No, not a drag queen. I don’t have much experience in the way of being a drag queen. I mean royalty queen…

…and in a video game, of course. Let me just start this again.

Hey all,

A communications breakdown can mean only one thing... invasion! Ahh, I feel dirty just quoting that movie. This is a relatively small invasion force. Yes, it's ugly out there.

I hope the twists and turns of the world haven’t caused all (both) of my readers to become disheartened or lose hope. I am still here, still plugging away at my blog. I’m hoping to continue making basic improvements to the navigation and structure of the site, as well as design changes as well. I’m struggling with how I want to proceed; I need some way to make it easy to keep track of different posts, but I don’t think that the categories are working out so well. I may end up breaking off the more formal game reviews I’ve been doing into another section. The lack of feature images on the first series of my stories is also saddening. Plus, I’ve got a super-secret-special-awesome post in the works for Halloween, and it is going to be epic. It should at least double my readership. I’m excited.

Queendom of Dawn troops prepare for the waves of enemies. Luckily the enemy isn't smart enough to build more than one siege ladder.

The last few days I’ve been trying to complete my campaign of utter military dominance in Mount & Blade: Warband. Needless to say, it’s been rough. I’ve taken a few castles and founded the soon-to-be-legendary Kingdom of Dawn, led by Queen Clover Dawn. I still can’t get over how silly it was to name it a “kingdom” when my character is female. Pfft.

So I’ve got a few castles and a few minions (also known as “vassals”) out doing my bidding. Unfortunately, the previous tenants of the castles that I’ve liberated tend to not like me much. And then because they have more castles than I do, they tend to send hundreds upon hundreds of soldiers to lay siege. Given my character’s heroic stature and her elite bodyguard, it’s not a problem to destroy them by the hundreds while taking few losses.

Fighting the troops off the walls is pretty easy. A nice two-handed weapon and decent skill will one shot the weaker ones, but it may take a couple swings to drop elite troops.

The trouble is not that the battles are hard, it’s that the AI can recover 500 troops before I can recover 50. I’ve spent the last few hours in my game running back and forth between several castles. I sneak passed the siege lines and then wait for the assault. When the assault comes, I lead my troops to butcher the enemies as they walk up the siege ladder (singular) in pairs or in single file. I’ll have a movie on and just click to attack every couple of seconds. It’s not challenging at this point, it’s just tedious.

Victory... but a hollow one. The siege defense battles just aren't doing it for me.

I think that I’m going to start taking the enemy vassals prisoner, so that they cannot fight against me as quickly. I was trying to build up enough honor to sway some of them to my side, but it’s just becoming too much of a hassle to defend so many places at once. I feel like if I could build up armies to defend easily, I could bring the fight to the enemies more easily, but so far I’ve been required to defend each fief personally.

I’ll see how it works when I start taking the enemies hostage after I destroy their armies. Hopefully it will limit the amount of defending that I’ll have to.

*whew* I feel better now. That had been annoying me all week!

Cheers all,
-S