unlikely.
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Aug 11, 2023 16:34
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Strategic Sage posted:I think you all are giving the Knight *way* too much credit. Impressive really. The idea of him having any long-term vision or plan is ... unlikely. I feel like a knight angling for promotion to a general or army leader isn't that much of a stretch. It's kind of a natural career progression and doesn't take a whole lot of imagination.
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Aug 11, 2023 20:40
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the CD got sold off in moves, I will dig around as the steam/gog versions should have the same files so I'll see if I can find them - no promises as there's a fuckton of vaguely named wav files to go through.
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Aug 12, 2023 16:19
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Dirk the Average posted:I feel like a knight angling for promotion to a general or army leader isn't that much of a stretch. It's kind of a natural career progression and doesn't take a whole lot of imagination. A generic knight, sure. That's not what we have here though.
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Aug 12, 2023 16:28
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Robindaybird posted:the CD got sold off in moves, I will dig around as the steam/gog versions should have the same files so I'll see if I can find them - no promises as there's a fuckton of vaguely named wav files to go through. I looked at the files when people started talking. The Victory dialogue for the Knight is Kt195_X.wav (there seem to be four variants for each type of dialogue). Everyone's dialogue files follows this pattern, with the first to letters changing depending on the Lord in question.
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Aug 12, 2023 17:04
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