#Prophesy of pendor gold bar full#

If they're at full strength, you guys should be able to prevail. If the Dread Legion or Ithilrandir/Aeldarian are on the map. I'm not sure how capturing the king influences this, but that makes a big difference too (you're removing 300+ troops from the enemy horde.) If there's no marshal, the enemy will be aimless until they elect a new one. But say they do join in and hope you capture the marshal. This seems pretty random, usually they will go after different targets on the map and lay waste to each other's kingdoms. Basically you're hoping for the two hosts to confront each other. This takes some luck to set up the opportunity. Now you've doubled your garrison virtually overnight and you're only outnumbered 3 to 1. If you run into a traveler that offers mercenaries, that's another 40 troops each. You have a 2 day window, usually the enemy will not show up in that first day, and when they do, they need another 8 hours to prepare for the siege.

This way you maximize the chance of getting an extra 200-250 troops fast. If your castle is in the lower part of the map, Inquisition parties are also a good source of prisoners. Vanskerry/Jatu parties have the most prisoners typically. Went back to Avendor to drop them off, then swung northeast to take out Jatu parties. I went west to Fierdsvain coast and took out a bunch of Vanskerries. Make your route efficient, for example, I took Avendor in my playthrough.

Another way is to rescue phat prisoner stacks.

You can disband them once you've consolidated your hold on the castle, but for now, you need the numbers. 30 troops of varying quality at ~10-12k denars a pop, or 40 if you have a gold bar. You can actually use the 'hire mercenaries' dialogue option multiple times on the same traveler. You get more if you have a gold bar in your inventory.

If a town is nearby, go check for travelers and hire mercenaries.

But it's something you have to prepare all the way from the beginning, and if a few key villages get looted it may throw off the timing. So you can conceivably get 100+ units in a recruiting run through a kingdom.

Optional: from the beginning of the game, you can pump up your village relations to get more units.

You might get 30 recruits total in that narrow window before you have to get back for the siege.

What you shouldn't do is go village to village.

Basically what people do is try to stuff their garrisons as much as possible, then either realize they have no chance and abandon the castle, or stay regardless and have their army wiped out. Sometimes individual lords will go siege it by themselves, or will arrive separately, giving you the opportunity to capture more.ДЄfter taking your target castle/town, now it's about getting a lot of troops while the enemy kingdom is in transit coming for your ass. If a huge host still shows up despite you taking 6-7 lords, you know you need to do more work. This gives you a good gauge of the level of the enemy's organization.

Optional: take a ladder castle right before you go for the main castle/town, leave 1 troop in the garrison.

Kite them away from the main host and catch the cowardly ones hanging around in their home territory. This means capturing everyone, even goodnatured and upstanding lords, not just the martial/cunning/ruthless/bad-tempered ones.

I had 8 prisoner management and it was rare for lords to escape. From the moment war is declared, the goal is to round up as many as possible.

Capture a LOT of lords in field battles.

You need all the killing power and speed you can get.

Load up your army full of Fierdsvain huscarls, Ravenstern rangers, Empire armored crossbowmen, Mettenheim greatswords, Mettenheim heavy crossbowmen, noble knights, Hero Adventurers.

So you have to do preparation (everything leading up to taking the castle): That's a lot of qualis steroids, tournaments, huge battles fought, and you'll still be outnumbered 6 to 1, which is not doable at full damage. At day 500 I had leadership of 8, renown of 3100, party size of 260. In order to keep the first castle against a besieging host, you have to survive 1600+ troops with a very limited party size. I was watching Lets Plays by two very good players and they both were forced to abandon the first castles they took because of how overwhelming the AI can be. You don't get any magical auto-garrison (even though the AI does) upon taking a castle. The second part is the main obstacle as you've likely experienced, the AI organizes its entire army and goes after you to retake the castle. In PoP, taking your first castle or town and keeping it are two altogether different things.

Prophesy of pendor gold bar