Quick Links
Picking A Culture
Change Your Esthetics
Choose Your Background
General Build Strategies
Difficulty Settings
Your experience will be largely shaped at the beginning through the character creation menu. It has a number of stages that will have you determine your home faction, what look you’ll be rocking, and what your character’s natural gifts are.
Related:
Because the game has a large variety of play styles to specialize in, your choices here will have a significant impact on how you’ll end up playing the game, even many hours in. There is flexibility later in this title, but your first few hours will go more smoothly if you know what you’re getting into.
Picking A Culture
The first thing you’ll be asked to consider is which of the six factions in the game you’ll start off as. Each faction has a bit of lore, some perks, and some drawbacks. It won’t necessarily affect where in the world of Calradia you start off. Regardless, factions have the potential to make a big difference to your playstyle if you take advantage of them properly.
Faction | Buffs / De-buffs |
|---|---|
Sturgians | Buff - Recruiting/upgrading troop cost -25% Buff - Daily army cohesion loss -20% De-buff - Relationship penalty from kingdom decisions +20% |
Khuzaits | Buff - Recruiting/upgrading mounted troop cost -10% Buff - Production of horse, mules, cows, and sheep in Khuzait-owned villages +25% De-buff - Tax income from towns -20% |
Battanians | Buff - Speed penalty in forests -50% Buff - Sight range in forests +15% Buff - Militia production in Battanian-ruled towns +1 De-buff - Build rate for town projects in settlements -10% |
Aserai | Buff - Build caravan cost -30% Buff - Trade penalty -10% Buff - No speed penalty in deserts De-buff - Daily party wages +5% |
Vlandians | Buff - Renown from battles +5% Buff - Mercenary income +15% Buff - Castle-bound villages production +10% De-buff - Influence cost of recruiting lords to armies +20 |
Empire | Buff - Garrison Wages -20% Buff - Influence when part of an army +25% De-buff - Village hearth growth -20% |
The Empire faction is often considered the best pick for new players, because of the strength of its troop types. It also means your home territory is right in the middle of the map. The empire is broken down into 3 factions, much like in Rome: Total War. If you want to, you can conquer one of your imperial neighbors and not suffer cultural penalties for loyalty.
The hardest faction to start with is Sturgia. This is because of weaker troop types and the fact that many factions tend to take advantage of this to claim land from the faction earlier on. This faction can sometimes bounce back a little in the mid-game though.
Change Your Esthetics
You’ll then be presented with the tools to customize your character's look. They allow you to determine your build, skin, hair, facial markings, and features in some detail. There is also a slider that will help you choose the pitch of your voice and a gender option.
The game has an interesting collection of unconventional hair and beard options, so they are worth playing around with. In the sidebar at the bottom, you can find a button that will toggle what your character will look like with clothes on, giving you a better idea of what the final look will be.
If you don't want to spend so much time here, you can always randomize and see what you get.
It’s important to note that your choices here will affect what things look like when the computer models your character at different stages of life. This can be seen in a later menu, and is often hilarious. The gameplay isn’t affected hugely here, but it should be said that larger characters get hit more easily and generate a tiny amount more damage because of how the striking physics work.
RELATED:
Choose Your Background
At this point comes a breakdown of your character at each stage of life. In this system, each stage represents a part of your backstory and helps inform your stats and weapon abilities. Your character’s model will pose for each choice, reflecting your selected trait. This has no technical use, but it does help you to understand your character visually.
You get offered different options based on which faction you start off with, and sometimes a choice you make earlier will open up new choices later in the process. For example, if you pick an urban family, you get options at later stages that aren’t otherwise available.
There are 100 different options available, so rather than getting into them in detail, here is the gist for each stage and some general strategies for what to pick.
Life Stage | Description |
|---|---|
The game generates your parents, and you get to choose their profession and lifestyle. Your options in this stage will be affected by your choice of faction. | |
Early Childhood | The game will generate what your character looked like as a small child based on your aesthetic choices earlier on. Here you get to choose what you were noted for. |
Adolescence | The character model ages up, and you get to decide what your job around town was growing up. |
Youth | At this older age, you have to determine what you chose to do as the war unfolded around you. |
Young Adulthood | In young adulthood, you get to choose your greatest accomplishment before you set off on your adventure. |
Story Background | Things become more detailed in this final stage. The story begins in earnest, and you are told that your two younger siblings were captured by raiders. You have to choose the reason why you and your brother escaped the raid. |
General Build Strategies
Generally, you want to specialize and pick a collection of stats that affect areas of the game you want to play with.
If you are new and want to make the most of the game’s awesome combat system, you would do well to invest in the Steward skill. It modifies your party size, allowing you to keep more troops in your party. No matter how good you are at the game, if you try to take on a hundred heavily armored cavalry units by yourself, you’re going to get smashed. Invest in this, and you are less likely to be defeated and captured. It isn’t a nice feeling to have to sit there and watch your character get dragged through the mud in chains while you wait for a chance to escape.
It might also be wise to invest in the Medicine skill, because it will decrease the downtime you have to experience from being wounded or having wounded troops in your party. It just means you get back into the action all the sooner.
Remember, your build changes as the game progresses, because you will get to use focus points to hasten the progression of certain stats. Alongside the game buffing stats you often use, this means you can enjoy some level of flexibility as you progress, and no build is a death sentence.
Difficulty Settings
The difficulty settings can then be chosen for the game. When starting off, most players will find the game challenging, due to the fact that you have to discover how a lot of mechanics work on your own.
If you are reading this guide because you are starting your first run, it is highly recommended you pick the ‘Freebooter’ difficulty level. The game is hard to play when you are constantly being overwhelmed by parties that are much bigger and more experienced than yours. It can be easy to get trapped in a cycle of being captured and stripped of everything over and over again. Because of this, there is no shame in picking the ‘very easy’ options.
Difficulty factors you can change:
- Friendly troops received damage
- Friendly parties received damage
- Player received damage
- Recruitment difficulty
- Map movement speed
- Enable death
- Auto-allocate clan member perks
Next:
