Manor Lords: Tips for Mercenary Captain achievement

The settings I recommend are using the easiest, most difficult, and competitively ignoring other achievements since you might lose sight of the mercenary captain achievement.

For the map, I recommend trying to get a starting location where you can get infinite iron ore and clay. If you can also get it to be a fertile piece of land, then that will help, but its not a must since I have done it without it.

NOTE:
My method isn’t the most efficient or the best, however, it works. I was just too lazy since I had to restart 3-4 times. Im sure you all will be able to do this a lot better than me.

You need to start producing money as fast as possible; however, make sure you don’t overtax the people or you won’t get enough influx of people (10–30% is pretty good). You probably have your own favorite money-making method, but do note that you need to focus on income, not efficiency.

The way I started with my development points for the first village was like this (yes, I didn’t fully max out my village since it bugged out and clothing didn’t sell for some reason):
Honey + Wax
Charcoal + Mineshafts
Heavy Plow

I also made sure to sell anything that I didn’t need as soon as possible, like extra firewood, or once wax was produced, I put it up immediately for sale. Once I had enough people, I started with the mineshafts and sold what they output. For the iron, I sold the raw iron ore and the smelted iron bars. Although the iron ore sells for less, there is only a limited amount you can sell every time, and since this is not for efficiency, it’s not that important.

While focusing on money, don’t forget to sustain your growing population; this is the reason why I got the heavy plow. I needed to produce lots of wheat and barley. If you did get the very fertile piece of land too, then it might be worth investing in flax. Since then you can produce linen, which is pretty profitable. You could also add some sheep to produce wool and make that into yarn; while you are at it you can also sell the exess sheep for extra income. As a bonus, you could use your remaining development point to either allow your sheep to reproduce faster or put fences around your farms to renegerate the fertility quicker.

And if you somehow have excess wood, try to make some wooden parts and sell them, as in this game mode it’s pretty nice to have extra income.

So you might have already found out that the player and the AI share the same mercenary pool, and the worst part about this is that once the AI hires one of them, they are usually gone for good from the whole game.

Usually it’s only when conquering new terrories and bandit camps. This information is very crucial, since what I found out was that if, e.g., the AI hires some mercenaries and tries to attack something, you can declare war on him and try to kill all the enemy troops; if successful, then the mercenaries will probably go back into the mercenary pool.

Now you will probably not be able to stop the AI from getting the mercenary troops before you and attack the first bandit camp; however, what you can do is save before the bandit camp spawns and try to load until the AI has chosen the worst mercenaries. This won’t cause any loss to you, and you can do the same next time too.

After you have gathered a bit of money, try to get to all other bandit camps before the AI does. Of course, you need to hire only mercenaries and do the method above again unless you are able to afford all of them. If you have made sure to hire all of the mercenaries for X month, then the AI won’t be able to hire any mercenaries, and you can attack the bandit camp at your own pace. However, be warned that in the next month the mercenaries that are still available will appear, and you need to make sure to hire them as well if you haven’t attacked the bandit camp already.

Rinse and repeat this until you have enough money and influence to take the AI’s territories.

This is probably the hardest hurdle here. To beat the final battle, you will need about 4-5 mercenary troops to beat it. You will need to use your own strategy to beat the AI, but if you have made sure to have enough troops, then you shouldn’t have any huge problems. In worst case just reload and try the battle again.

The type of troops that I recommend are mainly melee troops since they will need to block the enemy and take them out. The archers that you have should focus on the enemy archers so that they dont get in the way of your melee fighters.

If you don’t have enough melee troops, try to use some agile units to bait out enough enemy melee troops so that the front line can hold out. When the front line is cleaned up, focus on the remaining enemies. If your front line isn’t able to hold out and is annihilated, you might even think about rehiring your lost mercenaries and playing ring around the rosies to extend the battle time. However, this comes with a big risk. It is possible to do the above; however, if you take too long, the enemy will just spawn a new batch of the enemy troops you just fought, and that is the point when you might need to either change your strategy or reload an older save. (Don’t ask how I know all of this; im sure you all would have already guessed it by now.)

Some of you will probably know there are already tips and tricks for this achievement online, but I didn’t find any here, so I thought I might as well share what I have learned the past day with anyone who wants to attempt this too and if anyone has ideas on how to improve this guide please do let me know.

Thanks for sticking through with all of this. It’s my first time writing a guide, so I hope I wasn’t too chatty and stuck with only what’s most important, and most importantly, I hope you found this guide useful.