1. I hire 12 people as soon as possible, cheap ones. My talented guys I put in the backline and give them a pitchfork or better, if I find a decent polearm early.
Game difficulty scales with size of your company so this isn’t the best strategy. You will have low skill, badly equipped brothers facing proportionate number of the enemies. You should avoid most useless backgrounds and you shouldn’t recruit new brothers if you can’t give them decent equipment.
