Festus Is The Bestus - Hecleas Grand Strategy Ep. 1

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:14]This was not meant to be.

[00:00:37]Hey guys, Michael here. I have had a number of requests to do a let's play campaign on this channel using Heckley's Grand Strategy, which of course is the overhaul I have talked about a few times recently on this channel. So, that's what we're going to do here. So, uh, for anybody curious about the Cougath campaign, the SFO campaign, obviously that's on hold for right now because SF SFO is still being updated, but hopefully that will start working again.

[00:01:07]I haven't really looked to see how the progress is going, so I have no idea when, but anyway, it looks like Heas Grand Strategy is pretty stable now following the latest update from Creative Assembly. So, we're going to go ahead and give that a shot. For anybody not familiar with Heckius Grand Strategy, I'm not going to try to go through everything all over again here at the beginning of this video, but it is basically a game that completely transforms the pacing and challenge level of the game. Does away with the uh the meta uber aggressive steamrolling uh feel of regular old vanilla. Turns it into a really good deep strategy game.

[00:01:48]Uh much more so than it is in vanilla.

[00:01:50]And for people who are curious about the challenge level of it, I will go ahead and say ordinarily when people are trying Heckler's grand strategy, at least for the first time, I would normally suggest playing on one difficulty level lower than what you normally play at uh at least until you get a feel for all the changes that Hecley's grand strategy makes. Um, however, in this particular case, because I am going to be playing Warriors of Chaos, and they are a um a relatively powerful faction, you could even say overpowered in vanilla. I'm not exactly sure how they're going to be in Grand Strategy. We will find that that out together. But anyway, uh because that I'm assuming they will be relatively powerful, I'm going to go ahead and leave it on very hard, which is what I've been playing at a lot recently anyway. So, we're going to go ahead and play very hard campaign difficulty. very hard battle difficulty.

[00:02:43]Of course, I'm going to make a couple of changes in the MCT settings for Hecley Grand Strategy. There's all kinds of changes that you can make. However, the only ones I think I'm going to change are going to be related to the ammo and devastation mod to kind of tone those down just a little bit. I should say tune tune those just a little bit. But anyway, uh what we are going to do Warriors of Chaos and uh I really enjoy all of the different Warriors of Chaos to be honest with you, but one stands out head and shoulders above the rest for me and that's because probably because I'm a Nurgle fan. So I'm going to play a campaign here as good old Fesus. Last time I played Fesus, it did fairly well. So hopefully that will continue to be the case. Love this lovable little guy. And in terms of how he plays out, he is a little bit different than most of your other Warriors of Chaos because he is of course located a little bit down in the uh closer to the Empire area. I'm not sure if this is considered part of the Empire or not, but anyway, it is uh obviously there there are fewer dark fortresses down in this area than there are up here in Norska and the Chaos Wastes. We will go ahead and try to take the three of those and then probably move northward. In case you're wondering why all of the green on this world map, it's because I am using the climate suitability map mod and a couple of other mods. I am also using mostly quality of life and a couple of cosmetic changes. I'm using Herold starting positions mod, but I don't think it's going to have any effect on this campaign. At least we'll find out when we get in there. Um, I am also using victory conditions overhaul. I think those might be the only changes, the only mods that I'm using functionally. A couple quality life things. Well, I am I'm using the uh GCCM and a couple of the other map mods. So, should we should have a little bit more variety for our battle maps. And I'm going to use a couple of the cosmetic mods that I really like. I'm using the fantastic mod by Bob Hat that changes all your banners. I'm using the new panoramic settlements um uh uh panel mod and I think the uh the progression building icons. Basically, you'll see the others that we're using that there's really not very many of them. That might be all of them. All right. Anyway, enough talking.

[00:04:59]Let's go ahead and get into this.

[00:05:08]Despair all ye elms. The leech world has come. The sad days of this world are nearing their son.

[00:05:23]>> All right. So, Thesus here in Brass Keep. This is our starting settlement.

[00:05:28]In terms of our dark fortresses, we do have one over here in Midenheim. Let me just get these off my screen. And then there's another one down here in Nolan which is going to be where about here?

[00:05:42]Hereabouts. Wistenberg. Okay. So, a little bit lower here. Filed.

[00:05:47]Where's Nolan? Steinart.

[00:05:52]Nolan. Right here. Okay. So, right there. So, we're going to go down this direction first to take these. Well, we've already got one, but to take the two additional dark fortresses in the empire. And then we're probably going to turn around and try to go north as quickly as possible. Now again, as quickly as possible is a very uh relative thing and it's completely different when you're using Heckley's Grand Strategy as it is in uh in vanilla, which you will see if you're not already familiar with it. Now, you should also be able to tell already that some of the banners and things look a little bit different. Let's go ahead and take a look at the panoramic settlement panel here for Brass Keep. So there we have some lovely artwork back there. And all right, so I mentioned I want to change the uh here in the Heckley Grand Strategy settings. We're going to come down to the ammo and devastation reforged. This is by PWD5032.

[00:06:52]We're going to go into the devastation settings here. Well, first of all, I'll go ahead and show you. We do want to have both the devastation system and the campaign ammo system turned on. So, we're going to go to the devastation system, and I'm basically going to cut the these things down here in half. So, raiding per turn, we're going to drop that down to 1.5.

[00:07:14]And sacking a settlement, we're going to drop this down to, well, let's do it the faster way here, to five.

[00:07:22]And occupying a settlement, we're going to go down to 2.5.

[00:07:26]And the reason for these changes that I'm making is because um they are incredibly powerful, most especially in terms of the troop replenishment penalties that you get. I guess another way to do it would be to leave these the same and and just cut the troop replenishment penalty.

[00:07:49]However, I feel like there's enough raiding and constant, you know, fighting going on back and forth. You spend an awful lot with the the settings on their defaults. You spend an awful lot of time with your settlements very very low on settlement health. And I feel like this is a good compromise between it's these things all still having an impact on your game but not completely crippling your economy and most especially your replenishment. So, we're going to give that a shot. That's what I recommend.

[00:08:21]We'll fine-tune it if anybody has any uh particular opinions about it. But for now, that's what we're going to get started with. Also, uh please let me know if you have any names that you want me to use for characters or units or anything like that. I always appreciate those. And feel free to leave those here in episode number one, which I will come back to and check periodically to make sure I don't miss any. Um, but uh as uh as the channel grows a little bit, gets a little bit harder for me to keep up with all the comments. So, this is probably the best place to leave them to make sure that I will notice them. All right. Anyway, so Fesus, let's go ahead and check out the trait here on our exalted hero of Nurgle. He has infernal dominance, undivided authority plus one, character experience gain plus 100%, upkeep minus 50%. That's all fine.

[00:09:13]probably not really one of my favorites, but um we're going to go ahead and embed him in our >> expedite >> main army here. And talking about Fesus, I really didn't do this at all in the main menu, and I should have. If you take a look at Fesus' uh particular traits, plague duration is plus three turns for armies and province. Battle healing cap plus 25% for the Lord's army. We're definitely going to be using that an awful lot because one of his uh really uh strategic advantages is the ability to have an area of effect heal that is a permanent passive thing unless he switches it over from healing over to damage dealing to the enemy units around them. And and we'll be using both of those. And then in terms of the overall faction uh specifics here, we've got vassels gain poison attacks and spread nurgal corruption. Not. I mean, we'll probably go ahead and vassalize Midenland at the very beginning. Not sure how many other fasils beyond that we're going to have, but we'll find out.

[00:10:14]We can brew plagues, of course, and then we've got 25 souls when a plague is spread, which will be good. Okay, so let's go ahead and take a look here at our Nurgalish gifts of chaos. What I think I'm probably going to want to do is eventually I want to start using like single entities as much as possible. So, we're talking things like your giant, which Fesus thankfully does start with one. We may want to add in some uh some beast of Nurgle. So, I might try to do that as well. In fact, let's go ahead and do that. Um, we're going to add Beast of Nurgle. Now, they're not a single entity. Actually, no, I'm sorry.

[00:10:57]They're they they they're a single entity in vanilla. They're not in SFO, which I'm kind of more used to right now, but uh I don't know if Heckley's grand strategy makes any changes.

[00:11:06]Probably not. So, they'll probably be single entity in Hector's grand strategy as well, which works for me. Then, in terms of Oops. Okay. So, this is a this is a thing that I hope someday Hecus is able to clean this up and get this uh button off of there because I always click on it and find out that uh yeah, can't use it. It says ignore this button. Warband recruitment. Here we go.

[00:11:27]We definitely want to do some warb band recruitment >> required.

[00:11:30]>> First thing you will notice right away is that with Hecus when you do recruiting that happens via warb band recruitment or via any other form of recruit recruitment as well. Your units only come in at half strength which I absolutely love. And then we're going to go ahead and launch our attack. And you will notice another major difference.

[00:11:49]Well, two more major differences. Number one, we are close enough to the settlement that the settlement garrison is actually going to come out and reinforce this starting army that we have to fight. So much more difficult fight than it is in regular old vanilla or quite frankly any other overhaul that I can think of. And then on top of that, you're noticing that we do not see what the results of the auto resolve would be if we clicked on it. So, we're not going to do that anyway, but it is definitely for people who do like to use autoresolved, at least more often than I do. Uh, it is definitely worth noting here that uh the default in Heckley's grand strategy is to not get uh told exactly what's going to happen, which personally I think is a vast improvement over vanilla, but obviously it's very subjective. Okay, take a look here at the battle map. This looks like it's going to be a regular wide openen map.

[00:12:40]They do have they've got one piece of artillery.

[00:12:44]They've got three ranged attackers. We have no ranged attackers.

[00:12:51]Um but uh but we have Fesus on our side.

[00:12:54]So hopefully we can still do this. Let's find out. Let's go ahead and fight it.

[00:13:03]>> Destroy it.

[00:13:10]>> Brace for impact.

[00:13:25]Hello.

[00:13:40]The This was not meant to be.

[00:14:00]Come on.

[00:14:25]Charge with us.

[00:14:38]All right. So, it would have been nice if we had had some trees to help protect us from that artillery and from those crossbowmen, but we don't. So, there's no sense in worrying about it. All we can really do is try to use what little speed we've got to maybe get around behind into their artillery. So, let's go ahead and put our uh our dogs over here. I guess we can vanguard deployment them. So, let's put them over here. And then the rest of our units, I think we're just going to go ahead and stack them back here. Now, this is not corner camping because we're going to have to go towards them. Um, so they have four. Okay, four minutes. This is another change for Hecia. So, he does slow down the uh or I should say increase the amount of time it takes for reinforcements to come in. So, it's actually going to be to our advantage to actually try to get to him as quickly as possible. So, instead of deploying all the way back there, we're going to go ahead and deploy right here. Let's go ahead and maybe get the damaged units into the back line. I guess that's really our only one.

[00:15:46]And we're going to go ahead and put Fesus. Fesus is awfully slow, unfortunately.

[00:15:51]We don't have any other Vanguard deployment, so this is the best we can do.

[00:15:55]>> We're going to go ahead and start the battle and start moving forward here as fast as we can. We're going to get the dogs in a position where maybe they can get into the mortars when the mortars come in.

[00:16:08]At least we don't have mortars firing on us here at the very beginning. But I'm still going to run even though fatigue is more of a concern in this overhaul. Um, I am I'm willing to sacrifice my vigor for the little bit of extra time that we might be able to buy before the uh the reinforcements come in. So, let's see how that works out for us. Let's get the dogs coming a little bit closer here.

[00:16:36]And we do have the option to get our troll and our giant in a little bit.

[00:16:40]Ooh. Oh, he does have the mortars already. I was thinking they were in the reinforcing army. My my mistake. Okay, let's go ahead and bring the dogs even closer then. Yeah. Okay, let's go ahead and get >> master of play.

[00:16:55]>> Let's get everybody just charging in as quickly as possible except the trolls.

[00:16:59]I'm going to do a little bit of finagling that with the trolls here because I don't want to get them too far ahead of everybody else.

[00:17:09]The giant. Let's just do this. Let's change the giant.

[00:17:15]Just a little bit just so he doesn't get too far ahead of everybody else as well.

[00:17:20]What are we looking at? Two and a half minutes here. We should get a little bit of time on our own, but not very much.

[00:17:25]Okay, Charles, come back. You're almost in crossbow range.

[00:17:30]Let's let the others start to get into crossbow range first. I'm going to go ahead and start sending >> sending the uh giving uh specific orders now for all of our melee infantry here.

[00:17:47]>> Utrity for all.

[00:17:49]>> And there's no point sending any of our melee infantry directly into >> the Empire Knights cuz they'll never catch up to them. Okay, looks like we have our trolls under attack here. The giant now is sort of under attack.

[00:18:02]Infestus, where are you at? Okay, let's go ahead and get your healing on for now.

[00:18:09]And Mr. Giant, let's go ahead and turn around. Get you going this way. And here come the uh Chaos Warhounds.

[00:18:19]All right.

[00:18:22]Yep. Here we go. We're already taking some damage, but it's okay. It's all right. Fesus. I'm going to change Fesus over to his damaging ability, his damaging order right now, just because the >> um the front line here is >> comprises a lot of fairly rubbish units.

[00:18:44]So, he'll be most effective against that type of unit with his uh with his chaos aura. And we're about to get into the mortar there. So, that's good as well.

[00:18:53]However, very soon I'm probably going to want to change his uh his aura back over to healing >> the sick move.

[00:19:04]>> And we definitely need to do something here to help our giant out. So, I'm going to start trying to move Fesus over in that direction.

[00:19:13]>> Let's go ahead for now and help out with some magic. Nope, that's not going to work. Let's Let's magic these guys over here.

[00:19:21]>> Elements of chaos.

[00:19:24]the corruptor.

[00:19:25]>> Okay, that that worked. That worked pretty well. Okay, we've already got one unit running away. That's very very bad indeed.

[00:19:32]>> Taking action.

[00:19:33]>> Okay, Fesus, you're >> we need to keep you need to keep coming here. Let's go ahead and get everybody over here now.

[00:19:42]>> Closing in together.

[00:19:45]If you you stay on those crossbow men, you stay >> You guys can stay on those crossbow men.

[00:19:50]Okay, good. We've got the mortars broken down. Let's go ahead and get the chaos warhounds on those crossbowmen. We should be able to win that, I would hope. Over here, Fesus, I need you and the giant. I need you to start healing that giant, but I need you guys to get a little bit closer together first. Meanwhile, we've got the we've got the reinforcements that we have to worry about here. So, this is going to make things very, very interesting. Crossbowmen are already opening fire there.

[00:20:22]>> All right, let's close everybody. Close in together now. Right here.

[00:20:29]We're going to blob up a little bit. And I need Fesus.

[00:20:36]Actually, I don't need Fesus. What? I You are really falling lagging behind there. Didn't realize that. Okay. Uh we we really need Fesus >> to lead the way back. Well, >> all right, everybody, charge charge into these uh this this group of infantry. I need to get the Chaos Warhounds out and get them around behind.

[00:21:01]Never mind. They're running into trouble there. If they they go backwards, I need to get somebody on those crossbow men is basically what I need to do. So really the only cavalry unit I have with which to do that is my chaos warhounds.

[00:21:16]So that's who we're going to try to use.

[00:21:21]Okay, everybody keep working your way in this direction now. Chaos Warhounds, you should hopefully be able to engage them.

[00:21:30]It's going okay. I haven't had to turn on my healing again quite yet because >> sickness >> the units I care about the most are not really in that bad a shape.

[00:21:44]>> Okay, we have the Chaos Warhounds now on those crossbow men.

[00:21:48]They're looks like they're in bad shape, however. So, I'm going to try to get my trolls back there to help support them.

[00:21:55]Everybody else needs to be locked on. with it.

[00:22:02]>> Staying around close to Fesus so that when I turn on the healing everything >> necessarily, >> which I'm going to do now >> by the power of >> when we turn on the healing, they'll all benefit from it. So, let's go ahead and get another dam too far away there, Michael. Let's get a damaging spell off right here.

[00:22:26]>> We have plenty of winds of magic. I need to be doing that a little bit more frequently. The trolls should really help against those crossbowmen.

[00:22:35]Okay, this is going all right. It's It's not too bad.

[00:22:38]These guys are running away, but hopefully we'll get them back in momentarily.

[00:22:44]>> Okay, we've got those crossbowmen broken. We've got those spearmen broken.

[00:22:48]Let's go ahead and try to get these guys to charge into the back of those swordsmen.

[00:22:55]This is going fine. Everything's going just fine. We now have chance to do a little bit more of this.

[00:23:04]>> Should help a little bit. I have enough winds of magic. I can even start to debuff some of these guys. Let's go ahead and do that.

[00:23:13]>> Okay, these cast warhounds, they need to get out of here or else I'm going to end up losing them. Not that that would be the worst thing in the world, but >> sickness.

[00:23:21]>> Don't desperately want to lose any units at this point. Let's go ahead and turn Festus' aura back over to Pestilence because I feel like with a good push here, we might be able to break some of these units. Now, we've got Where's the crossbow man? All the way back there.

[00:23:39]That's too far away. We're going to go ahead and hit these these guys right here.

[00:23:46]>> Chaos.

[00:23:46]>> Okay, there we go. But that's another change you'll see with Heckley's grand strategy is no more chasing units after the battle's over. The AI can't do it.

[00:23:55]It's frustrating to do anyway for reasons I've talked about plenty of times before. So, kind of nice to just have that option taken away from us in this case.

[00:24:06]Okay, we did not lose any units. That's always good. We didn't do that much damage to them. They're going to lose the starting army anyway, but that garrison is still strong enough that we're going to have another fight on our hands obviously, but it shouldn't be too big of a deal. We should be able to handle this with the the units, just the units that aren't too badly damaged. We got ourselves a rod of torment here, bombardment. That'll be useful. We'll give that to Fesus. And we got ourselves some souls. Decent amount of money.

[00:24:35]would have been more if we had killed the enemy lord, but that happens a lot less frequently in Hector's grand strategy. All right, let's go ahead take the Oh, it's hard to say no to those souls, isn't it? Yeah, let's take the souls.

[00:24:48]>> I want the infections as well because Fesus does struggle with infections more than your other Nurgle factions do, but we desperately need souls. Okay, so mission successful right there and Rod of Torment as mentioned. We're going to capture Crudenwald here in just a moment.

[00:25:09]Factions encountered whatever ogres and uh are they both ogres? Yes, both ogres.

[00:25:16]>> So many, >> but we'll worry about those later. Okay, let's go ahead and give >> our exalted hero of Nurgle here, Samuel Ludenhoff, until we change his name at least.

[00:25:28]Let's go ahead and give him not sure why I'm looking at that. I already did that. Um, Rod of Torment.

[00:25:35]Yeah, that's on Fesus. Okay. So, yeah, let's go ahead and give him Blade Master. And let's check out his Path to Glory here. So, lose the battle and survive to get that ward save. That would be nice, but I'm not going to deliberately lose any battles just to get that. Win a battle with two chaos knights in your army. Well, we're not going to be there for a little while.

[00:25:55]Mage hunter win a battle against an army led by a spellcaster. That will happen just in the natural course of things and then rank up in raiding stance aura of atrophy. Yeah, we'll see. We'll we'll try to get that at some point. Let's go ahead now and >> assault this settlement. So, >> we've got her gig down here.

[00:26:17]>> Walled city, size 10 garrison. It's going to be a little bit of a tougher nut to crack. I doubt if we can reach it.

[00:26:25]>> The second day.

[00:26:27]>> No, we definitely can't reach it, but thankfully we can reach Crudenwald. So, we'll go ahead and take Crudenwald this turn. It might even take us two turns to get to her gig from Gruden Wald. I'm not exactly sure, but that's definitely going to already start to have a compounding impact on the pacing of the campaign. But uh I don't guess there's really well let me just check this casualty replenishment rate for Chaos Marauders. Well, we don't have the souls for it, so never mind. Not really worth worrying about. All right, so we're going to go ahead and attack Crudenwald.

[00:27:02]We're going to occupy it.

[00:27:04]>> I'm going to try to come down and take her gig and vaselize. I said uh uh Midenland earlier, but actually it's probably Oakland that we will uh vasselize. I don't know if we'll vaselize Midland. It'll depend on how they do, >> but anyway. Um so if we take Crudenwald and then we come down and vaselize her gig, then I'll probably give Cruden Wald back to them at that point.

[00:27:29]>> Saves us from the brink.

[00:27:31]>> But I don't want to get ahead of myself here. We still have a battle to win. So this is going to be another field battle. Very wide open again. Looks like exactly the same map. In fact, no trees.

[00:27:43]It's okay. Should be a lot quicker than the previous one.

[00:27:50]All right. So, what we're going to do is we're going to protect our most badly damaged units. At least those three right there. Not sure. I may even >> I may even >> go with Nah, it's fine. We'll go ahead and we'll use all of these units. This will be fine. Okay, so let's go ahead and set up with uh Fesus and our exalted hero up front as well. Start battle.

[00:28:17]Start moving this way. Now, this time they don't have artillery, so we can walk. Let's just speed up the camera here.

[00:28:26]At least until we get close to range.

[00:28:29]They only have a single crossbow unit, which is great.

[00:28:34]What we're going to do it, like last time, we're going to send our fastest two units just a little bit to the side here. Little bit of a distraction, but mostly just so that they don't end up ahead of everyone else here.

[00:28:49]>> And speaking of everyone else here, >> let's go ahead and start >> assigning some targets.

[00:29:01]We will possibly adjust as necessary.

[00:29:09]>> I'm trying to get them all to arrive at roughly the same time as prescribed.

[00:29:15]>> And this time, let's go ahead and turn Festus' healing on a little quicker. He also has a range 200 bombardment.

[00:29:23]So, let's go ahead and do bile blood.

[00:29:32]And it looks like he doesn't have to stop to cast it, which is great.

[00:29:37]That worked out pretty well.

[00:29:40]I don't love that those spearmen are there and they're going to try to intervene, intercept probably our large units here, but I don't think it's going to matter all that much.

[00:29:54]>> Festus, you can go ahead and chain. Are you healing at all? Yes, you are. Okay, go ahead and change over to >> pestilence >> harbinger of pestilence.

[00:30:06]Already have the trolls now locked in with the >> with the crossbowman. So that's good.

[00:30:14]Let's go ahead and maybe blast these guys over here.

[00:30:23]>> That looked pretty good. I think we're doing just fine.

[00:30:28]Let's go ahead and do a little bit of uh melee attack debuff, I guess, of those guys right there. But for the most part, this is pretty straightforward. I'm going to switch him back over to healing. Now, >> we don't need any additional help dealing damage, and at least we can get Festus and our giant back a little bit closer to full health by the end of the battle.

[00:30:52]>> These guys are trying to regroup. I don't want that to happen.

[00:30:57]over here. We'll try to get some help over there to those guys in just a minute.

[00:31:03]Actually, we're probably not going to need to because it looks like they're about to melt. The enemy that is is about to melt.

[00:31:10]Broken. Broken. Broken. Broken. And only shaken right here.

[00:31:18]>> All right, let's get everybody on him.

[00:31:20]He's still putting Oh, this guy's actually only sh He's wavering. Okay.

[00:31:29]is the giant healer.

[00:31:32]Yes. Okay, that's good. That's what we want. There we go. That ought to just about do it.

[00:31:39]All right, another decisive victory. Going to get a lot tougher from this point forward. I will say in my experience, most of your other factions have a more challenging start than Fesus does uh with Hecley's grand strategy. Some of them have a practically impossible start.

[00:31:55]Um, but you never know until you try it.

[00:31:57]So, we're going to go and occupy like I said and then we are going to try to vaselize Huland next turn or two turns from now as quickly as we can get down there. Okay, so we got ourselves that mission objective satisfied. Potion of Farsight. That's fine.

[00:32:16]Okay. Um, however, here's going to be another massive departure from what people will be um more familiar with in vanilla, which is that your settlements have health because I reduced the default settings here, or not the default, I reduced the settings for ammo and devastation. This now is what you can see. occupying a settlement only did 2 and 1/2 points of uh settlement health damage. Whereas normally this would have dropped down to five. We would have gotten absolutely zero replenishment.

[00:32:52]But instead, because it's at 7.5, which probably rounds up to eight.

[00:32:58]>> Anyway, we're we're still getting a casualty replenishment rate of minus 8%.

[00:33:03]So after just this one battle and initial occupation of a settlement, it's not completely ruining our replenish for replenishment for multiple turns, but it has vastly decreased it. As you can see here, we're getting one Chaos Warhound per turn.

[00:33:21]We're getting two Chaos Marauders per turn. So obviously the replenishment is an absolute trickle. That feels about right to me, quite frankly. So, I'm okay with that. And then, of course, we're going to give Fesus route marcher.

[00:33:36]And I guess for now, I'm trying to think if we have any lords or heroes that will ever have a ranged attack. Probably not. So, we'll give this to him for now, but eventually I'll replace that.

[00:33:50]>> Either fuse it or sell it. Now, the other thing, so let's take a look here at these other debuffs that we're getting as a result of the devastation >> because our settlement health is now less than 10. We're seeing that we're going to have campaign movement range reduction. But the one I care about right now is recruitment cost plus 25% recruitment duration plus one turn. So that is something that would normally have a massive impact. Not going to matter all that much for us because we don't do regular recruitment. we do this war band recruitment. So, we have to wait for these units to come in anyway.

[00:34:27]And in terms of gift gifted units, we can now go ahead and do these, which we're going to do. Even though our replen replenishment is not very good, we'll still get a tiny little bit of replenishment. And it's probably worth paying the extra upkeep for the extra turn if we go ahead and recruit them now before the end turn as opposed to waiting until next turn to do it.

[00:34:50]Okay, which is how I would do it in vanilla.

[00:34:53]>> So, next thing we want to check out is diplomacy. And again, vastly different than vanilla because number one, we cannot see the relative faction strength. We don't see the ranking numbers, but we also don't see that little bar of green versus red. So, when we look at Oakland here, we have no way of knowing whether or not they have another army or not. I think I just said that twice, but you get what I'm saying.

[00:35:16]We don't know how strong any of our neighbors are. All we know is who we're at war with, which currently is only Hoklland. However, that will change very, very quickly, I am sure. All right. I think then there's probably no uh nothing further for us to do. I don't think we can recruit any more heroes at this point.

[00:35:36]No, indeed. We could recruit another lord. We can actually afford to. Let's see what is available.

[00:35:46]Okay, we have you know what I'm going to do? Just realized I'm going to recruit the lord back here in Brass Keep because we can then recruit in a couple of units that are available via warb band recruitment over here whereas we've already exhausted the supply of warband recruitment down here in Oakland. So brass keep. Let's go ahead recruit a new lord here.

[00:36:10]I'm going to go I think with a chaos lord. Let's just see what the traits are. Missile block chance, armor, unit mass, open dyes, or burning body. Eh, chaos sorcerer lord. We have more choices here. If we went metal, hideous vis.

[00:36:31]Uh, so far nothing's really jumping out at me.

[00:36:37]Um, possibly diabolic splendor.

[00:36:41]These guys are not too bad in melee if we decide to go with Chaos or Lord instead. However, I don't love recruiting a wizard and who has traits that improve his melee because generally speaking, it's not. It's suboptimal to use them that way.

[00:37:00]Excuse me. All right. Ambush defense chance is okay. Okay. I I do like scaled skin.

[00:37:10]In fact, I think I probably like that better than anything else. Missile resistance and physical resistance is very good for a wizard. Uh really for anybody. So, this is what we're going to go ahead and take. Supply consumption will increase by three. Okay. Kind of forgot to talk about this point up here.

[00:37:29]We can see that we've got this minus one. This represents our supply. This means that our the units that we have in our armies exceeds the capacity of our military buildings to support them. So, we're definitely going to want to try to improve our military buildings, maybe build another one, but obviously the first and foremost the most important things that we're going to do is get our economy going here. So, and our growth. So, we got to do those.

[00:37:58]That's all we can afford. So, I'll worry about increasing the uh this building right here another time. You know what? I just realized I can't recruit in the lord or do any warb band recruitment if I if I try to do all this.

[00:38:21]>> The plague guards instrument.

[00:38:25]>> Well, okay. I think what we're gonna do is I I I need the growth and and the money as much as possible. So, I think we're gonna go ahead and do this and just not have a second lord for next turn. And we'll we'll see how it goes.

[00:38:40]It's going to be relatively interesting to try to take a walled city with such a small army, but it is what it is. We'll do the best we can do. Commandment available, of course. Let's go ahead and probably take the growth.

[00:38:59]Yeah, we'll take the growth for now. We need to get that down to less than nine turns. Of course, this is going to help a little bit, but yeah, I'm okay with growth for a turn or two.

[00:39:11]Our uh mission objective here, capture two provinces. Yeah, we'll we'll see about that. We'll get there eventually, hopefully. I've already >> oy me >> uh looked at the relative faction strength and all that. But here you see another difference with Hecley's grand strategy which is we can only do a very limited amount of diplomacy. Basically the tree hammers are the only faction here >> that we can do anything at all in terms of non-aggression pack or defensive alliance or military alliance with become vassal. We can vaselize these others, but obviously they're not willing to at this stage.

[00:39:47]>> All right. Think then that pro Oh, we need to research technology, of course.

[00:39:52]Except I cannot afford to. All right.

[00:39:55]Wow. Well, I really hate to not even start researching the technology. We're going to cancel the growth building for now because you can tell already that money is going to be a major issue for us. This then means we're going to be able to do some tech research.

[00:40:18]I'm going to go ahead and do scrutiny of the dark gods first for the experience for the marauders.

[00:40:23]>> Such compelling >> since it's here in the early game is really the only time that we're going to be using them very much. And we cannot afford a building. We could potentially go ahead and afford that lord recruitment.

[00:40:38]Now, let's just see how expensive he is.

[00:40:40]1,200. That would leave us 700.

[00:40:48]I am going to do it, but I'm going to do it down here after all cuz I'm not going to be able to afford >> any uh warb band recruitment after all. So, let's go ahead and recruit him here.

[00:41:05]Okay, let's just see it. Well, we would have been able to afford a single marauder unit if I had done it up there. The thing is I I want to make sure that he's going to be close enough to help out in the fight against her.

[00:41:20]Okay, good enough. Let's go ahead and do our intern now.

[00:41:30]Okay, not a terribly eventful intern so far, but we can see Midland as Boris Toddbringer moving around. Be very interesting to see what happens between him and like Kazra and Black Pit tribe.

[00:41:44]Don't know quite how much of a dynamic change it's going to be >> with Heckler's grand strategy. Nlings, you fight well, but the stronger the war band, the more cadavs left in our wake.

[00:42:01]>> Okay, so we could go ahead grant three units the mark of Nurgle. We could go ahead and start doing this now. Let's see how expensive it is cuz I don't remember off the top of my head. If we take a look at our marauder here and we get want to make the marauder of Nurgle 230 each.

[00:42:26]Let's do it. Upgrade.

[00:42:30]Upgrade.

[00:42:32]Upgrade. Mission successful. Got 2,000 favor out of that. Got increased movement. Campaign movement range plus 15% and 50 infections. All very good.

[00:42:42]Let's see if that campaign movement range helped us out. It it it you know I didn't look to see whether or not we were going to be able to make it before that, but it looks like we can just barely make it now. The thing is they do have an army there, but it looks like it's only probably just the Lord Crudenwald. Obviously, I'm not going to build anything here because I'm probably assuming that we defeat Oakland and vaselize them. I'm probably just going to give it to them.

[00:43:15]We could do some war band recruitment.

[00:43:18]We can get one more >> chaos marauder unit. And would we want to go ahead and give him the mark of nerl as well?

[00:43:35]Let's go ahead and do this. Let's let's give him let's make him a great weapons unit here.

[00:43:42]burning through the money. But we do in the long run save money by giving them the mark of Nurgle because of the greater Nurgle authority than that we have compared to undivided authority.

[00:43:55]All right. And gifted units. Uh nothing else to do there. We do have these beasts of Nurgle. It is a single entity in uh Hecley's grand strategy just like in vanilla. That makes sense. I think probably we're ready to go ahead and do this. Last thing we'll do for this episode >> is we will actually I don't we're probably going to want to uh let's let's lay siege for the moment and think about do we want to attack it?

[00:44:35]Would we rather fight this as a walled city battle? Probably not.

[00:44:41]>> Or would we rather fight it as a field battle?

[00:44:46]>> My lord, >> give him some winds of magic boost.

[00:44:52]>> I think we would probably prefer to fight this as I don't think we can do it. There might be some cheese that we can do in a in a siege battle, which I don't like to do anyway. So, I think we'd probably rather fight this as a field battle.

[00:45:09]And uh and so I'm not going to launch the attack right now.

[00:45:16]We do have three crossbowmen plus those towers to worry about. They will do lots of damage to us.

[00:45:24]Okay. Yeah, we're going to we're going to lay siege for at least one turn. See if they sally out and attack us.

[00:45:30]So definitely not the last thing we're going to do in this episode. We're not getting any replenishment.

[00:45:38]>> Nothing really to do there. Grass keep.

[00:45:41]Our supply has dropped down to minus two.

[00:45:46]I'm going to do the growth anyway because that's the higher priority. I think we're we're at eight turns right now. Yeah, we need to improve our growth.

[00:45:57]We should make some money hopefully out of winning some some more battles here.

[00:46:05]Building upgrade available. No, I I I don't Oh, yeah. No, I guess we have one in Crudenol, but we're not going to do that. And I'm not going to bother to check the diplomacy again. Let's just go ahead and do another intern.

[00:46:23]All right. So, obviously they did not sally out to attack us.

[00:46:28]>> It does say we've got zero turns until the garrison is wiped out. I didn't even look to see what that number was. Last time, my guess is it's not really zero turns. It's probably just not telling us >> in the uh the the typical Heckley Grand Strategy policy of not giving you all of the information that vanilla does. It spoon feeds you all this information.

[00:46:54]Instead, you kind of have to learn as you go. Use other tools at your disposal to to try to glean information. So, I'm going to assume that this is not actually going to surrender to us over the course of another end turn. Now, that does mean that we could go ahead and attack. We've got a single Well, I'm sorry. We've got two Chaos Siege towers.

[00:47:19]Is that good enough?

[00:47:25]They have suffered no attrition yet. I'm going to give it another turn. That's going to get us up to six. I like the sound of six a lot better than two. And these are definitely uh decisions that you have to make in Hector's Grand Strategy. You can't take as many chances as you normally would in vanilla. The game is just a lot less forgiving of uh of mistakes and like losing an entire army at uh this point in the campaign would be pretty much fatal for this let's play. So, we're going to give it one more turn. We don't have any other enemies.

[00:48:02]Oh, we do. Okay. So, this is this is another thing that I I wish that Hecus uh was would be able to change about the mod. You cannot always see declarations of war from your neighbors. So, you have to get in the habit of checking your diplomacy to see whether or not you're at war with anybody new after every end turn. And in this case, we can see we are in fact at war with Osland as well.

[00:48:30]Now, they're also at war with uh that is um is that Gorbad? No, that's not Gorbad. Uh what's his name? Uh Goldfig.

[00:48:42]That's what I'm going to call him anyway. Uh I think that might be Goldfig. Anyway, then we have uh Nordland. He's at war with Nordland as well. Interesting. Okay.

[00:48:51]>> All right. So yeah, we're going to hope that he shows forbearance for at least one more turn. We're going to keep the siege going to build up a couple more siege towers. Also, can we do any warband recruitment?

[00:49:06]>> Yes, we can. Okay, it's even a good one.

[00:49:09]>> So, marauder of Nurgle. Okay, we definitely like that. We're still of course not getting any replenishment though, but every little bit helps.

[00:49:18]Gifted units.

[00:49:21]Oh, nope. We're not in our own territory, so we can't do that. That's fine.

[00:49:26]What I could do, however, is put him It shouldn't make very much difference, but I'm going to put him in um encampment stance. This way, he will get Oh, no.

[00:49:43]He doesn't get any melee defense bonus.

[00:49:45]Okay, never mind. Then we're going to go back into uh or leadership bonus. We're going to go back into channeling stance.

[00:49:52]All right. And other than that, then I think I think we're all good here. We're now at four turns from from growth.

[00:50:04]>> And I guess I may as well check my deals out. That's not going to be any different. Nope. Okay, let's do another in turn. And this might then be the end of this episode.

[00:50:18]Okay, so Olland did not invade us and Hoklland did not sally out souls. From souls come gifts that Nalagol bestows.

[00:50:30]>> Okay, sacrifice 1,000 souls to Nurgle.

[00:50:33]We'll get there eventually. Give a vassel workable reation target. We'll get there eventually. We need a vassel first. We've encount encountered clan fester. Got a rank here for our exalted hero and wars. We can see wars being declared back and forth between other factions, which is why I wonder why we can't get that for ourselves, but I'm not a modder, so I I presume Hecus would have changed it if it were >> reasonably feasible.

[00:51:04]>> Okay, so we're not at war with anybody else except for the two that we already were.

[00:51:10]Let's go ahead and give our exalted hero here a hard to hit. Why not?

[00:51:19]Okay. So, I think what we're going to do, this is still going to say zero. In fact, yes, it does. Still says zero. And we now are seeing some attrition.

[00:51:29]>> Not possible.

[00:51:30]>> Not very much, but we're seeing some.

[00:51:33]So, if we do this, if we look at this.

[00:51:36]Yeah, they have not suffered any attrition yet, but they might starting over this end turn. I'm I think I'm going to attack at the beginning of the next episode. We'll fight We'll start out the next episode with this battle cuz I like to take my time, particularly for siege battles. But what I want to finish this episode with is because I haven't done this yet, is taking a look at our victory conditions here. So, we're using VCO, Victory Conditions Overhaul. And I'm not going to read these out, but I really encourage people to read these for yourselves if you're using this mod because the it really, you know, the flavor text is really quite good. All right, so we have to destroy or vaselize basically all of the Imperial factions. That's the first one.

[00:52:21]That would give us the great tribulation here. Replenishment in foreign territory. We're going to get that anyway with one of our uh chaos, our gifts of chaos. Uh then warb band upgrades cost growth and nural corruption and all Jace provinces.

[00:52:36]That's all fine. Um but we'll probably do that. We'll probably shoot for that one. The second alternative here or the the first alternative, the second victory condition would be strange bedfellows. So this looks like uh interesting. Okay, this is Lurlearn Forest. the Black Pit, Kisslev, Castle Draenhoff, and Caracadrin. So, obviously farther a field than this first one is, but fewer targets and more flavorful in terms of a variety of enemies that whereas this is all Imperials.

[00:53:15]And then the third one here is down with the sickness. Control at least two of the following. So we've got Coron, the Oak of Ages, Scaven Blade, Sartosa, Kurza Karac, and Black Crack. Okay, so kind of similar to the second one in that it's a variety of enemies.

[00:53:35]Okay, but we only need two of the following regions. Okay, that's that's interesting. Well, we'll think about that. But this one, at least at the start of the campaign, feels like the more achievable. But anyway, I'm going to go ahead and wrap up this first episode there. Need to rest my voice for a little bit here. We will fight this battle then at the beginning of the next episode. Probably this turn. I don't think we want to continue to wait. They're probably not going to suffer attrition all that qu quickly. We're not getting any replenishment of our own. I I can do some warb band recruitment. So, we're going to go ahead and do that and then we're going to wrap things up there. go ahead and fight this battle then in the next episode. Thanks everybody so much for watching and I will see you guys then.