King of Dragon Pass

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Zinegata
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Post by Zinegata »

Actually the point of the "Pro-Peace" guide isn't to say that War Clans are actively bad.

The point of the original guide is that you want to avoid being aggressive early on, because as you noted in item #2 your enemies will tend to attack you a lot during the Fire Season. Taking a War clan, I feel, tends to encourage early aggression when you should be defensive during this period. I am also not a fan of raiding during Storm time in the early game - because there are events that can cause the raid to fail badly which can leave you crippled on top of the farming problems.

Also, I would note that the bigger Fyrd tends to be a relatively weak advantage in comparison to blessings. As I noted in the original guide, rushing Fyrdwomen for Vinga essentially doubles your Fyrd troop count for defense, while Humakt can double your Thanes. This tends to far offset the additional Fyrd you get for being a war clan.

In short, you can totally win being a War Clan. However, to survive the early game crunch you're going to want to leverage more on blessings for defense whatever type of clan you pick; and I wouldn't risk too many early raids either. The priority in the first couple of years is really survival and to build up your capabilities (mostly in terms of blessings, trade surplus, and cow count) until you reach a state where you're essentially self-sustaining and unassailable. At that point you can pretty much pursue any kind of clan that you want.
Last edited by Zinegata on Wed Dec 14, 2016 10:01 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Whipstitch
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Post by Whipstitch »

Zinegata wrote:Taking a War clan, I feel, tends to encourage early aggression when you should be defensive during this period.
I actually like most of your advice and most of my beef lies with ancient advice sourced from outside of this forum, long dead places where people believed that playing a War Clan implied constant raiding and that War Clans really were hard mode. My argument is that you can play defensively as a War Clan because the big punishment for not raiding at all for years at a time is that you lose some magic for a while and your thanes become mildly irritated. It's intuitive that playing a War Clan means your strategy needs to involve a lot of blood and plunder but that simply doesn't have to be the case. You can seriously just give up a bit of herd and crop magic in exchange for better war magic and security and while that strategy is conservative it can still easily come out ahead when you have a bunch of enemies like on a hard start.
Zinegata wrote:Also, I would note that the bigger Fyrd tends to be a relatively weak advantage in comparison to blessings. As I noted in the original guide, rushing Fyrdwomen for Vinga essentially doubles your Fyrd troop count for defense, while Humakt can double your Thanes. This tends to far offset the additional Fyrd you get for being a war clan.
Fyrdwomen is a great blessing but War Clans can and should rush it too. One of the beautiful things about playing an early game War Clan is that you can start with Thunderstone known and a shrine to Odayla which means you're a couple sacrifices and a Vingan shrine away from running a Sureshot, Thunderstone & Fyrdwomen combo. That lets you start facerolling Skirmish instead of hoping you guess right with maneuver, charge or evade. Combined with 20-40 hunters in a 240 man fyrd and suddenly you have good odds even on fights where your patrols fuck up and "only" half of your foot can make it to the battle. As far as Truesword goes, I've found that it's actually a bit overrated in the early game--it's a good buff and all, but thanes aren't super men who decide every battle so much as they're the guys that run your patrols and get sent out on missions. You'll get caught with your pants down time and time again if you can't keep a good number available for patrolling but as far as I can tell Truesword doesn't actually help with your patrols, so ultimately I don't really rate it higher than army wide buffs.
Zinegata wrote:I am also not a fan of raiding during Storm time in the early game - because there are events that can cause the raid to fail badly which can leave you crippled on top of the farming problems.
Agree to disagree here, with the understanding that I only full-scale raid maybe once or twice during the first half dozen years of gameplay. It's not actually all that high risk since Storm Time weather events typically just void a turn as your guys are forced to turn around and maybe go home sick. That can be about as bad as a defeat for a full-scale raid but if we're just talking about a cattle raid or an expedition then we're seriously just talking about having a tiny ass number of people healing up at home during Sea Time. That's not a great outcome, but it's better than the Dark Time weather events or having Thanes traveling outside the tula during Fire Time turns when they could have been watching your lands or filching cows in tiny yet effective cattle raids. Again, I'm also biased here by playing Hard a ton. When you're strong and have a designated weakling to pick on then by all means raid during Fire Time if you think it's a good idea but until then I play under the assumption that I could potentially be attacked 3 times in one season.
Last edited by Whipstitch on Thu Dec 15, 2016 1:33 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Whipstitch
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Post by Whipstitch »

This is apropos of nothing, but the battle results screen starts getting pretty ridiculous once you've optimized for skirmishing and gotten a hold of my favorite artifact. We mauled virtually everyone in the raiding party. Have fun harvesting now, assholes.
Image
Last edited by Whipstitch on Sat Dec 24, 2016 7:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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