Lords of the Realm II – How to Forge, Kopen, or Mercs Weapons

Scope

To raise an army with units other than peasants, you need weapons, and there’s two basic ways of getting those weapons: You can buy weapons at the Merchant Caravan, or you can craft the weapons yourself at a Blacksmith. Afwisselend, you can hire Mercenaries. This guide compares these options and helps you take advantage of each one to raise an army with maximum efficiency.

Forge vs. Caravan Cost Comparison

Eerst, we’ve got to put a price on the labor of your villagers to make an apples to apples comparison. If a villager produces a ton of iron, what price should we assign to that? You buy Iron for 2 Crowns a ton, but can only sell it for 1 Crown. The price you should consider is the kopen price of 2 Crowns: the only thing you usually want to sell at the Caravan Merchant is Cows, for everything else the relevant price is the buying price.

For every weapon you forge, your villagers could have instead gathered 4 ijzer, 4 hout, of 2 steen. The cost of getting that same amount of iron, wood or stone from the Caravan is 8 Crowns, so the cost of forging a weapon is 8 Crowns worth of labor for the crafting, plus the cost of the iron and wood reagents:

Here’s how you read this table. Iron and Wood is the amount of Iron and Wood it takes to craft a weapon. Forging is the flat cost of 8 Crowns’ worth of labor it takes to craft a weapon. Forge cost is the cost in Crowns to buy the necessary Iron and Wood from the Caravan, plus the cost of Forging the weapon, and is calculated as (Ijzer + Hout)*2 + Forging. Price is the price at which you can buy the completed weapon from the Caravan. Forge Discount is Price – Forge Cost.

The main takeaway is in the Forge Discount column. Buying a Sword at the merchant costs 46 Crowns, but if instead you buy 10 Iron and 3 Wood from the Caravan, and then craft the sword yourself, you can save 12 Crowns per sword, which is a nice discount when you want you need hundreds of them. You should pretty much never buy Mail directly from the Caravan, whereas buying Maces and Bows from the Caravan is a pretty good deal.

Mercs

The basic tradeoff of Mercenaries is that you can get units at a cheaper cost up-front, but with a higher maintenance cost. There’s an army upkeep cost of 1 Crown of seasonal wages for every 4 units in your armies, regardless of unit type; Mercenary wages are twice as high at 1 Crown for every 2 eenheden.

Of… at least that’s how it was meant to work. The upkeep cost of Mercenaries is bugged, and is equal to that of regular soldiers.

There’s a few other considerations for Mercenaries vs. regular troops: Mercenaries don’t have a population or happiness cost. Echter, when you disband a Mercenary army, you don’t get the population added back, and you don’t get their weapons added back to your stockpile, of. There’s also a hard limit of one Mercenary company maximum in every army.

There’s another Steam guide that details the Mercenaries you can hire. That guide is wrong: It correctly lists the cost of each mercenary company, but incorrectly lists the Spanish Knights company as consisting of 25 Knights (they’re 50), and the Angevin Knights as consisting of 50 Knights (they’re 100):

These are the 12 Mercenary companies. Mercenary Cost is the hiring cost of that Mercenary company; Caravan Price is the Caravan Price of buying that many weapons; Forge Cost is the cost of buying the requisite Iron and Wood from the Caravan, then forging that many weapons. Savings is the difference between Caravan Price or Forge Cost, whichever is cheapest, minus Mercenary Cost.

With the exception of Knights, Mercenaries are always worth getting, but the 1 Mercenary Company per army is a serious limitation. Because of this limitation, bigger mercenary companies are better than smaller ones; 200 Irish Pikemen are preferable to 100 Scottish Pikemen, en 250 Burgundy Macemen are preferable to 150 Saxon Macemen. 200 Welsh Archers are a fantastic deal for defending your castles, but for your armies I recommend melee mercenaries instead, who fight in the front lines and die faster; it’s better to have melee mercenaries who fight hard, die fast, and then get replaced by a new mercenary company- at a discount, Natuurlijk.

In my estimation, the best Mercenary companies are 200 Welsh Archers and 250 Burgundy Macemen, followed by 200 Irish Pikemen and 200 Danish Swordsmen. De 200 Norman Crossbowmen can also be a good deal; they make an excellent early game combination with Peasants. Peasants don’t cost any Crowns to raise, but they struggle badly with armored melee units like Swordsmen, Pikemen and Knights… who in turn get countered by your Crossbowmen.

Other considerations

*Dat kan (en zou moeten) gather your own Iron and Wood, Natuurlijk. Maybe your main County can produce Wood but not Iron; if you have a large surplus of Wood, then you probably want to buy some Iron from the Caravan so you can forge Pikes and Swords. Forging Pikes may not be crazy efficient compared to buying them, but it’s an excellent way to put that excess Wood to work without spending a fortune buying Iron. If you do have the capacity to gather plentiful amounts of Iron, then you should focus on forging the weapons that are more cost-efficient to forge: Zwaarden, Crossbows and/or Mail, depending on your desired army composition. You can then buy Maces, Pikes and/or Bows from the Caravan Merchant to round out your army.

*It takes a season to forge weapons, and sometimes you need the weapons NOW. It pays to plan ahead, but sometimes you’re caught off-guard and need to buy a bunch of weapons from the Caravan. Ideaal, you’ll buy some of the cheaper weapons, like Maces, Pikes and Bows! Buying Swords and especially Mail from the Caravan is very inefficient.

*You often try to optimize your weapons forging by having, inspraak, exactly a 2:1 ratio of Wood to Iron to forge as many Pikes as possible, but remember that building castles can cost Wood as well. Voor 800 Hout, 80 Stone and a little labor, a Motte and Bailey will boost your tax revenue in that province by 75%, give you 150 free garrisoned Bowmen (A 4,800 Crown value), and it forces invading armies to spend at least one season constructing siege equipment, buying you time to mount a defense. Niet alleen dat, the AI will be less likely to attack provinces with well-defended castles, especially before they hate you and declare war on you, which in turn keeps your relations with them from souring for longer. Remember to set some Wood aside for Castle building!

Legalese

All rights are reserved by Taznak. Partial or complete reproduction of this guide is allowed, so long as Taznak is credited for all parts of the content that are reproduced.