Have you ever wanted to conquer all of Calradia before? *Crickets, Bueller. Well too bad, you’re getting a build guide on how to do it anyways. Check the timestamps as I’ve broken this guide up into sections.
Let’s start with the character creation picks. We’ll be using campaign mode for this, but it’s even easier and less restrictive to do in sandbox mode. I’ll be using Aserai as the demonstration, but we’ll cover which picks to make for all 6 cultures at the end of this section. For each stage, we want to pick options that put focus points and attribute points that fall within the final build so as to not waste any points. We take Option 1 for Family, Option 5 for Early Childhood, Option 4 for Adolescence, Option 5 for Youth, Option 2 for Young Adult and Option 5 for Story Background. Your starting character should look like this – the only questionable focus point is 1H, but there isn’t much we can do about it. If you prefer a Vlandian character, here are the picks. Each culture has slight variations, but the end results should be within 1 or 2 focus points of each other, which won’t be a problem in the long run. Sturgia picks should look like this. Here’s the Empire starting picks. And for the Khuzait’s starting picks. Finally, we have the Battanian starting picks. I’m going to put all 6 on the screen with a timestamp so it’s much easier to find when you’re starting a new game.
Now let’s take a look at the end goal for this build and put a plan in place for how to get there. By the time we reach level 32, we will have 26 attribute points in total. In this case, we have 28 because of perks, which we’ll cover in just a minute, but taking those out we should have 2 vigor, 5 control, 4 endurance, 4 cunning, 9 social and 2 intelligence. In general, I recommend putting points into the areas we’ll be using first. Personally, I put points up to the limit from the top down – getting to 5 control first, 4 endurance second, 4 cunning third and then everything after that goes into social. This way we’ll have decent combat skills in the early game when it actually matters, then riding and scouting for specific perk combos and social last since we’ll need this for the mid and late game expansion.
Focus point placement is similar, but has some distinct differences – we prioritize throwing and riding first, but ignore athletics since we’ll only be using that for siege battles. Scouting should come next since we’ll need it for the early mid game. Charm should be next followed by leadership. At this point, either tactics or athletics can be taken next. Tactics is a terrible skill, but for your mental sanity I recommend having it for the late game – fighting hundreds of battles in person will make you hate this game, but a decent auto resolve will keep the pace of conquest moving along. And finally, we have 7 unused focus points to spend. These could be put into smithing, roguery, trade or any of the other combat skills, but they aren’t necessary for this build to work so we’ll leave them up for interpretation.
Now for the most important part of the guide – perk selections. A lot of these picks are either subjective or irrelevant, so we’ll only focus on the most important must-haves.
Going from top to bottom, let’s start with Throwing: I’ll include the full selection of picks in case you want to follow my exact build. There are 3 perks that increase our stack size – Level 75 well prepared, level 125 Saddlebags and level 200 resourceful. Saddlebags require that we’re mounted to get the +2, which isn’t a problem since we’ll be fighting mounted for everything but sieges. These 3 perks will give an extra +5 to each stack of javelins we equip, taking the total up to 10 per stack. And finally, one of the best combat perks in the game – level 250 impale. This perk allows us to completely ignore enemy shields and 1-shot every troop type in the game, no matter how armored they are.
Moving on to Riding – there are some decent perks here, but the only one that’s a necessity is level 225 Mounted patrols. We’ll be combining this perk with another from the scouting tree in order to reduce prisoner escape chance down to 0, effectively holding on to them as long as we wish. The only caveat here is once peace is declared, they will be released, which makes this combo not as effective while serving as a vassal but incredibly powerful as a solo clan or king.
As I mentioned earlier, we can pick up 2 attribute points from the perks here – level 175 durable gives us +1 endurance and 200 steady gives us +1 control. Attribute points are much more scarce than focus points, so perks like these are S-tier.
Now let’s cover the other crucial perk for this build, which is in the scouting skill. Level 225 Keen sight adds the other half of the -50% escape chance for prisoners. These two perks combine are incredible!
I feel a bit gross recommending anything tactics related, but here we go anyways. Level 75 horde leader is a really good perk since it can be taken in the early game and +10 party size is huge when most early game party limits are around 40 – 50.
We’ve got a lot of important picks in our next skill – Charm. Level 50 warlord gives +30% influence from battles, which will help us earn more money during the mercenary phase and more influence for votes in the late game when we have vassals to keep in check. Level 125 Firebrand does 2 things – it decreases the influence cost for policy votes by 50%. Influence will be very tight once we form a kingdom and passing a handful of policies will be crucial. It also increases the number of troops we can hire from villages by 1. Level 200 Natural Leader reduces the number of chat checks we need to pass in order to recruit nobles into our clan by one, making it significantly easier to bring them under our banner. And finally 275 immortal charm gives influence each day. In the late game, we’ll need thousands of influence to downvote bad peace deals and war declarations, so every bit of influence we can save will go a long way.
For leadership, there are quite a few important perks to pick, starting with level 25 Combat tips. If you follow the starting picks, we’ll have 30 leadership from the start and get a +1 to recruiting slots at fiefs of the same culture. This makes early game recruitment so much easier! Level 50 stout defender gives a 50% increase to prisoner recruitment rate for higher tier troops, which will come in handy late game when we don’t have time to return home to recruit more troops. Level 100 famous commander increases renown gain by 50% from battles, so if we can get this perk early enough, we’ll have no problems getting to clan tier 4 and be able to start a kingdom. Level 125 leader of the masses increases every party in our clan by 5 for each town we own. If we have 4 clan parties, then a single town increases our total army size by 20. Level 250 talent magnet increases our clan party limit by 1, allowing us to create another party. This perk alone can increase our army size by 150 – 250 troops and is easily one of the best in leadership. And finally level 275 ultimate leader increases the size of our main party based on our leadership skill. During the early kingdom phase, we’ll need every single troop we can get!
A quick side note – no matter what build you’re going with, you should always put at least 1 focus point into medicine and take level 25 preventative medicine. As long as you win the battle, you’ll always regenerate enough HP to fight right away.
Now let’s talk about the strengths and weaknesses of this build in the context of a world conquest run. The most obvious strength is being able to capture nobles through winning battles, reducing the enemy’s fighting force for the rest of the war. Instead of dealing with an infinite amount of reinforcements, we’ll be dealing with 3 – 5 waves most of the time. Once we’ve captured the majority of their nobles, we can siege down their fiefs without having to deal with defending armies. This also means we can take out time and starve out garrisons, build siege equipment to take down walls and reduce our overall siege casualties. And since we will have the entirety of the enemy’s kingdom in our prison hold, we can easily find the clan leaders and attempt to recruit them into our party. It was always a massive pain trying to track nobles down since they can only be recruited if they were in a solo party. Oftentimes they are in an army, making it impossible to even attempt!
Another strength of this build comes from the social skills – having 275 or higher in charm and leadership can make a huge difference in the late game. We’ll be burning through thousands of influence per vote in the late game so it’s important to save up as much as we can. By downvoting wars or paying for peace that nobody wants, we can limit our wars to a single target, clear them out and move on quickly. Leadership allows us to field an even bigger army, a 4th clan party and increases the rate of recruiting prisoners, which will be the main method of replacing top tier unit losses during the late game.
When it comes to combat, I see this build as somewhat neutral – having impale with massive stacks of javelins is very effective in most situations, but considering a highly skilled warrior build can slay hundreds of troops per battle while a javelin build like this will top out around 30 – 40 kills per battle means it’s mediocre. Since our ammunition is limited, I try to focus on taking out high value targets – tier 6 cavalry, enemy nobles, shock troops, etc. Also keep in mind we have 7 unspent focus points that could be put into a melee skill, so it’s not all bad.
Now for the weaknesses – We’ll be handling scouting with our main, but need to hire out for the intelligence roles. Finding good companions or family members to excel in these roles is challenging since most companions will top out around 5 or 6 attribute points in any category, meaning we won’t be able to take advantage of the final perks. There are also some amazing perks that don’t work with a companion, like 275 medicine. Those perks must be taken on our main character in order to work. Playing campaign mode can help some since we can immediately give our brother 10 intelligence and make him the party Stewart, but for sandbox players that won’t be an option. Getting to 275 Steward and medicine makes our party cheap and nearly impossible to kill, so we do give up quite a lot by using companions for these. Another weakness is making money – without leveling up smithing or trade we’ll have to rely on mercenary contracts and quests for the early game and fief income for the mid to late game.
For my final thoughts – I personally love this build. It can be used to achieve a solo clan world conquest or a more standard one. Being able to reduce the enemy’s army size or eliminate them altogether is a game-changer and remains useful up to the very last fief. It’s also a challenging build to get right in the early to mid game since money will be a huge problem. However if a good challenge interests you, then I recommend giving this one a try! Just be prepared for some mental warfare as late game world conquests can get quite boring and tedious.
I’ll be updating my world conquest guide soon, but if you want to see this build in action, check out this video here! Let me know in the comments what kind of build you’d like to see next. A huge thank you to the channel members and Patreon supporters who help keep this channel afloat! I appreciate you.
Starting Picks
- Vlandia: 1,5,4,6,2,5
- Sturgia: 1,5,4,5,2,5
- Empire: 3,5,4,5,2,5
- Aserai: 1,5,4,5,2,5
- Khuzait: 6,5,4,5,2,5
- Battanians: 5,5,4,5,2,5
