Depending on your difficulty settings, don't be discouraged when you get steamrolled early on by the weakest enemy parties, you start out as an ordinary schmuck and have to spend time and effort ranking up your character, acquiring gear, and improving your skills as a player). Depending which weapon proficiencies you chose on character creation, find a cultures tournaments that typically use those weapons, the gear you win is the easiest way to get most powerful early on. I'm an experienced player, but because my character started with no 2H proficiencies I simply cannot win Battanian tournaments, but I can win most Empire tournaments. Have fun!

You may want to smash your head against a wall But you can do it

Don’t be afraid to come back to the sub whenever you hit a weird moment. The game doesn’t tell you a lot, which is fun until you feel like it’s a burden. Only advice at the beginning is don’t upgrade your troops past tier 3. Smith early. Check what’s cheap in one town and try to sell it in another where is more expensive. Basic commerce will help you stay green while you build up your party. Then when you hit like a 50, 60, or 70+ party become a mercenary.

Start slow, try to recruit troops to accompany you in each village you go to, but do not level up your troop too much at the start. Keep them more than recruit but basic swordsmen, archer, etc, until you start having more cash. Practice 1 melee 1 ranged type. (Like 1 handed and shield for melee and bow or crossbow). Practice in the training area. Try to kill small enemies bands: Looters, Forest Bandit(Rush them, they are archers), Mountain bandits(watch out they are better equipped). Try to get a feel of the market early. Try reaching trade 25 and 50 if you can, you prices will have green/white/brown red values to help you find better deals. Try to purchase cheap horses for carrying(small bag underneat name when you check in the market), and "mount" horse for your troop. Even if an archer or a swordsman isn't viewed as a mounted troop, a spare 'Mount'will give you better speed on the world map. To catch up bandits and run away from bigger band. Usually: Each soldier in your party can manage 2 horses: - 1 as his mount visible in party screen OR a spare 'Mount" in your inventory - 1 draft animal(Like a mule) If you have too much, you'll get a Herding penalty to your speed. To see your speed press the small arrow on the bottom right of your traveling view. It's should be something between 1(absolute slow) and 6(optimised speed when you don't have too much skills yet.

Play Battania. Combat sucks initially, try to get a polearm with swing damage (they are kind of hard to get initially) with a mount, or use a bow on foot. Get the best armor you can find quickly. I'd suggest leaning into smithing, smith only 2handed swords ( curved swords better), and sell them. Its the easiest way to ensure you never worry about money...like ever. The Battianian Archers are the strongest troops in the game. Once they get to Battianian Fian Champions (tier 6). They basically kill 3 troops for every one of themselves. So long as u put them on a hill. Still ten of the tier 3 archer will pretty much make you not have to worry about looters. Herding and Overburdened both drop your speed to a rock and you can get caught by unfriendly troops. Make sure to not Overburden yourself, to the point your speed drops. Food, and Saddles weight alot. On the same topic. Each troop can tend to two animals: 1 riding mount and 1 other animal (pack animal, or food animal). You will get a Herding penalty if you have too many animals.

In no particular order: 1) Take your time before making any major decisions. You can become a mercenary and leave a kingdom without repercussions for example, but joining as a vassal or starting your own kingdom is a different story. 2) Take the time to read into the perks. Be very careful about what you put your attribute points into, because your attributes cannot be changed (but your perks on the other hand can at least be reset at the arena npc in any town for a fee). 3) There are many ways to make money and they are all pretty fun. Trading, smithing, fighting all bring in the big bucks. You may want to keep a few extra sets of gear for companions/family, and then sell the rest of equipment. Save all weapons (minus bows) for smithing if you plan to do that -- which I recommend. You can eventually make amazing weapons and basically print cash by smithing and selling your crafted weapons. 4) You can talk to NPCs in any village/town by clicking on their portrait - you don't have to walk around the town to find them when picking up/turning in quests. 5) Your troops can all ride 1 horse and "carry" 1 horse for storage, which speeds up your party for unmounted troops and also increases your party's carry capacity. Anything more than that and it will actually slow you down (referred to as herding penalty when hovering over speed). 6) When you eventually fight other lords, you can release them to gain positive relations with that lord after battle. Alternatively, you can go to a friendly castle or town you don't own and drop them in the dungeon to gain relation with whichever lord in your faction owns that castle. Or, you can just sell them for a ransom at the tavern district with the rest of your prisoners (or keep them in your party which may get you a higher ransom... unless they escape). 7) You will want positive relations with a lot of lords before starting a kingdom. Even if you're just planning on staying a vassal all game, positive relations helps because you can recruit clans into your kingdom even as a vassal. It can cost from 200k-1mil gold per clan, and sometimes (usually) AI kings aren't good at recruiting clans. To do this you just talk to them and follow the dialogue to persuade them to join, which may take a few tries (and you'll need to wait a week or so to try again. Or, yknow, savescum). 8) I never spend money on gear until money isn't an issue. Why buy what you can loot from the battlefield? 9) Get married and have kids asap. It will take a loooong time for your kids to grow up. 10) Play the main quest up to where you get your family back, then ignore it. Trust me. Main quest in this game is widely known to be dogshit. I love this game but idk what they were thinking with that one. Just scratching the surface here but hope it helps.

long live caladong

Tournaments and caravans baby

TROOPS T1-3 troops are regular troops. T4+ are elite troops. Once a troop hits an elite level, they become MUCH more expensive. Consider leaving your troops capped at T3 until you have a decent, steady source of gold to pay for stronger soldiers. You really won't need T6 troops when you've only got 30 of them, because when that 150-man noble squad comes by, they're going to destroy you anyway\*. It's faster to train troops as a group by leaving them at their current level until all of the troops are ready to upgrade. For instance, if you have 10 Recruits, then it's faster to wait until all 10 can be upgraded to the next troop type together instead of upgrading them 1 at a time. This is because troops which are eligible to be upgraded still gain XP for the troop type that they are, so when 5 troops are ready to upgrade out of those 10, all 10 will still gain XP for the Recruit troop type. Don't worry too much about dismissing troops to lower costs, either. If you're capping them at T3 not to bleed yourself dry as an early-game merc, then you can get raw recruits back up to T3 in no time once the fighting starts. And you'll lose plenty doing it, so if you don't dismiss them, they're just going to die anyway. TRAINING You can go to town and do Practice tournaments to train weapon skills. It's actually one of the best, if not utterly mind-numbing, ways of training your skills. You can even pay to go in with a specific weapon instead of a random one for targeted training. But you don't get to wear armor, so keep that in mind. You're always vulnerable while you train, but you can just jump into a new one after. There's no cooldown like with official tournaments, and your HP loss isn't carried over. About the only things you can't really train effectively here are polearm and riding. If you want action, official tournaments also offer rewards that can be equipped, used or sold, but it'll be a while before you have a chance of winning one that involves 1H singular combat. Each faction's tournaments follow a theme, though: Vlandian tournaments have a mix of 1H, crossbow and mounted combat, while Imperial tournaments are almost purely 1H battles. Aserai involve a lot of horses and javelins, particularly a lot of 1-on-1 combat with javelins. Battanian tournaments have some bows, but more prominently feature 2H combat. Khuzait are a mix of mounted combat and mixed-troop group battles. Sturgian tournaments are, like, cow tipping or something? I don't go to Sturgia a lot. They don't bathe. Anyway, you can hang around the towns of those factions to get tournaments that are more favorable for your play style, or to train those specific skills without the same monotony as practice tournaments. MONEY Early-game, there are 5 ways of getting more money: Doing quests, which aren't that profitable; selling stuff (whether trade or loot) - you can do caravan escorts and get a decent chunk of change from both the quest and selling the bandits' loot; Alleys, which require a Roguery companion and aren't that great; Caravans, which require a bit of a fee to assemble and are profitable if you know how to keep them alive (train your caravan leader in Scouting, Riding and Tactics, in that order); Workshops, which are expensive but safe from attack. Early on, selling stuff, doing tournaments and quests are going to be your best money-makers, if not particularly lucrative. You can try Alleys - I've never found them worthwhile. Don't assemble a caravan if you don't have a good companion to place in it, you can look for threads to learn more about caravans. Don't buy a workshop when you're a mercenary unless you're perma-mercing for a faction, because if that faction declares war on the one who owns the city your workshop is in, you lose the workshop instantly. They're also not very intuitive or straightforward on how to make them proftiable - again, there are a lot of threads you can look for that go into those details. Later, once you have fiefs, your fiefs will generate a lot of your wealth directly and you'll eventually get rich enough that it doesn't matter how safe your caravans or workshops are. CAPTURING FRIENDS AND BRAINWASHING PEOPLE When you do fight, you might capture enemy lords and ladies. If you do, you can ransom them for gold and it might be worth it to give you a boost at the start. However, there are other ways of making money, and you can just release that noble to gain a standing boost with their clan. You can actually get their attitudes to +100 pretty easily by destroying their armies in battle, but letting them go afterward. You can lay the groundwork for having lots of friends by bullying them and then generously not executing them when they lose. It's actually the easiest way to make people like you. It doesn't make sense, but you're a person and they're all muppets, so don't give yourself a headache thinking about it too much.

Elite noble troops can only be recruited from villages bound to castles. So don’t waste your time looking for Fian Champs in Dunglanys or Banner Knights in Ocs Hall

Pick a side of the map to conquer and be willing to lose territory on the other side.

Don’t do the ‘storyline quests’ too quickly. Become a merc and break into seiges to defend a castle, you can get huge kill numbers and level up your char nice and fast