Conquerors Blade Conqueror's Field Manual

『 STARTING OUT』

You should be doing the mainline quests (God of War) because they give excellent rewards, horses, horse barding, equipment, weapons. Notable is the epic weapon you get at level 60, a set of simulacrum to redeem a silver era unit, a full set of rare horse equipment, and a few stat point reset books. The God of War questline ends at level 100 (?) with a set of Castellean costume attire for playing so hard!

You shouldn't concern yourself with what stats to add. I find that autoassign works well. So long as you are using one weapon only.

E.g If I use glaive dominantly, autoassign will put points in strength, toughness and armor. However, if I switch to maul halfway at say level 40, autoassign will try to assign points in agility! This is to be avoided.

Level 60 is where stat differences level off, there are no more stat points are awarded for leveling.

Since level 60 is where the playing field is roughly equal, your aim should be to get to level 60 as quickly as possible.

『 CHOOSING A WEAPON』

While you get skill reset books while leveling, they are NOT unlimited. You should choose a weapon to specialize in.

Another reason to specialize is because weapon ultimates (strongest skill in weapontree) require skill books, which only come from weeklies and the rare deathmatch drop. You are timelocked from them and will have to choose which weapons you want to invest in.

You can also freely experiment with other weapons in the same armor weight class. This way you do not need to keep and swap multiple sets of armor.

E.g I specialized in glaive, which uses heavy armor. It is easier for me to swap to Sword and Shield than say Musket, which needs me to invest in another set of level 30 medium armor.

After playing long enough you will gather enough skill points to unlock all weapon classes. I reached this point very easily at around level 40.

『 THE SKILLTREE』

Each weapon has a special skill tree which has effects unique to it.

For example, glaive gives you an extra slashing skill on horseback. Nodachi has a skilltree which focuses on lifesteal and so on.

Skills usually can be divided into hero-killing skills and troop-killing skills.

AOE skills lean towards troop-killing, while stun and knockdown effects lean towards hero-killing.

Be aware that some skills require investment in other skill lines, check the requirements first.

『 BARRACKS AND UNIT UNLOCKING』

There are three main unit types: Melee, Ranged, Cavalry.

Melee can be divided into shielded, non-shielded infantry.

Shielded Infantry, especially tower shield class units are very good at holding a point and delaying the enemy. You will see them most often defending capture points. They are also big trebuchet targets.

Sword and Shield units are mostly chargers which want to hit the enemy line in the back, eating up archers or infantry with bad positioning. Head on charging is not recommended unless needed, you have too little health and defense.

Pike infantry wants to stand at a point and not move. When not moving, pike infantry will brace (lower and point weapons at a direction), all units caught by the brace will take damage. This is good at defending the sides of a narrow choke point. Very easily defeated by archers or hero disruption.

Ranged can be divided into archers, crossbows and matchlocks.

In general, archers have more range than crossbows and matchlocks, so you should be putting them from afar and using your "target area ability" to snipe enemy matchlocks.

Matchlocks and crossbows share roughly the same role of armor piercing. Have not experimented much with them.

Cavalry is very difficult to control. They are also very fragile and early cavalry are not good at dealing with what they are supposed to deal with. (archers) Also, every random person with a pike will destroy you, (which is everyone in siege) so it is better to not invest in cavalry.

They also have a double upkeep cost (horses and weapon kits), which make using them very expensive. Since cavalry are not cost-effective, it is not a good idea to invest in cavalry until much later in the game.

In all honesty, I have never seen a cavalry charge ever go well. Even charging into shield and sword units is a bad idea, since the opposing hero will pick off your horses while they are bogged down. My Condoetti Guards do a much better job of being chargers than cavalry. You unlock new units with honor, which you gain by playing battles. The weekly honor cap is 20000 which is pretty high and hard to cap out.

『 MERCENARIES AND AUXILIARIES』

At level 30, you get to try out a selection of units from the mercenary tab. You get to temporarily recruit a 3 star unit and a 4 star unit. Mercenaries only work for a week. Once the week is up you will not be able to select them for battle.

Mercenaries do NOT take up a barracks slot. So you can keep them indefinitely.

An interesting thing is that from my experience with Mercenary Guards, which I had a 3 day license to them, if you get the permanent version of the unit after they have expired, the experience your temporary unit gained is retained! Therefore, you shouldn't disband used mercenaries, it doesn't really hurt you anyway.

Mercenaries are a good way to test out units before you dump your hard earned honor on them.

I was thinking of whether to invest in Rattan Repeater Crossbows or regular Demense Crossbows, and trying both out with the mercenary system, I found I like the repeater crossbow playstyle MUCH better, saving me a lot of honor.

『 SIEGE THEORY』

I play siege battles almost exclusively because I think games are more fun when you have a solid objective. Here I will detail some observations about siege mode.

Siege can usually be divided into a few stages; the artillery stage, the outer wall assault, and the base assault.

During the artillery stage, both sides try to take out artillery pieces from the other side. If the defending side manages to take out all the artillery, they can effectively defend against the first wave of large siege engines.

Because large siege engines respawn very quickly, defending ammunition will run out by the second wave of machines. Therefore, the outer wall is almost guaranteed to be breached.

When the outer wall falls (which it will), usually two paths to the base will open up, having a small force attack the secondary capture point will divert defenders and make it harder to defend.

The point is not to save the outer wall, but to delay the enemies enough that a base assault results in a timeout.

During the base assault, usually a supply point is very near the base, capturing it gives a large advantage to the attackers, as the defenders can now only respawn and get more ammo from a default spawn point!

Forcing a defense on two fronts is the most important concept in sieges.You can achieve this effect by attacking a point which is not the obvious capture objective, forcing defenders to make bad decisions.

Even taking a supply point is pressure because heroes who lose their troops now have an easy way to continue the assault while the defenders cannot continue to keep up their defense since an alternative resupply is far away.

When there are two starting capture sites, and one of them is taken, it is almost inevitable that the other site will be taken too. This is because the enemy can now attack closer to the base, and leaves the second site isolated behind enemy lines.

This doesn't mean that you should abandon B immediately when A is captured. If you abandon B immediately, the enemy gets a free 3 minutes and has an easier time to attack the base.

Use meatshields during the artillery stage. During the artillery stage, it is inevitable that your troops will die. They will die to artillery, archers, and trebuchet bombardment. Therefore, you should be using expendable troops to assault the enemy.

Peasants are cost effective; they can storm battlements and operate siege engines. If they die, you do not really hurt much. The point is not to kill many people with them, but to serve as a shield/ die in place of your better units. Only swap to better units when you see an opportunity to overpower the enemy's lower tier units.

Subverted when a defender uses a high tier unit to counter this strategy, but runs a very high risk of failing. The defender might kill off a lot of low tier troops and some mid tier troops if you are lucky. But more often than not the defender is going to lose a third of their leadership to artillery.

Do not use archers on outer wall assaults. On offense, if you board the siege towers and your frontline fails, what then? With melee troops you can still run away, but with archers you will be chased down. Only bring archers when the outer wall is secure and the defenders are retreating from the outer wall.

Climb ladders only when the coast is clear. This seems to be antithetical to siege mechanics and has more to do with the mechanics of the game.

Climbing ladders is actually a major risk because while climbing the ladder , you have no control over your unit, and when they reach the top they will attack anyone they see, even in certain death.

Two, you cannot cancel a ladder climb! If you climb up a ladder and see your enemy is ready to intercept, there is no command to come down the ladders to save your troops! This is important.

Some walls can be destroyed. If during the artillery stage you have cannons leftover, you can shoot them at the walls to destroy them. Use TAB to bring up the map and look for walls which have a health bar. This is critical to some maps like The Great Wall.

『 LAST WORD』

I wrote the bulk of this guide before I hit a hundred hours on Conqueror's Blade. A hundred hours later, I still feel I am learning new things about the game.

The game's really simplistic, but the result of a battle is really determined by a lot of little choices that the players make that generate an advantage or disadvantage later in the game according to the above siege theory.

There probably is more to be written about map-specific strategies as well (I'm looking at you, Augolia A point), so maybe I'll update this if I have time.

Game's really fun, go out and play it while its good!

Pictures are from a defunct card game called Zhen Mian Dui Jue that I saw many years ago.

Messers Ratburg

Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2073259901

Conqueror's Field Manual