In order to recruit new units, you need money (krowns, they call it) and influence. You get both from completing and turning in missions. You can also get influence from other sources, so it’s not too hard to farm. You can get new recruits at an inn in town, or from the local prison (not recommended, as prison recruits have more negative traits). You can also occasionally find a recruit outside of the major settlements. Sometimes, these guys will require something else to recruit them, like medicine to save a guy’s life. That guy will then offer to join you for free (except for the medicine).
Remember way back when I mentioned the knowledge perk? Well, I do. Exploring the map or finding books in somewhat hidden locations can award you knowledge points. You can spend these knowledge points on perks either serve a practical purpose for your company or provide a QOL change, such as giving you a run button while on the area map. While some of these perks are available at the start, others have to be unlocked first.
In addition to knowledge, you also have paths. Paths offer perks, just like knowledge, but they require a little bit more effort than just wandering around and finding books. You actually have to
do things, achievement hunter style, to gain path levels, which give you perks, some of which are very good. There are four paths that you can level, each of which has its own list of perks. The four paths are:
Power and Might
Trade and Craftsmanship
Crime and Chaos
Mysteries and Wisdom
Power and Might deals with combat, I believe. Trade and Craftsmanship deals with, well, trading and crafting. Crime and Chaos goes hand-in-hand with thieves and stealth. Meanwhile, Mysteries and Wisdom is increased through exploration and collection of resources. You’ll be gaining experience in all of these, though the rate at which you do will depend on your play style.
As you can probably tell, there’s a lot of depth that goes into building your band of mercs. In addition to recruiting, you have to feed them and pay wages once every few days. This becomes more expensive as your band gets larger, which feeds the vicious cycle of getting more work to recruit and support more members to get more work. But that’s basically the game. The story is basic and not very interesting, and you make the characters’ stories yourself as you play.
Combat is turn based, but you decide which order your mercs take their turn. This adds a layer of strategy to the combat, because you can freely choose which character moves at which point of the round, and that’s very handy considering the heavy emphasis the combat places on engagement.
Engagement is a very interesting mechanic. In combat, if a melee unit attacks an enemy in combat, they engage with that enemy, forcing them to either fight back against the attacker or take an opportunity attack to disengage. An engaged unit cannot move or attack any other unit besides the one they are engaged with, without disengaging. This means that, with tactical placement of your mercs, you can lock down ranged units and more dangerous adversaries with an appropriate unit that counters them before they get their turn, and unless they or an ally of theirs has a skill that gets them out of it, they have no real choice but to accept their fate and flail helplessly as you kill them.
One final thing, before my long-winded thesis on Wartales is through: you can capture enemies in battle instead of killing them. This includes human enemies, as well as wild animals you find in the wilderness. I for one have only taken a human prisoner once, as I didn’t see much point in it. You can take outlaws to the prison and turn them in to reduce suspicion, another mechanic where committing crimes can raise the county’s suspicion level, which can lead to a warrant for your arrest and/or death if your suspicion level rises high enough. You can also take part in some human trafficking and sell them to slavers for a small amount of influence, but I just… don’t. A third option exists where you can make your prisoners happy enough that they’ll want to join your team, but from what I can tell, it takes a while for them to like you enough to want to do that. Too long, for my tastes. I just let my one prisoner go after so much time had passed. It wasn’t worth feeding the extra mouth.
Animals, on the other hand, if you can successfully capture them, they join your team immediately, which is kinda cool! Also expensive, it turns out, since animals eat a lot of food, while they don’t cost anything in wages. They’re also understandably weaker than the human recruits, for the most part. I hear bears are great tanks, but I’ve never actually seen one yet. Wolves have a skill that gives them +50%(!) crit chance if you have three or more of them. That’s not an extra 50% of their crit chance, it’s taking a wolf with a 3% chance to crit, and putting a 5 in front of the 3, and now that wolf has a 53% chance to turn a hit into a critical hit! The downside with wolves is that they aren’t very durable, and will often die when engaged. It’s worth noting that you CANNOT control animals unless you have a certain skill, so the wolves will often just run in and die, while delivering some admittedly juicy critical hits along the way.
I think I covered everything I know about the game. This is all the information I got from spending almost a day’s worth of hours in this game. I don’t consider myself an expert; there are probably going to be some conflicting opinions here and there. But I believe I know enough to recommend this game, at least for people who love figuring out team builds and turn-based combat. I’m one of those people, so I’ll keep playing it. Now, I’ve spent the better part of my day on this post, and I’m tired, so I’m gonna go play.
