Quote:
Originally Posted by twillight
Are there diplomacy options?
About capturing cities the manula maybe tells something? (replacementdocs has the manual if you need one)
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My one foray into diplomacy with one of Harold's towns did get a response ("Not now, pinhead!") - I think it is possible to get better results if the captain has Pots in his inventory. But generally I think if you have time to build Pots, you should be building Pikes or Bows or something, so I admit haven't gone very far with this.
As it turns out, I did have some success today capturing one of these ridiculous places. This scenario is in the center of the bottom row of the map.
All the towns are owned by Jos and he has 5 or 6 captains. Jos XVIII himself is a captain starting in the little tower center-top. He orders the other captains to recruit their entire town and attack the only object not under his control, your tower, center-bottom. So you need to leave that area quickly. If you capture a town (they're all deserted thanks to the recruitment drive), he immediately marches there with his overwhelming force and retakes it.
Anyways, after the match started I left and attacked a few sheep. Once Jos' armies were all down at my tower, it seemed like he made a little mistake. He combined all his men into all into one army, 150 soldiers. I sort of ran around assassinating the now-vulnerable sub-captains for a while but Jos himself never ran out of food, so there's probably an AI handicap going on there.
Eventually I managed to deal with the stupid 150-man army. I captured the deserted bottom-right town, which prompted Jos to go there and retake it. Meanwhile I captured the top-right town. You will notice, regarding these two towns, that the ocean blocks a direct line between the bottom- and top-right. Jos and his original crew have boats, but none of the rest do. Being a dumb bastard, Jos just leaves the 135 soldiers without boats straddling the shoreline while he takes to the sea. I camped my 18 guys on the opposite shore, pictured, in direct line of his march, and when he made landfall with just a few boats, we just murdered him.
If all the captains are killed, it's basically in the bag. All their recruits simply return to their hometowns and go back to farming, and do not go on offense any longer, so it was just and easy-going cleanup after that point. Problem is, this match relied on cheese to isolate Jos from his army. I don't know if the other scenarios like it have such a convenient weak point....