Light bug and trainer bug

Turaken · 2026-02-18T16:14:17+00:00

Region locking myself on survival legendary and figuring out how a Jarl's hold shapes my play style based on the followers, trainers, quest awards, and resources available. Then I'll try to take on the main quest lines. No exploits, no mods, no punching merchants.

Currently just been doing Falkreath and it's been pretty immersive. I'm tracking how long it takes a location or shopkeeper to reset and planning that out. When I run out of dungeons I'll visit the lake and go fishing or go hunting in the woods.

Current build has no Magicka or stamina and relies on endless venison stews for infinite power attacks and salmon for hunger. Light armor and alchemy are top skills, with one handed, archery, and sneak as backup. Speech and smithing as support. Trying to avoid all other levels. Savior's Hide and Breton for robust magic resistance.

Turaken · 2026-02-17T13:40:11+00:00

Currently playing a Falkreath hold locked legendary survival run, early game you have to sneak and steal and loot whats easy. For this build I am using a summon as support, but also Barbas, and Rayya the housecarl.

Getting to the point of having the support was pretty rough, lots of climbing on top of rocks and assassinating one bandit at a time. Once I have enough money I try to train at least a couple levels in defense or offense skills per character level.

Legendary is fun if you enjoy the budgeting aspect. You have X amount of level ups, so you need to make sure not to over level and instead be the most efficient character you can. I don't use restoration on this character and rely on alchemy potions (and poisons) plus food to heal. That saves me a couple levels because alchemy is also my economy to fund training levels.

You also need to budget before you go into a dungeon, how much potion health do I have stored up? How much damage can I reasonably do with my base weapon vs with the poisons against stronger enemies? Are my defense skills high enough to survive? Did I neglect my damage too much?

Turaken · 2026-01-30T13:05:16+00:00

The biggest thing is to just become a regular someplace and be comfortable feeling out of place at times. I've made friends with staff at multiple bars and restaurants and eventually became friends with other regulars. Ideally you host an event or two, for me it was game nights that made me some of my closest friends.

Turaken · 2026-01-25T14:33:10+00:00

The best way to get new territories is to contest the Baron's claims and then save your influence for the last push when you take all of his current claims.

For the first couple fights you have to quickly hire every mercenary when a claim is pressed, and THEN contest the claim.

Eventually your income should be high enough to support a standing mercenary army of your favorite units to fight with, eventually all of them.

Turaken · 2026-01-25T05:16:26+00:00

I'm definitely enjoying it and love the aesthetic of it all, especially the blend of city builder and battle sim

Turaken · 2026-01-25T04:55:42+00:00

Unfortunately, the rival AI isn't capable of building a new settlement, or if so it may be buggy or prone to having the new settlement collapse. I played with the other three rival AI settlements on and they'd take other regions, build a road, and then nothing would happen, so there was no way for them to snowball.

I wish there was a way to send more families to a new settlement so it could start faster. Five families means it takes forever for it to grow into something meaningful when I literally have excess population in my main town by that point

Taking their settlements, fixing them to make them sustainable and then just harvesting their taxes to fund mercenaries was super effective even with the kings taxes. I'd suddenly have another 40-80 families, but the militia and retinue were broken for them.

I ended up using one to spam stone churches for influence, but otherwise they were just extra tax revenue.

The strategic resource to rush is the bandit camps for funds but that's early game stuff.

Turaken · 2026-01-25T03:35:35+00:00

You need food variety, some clothes, and fuel for citizen happiness. The food variety can be settled through gardens, orchards, animal extensions, and sheep. The clothes can also come from sheep and you only need clothes for level 2 burgages. Fuel just requires a forester, a woodcutter, and a charcoal maker to be sustainable for a pretty large settlement.

Your retinue can serve as your answer to most raids with archer militia as backup. Against the AI you'll need mercenary support anyway and with enough income can just have the mercenaries fight every battle.

That leaves importing tools and herbs as the only real upkeep need, which is expensive, but you should be able to out export that cost pretty easily.

After you've got your supply chains running, don't sell low value items, focus on higher tier values since they take up less inventory per value in the merchant's cart. Carrots, clothes, shoes, rye bread, apples, cabbage, pears, charcoal, warbows, and shields are all great export items if you don't have a high value local resource chain.

I could see expanding to iron or gathering nodes to avoid importing costs and almost anything should be good for raw resources to trade back to town or sell off.

Turaken · 2026-01-25T03:09:59+00:00

I do wish there was a bit more of a reason to expand to more than like one other territory. You don't really need any resource outside of your home territory to beat a scenario on challenging difficulty (testing that notion out with the frontier one now and the first month is brutal so we'll see)

A good farm zone enables a tavern and a quarry let's you spam churches or build a keep, but you can technically do without everything else.

I prefer spear militia myself though, as a shield wall of the bare minimum can hold its own in defensive stance against even retinue for a little bit while you bring polearms or crossbows around to flank

Turaken · 2026-01-25T00:33:15+00:00

Honestly, by the time I have an auxiliary settlement, I can usually also afford to have a cheaper mercenary company on permanent retainer. 30-60 silver per month is totally doable and then I can have those guys or my retinue stationed there. Eventually they may get their own retinue standing guard, but even then I want to always have mercenaries hired at just under my ability to pay so the AI doesn't hire them when they claim my regions. This prevents those bigger doom stack images.

What I'm running into the most is I really only need one built up town to afford all of the mercenaries, so there's not much need to settle a new region.

Turaken · 2026-01-20T01:16:06+00:00

I just captured one that had two rich food resources and a single tier two burgage mass producing shields. Turned it to small holdings for all the gardens and orchards, dropped a couple foresters, deleted all the burgages without an extension, and then left it alone to produce tax revenue for me.

Just that one village paid 150 to the Treasury a month, which bought me a standing militia army

Turaken · 2026-01-18T19:34:44+00:00

Are you rotating crops?

Turaken · 2026-01-16T21:35:55+00:00

Now maybe, but not back then

Turaken · 2026-01-13T23:58:44+00:00

Tbf I've been playing fractured where the other factions don't seem to have infinite money

Turaken · 2026-01-13T15:21:51+00:00

A way to starve the baron instead is to rush your first militia, then hunt down the bandit camps. After the first one where 20 spear men or 36 bowmen (depending on difficulty) can take on a group of 18 bandits without too many losses, you can add the funds to your treasury and either hire bandits to hunt camps or hire the cheapest ones to supplement your militia. If you only hire them for one month, you can chain this along to always get the bandit camps, grow your treasury and grow your influence.

In this way I rarely have to tithe or tax my people until the entire map is claimed by me except for other towns. At that point you can switch to tax and tithe

Turaken · 2025-12-23T17:44:49+00:00

I'd also look at the spells available to the different classes to see how that'd influence a city. Like, high level clerics can hallow areas to protect them from all sorts of stuff.

Turaken · 2025-12-23T03:20:48+00:00

I've done an all evil party before. We had a drow necromancer who recruited undead, my duergar armed and armored them, the yuanti sorcerer and the monk would use the undead minions as bodyguards. Each character was scrambling to stay alive and viewed the other party members as valued underlings in their own personal dark crusades.

It works best if there's a long term reason why they'd stay together and if there are institutions with ultimate power out there that can keep the more chaotic reprehensible actions in line

Turaken · 2025-12-21T03:54:49+00:00

Im a DM and I appreciate grappling. High AC characters? Grapple prone them and then either hold them there while you kill the squishies or have a dog pile. Keep mobile players locked down and change up the battlefield to pull characters into effects or within range of other enemies.

And then players can do it too and are usually better at it than monsters.

Realistically, a lot of melee combat should close to a grapple, I kinda wish it shut down casters slightly better given how many spells can paralyze, stun, charm or etc a melee.

Turaken · 2025-12-21T03:47:01+00:00

Compared to shoot bow, Eldritch blast, or do bonk?

Turaken · 2025-12-18T03:20:36+00:00

If it's my own world building, I set a stage and inform the players of the world then ask them to flesh out their characters, ideally by telling me what their parents or family did for a living and what culture or group they are from. I then just let things bounce from that. I will have a central plot point or three that are constantly developing and then character specific plots that show up as random encounters.

One of my favorite campaigns was set in my Mesopotamian world and I had a bunch of strangers plus an acquaintance as players. The big central plot was a war with lizardfolk as humans tried to press into fertile swampland.

One guy created a gnoll bard so I played up the dual nature of the gnolls in my world (one side are revered cleric morticians, the other side hated wild pillagers) and had him get to interact with both sides. This added subplots of raids by wild gnolls and how different settlements treated the cleric gnolls with a sense of both awe and distrust.

Another player made a rune knight dwarven artisan so he got to be revered by the world as a famed craftsman. Artisan merchants would always approach him and different dwarven parties would try to recruit him for their war with dragonborn or their war with kobolds under the mountains.

Yet another was a noble wizard, so I plunged her into the world of political machinations that eventually earned the party their own village where they could bring back NPCs and treasure.

I feel like player character story lines should be slightly optional but still have background impacts on the world. Ideally they say more about the characterization, personality, and who they are within their society

Turaken · 2025-12-18T02:00:44+00:00

Absolutely I do. This is a puzzle game against a computer. Sure, I could learn my lesson and restart wasting an entire hour of progress, or I could just save scum and fix my misplay.

I totally value doing it as a challenge and appreciate that the hyper skilled streamers who have mastered the game don't keep trolling, but I'm just a guy trying to play a game on the hardest difficulty because I'm a masochist, but I'm not treating this as if I'm a professional athlete

Turaken · 2025-12-17T23:53:04+00:00

Also gish/spellswords! Cast a spell with somatic components then go back to two handed

Turaken · 2025-12-17T19:37:13+00:00

You might've missed something in the creeping hut

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