Possible to progress at Deadly difficulty if you choose to kill Hoggart?

[Wargasm]

With the fewer crowns and steeper prices of recruits and equipment, you find yourself obliged to buy 3 more men and some weapons and arms just to continue with the opening contract to kill the weasel, and this means that you end up with a rabble clothed in rags and soon find yourself (if you even do manage to kill the weasel) overwhelmed by a horde of zombies encased in full mail. Even if you keep dodging and hitting them, your cheap weapons will soon break and force you to take recourse to a succession of futile knuckle-sandwiches. Still, you have to admire the resolve of my beleaguered bowman (a magnificent seat in Valhalla assuredly awaits him):

Only another 1000 or so points of armour for my mighty spear to get through:

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[dltoster]

Yep.
In my current deadly ironman game i killed Hoggart on the 63th day. Was trading and equiping until that day. 6-7 men in simple mail and with decent weapon. Yeah, it is not necessary that much but i did not want casualties.

[Wargasm]

Ah well. This time I managed to kill him at dawn on day 4, with a full band of just-about-properly-armed men, all of whom survived with minimal injury. We even got some swords, shields, gambesons and silver plates as loot, and it was the “useless” beggar (35 crowns, no shield and just a green tunic but useful melee and defence skills) who hacked off Hoggart’s head at the end (scorning to waste time splitting the shield first).

[mrbunnyban]

…THAT’S what fight awaits on Deadly? Looks a little more than deadly, lol. Think the devs overdid it.

[Johan]

I playing on deadly atm and i´ve killed hoggart both times I´ve started a game. Like on day 2-3 after you go get more men.
Use high ground and pray the RNG gods are in your favour. Both times it was really close fights, but both times i won.

Killing the thugs early might make a few of them run. Then you only need to deal with hoggart.

[mrbunnyban]

Johan wrote:

I playing on deadly atm and i´ve killed hoggart both times I´ve started a game. Like on day 2-3 after you go get more men.
Use high ground and pray the RNG gods are in your favour. Both times it was really close fights, but both times i won.

Killing the thugs early might make a few of them run. Then you only need to deal with hoggart.

Zombies do not run. I’m guessing the situation posted above where you have to fight 11 zombies didn’t occur to you?

[Wargasm]

Yeah. It’s not actually killing Hoggart that’s hard. What is hard is fulfilling the obligations of the opening contract (hire at least 3 more men and buy weapons and armour) without the “armour” being little more than rags and the weapons not being sufficiently durable to take on the much more heavily armed opponents that you often find yourself having to take on early at Deadly. If there was no requirement to recruit a certain number of men, you could just buy decent weapons and armour for your 3 starting troops and use only them to kill Hoggart (and then they’d get a nice load of experience points to start with, as well, instead of having to share them with some also-rans that you probably didn’t really want).

[mrbunnyban]

Wargasm wrote:

Yeah. It’s not actually killing Hoggart that’s hard. What is hard is fulfilling the obligations of the opening contract (hire at least 3 more men and buy weapons and armour) without the “armour” being little more than rags and the weapons not being sufficiently durable to take on the much more heavily armed opponents that you often find yourself having to take on early at Deadly. If there was no requirement to recruit a certain number of men, you could just buy decent weapons and armour for your 3 starting troops and use only them to kill Hoggart (and then they’d get a nice load of experience points to start with, as well, instead of having to share them with some also-rans that you probably didn’t really want).

So your plan is to take out zombie Hoggarts and then run? Somehow, I doubt 3 decent troops could take out 11 mid range armor zombies. The screenshots you just posted above look like some sort of joke scenario from the devs.

[Wargasm]

The zombies weren’t from the battle against Hoggart. That had already been won, but with very few crowns and resources remaining. So I accepted a mission to attack some graveyard, and (instead of the anticipated horde of zombies in rags, along with a few in semi-destroyed armour) I found myself up against a mass of them almost all in fully intact armour, so that my weapons began to break etc. In other words, at Deadly difficulty, you have much fewer crowns but you need to spend more crowns on more lethal and more durable weapons, because most of the enemies you face (and they tend to be lurking everywhere) are very heavily armed.

If I hadn’t needed to recruit 3 more men to fulfill the opening contract, I could have easily won the battle against the 5 or 6 thugs, and then I’d have had some crowns spare and wouldn’t have needed to hurriedly accept another contract.

But could 3 decent troops beat that horde of zombies? Yes, probably – provided they were all in armour similar to the zombies’, and had shields and sufficiently lethal and durable weapons.

[spamtaboo]

There is a number of skulls above the contract that gives you basic idea about it’s difficulty. I imagine this contract had 3 skulls above. Playing on deadly you need to be picky with contracts at first, try going for 1 skull contracts, avoid protecting village from “terror” before having a decent front line. I also did some research and killing Hoggard on deadly is way better then skipping this mission. (I had about 15 restarts already). I traded only once when the location was very beneficial (plenty of towns with trading goods in 3 various locations accessible from ports and a huge harbor to sell goods to) and once I’ve got some lucky patrol marching ahead of me and a few kills bouncing my way so I had great equipment. Other then these 2 cases I managed to go by with initial 1400. Killing Hoggard is easy because there are no raiders with him, just thugs.

[Ioci]

its all about who do you hire and what do you buy in that very quest.
militia, deserter, and caravan hand are the best option, but they could be expensive. you need someone who has high melee skill, this is the only matter in the very early game. dont pitty your crowns, get them enlist, at least one. they are expensive because they already carrying a decent weapon and wearing a nice cloth rather than rag.
then buy shield, any kind of them, the broken one is better, because its cheaper, equip them for your new recuits.
get your second companian a shield as well, the one who has a big axe, so he, one of your damage dealer, wont die easily. give the big axe to someone costabe, maybe a begger or a refugee, you only need that weapon for shield breaking when you facing hoggrat.
after the blood bath against hoggrat, most of your men will survive, tend the wound, if anyone with low melee skill was badly injuried, dismiss him and get someone new, not worthy waste your medic supply.
then you get a brand new party of your journey.

[Author]

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