Questing with Bad Company (Alberic of Bordeleux Quest Battle of Manann)

Hey what's up guys, it's Oakley and we're going to be doing a quest battle here with Alburic of Bordelot, and this is going to be the Trident of Manon, or Manon, however you want to pronounce it. And this is kind of a cool quest battle where it's you fighting against presumably another Duke of Bretonnia, Guillaume du Chastillon, and he also has, so this is a group of Bretonnian knights against us, but then there's also what's called the Bad Company as part of his allies, and these are Empire forces that are thrown in the mix as well. So it's kind of a cool scenario that every time I play something like this, it really makes me want to play A Return to Medieval 2. It's just so glorious, all human forces fight against each other with relatively minimal magic and yeah, this battle as you'll see was a blast. I did record it live, the gameplay, but I'm going to be commentating kind of post battle after the fact, just because I didn't know if I'd like the footage, but I think it did end up pretty awesome. I am going to allow him to give his speech here. So that was pretty awesome, and that is something I've been missing out on, I haven't been playing too much campaign, haven't been playing too much quest battles, it's all been multiplayer stuff, and well, making documentaries. So that was a cool little piece of, I don't know if that's a reused speech from before, but I haven't seen it before. But anyways, that's a cool little intro, pump up speech that they put there. I'm really digging these quest battles, I don't know why I haven't played them before. It's cool, it at least makes it a bit of a challenge when you play against the AI. And one of the neat things is I imagine in the not too distant future, we'll be seeing the potential for modders to actually make their own quest battles, which is going to be unbelievable. I've seen some of the stuff that they've been doing for the Lord of the Rings mod for me, ridiculous stuff. Pair that with the custom maps, and you can start to build entire campaigns built around scenarios. There's so much cool stuff, because obviously scenarios has a lot of little things you can add to it. One of the big ones being, well, the army composition, some scripting for the AI, reinforcements, choosing when and where they come in could be really cool. You can do waves of survival, all kinds of really neat stuff, which would be fun to see. As for this battle, I'm fighting against the enemy, and I'm going to start to move forward because they have some guns. So some of my cavalry is hidden in the woods, then I'm going to push up on the left. I want to try and silence these guns before I get up close. The enemy does have a lot of firepower, and a lot of knights as well, so I'm kind of scared to charge at this with my full army, so what I'm going to try and do is move forward with just a couple of my units. Unfortunately, some of my knights of the realm here are starting to get picked off, so I'm going to move them back into the woods, and I'm going to charge forward on the left with a fair amount of my heroes. Got a little bit too close, but thankfully didn't take too much damage with my damsel. I'm going to move into the woods for some protection. What I'm trying to do is just play around with the enemy, try and see how they react, try and probe to see if there's any more stuff in the woods here. I don't know where that second army is coming from. And then I'm going to start to throw a couple more units in here, and my primary target is to take out the guns. I'm going to use a curse of the midnight wind, or at least I'm going to try to, and then I toggle over to the lightning strike, and I'm going to just try and get at this crew. Now I know that these spells don't do too much damage, but I figured we'd get a little bit of action underway here. I charge in with two heroes and immediately pull out of that fight. I know I'm not going to do too much, I'm just trying to disrupt the enemy, and I'm going to try and pull out here. I have heroes to reinforce, cavalry moving in, and pikes here, and I want to start to shoot up any of the enemy who try and chase me. Albrek's going to try and get a flanking shot on these guys once they get onto the open road. But it looks like I'm getting rather stuck in the woods here with lots of units coming at me. Thank god for the heavy support of the bowmen, and two deep ranks of halberds. That's going to be a really big boon. I'm going to try and curse some of the enemy to deplete their attack abilities. Fire away with marchers, and now we're going to spring the trap and get everyone in on them. The enemy is also firing at me from a distance, but A, they're shooting through woods so it's not very effective, and then B, the units they are shooting are kind of crap peasants, so I don't worry about that too much. I'd rather them shoot my peasants than my knights. So this engagement on the flank here is going pretty well. I'm able to pick apart some of the key enemy units, take out a couple of their knights here rather easily, and only for the price of a little bit of the HP of my heroes, which I'm not super worried about. My archers are actually doing a really good job of sequestering the enemy, forcing them back, and the enemy AI is kind of stumbling around, not quite sure what to do. Cannons are still firing, but now I can start to move up and hold a bit more of an advantageous position here as I continue to push forward. Halberd is obviously going to be screening my troops. I do have to be careful because the enemy has some swordsmen as well, but for now I'm relatively comfortable. I'm going to get him in here and try and knock out one of the guns. I'm not going to commit all of my heroes to the same blob because I know there's a cavalry right there that's eager to charge right in. So I'm going to pull in some halberds to support, try and knock out the second pair of guns, and then kind of sit tight and just try and do as much damage with my functional group here as possible. I am going to zoom in a little bit after I get a couple of these commands off. I'm going to try and get a wind ability here. It does more disruption than damage, so it really didn't end up doing too much to those knights. I really do hope they buff some of these spells because that was rather disappointing. My knights there are routed, but it's a fair enough trade for what I'm killing from the enemy side. Heroes still at fairly good health, so I'm going to keep them stuck in. fire at everything. Now I believe is going to be the moment to draw in my reinforcements. Now that they're all occupied, slammed up against my halberds, and then pull up with the infantry. This is going to be the key moment. I find it's often best to try and play against your opponent with a bit of a skirmishing, move on one side, get as much damage done as possible, and then come in with a heavy hammer blow once you've forced them to expose their flanks. That's a bit of my tactics here. I'm going to zoom in on these peasants because I do really love the fact that CA has given us different sub factions, each with their own custom colors. Makes for really epic scenarios and some glorious eye candy for sure. I'm also going to be targeting with my archers, the unit that formed up into lance formation, because that one takes a lot more damage once it's in that position. Enemies continuing to cycle charge here. Not super worried, I mean cycle charges against heroes isn't going to do too much, but now this is actually kind of a critical moment. My halberds were dealt with, and so with them routing, now my heroes are going to start to get surrounded. That is not looking good. So now I have to kind of precipitate the assault on the rest of the wings and try and save my heroes here. Archers continuing to fire, continuing to get a lot of kills, but now my heroes, you can see, yeah, they're all starting to route. I'm going to reform my halberds to try and blunt the enemy. Charge in with two knights to try and save my heroes and pull them out. Pop some more abilities, but really try and get Alberic out there. I can't suffer his defeat early on. And that's also another thing that I tend to have is, yeah, I like to do a lot of micro and try and finagle with one of my wings, but often times, even in multiplayer, you'll see me kind of waste my lords in scenarios like this, where I try and have them tank out a lot of damage early on, because I really feel bad for my foot troops. I don't want them taking the brunt of the loss, and if a hero has a lot of health to go around, well, I usually like to spend that before I spend my troops. But it doesn't always have the results you want. You have to be very careful, because they can get sniped and overwhelmed. Now in this case, I was able to pull them out, so I would say this is a very successful attack. And I've reformed behind my peasant line, which is pretty awesome. And we're going to get ready for an all-out assault on the enemy blob here. I'm going to get everyone stuck in. And this is a nice blob for my archers also to shoot in. They're getting ridiculous amounts of fire in here. I'm going to move up with my damsel as well, hoping that she can get some awesome bombardment in on that blob. And then we're going to bring everyone into the center, because this is where the kill is going to happen. Let's go ahead and we're going to zoom in on my charge. So now we get a bunch of the troops moving in. Lots of the kind of, I don't actually know, those are like pox arrows. I don't know what the lore is behind those. Maybe they're tainted with smallpox or something, I don't quite know what's behind that. But they are kind of poison, so everything in the middle is being slowed. I believe it also has morale debuffs, but yeah, the enemy is hurting. And now here I'm going to cast a bombardment spell on the enemy. We'll see kind of how that goes off. I don't think it'll do super well, but anyways, let's go ahead and see a little bit of units tossed around. But the bigger damage is going to be knights coming in, boom, hitting the enemy from the rear. And this is why I didn't want to charge early on in the fight. It's better, as you saw here, to wait until the enemy is fully engaged and then swarm around the sides. And now I've got a complete clusterfuck on my hands. But the clusterfuck is sort of to my advantage. The kind of biggest thorn in my side here is if you take a look at my heroes, oops, looks like two of them actually routed when they committed to that fight. I think they were chased down to some cavalry, so I'm down to just Albrek. Which is okay, he's still in pretty good health, but I do have to keep a watchful eye on him because if he drops, then the rest of my army will surely flee as well. You'll notice that most of my knights are pretty low health, but I'm doing a fairly good job of trying to nurse them and keep them alive. And then also focus firing with my archers on some of the more vulnerable targets. These empire swordsmen are actually being rather resilient against my forces of Bretonnia. Obviously Bretonnia not very much known for their infantry, but I was hoping they'd be able to hold up a little bit better. And yeah, actually a lot of my cavalry tied up in the woods chasing down the enemy. I'm going to try and pull them back. Couple halberd units here, yeah they're trying to hold a defense against my guys, but lots of cavalry are going to be able to overwhelm them. In the center however, the enemy has a fair amount of heroes that are starting to tank out against my guys, so I'm a little bit scared here. Albrek is starting to waver, I quickly pull him out of there, and this is kind of a scary situation for me. And I have a couple more units rallying, we're going to throw them into the mix and just surround these halberds on this position. And these gunners keep coming back. That's one of the things when you fight against the AI, it's very good about automatically bringing anything from the fight that routed back into the battle. Firing and kiting, it's obviously programmed to do that instantaneously, so that's one of the advantages the AI has. So when you're fighting against them, always keep an eye on routing units, and it's usually good to chase them pretty far off the battlefield, make sure that they shatter, it's worth the extra effort. We can see a little bit of the chase of the bad company here. These knights extremely angry at anyone who would dare bring a gun to a lance fight here. Down in the center, the enemy line is still kind of holding surprisingly, with their swordsmen. I've got some of my bows in the mix, not really going to hold out too well, so I definitely need to bring some cavalry to hit the back of this. Thankfully I was able to see the enemy hero off, looks like he was distracted by other units, and I can reform and try and knock out, again, these pesky handgunners around the back. Going to pull Albrek out, don't want him losing against the enemy hero who has better health than me. I'm going to swing him around, and then these archers, I'm going to continue to target the enemy hero, take a chunk out of his health, and then once I see off these handgunners, try and wheel about because I really need to strike these swordsmen units, they're actually being much more sticky than I would have originally anticipated. And knowing that as well, I'm going to re-prioritize the focus fire on my archers, hit the entire flank of this spearman force, and try and free up some of my infantry clusters as well. So yeah, we're going to infect them with smallpox here, and that should get them to route, yep. So I find peasant archers are actually super versatile and useful in this game, it's really awesome, love to bring them, well obviously they've been dumbed down, or not dumbed down, a debuff from what they were before, but still rather powerful forces I find. And given Bretonnia's cavalry advantage, you usually don't have an enemy who's able to get at your archers, which isn't always the case with armies in Total War, but for Bretonnia it's definitely a nice little boon that you can pick up. That's going to be about it for the battle, I'm seeing off the remainder of the enemy, Albrek is still alive and he's going to try and deal with the enemy count here, Ganon, and try and finish him off. A couple final blows coming in of the pox, it's hitting some of my knights, but the blessing of the lady should keep that from infecting us. Same can't be said of this other duke, I don't know if I should call him a duke or a count or whatever his title is, it won't matter very much longer, he is about to see the end of his reign here, and yeah the blessing of the lady has definitely left him. We're going to cut him down, cut him down to size. So I do have to say this has been a very fun quest battle, I really like the map, I like the scenario, I like the more traditional army builds that you saw here, I mean medieval stuff almost edging on renaissance with the empire forces with guns and handguns, it was a really cool fight actually, very much enjoyed it. Not too many flying units or magical units, and it was a pretty close run fight I do have to say. And take a look at this cinematic thing, this is like images you'd see out of the US Civil War, cannons just sitting here with bodies strewn all the way around, just an epic sight all around, and the peasants stand strong here, and they're going to see the enemy away. I actually do think that Albrecht of Bordeleau's army is kind of my favorite color scheme of them all, I really do enjoy his. I'm just going to save the file as questing in case I want to use this for cinematics later. But now we can go ahead and take a look at actually some of the stats here, so I was actually fighting against Guillaume de Chastillon, and he had the rogue knights Retinue and then the bad company here on the other side. We had about a parity of forces on both sides, my knights did actually really good, 218 on some of them, the rest doing pretty good, archers doing way too much damage than they should have, paladin and damsel doing okay, Albrecht was really close to dying so I'm glad I kept him alive when I did, I was a little bit hasty in charging my lords into the fray in the very beginning, maybe that's what caused them to die, but I think it did allow the meat of my army to do much more damage than it otherwise would. But yeah, that's it for the battle, hope you guys enjoyed, see you in the next one, peace out.