by Michael D. Neal
Feudal Lords is a play-by-mail game of eight to seventeen players who conspire, bribe, and battle against each other in an attempt to succeed the late King Arthur of England.
In the year 801, I was the Baron of the fief, Glamorgan, which was located on England's western coast. Fourteen other players each controlled one fief and were spread evenly across a map of 46 fiefs of Britain. This was the first turn of the Feudal Lords game, FL-161.
I started with 1,400 gold, 1,400 food, 200 knights, 800 peasants, and 200 townsmen, and from these humble beginnings, I would contest for the crown.
All multi-player games allow alliances, but Feudal Lords virtually demands them. So, with the understanding that cooperation was the name of the game, I contacted several players and eventually allied with two, the Baroness of Cardigan and the Baron of Kent. I also had cordial relations with the Barons of Avalon and Stafford, at least for a while.
For my first turn, I sent Flying Buffalo orders to sell 200 excess food, and purchased 200 livestock, two markets, two fishing villages, and two lumber mills. I also ordered my knights to raid an adjacent, non-player fief.
You should never let excess food spoil; either sell it to the market or feed the excess to your peasants to accelerate the increase in peasant population growth. (Editors note I don't agree with never letting food spoil. If it's really cheap you can buy a lot and still sell at a profit next turn even after some spoils. That's risky, of course, since it might be cheap again.)
Purchase livestock when the price of food is ten gold or less. Livestock is like food that never spoils and always grows. Later in the game when famine strikes and food is selling above 30 gold, you can slaughter and sell your livestock to reap a king's ransom in gold. By the third or fourth turn you should have already built the maximum allowable markets, fishing villages, and lumber mills. These small ventures really help in the early stage of the game, but in later years, you hardly notice them because you'll be concentrating on higher risk/higher return investments such as mines, agriculture research, and foreign trade.
My knights returned from their raid with 1,393 gold. Not bad considering the alternative that they sit around the castle, eating my food, spending my gold in the taverns, and generally being a nuisance. In the later stages of the game, you might want to keep your knights close, to repel any attackers with designs upon your fief, but early on, make your knights earn their room and board.
My first two turns went better than planned, so on my third, I built three ships and set sail for foreign lands for trade. Glamorgan is a coastal fief, as are the large majority of fiefs in Feudal Lords, but if you're landlocked, you are both at a disadvantage and at a huge advantage. The disadvantage is that you can't build ships with which to engage in foreign trade, though you might buy ships from a coastal player--unlikely, because lords will want to keep their ships. Bide a moment and I'll come to the "huge advantage" later, but one small advantage is that landlocked fiefs have much more room for farming and grazing. As a landlocked lord, you should continuously buy livestock, invest in agriculture research, and feed your peasants extra rations. When the famine hits, you should be sitting on a mountain of gold.
I continued on in this fashion, building a few ships, raiding non-player fiefs, making various other investments, but it was the year of 805 that several players began to make their move. What they did, and what makes alliances so very vital, is that they bribed their ally's siege target. For example, suppose you want to attack and siege an adjacent, non-player fief that we'll call "Fief A." Your ally bribes Fief A, while you bribe a fief next to him, "Fief B." Then you use the bribe of Fief B for campaign support, which gets you up to half of Fief B's knights (and also reduces its defense). Fief A's defense is likewise reduced because half of them are on a quest with your ally to attack Fief B. So instead of attacking with 200 knights against a non-player fief of 200 defenders, both you and your ally are now attacking with 200 knights, plus an additional 100 from a bribed fief, against only 100 defenders, which yields a much better chance of success.
If you swear fealty to a vassal, the fief becomes your overlord, and you become its vassal, so you cannot be both overlord and vassal to the same fief at the same time. However, a technique that alliances used was that they swore to a subvassal or a sub-subvassal, so in effect, a multi-player alliance would set up a circular chain of vassals which exploited the increased powers of higher ranks for each member of the alliance.
By the year 806, the Lord of Lancaster was almost an Earl. I, and the Lady of Cardigan, were still at the lowest rank Baron(-ess).
In 807, I swore fealty to Stafford. The team of Lancaster and his vassal Cheshire was driving their conquests toward me, and, since Stafford was Cheshire's vassal, I thought I might buy myself some time by swearing into their alliance, and it worked (but I would betray them soon after).
Crawling at a snail's pace, I finally won a siege and acquired my very first vassal, the non-player fief Cairleon, in 809. You no doubt will be doing much better by 809, having several vassals by now, but there were several bright spots in my position. I had amassed over 40,000 gold which was possibly the largest gold total in the game at that time, my livestock had grown to 1,448 head of cattle, and I had built a twenty-ship fleet for foreign trade. My real ally, Kent, was an Earl, but Lancaster was higher yet, a Marquis, while my own royal aspirations languished.
The huge advantage that landlocked fiefs have is that they are hard to sneak up on. An overland attack must first beat a path through intervening fiefs before reaching its target, whereas a naval attack transports 50 knights and/or mercenaries per ship and can reach any coastal fief in one move.
Knocking over fiefs at will, Lancaster-Cheshire-Stafford were becoming too strong to stop. And so in 810, I led 500 of my own knights, plus 257 knights from two non-player fiefs, against Cheshire in a successful naval-borne siege, which forced the player-lord to flee Cheshire and to take refuge in Northumber, which was one of his vassal fiefs. Consequently, the Lancaster-Cheshire-Stafford siege train came to a screeching halt. I renounced fealty to Stafford and swore fealty to Cardigan, who was a vassal of Kent, and I invested mightily in defensive castle fortifications to gird my fief for a counterattack that never came.
In the year of 811, famine hit, and the price of food tripled. So the very next year, I ordered a herd of over 2,500 livestock to the slaughterhouse, ready to claim my fortune, and this was when I screwed up. In any game, a player should have a strong understanding of the rules. Before submitting orders, a player should check, double-check, then triple-check his work which I didn't do. I attempted to sell all 2,500 units of fresh meat to the market with one Sell Food order, whereas the rulebook specifically states that although you can submit more than one Sell Food order per turn, each order is limited to a maximum of 1,000 food. The Feudal Lords rulebook describes in detail 31 different order types. Study the rules. The maggots ate well in Glamorgan that year.
Alas, that was not my only mistake in 812. The player-lord of Norfolk had just resigned, leaving his fief and his three vassals unclaimed. I, flush with victory from the naval attack in Cheshire, decided to lead an attack against Norfolk. The siege was successful, but I should have pressed my attack against Lancaster's alliance (indeed, against Lancaster himself). The Duke of Northumber regained his old fief, Cheshire, and with their alliance fully recovered, Lancaster talked the Viscount of Avalon and the Baron of Cornwall into swearing fealty.
The Lord of Lancaster had now accumulated 24 fiefs of vassals and subvassals, one fief more than the necessary 23 that wins the game, and he was crowned King of England in the year of 813, the same year I unsuccessfully laid siege to his castle with over 1,300 knights. I finished the game as a Viscount, but was in open defiance of the coronation. You might predict that, as an unsuccessful attacker of the King during his ascendancy, the King's first order of business was to hunt me down and introduce me to the executioner's axe like I was some common criminal. I prefer to believe that the new King met with an "unfortunate hunting accident" before he could establish an Heir, and thusly launched a new race for succession!
The King is dead! Long live the King!
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