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The information was battle-tested with very hard difficulty to ensure consistent performance. The sections include creating the best army composition,managing marshals, and exploiting the enemy weaknesses to destroy them!

I enjoy helping others and wanted to share and preserve the key findings. Other guides seem to be incomplete with lack of enough information, screenshots, and higher standards to guarantee successful runs.

The guide is for everyone, but much more friendlier to new players. The writing will be easy to follow and supported by plenty of screenshots for those who are too lazy to read everything! Everyone will be playing on the same level with the most experienced!

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The game settings should be set to include very high starting gold to quickly build the economy going. Very hard difficulty may cause the first war to break out much earlier with the chosen kingdom.

The starting class of the King needs to be set as merchant to immediately start trading for more income. Certain classes like the Spy can become a marshal later on with the call to arms.

Depending on preference, the aging of the king can be set to slow to limit negative events. Espionage can also be set to very limited to avoid defections like a merchant that could tank most of the economy. In general, spy activities are too expensive to conduct and the developing kingdom needs the gold more.

Market Square should be the first building to be constructed in each settlement. Then, build one Village Militia building in the settlement that has the highest number of villages and/or maximum worker capacity. Another one can also be constructed when needed.

Be sure to hire them as garrison squads first because workers take awhile to replenish and will eat the town's food instead. This action also reduces the number of rebel units if there is a starting instability within the settlements.

These marshal skills were battle-tested to fully enhance the army to deal with all threats efficiently and effectively. The ultimate purpose is to keep constant pressure on the enemy and take objectives while keeping the armies mostly intact.

Note: Siegecraft was excluded because it only benefits a fraction of the battles and the additional troops upgrade is significantly more useful.

A kingdom tradition can be purchased sooner if a king is lucky to select one of the available ideal skills. The skill then becomes a permanent option for future knights and further limits the random chance.

The priority of books must be given to knights who are not the crown prince because they never die from aging like the King. Before promotion, the crown prince will waste so much resources to develop the skills that would otherwise cost only 200 books each later.

The foundation of each army relies on quality swordsmen and non-cavalry archers to form a very strong line. Their combined arms works well on any battlefield that includes siege warfare. Other units types are mixed in later to further enhance stopping power.

Spearmen are strictly used as defensive units and are quite vulnerable in direct combat against non-cavalry units. When needed, one heavy spearmen unit should be hired from a mercenary camp to have better chances of survival than a light one. They become obsolete in late game and may be used as garrison squads in defending frontline castles.

For the same reasons, cavalry units should be hired or created from at least a heavy quality. 1-2 cavalry should be sufficient enough without jeopardizing the foundation. The typical enemy army has a bias against cavalry and may use multiple spearmen.

An overview of unit types in the army during each stage of the game (max 8 unit capacity):

Note: To save resources, the barracks was only upgraded with Swordsmith and Fletchers. The Royal Armory provided the rest of what was needed to recruit heavy and elite units.

Each kingdom has different backgrounds that affects who has access to produce the most elite units. Limitations can be bypassed by hiring such units from mercenaries that are camping in such kingdoms.
Jerusalem and Antioch kingdoms produce the highest quality swordsmen and knights called the Templars. They are the most expensive to hire but are strong enough to last until the end of the game!

The settlement with the most castles is preferred to build military buildings beyond the Barracks for better investment. The Royal Armory and Lord's Castles produce additional levies for every castle with the latter having a base of 4 levies.
For additional levies, settlements with high number of villages can construct Village Militia buildings when demand cannot keep up.
Each marshal needs to govern these provinces to receive a major manpower boost. The bonus X% manpower depends on the X number of levies produced at that settlement.

Each army has the option to purchase an "Additional Troops" upgrade that can stack up to 4x with the kingdom effect of logistics! Only larger settlements have more worker capacity to allow such upgrades and each one further increases the army manpower by 15%!

Overview of each successive manpower upgrade:
Note: The only major limitation is the very high food upkeep that could result in lowering army opinion.

The enemy AI will typically pillage all other areas of the settlement before attacking the central one. Such delay will allow more time to save the area and even separate the enemy armies to be dealt with individually.

Every battle has a brief pause with a predicted outcome to decide with staying in or retreating. Participation is limited to 2 armies from each opposing side but retreat applies to both armies.
There is a 3-star rating system that explains the stats of both armies and checking if army is balanced. The most important stats to check is if the troops rank (veterans) and tier are higher than the enemy to inflict more damage.

Multiple active enemy armies can be overwhelming but they can be separated one by one.
The more favorable terms are to lure them away enough to be isolated, then engaged in preferably 2:1.

An overview of methods to split enemy armies:

Two armies need to march closely together to have better chances of opportunistic battles. Battles that have begun with an isolated enemy army still have a 2:1 advantage even when being reinforced later.

Two super-sized armies of high quality can lay siege with minimal losses. The archers will kill all the defenders before the need to assault the castle.
The capture can also go much quicker if the enemy decides to break the siege with another army. The open battle forces the defenders to join the fight that can be all wiped out in a single battle!

The manpower (health) of every unit determines the combat performance for the entire army. Every missing point hurts the battle outcome and accelerates mounting casualties that can lead to death.

To do a rapid heal, two armies could do a transfer and swap all healthy units to one army while the other goes back to replenish. A trick is to heal units of the same type by combining them without accidently deleting an entire unit. This allows the last remaining unit of that type to have all the damage.
As a rule of thumb, replenishment priority needs to be given to higher quality units. Units with less than 90% health need to replenish at the nearest settlement. Units with around 60% health or less needs to stay behind as garrison squad. The idea is for each unit to survive long enough to earn all 3 levels of veterancy.

The enemy army flees in a random direction after suffering a defeat and immune from getting re-engaged for a few seconds. If they are close to friendly territory, they will retreat back there or try to garrison in their own city.

A successful chase begins with an immediate manual order to pursue them and close the gap.
The capture of their marshal in the next battle depends on the number of remaining troops.

Ransom offers for marshals depends on the enemy's current wealth and they can abandon them.

The late game is about capturing provinces that have the missing resources for the kingdom advantage victory.
The kingdom needs to field 5-6 elite armies and push towards the objective while hiring mercenaries to take care of any rebel uprising due to war exhaustion.

This guide was written by Laguna Queen et al. (2022) on Steam, and not to be republished without crediting the authors and gaining their permission. We can be reached through the the guide comment section below.

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