A costly victory, but a victory nonetheless. We should go get paid for our work!
We're 400 crowns richer and we've been given the starter contract to go do. We don't
have to do this, but I see no reason not to. It's an easy enough mission with good rewards.
This is Seefeld. Not much of a town, with the only special building being the Harbor, but it's not a bad place to start. Fishing towns have some decent recruit options.
Up at the top you can see our supplies. Money, Food, Tools (to repair damaged equipment), Ammo (to resupply our quivers), and Medicine (to heal wounds). You can also see we have 3 our of the maximum 20 soldiers. We start with a lot of money with how I set things up and decent amounts of everything else. But we'll burn through that money quickly.
First order of business is hiring some new meat. Fishermen are solid choices, since they usually have good Fatigue and no bad stats. Since I consider Fatigue the single most important stat in the game...it bumps them up on the list. Not the cheapest recruits, but worth the extra few coins.
Flagellents are also pretty good, with high Fatigue and Resolve. Lower HP, but that's less of an issue. Good armor and defenses will do more for you than a large HP pool. He's rather expensive, but that's because he has a decent weapon in that fail he's holding. I consider passing on him, but with Wilhelmina's excellent Melee skill I
really want her to have that flail.
So we hire all three. Hopefully we can get at least one Tier 1 troop out of the set.
Next up is the market. Not much here, but we pick up some extra supplies and a bit of gear. We'll head to a city next to see about more equipment in a bigger market.
We finally check out our new soldiers. The flagellant turns out to be an excellent pick up! He has both Sure-footed (+5 Melee Defense) and Brave (+5 Resolve). Those, combined with some solid starting stats and stars in both Melee skill and Health make him a solid Shieldman candidate.
One of the Fishermen has 3 stars in Melee Defense, making him an obvious Shieldman candidate. With some decent starting stats to go along with it, he's got great potential if he can live through our first few fights.
Our final recruit is a bit of a disappointment. He's
almost archer or even skirmisher material, but has a bad Ranged skill to start with. His melee is good, but no star in it. If he had those rolls swapped or had stars in different areas he'd be good. But as it is, he's a Grunt. We'll just have to see how it shakes out. He has good Ranged Defense potential, so we may want to make him an Archer Hunter. It's a risky Role, but useful.
Off to Tiefenburg to do some shopping!
There are a few of these little 'Tips' at the start of the game. They're a nice flavor way of introducing game concepts.
Bigger city, more options. Armorer and Weaponsmith are too expensive for us now, but nice for later. Kennel is
super nice, as war dogs can be incredibly handy, but I doubt we'll have the coin to spare on a dog quite yet.
The market should have more available, as should the pool of recruits.
Speaking of...
Farmers are good options, with high HP and Fatigue without being overly costly. Often come with Pitchforks as well (the low level polearm).
The sellsword is great, of course, but way too expensive to even think about early game. That Deserter on the bottom has potential, as he's already equipped as an archer and they tend to have decent stats except for Resolve. But that'd eat up a bit more coin than I'd like, as we want to get more gear for the troops we already hired.
The Minstrel and Miller aren't bad early recruits, but no better than the ones we already have potential-wise.
We grab the Farmer to round out our troops and head to the market where we pick up some more armor as well as some additional tools since our gear got rather beat up in that first fight. Plus, I tend to buy damaged gear since it is cheaper and then just repair it.
We quickly discover that our Farmer is actually a woman wearing a fake beard. Well, whatever, she turns out to be a very solid Shieldman pick up. She's Loyal, and so will not leave us if things get bad, which is always good. Great fatigue and stars in it will make her very solid on the front line, and she has good overall stats. Except Ranged attack, which she has two stars in. *sigh*
Probably won't bother to do anything with that, but we could consider eventually giving her some thrown weapons or something later on.