Bay 12 Games Forum

So there's a few glaring expections to the above advice:

1)Retinues. You have complete control over them, so building a wing of an army with a strong focus works very well
2)Hordes (using the horselords dlc). Hordes are proben out by 250 man unit, so you can build focus here as well
3) Mercenaries. Many mercenaries have a different troop mix than normal levies. You can pull off some neat tricks with these.
4)vassal levies from another government form (e.g. tribal vs. feudal). Different types of holdng give vastly different troop mixtures, which means that you should take care how they're deployed.

In general strong skirmish troops can hold their own in smalller battles, but once we get into the 2k+ fights the melee folks begin shine....kee that in mind when you're looking at what your unit composition is. Particularity when dealing with tribal vs. Feudal combat.

Student

Is there any point (other than redundancy in case of their death) in taking a back-up medic with you on expeditions? And does having more heavily wounded people make the medic's job harder? Even after >10 hours I honestly can't tell.

Medic skills can be used in challenges, so sometimes it's very useful to have multiple medics. I'm not sure how the death checks work though...

When you village is threatened, it often makes sense to form up everyone in the village, move to the threat, defeat with social/tactics/whatever and then move back. OR just invest in a really sweet set of palisades and barracks.

I've also just been leaving the one skull lairs so that they can continue to generate xp over the course of the game. Does anyone find the resources from them to be useful?

The tutorial missions give small stacks of some good materials (or maybe I've just been lucky). You might be tempted to hoard those, but I'd heartily suggest using those materials (or anything else you get through events/etc early on) to make good gear right out the gate. Thanks to how the crafting system is designed, hoarding rare materials isn't as useful as it is in some games.

For example, pick up the 1-handed blade recipe as one of your first techs and pump a few chunks of mithril (I got some from the tutorial) into a sword. A mithril sword + any old shield is a pretty solid all-rounder choice, and mithril blades are light. Decent in the front line, and all that shielding can be used from the support line.

Later on, I've found crossbows to be a decent investment. While bows are often so weak as to be dead weight, crossbows aren't much heavier and help flesh out the support line (in combat, ranged attack is used by the support line to buff the attack of a combatant). Can be reasonably cheap, too - iron & string yields 50 weight, 7 ranged attack. Works well buffing a blunt weapon user, as the ranged attack buff becomes blunt damage.

Don't be afraid to use the non-lethal options, and when using non-lethal don't be afraid to use autoresolve (as long as you're not playing iron man, I suppose). The autoresolve is pretty iffy in regular combat, but the lack of wounds/casualties from non-lethal options means you're fine as long as it wins (and it's not too bad about winning).

I've found focusing on 'Cheap' to be a mistake. Every item made makes research points, make expensive items for more research points for better items...

bu then that's why I always rush gatherers...

Just noticed that lava counts as "nearby fire" for cooking. Neat. Guess I'll have to build a base near this lava chasm. Later on. After I can take on the few thousand zombies near it. And it is harder than it sounds to get them trudging through the lava.

Be aware that it also counts for light...Zed's can see you near lava at night.

So Thea just got a major upgrade, with changes to worker management and resource distribution. Worker activity is now project based, with one lead and assistants helping, rather than a multitude of individual tasks.  and you're no longer guaranteed vegetables and wood at your starting location, which makes expeditions much more important.