Advice on Direwolves

[Ned Stark]

Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?
After three waves of dire wolves on day 4, I can certainly say that my 4 surviving mercenaries are.

I started the first battle with 7 mercenaries, lost 1 merc., and killed the 3 dire wolves.

The second battle again I faced 3 dire wolves. I retreated, losing 2 men and suffering few injuries.

The third battle occurred when I was out and a little ways from the woods, but either the second group of dire wolves found me again due to their speed, or it was another wave of 3 dire wolves. Either way, I immediately retreated, suffering heavier injuries.

What more could be done in this situation? Any advice?
Thanks.

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"It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live." ~Marcus Aurelius

Game: "Characters with a height advantage against their opponents are harder to hit"
Me: "That's not true, and my short axeman is living proof!"

[RusBear]

with such armor on dificulty 2 or 3 ?…hm Only 1 advice : “to pray”, i think )

[SuperCaffeineDude]

They’ll almost always move first, so unless you have the armour for it, you’ll have to be able to kill them on the 1st turn they spend closing the gap,

Honestly though there’s no profit in fighting them. You’re just better of taking up quests against the undead and bandits that’ll yield you the loot you’ll need to guarantee you won’t take loses against “fast” enemies.

I guess you could try going without ranged attacks, go shield and club & spear, have your spears fend them off, and your clubs stun them, while your polearms work behind whatever shieldwall you can muster. Since wolves get about 3 attacks a turn, a swordsman might do well using the Riposte with a shieldwall. Shields are most important though.

But best advice is to avoid them till you can take hits

[Rahziel]

Don’t take hits – feed ’em spears!
Riposte has -10% hitchance without mastery, also you need high melee defence for it to work (enemy must attack and miss, but on day 4 you’ll hardly have decent melee defence), and in the end you will strike back only 3 times if all hits from a direwolf miss.
Spearwall on the other hand don’t require you to even have a shield to work (if you’re too poor, but it’s a risky gamble), and it will inflict as much as 6 hits since direwolves have 12 ap (thus 6 moves), while denying their ability to hurt your men. Also it does more morale checks and make ’em flee sooner.
Lastly, crossbows and bows only good until they can be used without aim obstruction penalty, after that they’re a hindrance.

So once the battle starts and the direwolves didn’t reach your frontline – spearwall and let ’em come.
If some of them did reach melee range – shieldbash or push away with pitchforks, and then spearwall..

[Wargasm]

There are many sound strategies for defeating direwolves, but none of them are wholly applicable to low-level recruits with light arms and armour …

Fighting and defeating direwolves is very worthwhile, though, because it gains a lot of experience points and is a good indication that the company has made progress and is ready to take on tougher challenges.

Direwolves get 3 attacks per turn (if already in melee) and can quickly rip through any armour that doesn’t consist of scales or plates. If the company members have lesser armour than this, they’ll need:

— (a) very high basal melee defence, or
— (b) good basal melee defence and a shield and/or a dodge bonus, or
— (c) a shield and high max fatigue (to keep forming shieldwalls) and high melee skill (to make their one attack per turn count), or
— (d) very high melee skill and a brutal weapon with which they can decimate and demoralize the direwolves

If you don’t have good melee skill, using accurate weapons like swords and spears doesn’t compensate by itself, since they aren’t damaging enough to decimate and demoralize the direwolves before they do it to you. However, it is possible to combine perks like Fast Adaptation, Adrenaline and Backstabber so that you can get in a good amount of hits with big weapons despite having modest melee skill, but this of course can only be achieved after a decent amount of experience has been accumulated, and is not applicable to raw recruits.

Forming a shieldwall and using riposte with a sword is very effective, since it turns the wolves’ advantage (3 attacks per turn) against them, but again will only work with a skilled veteran with high melee skill, high max fatigue and sword mastery.

For a company of raw recruits in the early game with no perks and level-ups and not enough crowns for fancy equipment, you might prevail if you (a) give them enough armour/protection to stand a good chance of surviving the first 2 rounds, and (b) arm most/all of them with a bludgeon (cheap and readily available) that can stun the wolves. Individually, they may not have nearly enough melee skill and max fatigue to keep stunning the wolves round after round, but if all of them keep trying to stun at the start then there’s a good chance that some/many of the wolves will get stunned in the early rounds of battle, and then you can switch to using less fatiguing but more damaging attacks against them while they’re unable to attack you, and you might just come out of it alive and without permanent injuries …

Also, what Rahziel suggested (spearwalls plus repelling with pitchforks or shields) can also work (again depending on damaging and demoralizing them before getting exhausted and suffering the same yourself). Spears with nets is good, since then you can slow their advance, lower their defence skills, and use double-grip to increase the damage done.

Later on in the game, once you’ve already got lots of crowns and equipment, you could recruit a whole bunch of raw newbs from promising backgrounds (e.g. wildmen, messengers, prizefighters, farmhands, thieves, flagellants, vagabonds) and send them off to fight an equal number of direwolves without veteran support, and they should manage to win (not necessarily without injuries and/or casualties) so long as each of them has medium armour (head and body both at around 70-110), a good shield, and either a boar/militia spear or an arming/noble sword.

[Ned Stark]

Thanks for the replies.

I think I’ll have my bowmen carry spears in their inventories from now on.

Handling direwolves on day 4 is hard, but I think if I had my ranged units equip spears during the battle (since I couldn’t react as the wolves jumped me from in the forest at night), and had the front ranks shield bash the wolves back, then I could have the ranged units help with the spearwall, and let the direwolves do all the damage themselves.

I believe that my ranged units were more of a hindrance as I first used them, because they had to line up a shot (that’d likely miss, low accuracy + night) with the enemy backed up so that they didn’t shoot my own troops (which doesn’t happen without shieldbash or my pitchfork-er, as direwolves are faster than all of my day 4 men), and lastly, the ranged units only had knives once the direwolves closed in on them.

I’ve always been throwing away the basic wood club. Now that I think about it, the basic wood club could have helped in this fight too.

At least I have some more ideas when dealing with wolves. Hopefully I’ll get to use these ideas after day 4 next time…

Thanks all.

"It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live." ~Marcus Aurelius

Game: "Characters with a height advantage against their opponents are harder to hit"
Me: "That's not true, and my short axeman is living proof!"

[Danubian]

There isnt much you can do about it at this point. In order to be effective against direwolves you need to have a full party armed and armored at least with the raiders grade of weapons and armors (that is medium level). Direwolves cant really do much against fully armored bros.

You possibly ventured too deep off the road or something.

[Ned Stark]

Danubian wrote:

There isnt much you can do about it at this point. In order to be effective against direwolves you need to have a full party armed and armored at least with the raiders grade of weapons and armors (that is medium level). Direwolves cant really do much against fully armored bros.

You possibly ventured too deep off the road or something.

It was a road that led a little ways through some woods to get to my quest delivery village. My 1st real contract, I think.

"It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live." ~Marcus Aurelius

Game: "Characters with a height advantage against their opponents are harder to hit"
Me: "That's not true, and my short axeman is living proof!"

[Holy.Death]

Direwolves aren’t that bad. I use spears and shields to keep them at bay. When they finally manage to break through I swarm them from all direction. This usually suffices, casualties are minimal (unless Direwolves have numbers that give them odds better than 2:1 and my mercenaries don’t have good enough armor to withstand their damage for the first few turns when they start getting thinned out).

[Ned Stark]

Sonuva…
When I finally thought Direwolves were getting easy…

My top crossbowman and my bottom pikeman got nommed before I could put up a defensive line. I didn’t yet have a skilled enough brother that could use Rotation or Footwork.

Now, however, I have the resources to seek out Impatient archers and pikemen, and that has helped considerably.

I’ve just come to the conclusion that Direwolves are the bane of early game players, as they are one of the few fights that you cannot always avoid or run from.
Well… that and those frickin’ Withered Vampires…

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"It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live." ~Marcus Aurelius

Game: "Characters with a height advantage against their opponents are harder to hit"
Me: "That's not true, and my short axeman is living proof!"

[Wargasm]

The Adrenaline perk can be great for solving some early problems (e.g. direwolves overwhelming you before you have much chance to act; orcs charging and stunning you; goblins netting/poisoning you before you can close on them; bandit pikemen punishing you if you move within 2 tiles of them and miss; remote targets being too obscured to hit with limited ranged skill; vampires disappearing elsewhere if you try to swarm them). The downside of it is that it’s of limited use for grizzled veterans, and then you wish you’d spent the perk point elsewhere. But it’s certainly worth considering for “expendable” characters that you don’t see being skilled enough to survive to veteran status.

[Johnsmith24601]

My highly armored band (~105 armor on average) slaughtered 3 groups of direwolves like it was nothing…moral of the story, get better armors ;) Spears and shields help a lot too, but armors are just awesome :)

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