Ultimate Guide to Cunning Skills: Scouting, Tactics and Roguery

Hello Everyone and welcome back to another Strat Gaming video guide. In today’s video we are going to be covering the Cunning skills: Scouting, Tactics and Roguery. By the end of this video you will have a firm grasp of how these skills work and how to efficiently level them. And if you stick around until the end of the video, I’ll show you a cool trick to max out you or your companion’s roguery skill in a single action!

   I’ve broken this video up into several chapters so if you’re following along you’ll be able to easily navigate through relevant segments. Check down in the description below for the time stamps. With all that being said, I hope you enjoy this guide and let’s get started!

There are 3 ways in which the scouting skill is useful: it determines how far away we can spot other groups, settlements or tracks, the difficulty of the tracks we can spot and how much information a track will give.

If we hover over the looking glass at the bottom of the screen, it will tell us what our current view distance, but there isn’t a good way to know what these numbers actually mean without examples: Here is the distance we can see at several different scouting levels starting from level 1. This distance will decrease significantly during the night time, so be extra careful when the sun goes down.

There’s no information in-game to tell us what track difficulty is, but from several hours of testing we can get a rough idea. You have a certain percent chance to spot a group’s tracks if you are within the track spotting distance. The higher your scouting level, the higher the chance of spotting tracks. The smaller the group is, the harder it is to spot their tracks. At a scouting level of 1, the smallest group we could detect tracks from was 18. At level 50, that number decreased to 10. However, for these two examples we had to corner a looter group and sit for weeks for the tracks to finally appear. Around level 75 – 100 you start to pick up tracks from all groups much easier.

Track information is well defined and here is a list of what each level does: At level from level 1-49 you only get track marks. At level 50 you can tell how big the party size is. The only other information that is useful is prisoner count, giving you the ability to track parties with large prisoner counts to convert into your own troops.

• Level 1 – 24: Info level 0 – Minimum Trackable Party Size = 18
• Level 25: Info Level 1 – Tracking Marks only
• Level 50: Info Level 2 – Part size, track age – Minimum Trackable Party Size = 10
• Level 75: Info Level 3 – Party Speed
• Level 100: Info Level 4 – Mounted Troops
• Level 125: Info Level 5 – Party Type (war party, bandit, villager, etc.)
• Level 150: Info Level 6 – Prisoner Count
• Level 175: Info Level 7 – Pack Animal Count
• Level 200: Info Level 8 – Enemy Party (Yes/No)
• Level 225: Info Level 9 – Party Culture
• Level 250: Info Level 10 – Party Name (Derthert’s Party)
• Level 275: Info Level 11 – More accurate numbers (Not Speed)
• Level 300: Info Level 12 – Precise Speed
• Level still increases, but no new information given.

Now let’s look at the two ways in which XP is gained for scouting: Spotting Tracks and Spotting Hideouts.

You get 50XP for each hideout that you spot. As long as you are close enough to the hideout, you have 100% chance of spotting it so it’s reliable and the XP gain is great for those early levels. However, once you get to higher levels, it can take a very long time to gain a level from hideout spotting. At level 75 scouting and a 10x multiplier, it can take 8 hideouts for a single level!

The XP you gain from a single track that you spot is tiny, anywhere from 0.5XP up to 3.3XP. However, once you start spotting more group’s tracks, the XP gain compounds and adds up quickly. The best way to understand this concept is to run several experiments and look at the results:

First we will travel from Ostican in Vlandian territory down to Husn Fulc in Aserai territory. We revealed all hideouts on the map to make sure we were ONLY getting track XP and then tested several scouting levels 10 times each to see what the XP gain would be. At level 1, we got 0XP most of the time. At level 24, the average went up to 90.3 At level 162, the average was 2219.6. Finally at level 282, the average went up to 3756XP. We also tested to see if there was a difference between spotting enemy, neutral or ally tracks. Individual track XP didn’t show any difference, however the runs yielded very different XP results: 127.7XP at 24, 4766.4XP at Level 162 and 8655.6XP at level 282. My best guess here is that enemies will follow you once they are in range, allowing you to spot their tracks from ahead and racking up tons of XP.

There was a lot of info there, so let’s sum everything up into a concise and usable strategy for leveling up scouting: At low level scouting, search for hideouts to gain quick levels. When you get above level 50, switch over to spotting tracks for leveling. Follow large armies, go to busy intersections on the map, get enemy groups to chase you, etc. The more tracks you spot, the more XP you gain, the higher level will become, allowing you to spot more tracks and so on – It’s a cycle that allows you to level up scouting faster at higher levels, the only skill to do this in the game.

A few miscellaneous points about scouting before we finish:

• Ignore the tool tip for leveling scouting: traversing difficult terrain does NOT level scouting.
• Group size does not effect XP gain.
• All armies count as 1 track regardless of how many groups are in the army.

Now we move onto my favorite skill in the cunning group: Tactics. It’s my favorite because it’s SO BAD that I don’t even need to cover it in the guide, which saves me a ton of time editing…

Okay I’m partially joking here, let’s break down what tactics is and how it works:

First we look at the part of tactics that actually functions – simulation advantage. For our testing, we ran an army of 1000 volunteers and fought against a well equipped army of 524:

• At level 1 tactics, our volunteers will lose 66% of the time.
• At level 50, you will win with 734 casualties sustained on average.
• Level 100, 751 on average
• Level 150, 699 on average
• Level 200, 675 on average
• Level 250, 660 on average
• Level 300, 589 on average
• Level 300, 475 on average with ALL perks selected

We see a 24% drop in casualties from Level 300 with no perks to level 300 with all perks. We see a 58% drop in casualties going from the worst loss at level 100 to 330 with all perks.

I also ran tests with 1000 of every tier unit available to see if there was an optimal unit to use for autoresolve and here is what we came up with:

• Every unit in the game has it’s own stats for autoresolve, but each tier and troop type were all within a few percentage points of each other. Ex. Aserai T2 melee ~ Empire T2 Melee
• The best unit for each tier was always melee troops.
• Mixing melee with anything else always resulted in worse results. (ex. melee only – 100 losses, melee mixed – 150 losses)
• Tier 6 slightly out-performed tier 5, but might not be worth it based on the cost and rarity of tier 6 units.

In order to test if there was any advantage to autoresolving a battle rather than commanding it in person, we ran a few battles to compare. We removed all personal weapons from our character so that we couldn’t personally participate in the killing. Using only tier 5 melee troops, we were able to easily defeat the enemy army and only lost 188 troops, most of which were injured. If we autoresolved this same battle, the majority of the time would result in 100% loss of our army.

Next, we have the gem of tactics – sacrificing troops. If you wish to avoid a battle, you have the option to sacrifice some of your troops and inventory in order to get away. Unfortunately, this part of the skill leveling is completely broken. We collected a ton of data, but there was very little coherence to it so I won’t even bother posting results. There was one pattern that did emerge… the higher your tactics level was, the MORE troops you have to sacrifice to get away. It’s entirely possible that I’m an idiot and don’t understand military tactics, but my first assumption would be that higher tactics should result is less losses. If only Napoleon was still alive so we could ask him, (picture of napoleon and huh huh French sound and french national anthem).

There are 2 ways to gain tactics XP: Having your soldiers get kills and sacrificing troops to evade a battle.

Anytime one of your troops gets a kill, you gain XP. The XP amount is solely determined by the tier of the troop killed starting out at tier 1 giving 1XP up to tier 6 giving 10XP.

You also gain XP from sacrificing troops to avoid a battle. The XP you gain is solely determined by how many troops are sacked. All troops give 50XP per sacrifice regardless of their tier.

A couple important points before we go over efficient leveling:

• Auto-resolve battles give the same XP as fighting it personally. There is no bonus.
• You don’t get XP if the enemy surrenders.
• The XP gain is the same for kills and injuries, all casualties inflicted are treated the same.
• Enemy lords give XP based on what their tier would be if they were a troop. Ex- level 21 lord would be equivalent to a tier 4 troop, hence it gives 5XP.
• Sacrificing troops to enter or exit a town during a siege does NOT give XP.

Now let’s look at the best way to increase our tactics level:

Step one – fill your personal army up to the limit with volunteers or peasants.

Step two – go find an enemy that is stronger than you. Let them catch you and sacrifice troops to get away.

Step three – repeat until satisfied.

Let’s do a quick comparison between passive XP gain from your troops’ kills and actively leveling it through sacrificing. I broke down an average army from the AI and the troop tier average roughly came to something between 3 & 4. If we were to defeat an army of 200 troops of 100 tier 3 and 100 tier 4, we would have gained 400XP + 500XP = 900XP. To earn that same XP, we would only need to sacrifice 18 of any troop type. If we were gather 200 volunteers and purposefully sacrifice them, we would gain 10000XP.

Now for the final skill on the list: Roguery. Roguery is useful for gaining more loot after battles from defeated parties and making it easier to sneak into cities that refuse entry. Let’s look at how these two change as your gain levels.

When you win a battle, you get rewarded in two different ways: Denars and items. We ran several battles and recorded the loot gained after to see what different levels of roguery would yield. Roguery level does not effect the denars you gain, but it does increase the total value of items gained.

Starting at level 1: Avg 34365 0.3% bonus.

Level 50 avg 41603 12.5% bonus,

Level 100 avg 46382 25% bonus,

Level 200 avg 50897 50% bonus,

Level 300 avg 54854 75% bonus,

Level 300 with final perk avg 82997.

A couple interesting things to point out here: there is a lot of RNG that determines what loot you get post-battle. There is a clear increase from each level gained, but even at the same level we sometimes would get a very expensive item drop that pushed the loot value 50% above other results at the same level. Ex – 35k denar horse armor drop happened 66% of the time at 300 with final perk. With horse armor drop total was 132k and without it only 88k.

Roguery also changes the chances of sneaking into a city that is currently denying entry. Your chances of getting in are effected by a couple things: your roguery level and the level of the walls. Level 1 and level 3 walls are the same and level 2 walls are 1% harder to get in. Let’s look at the how our chances change with roguery levels: at level 1 we have a 7% chance to sneak in, 22% chance at Level 50 and a 97% at level 300. If we take the two-faced perk at level 50, we raise our chances to 32% and 100% at level 199.

Let’s now look at how you gain XP for roguery. There are 6 ways:

• Sneaking into a town gives roughly 18XP
• Escaping Prison gives 31XP
• Ransoming prisoners
• Recruiting bandits to your party
• Raiding villages
• Breaking a noble out of prison

Let’s expand on the 4 categories we didn’t list XP for:

Ransoming prisoners gives 6XP per prisoner regardless of their tier or level. Nobles also give 6XP regardless of their level. The big difference between each troop tier is how much money you gain for each type: Looters give the least at 5 denars and tier 6 give the most at 150. Nobles have their own equation for how much they will give, but there are a couple patterns that are easy to understand: Higher level pays slightly more. Higher clan wealth pays more. Clan leader pays significantly more. See ransom prisoner for data.

Recruiting bandits into your party will give XP based on the tier of troop you recruit. Looters give 2XP and tier 5 such as the bandit bosses give 10XP. (put data on screen, see below)

XP is also given for raiding villages. The way raiding works is a little more complicated than most things in this skill, but as always let’s break it down into more manageable parts. From the beginning, you approach a village with your army and commence the raid. If your army is less than 8x the defending militia, you will be forced to fight them. If you have more than 8x, they will simple let you raid for free. Once raiding begins, you will see the progress bar for the raid appear. Every few hours, you will get a “tick” which progresses the raid. Each tick will earn you a denar reward (based on the hearths of the village, usually around 10 – 50 per tick), some resources from the village’s supply, some XP (between 4XP & 12XP) and remove some hearths from the village. The speed at which you raid is directly tied to the size of the raiding force. 25 troops will take roughly 3.5 days while 1000 troops can get it done in just under a day. The total XP gained only depends on the raid ticks earned, so the slower the raid the more XP earned. Completing the raid will result in between 29-30% of the villages hearths being removed, a -1 per day hearth modifier for several days, the bound settlement losing food and denar income per day and the complete shutdown of village functions such as buying goods and recruiting troops. Some interesting things to note about raiding:

• Higher hearths give more denars, but XP is the same
• Roguery level has no effect on any aspect of raiding: loot, XP, speed, etc.
• Raiding causes relationship hit to each notable in the village as well as the bound settlement’s owner.

Now for my favorite part of the whole guide – Prison breaks! You can attempt to break any noble out of a prison as long as you are not at war with them. You can do this by visiting the dungeon of any town or castle and selecting prison break. You will have the option to pick which noble you want to break out and how much you will need to pay to bribe the guard. The cost of the bribe can be anywhere from 1000-2000 denars or more. Once you are in the prison, you have the option to have the noble follow you and help or sit there and wait. You will need to dispatch up to 5 guards and exit the final door in order to successfully break the noble out of prison. You will be rewarded with tons of XP and a huge relationship boost to that noble’s clan, depending on your charm skill.

When it comes to XP gain for prison breaks, you can earn in 3 ways: successfully breaking out, kill all guards but losing the noble in the process or being knocked out before making it out. Failing the break will give anywhere from 1434 to 2271 regardless of how you fail or how many kills you get. Successful breaks will give from 3565XP up to 5914XP. I ran nearly 100 prison breaks trying to find the pattern for what gives more XP and nearly gave up when I accidentally figured it out: the amount of time you spend in the prison break dictates how much XP you earn. If you sprint to the end without letting go of the forward key, you can net nearly 6k in XP. If you take your time and go slowly, you will earn roughly half of that at 3500XP. I guess it makes sense – you want to spend as little time as possible in the danger zone if you’re doing something crazy like this.

A couple final points about prison breaks:

• You cannot leave until all guards are dead, so running past does no good.
• Once you clear a prison, if you come back to break another noble out soon after there is a chance the guards are low tier. I’ve seen 5 peasants before.
• You will have to wait 7 days before you can attempt another prison break from the same dungeon.

Looking at all the different ways you can earn roguery XP, it’s very clear that doing prison breaks as fast possible is the most efficient way. My favorite strategy for leveling roguery goes like this:

• Do not become a mercenary or vassal, stay solo for now.
• Look on the kingdom tab and find factions who are at war.
• Visit the bordering towns and castles of these factions, looking for imprisoned nobles.
• Grab the best 2H sword you can find.
• Once in the prison break, tell the noble to wait.
• Run as fast as you can to the end, using ONLY thrust attacks to kill the guards. If you have to fight 2 or more, then circle around them so that you can’t be attacked by more than 1 at once.
• Hit that exit door as fast as you can and reap the rewards!

We are nearing the end of the video and as promised, I will show you a cool trick for maxing out the roguery skill of your main character or any companion. To do this trick, you will need any town (will not work with a castle, must be a town and you must own it personally). Next, you will need to pile up as many prisoners in the dungeon as you can. How many prisoners you save up depends on how many levels you want – recall from earlier that we earn 6XP regardless of the troop tier, so all prisoners are valuable here. The most impressive results I can think of is going from level 240 up to 330 (or even more if you want) in a single second. Let’s calculate what we need to accomplish this.

Looking at our handy XP chart, we can see that we will need 4,002,180XP to go from 240 to 330. If we have 10 attribute points into cunning and 5 focus points, we will have a 12.5x XP multiplier, which means we only need 320,175XP to accomplish our goal. We divide by the XP per prisoner to get a grand total of 53,363 prisoners. Under normal circumstances, if you were to ransom prisoners as you get them, you would level up one at a time. Once you go past 240, you reduce the XP multiplier making it even harder to level. This is partly why it takes so long to level up once you get past 240. If you were to ransom all of these prisoners at the same time, it is treated as a single XP gain event, meaning you gain at the XP multiplier rate before you level up. Basically, you get to keep that 12.5x multiplier all the way through 330! This is also the only way to break the hardcap of 330. If you were to turn in 100k prisoners, you would end up somewhere around 450 roguery. Maybe 330 roguery isn’t that useful, so let’s look at a more reasonable scenario – you have a companion at level 70 roguery, 2 attribute points into cunning and 2 focus points into roguery. Their XP multiplier would be 4.75x and would begin to diminish if we level up any further. The hardcap for roguery here would be level 98, but let’s say we really want the level 100 perk. To go from level 70 to 100 we need to have 135,745XP. Divide out the multiplier, we get 28,578XP. Divide out the 6XP per prisoner to get 4,763 prisoners. This is much more doable! If we collect 1000 prisoners per war, we could easily be ready by the end of the 5th war and if there’s one thing bannerlord isn’t short of it’s constant wars!

Once we have the needed prisoners, call your companion into your army, take all of the prisoners into your party and exit the city. Be sure to not move as this will cause the prisoners to flee instantly since you’ll be WAY over your max prisoner limit. Click on your companion’s portrait in the bottom right and tell them you need to inspect their troops. Transfer the prisoners to their party and go back into the city. They will automatically ransom all prisoners in their keep and you’ll see +30 levels into roguery.

One final tip for collecting prisoners faster – if you fight a battle in an army with your own parties, you can inspect their troops after the battle and transfer all of their prisoners into your own party.

  I want to thank you all for watching another Strat Gaming video guide. If you found something useful in this video please give it a like and subscribe down below. The likes really make a difference with the YouTube algorithm and I’ll would really appreciate your help. Let me know in the comment section below what kind of guide you would like to see in the future. Next Friday we will have the complete guide to the Social skills so be sure to hit the bell notification so you don’t miss it! Thanks again for watching and as always… I’ll see you… on the next one.