Vlandia Unit Guide: Troops Ranked Worst to Best in Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord

it's time for another unit guide we've covered four of the six factions in the sturgeons battalions kazate and azerai unit guides and today we are going to be discussing the vallandians the precursor to the swathians from mountain blade warband and this is going to be a pretty interesting one i think that for a lot of people blandia and or blondia and in the imperial army kind of make up the two top tier armies right now just because i think you have so many shock cav or so much shock have accessible through the noble line for vladia and for um imperial you have just ha so much armor across the archers across their noble line with their cataphracts and across their infantry it's going to be a very interesting video today as we discuss all of the many units of the vladian army and if you this is your first time tuning in the way i like to do these is we're going to go through each tier 2 3 4 and 5 of just the base unit then we'll cover the nobles in their own line the noble line as i call it and i'll be then ranking each unit within each tier either low mid or high and at the very end as per the request of a lot of you guys i will be putting up a picture that shows um all of the rankings kind of summarize so if you want to just go ahead and jump ahead to the end of that you're going to be able to see the chapters and the um table of contents in the description and in the timeline so you can jump to whatever relevant tier you would like to let's get started on our unit guide for blondia as always we'll be starting with tier two we skip over tier one because for the most part for every faction tier one is pretty much the same and this will be interesting because this is the first time we will be reviewing a crossbow unit in the levy crossbowman and then the other tier two unit is the footman so crossbows are a pretty interesting situation right now in the current game they are for the most part very accurate and they do high damage but they are quite slow to reload so in my opinion crossbows really need a mass in order to really be successful if you have five archers i feel like they're going to be more useful than five crossbowmen whereas if you have 25 crossbowmen you have so many shots being put down range it really kind of balances out that slow reload and especially as we kind of progress through this list you're gonna see that crossbow reload speed will start to increase but right now with the levee crossbowmen um again i think that they're only good in mass they're only one of two pure archers at tier two the only other one is the imperial archer right that's the only one that starts out at tier two the rest kick in at tier three or four depending on which faction we're looking at and again we're looking at something like this high damage at 75 pierce damage but slow speed at around 62 speed and it's going to start to be interesting as we progress through these tiers because you'll see that your your speed is going to be 20 some odd um speed less than a normal bow but the damage should just around be double depending on what situation it is or at least a significant increase and the accuracy will always be very high so those are the kind of caveats when it comes to dealing with crossbows you are going to have high damage you're going to have a low reload so right now though i would give this a mid tier just because even though there's only one other option to choose from i feel like the archer is good in both low quantity and high quality at this tier range because their reload speed is just going to outpace the crossbow by such a high margin looking over at the vlondian footman though we get a pretty exceptional soldier this has got the second highest armor of any tier two soldier also they have a pull arm and a sword and a shield so they have a very solid kit here whereas most units will have one or the other so a very very good all-around unit and in addition to that they have a static loadout all three of the loadouts for the most part are the same with the differing spear and helmet on this one but for the most part again nice and simple so you won't deal with a ton of variants when you recruit these guys and they're more likely to tr to progress to tier three than a lot of the other tier two units which will tend to get cut down a little bit easier but i think that these guys are a good high rank versus some of the other ones we've taken a look at in tier two just to recap real quick we have a mid-rank on the levee crossbowmen and a high rank on the volandian footman let's now jump over to tier three tier three i think is probably one of the hardest ones for vlondia i think it's they struggle in a lot of places here starting with the crossbowman now the crossbowman has a good deal of armor a lot more than its usual other archer counterparts but again it still is a crossbowman with the heavy crossbow you can see it's got a speed of 61 and a damage of 87 pierce so if i were to compare this to a trained imperial archer we can look at the mounting mountain hunting bow which is not too excellent and the speed is 86 and the damage is 46 so you're basically looking at 25 speed difference and around double damage so you're going to drop significantly in speed your crossbow skill is going to add only about let's just say five percent more speed here so you're not going to really be increasing a whole ton and you don't have any real difference from your standard kind of archer you're for the most part a guy on foot with a bow or a crossbow and a sword so you don't really have a ton of things above that archer and i feel like it's it's not as excellent but it's still a considerable amount of damage if used in mass so i think that these guys giving a nice mid rank is still pretty fair and i'm going to be honest with you for the most part i find that crossbowmen aren't terrible but they just aren't great and i'm going to explain that more as we jump into the hardened crossbowmen in the next tier moving over to the vlondian spearman and also you can kind of parallel this with the infantry because they're almost identical units taking a look at the two you can see they have almost the exact same loadout too the only difference here is 71 handed 70 pole arm and 70 athletics over here guess what 70 70 and 70. i was kidding there's not a difference so these two units the um for the most part when it comes to their skills or loadout it's pretty much the same the only difference is of course though is what they're going to progress down to in tiers 4 and tier 5. and when we look at them um they don't have excellent armor 16 15 19 14 other things by that tier three just have a lot better staying power especially when we look at kazette who has like a whopping like 50 some odd body armor so the kazate or i'm sorry the vlondian spearman and and infantry they just don't really have a ton going for them the spearman he has the same kit across all of his variations so at least you get minimal variance but when we look at the infantry soldier he does get a different sword an axe and an axe so i actually to be totally honest i like that he has a little variance in here because i find that getting that variance can be pretty good for certain situations say if this infantry soldier was fighting against a higher tier infantry soldier with more armor axes and maces tend to do a little bit more damage that situation they do get decent shields which is a nice situation to deal with you know you can have um any of the battanian shields which are just small little circular shields which don't really do a whole ton and for the most part they're just kind of bland so i'm going to give a rank to both the spearman and the infantrymen at a low which is unfortunate and i think that this is the kind of bottleneck for blondia is that tier three the crossbowmen are not super exceptional and the spearmen and infantrymen are infantry are just not good with them both being a low rank and you're a crosswoman at a mid rank you're really relying on that noble line to push your soldiers into tier four and when we go over the noble line we'll discuss why uh having a low rank tier three infantry is not as terrible when it comes to comparing against just the the ball crushing awesomeness of the heavy cavalry of blondia that concludes tier three again real quick real quick mid low and low let's jump now over to tier four tier four is where things start to get a little bit different especially for the hardened crosswoman for blondia now the the hardened crosswoman uh is solid it's got a lot of really good armor here and it finally adds a big nice shield to the situation now with that shield it actually becomes a very decent combatant if it actually gets pushed into melee combat or if it's in the siege and it needs to scale walls it at least has some protection so i think this kind of gives it a little bit more value in the long run i would really like to see the ai um turn their back to the enemy when they reload their crossbow the way that these shields were intended to be used obviously they can't plant them in front of them if they could that'd be even better now one of the biggest issues with all the crossbowmen and i was saving it for this one to talk about is that the bolt never progresses in rank when you take a look at some of the other um one of some of the other things called azerite archer some of the other archers you get um things that at least progress in weapon tier the barbed arrows is probably a terrible example here but still when you're looking at the bolt it is always zero additional pierce damage and it always is just one single stack of bolts no matter what tier we're looking at they only get 20 shots no matter what so when you take a look at these guys compared to pure archers what is supposed to be their role right unranged archer or arranged missile unit then they kind of start to fall short because you're realizing that almost every other pure archer gets two stacks or two quivers and as they progress through their tiers they get access to better and better archers or i'm sorry better better arrows or quivers the bolt still just stays the same i think one of the biggest issues with crossbows is that they don't do what they're supposed to do right they're not doing more damage to armor than an archer does for the most part they do the blanket amount of damage and it always seems to just wreck house no matter what so i think the biggest thing that's supposed to be going for crossbows just doesn't exist but again like i said they've got great armor and shields um and with their 100 crossbow skill we're starting to finally get a little bit closer to the reload speed because the bonus from the personal skill of a low tier bow so at least things are getting a little bit better but i would still rank these as a mid-rank just because i still think that a pure archer does better even the sturgian archer the sturgeon hunter i believe it is at this rank which we rated as a low rank in the sturgian video i still think can just pour enough damage downrange to rival these guys but i think the hardened crossbowman still brings so many other things to the table as far as being way more survivable and having the ability to fight a little bit better in close combat with that shield edges it above its sturgeon counterpart now looking at the billman we have another pretty interesting situation he brings this nice beefy short bill to the table with 124 swing damage now the billman we're going to be comparing against stuff like the uh sturgeon berserker the falksman the monaviaton things that have two-handed weapons and that is like their staying power that is what they do or the mam luke guard which eventually progresses to the palace guard now with this situation we get a situation like i said that 15 times it's jersey's jersey shore over here but the swing damage on this bad boy is 124 that's the second highest damage behind the falx at 126. also he brings a decent amount of armor to the table at 16 31 15 and 20. and he gets good athletics the only one that rivals this is of course the berserker at 130 athletics but he stays really good at 110 still staying above his competition so i don't think he has the most armor right the berserkers got better um the monaviatons got better and the mamaloo guard has got comparable amounts but i think across all these other situ or these other almost said it again all of these other statistics he still keeps at good solid mid rank he's not the best like the berserker and the monaviaton are because i think the berserker can dish out so much damage and the monaviaton can take so much damage and also dish it out as well but the billman still kind of has a solid amount of armor pushing it above the folksmen and a really great amount of damage keeping it in line with the uh mom loot guard now mid rank again for the billman but pushing into the light cav we get a a really kind of um not fun cavalry unit or blondia but that's to be expected right the noble line is where you're going to find the main staying power of your mounted army these guys unfortunately have a terrible horse just a disgusting saddle horse which is no good for anyone they have very very low armor at 16 18 15 and 29 remember we're comparing these two other non-noble line um mounted soldiers now that would be stuff like the battanian scout or the kazette lancer just to give you a comparison here we were comparing the kazette lancer to noble line soldiers because it was so decked out and so good the kazette lancer gets a hundred writing which is great and this progresses even higher to the heavy lancer that gets 150 so the kaze lancer also gets a war horse very similar to the battanian scout who also gets a battalion pony i thought i got the war mount that's the horseman so at least the battalion pony compares a little bit to the saddle horse but not really and at the same time too the light cavalry just doesn't get that much armor he does have a nice good spear with a long fine steel spear which is one of the longest reaching spears in the game which is good gets a nice good shield with the reinforced cav shield and also a ridged arming sword but one of the biggest kind of achilles heels for this guy is he gets 100 throwing where's that going to go to use so it's got to be swapped with one-handed and we do have a number of situations like this too where the oath sworn has has a kind of offset skill and that isn't really awesome and i think that once skills kind of get rebalanced it would help this soldier out but as it is he gets a low rank because of the offset skills terrible armor not a great horse and just kind of an awkward placement across the entire board here moving over to the vlondian swordsman we get a very solid soldier in the tier 4 ranking now he has a wide range of weapons of course he starts with just a simple sword but another one gives him a mace which is really great against heavily armored units especially at the tier 4 and tier 5 level and he gets an axe which is that kind of nice middle ground also on top of it he's got a spear so this guy can really threaten all range of opposing units and be very solid in sieges as well i think that's one i really enjoy about a lot of the higher tier blondian soldiers they have a really awesome kit we're going to see that with the sergeant and the vergier in a little bit but their ability to kind of be a jack of all trades in a lot of situations i think is a really big strength whereas normally it would be a detractor because it kind of reduces their specialization but they do a high amount of damage to their sword is one of the highest damage swords out there um of course the battanians have just tanks for swords they also have a decent amount of armor and i think that once you get the infantry soldier to the swordsman that's your real big reward there because the sergeant uh really kind of takes things off from there and the swordsman can can really hold the line in the way that the infantry soldier i wish did i think the biggest issue here is there's such a huge jump in quality from tier three to tier four with just the vlondian infantry and i think that's pretty unfortunate now we give this guy a mid-rank so quickly recapping we're gonna be mid for the hardened crossbowmen it is going to be mid for the billman low for the light cavalry and then it is mid for the swordsman let's now talk about tier 5 before closing things out with our noble line tier five let's talk about it now we are talking about the sharpshooter and it's going to be the same thing we've talked about with some of the other crossbowmen it's still just one stack of bolts and that bolt doesn't have an increasing tier so it's going to suffer but with the bound crossbow we get 100 damage and 100 accuracy that is worth noting with every shot from a crossbow it is hopefully on target of course they're going to miss but it's trying to say that what you're aiming at is pretty much going to hit as long as that thing doesn't move with a bow you're shooting from the chest it's got a 94 accuracy so there's still a light there's still six percent quote unquote six percent margin for error i know it's an actual percentage here but it's saying that what you're directly aiming at the center of the reticle is going to have a small slight kind of deviation now one thing to take a look at here is with crossbow at uh was 130 130 skill we're getting a 9.1 percent reload bonus so that's going to bring this thing up quite a bit so let's just say six run it to 10 for easy math bring us to around 69 speed it's quite good now um when we look though at this the azeri master archer asteroid master archer which i consider probably one of the best archers outside of the noble lines it has 160 skill giving it a 17.6 bow damage on top of his step recurve bow and the four piercing damage of the piercing arrows this comes out to like something like 75 76 total damage so it's not that far behind the sharpshooter and he's just going to be able to get that many more shots downrange i know i'm kind of beating this point to a to a pulp but i think that this keeps the sharpshooter at a mid-rank even though he still gets a nice good sword and that good shield that he carries over from tier four now looking at the volga and the pikeman we get a very um i i think that what's what's wrong here as the the volga is amazing and the pikeman is terrible and i think the pikeman relies on a mechanic that has not yet been put into single player with being able to brace your spear a pikeman uses a pike that pike relies on being braced to really do damage so when i even compare these two units against each other the pikeman just doesn't have the amount of armor to even compare to the volga and it does a low damage because it the pike itself doesn't have a ton of damage so it's unfortunate but when we now look at the volga it is amazing it's got an awesome kit it has got a volt it has got a broad two-hander it's got a ridge tipped arming sword and it has throwing axes and if i kind of vary this around for the most part it's all the same so i really like this unit and uh even comparing it to the other ones in its class like the ulfhedonar like the elite monaviaton the veteran folksman the palace guard it's still i think even though it doesn't have the most armor it can threaten such a wide range of units that i think kind of gets a little bit of a leg up because of that it's not have doesn't have terrible armor it still has decent armor here but i think it's so well-rounded that it can be really good in an open field fight it can be great in a close quarters field fight once things really kind of get into a strong melee and it can be very great in sieges i love this unit it's one of my favorite ones so i'm going to be giving it a high rank and the pikeman you guessed it it's a low ring for that little guy moving over to the vanguard we get uh just a huge upgrade from the light cavalry um but it still suffers from having a terrible horse that saddle horse has stayed with him from tier four into tier v um also though he gets a braceable spear he's a lance blondie and lance um now i'm gonna bring up the heavy lancer because i got again this guy is like the cream of the crop when it comes to non-noble line cavalry and he has really good armor 42 60 52 28 real solid this guy really not terrible at all 40 46 43 and 36 i think he has a lot of really good qualities about him but i think that when comparing him to the heavy lancer he just doesn't stack up a hundred percent especially because blondie relies on its noble line for really its heavy shock cav damage so the vanguard gets a nice mid rank for me i think it could be it could be a high rank if it had a little bit better of a horse or just something that kind of tipped it over to the uh to that high rank uh situation uh when we look at the heavy lancer it gets a step war horse and it gets at 150 riding so it is already kind of outpacing um the vanguard by comparison now our last unit here in tier v is the vlondian sergeant and this is another one i've always really liked it has had its kit changed a little bit since launch when it used to also have a two-hander very similar to the volga but now it has a mace which we know is really good against armor it has a sword and it has an axe so i like the amount of damage again that the sergeant can do it has a really good amount of armor it doesn't compare to the imperial legionary which has the most armor but at 41 44 42 and 34 it has a lot of great staying power in addition it skills 130 one-handed 130 polar and 130 athletics so its skills are all in line with its quote unquote use case which i really like and it has a very long spear yet again with the long fine steel spear giving it like i said before the longest reach of a spear that isn't a lance so i absolutely love the sergeant and in my video discussing my favorite units per class i said the sergeant was grade a top of the best of the best it isn't as good as it used to be because of the the way its kit has changed a little bit but i still give it a high rank because like i said before it can threaten across such a wide range of additional units on open field melee sieges every kind of scenario you'd want him to be in he can really he can really prosper and also he's a huge shield man like a massive shield look at the guy reinforced oak and kite shield just very buoyant now going across the line one more time to recap the sharpshooter is mid rank olgier is high rank pikeman is an abysmal low rank the vanguard is a mid-rank and then the sergeant is a high rank now let's talk about the noble line for blondia which i'm sure we all know is amazing the noble line the cream of the crop the top tier of vlandia and really the biggest driving force behind them right these heavy shock cavalry style units that everyone loves especially the ai when they're pushing against dergia now um one of the standout things with the valondia and shock cav or noble line for this matter is that their tier two unit is on horseback when i compare this to the sturgians or to the imperials they both start on foot the imperials get mounted into a horse with their equity line which is their tier three and they stay on a horse throughout but the stergians don't mount a horse until their latter two steps in their drew's sneak so it's important to note that when you're trying to level up the volondian squire in the mid to late game in your actual army they're going to survive i think a little bit better than the alternative ones that are going to be on foot my personal opinion if you're trying to level up your squire and you're in that mid to late game you're probably better off putting them into a garrison to automatically level up or use your leadership skills which will allow them to level up and maybe put them on their own stand away formation and have them just kill looters kind of pushes their level up quicker quicker but the squire's got a little bit of an evolution over time it got a shield it got a better loadout with a helmet and its chest piece so it's gotten a little bit stronger as time has gone on it also has a mace in one of its loadouts i think it's a sword and an axe on us another mace so spiked mace on two of its three loadouts now pushing over here to the gallant or the gallant we get another really strong unit and this guy actually um stays the line very well now the big thing here the big kind of army to beat or or unit to beat is the cataphract now comparing it to the equitae the equity has 100 pole arm and then 60 i'm sorry 70 riding and 71 handed comparing this back across to blondia we're looking at 100 170 so it's a very nice skill set that really outshines by comparison to the imperial line i know that we could be comparing this to the sturgians but like i said they don't mount up into those last two tiers and even then i think valenti is a better shock cav than uh sturgia now when we jump to the volondian knight oh and also worth noting i would give the vallandian squire a rank of mid because it's not necessarily super strong outside of getting to tier 3 as fast as possible i mean it doesn't have a lot of ways to threaten things because of its lower armor i think it can get killed a little too easily in the early game i think it's very strong but i think after that early game portion it falls off quickly but i wanted to i want to keep it at a mid rank but for the gallant a mid rank i'm sorry a high rank and then for the knight it's interesting because we look at his one-handed at 100 and we look at his pull arm at 110 and his riding at 100. well let's jump back over here to the imperial line the heavy horseman gets a 150 pull arm with a 40 skill bump over it so that does kind of put it a little bit heavier of a uh of a shooting bracket i guess you could say or of a hitting bracket also it's got an armor of 27 35 to 26 and 31 compared to 29 35 and 33. so the armor is kind of a little wonkapotamus here and the weapon loadout are a mace or is a mace followed by an arming sword and then another mace so we keep that double mace single sword action well into the uh fourth tier or i guess you have tier four for uh the volandian shot cap so i still think that they are a high rank and i think the same thing is true of the champion all the way down to a banner night the three of these or four of these are all high rank in my opinion and i think it's because they also threaten differently than the cataphract one of the biggest differences between these two is their horse the banner knight gets a coarser while as the elite cataphract the top tier shock cav for the imperial army gets the imperial charger so it's a bit of a drop in horse tier quality and that is unfortunate of course they get the imperial scale barting which is better than the chainmail barding of the blondia but they also have a very limited kit they get an imperial lance and they get knight's kite shield fine steel parame perimerian and that is it it's the same thing all the way around just a different shoulder armor so when we look back though at the banner knight we get the blondian lance the reinforced cavalry kite shield and then the ridged arming sword and this evolves into either the northern spiked battle axe or the western mace i think as a whole this makes for a really strong well-rounded unit once more that's kind of been the the saving grace of londia is that it constantly has the ability to threaten on siege warfare in close melee and close cav to cav melee where it's not using its pull arms anymore they're strictly switched over to one handed weapon and they also get a leg up in that the banner knight gets 20 more one-handed skill than its elite cataphract counterpart they sit at a a measly 200 but a 200 to 220 that is some difference when we take a look at the skill we can see that it's one-handed damage at 30 percent and 14 speed comparison to the banner knight at 33 and 15 uh damage and speed so banner night is still good its armor is a little bit lower than the imperial counterpart and that's what we're going to expect especially when we talk about the imperial unit guide their armor is always going to be aces but i think that the different the varying kit loadout of the banner knight and the overall staying ability and punching ability makes for a high rank soldier especially in the noble line like when you think of shock cav you think of the banner knight and the elite counterfeit those are the top two in my opinion but this concludes our noble line for velondia so let's just sum up our video now kind of going over everything at a high level so what to say what closing thoughts do i have for blondia and i think that of all of the factions that i've played blondia is up there as one of my favorite because i enjoy the kind of western european approach that it takes with the military but with that being said i find that velondia bottlenecks very hard in that third tier and we talked about the vladion crossbowmen only being a measly mid-tier or mid-rank sorry with the spearman and the infantry being in that low rank it's very very hard to deal with because the rest of your army is gated by two sub-par infantry soldiers now of course those guys are then supplemented very heavily by an amazing noble line out of valondia where they just have just amazing cavalry that can just plummet or i'm sorry pummel anything so you do get at least an anchor or a crutch that can secure your line and if you use that cavalry properly then you can really do a ton of damage by getting them to flank into the opposing units archers or even counter-charging their cavalry or just doing whatever you can to really do a lot of damage to their army using that noble line i think it's it's the saving grace of valondia now when we look at the rest of olondian units though we get something that is very well-rounded right everything has a solid amount of armor nothing uh for the most part suffers armor-wise compared to other factions other factions either are grossly under valondia or just a little bit above in fact i would say that as an average velondia is probably the second most armored faction behind the imperials now i think it's a little bit of a generalization but i guess i'm just kind of talking if we're looking at the average of each one of their armor values now looking at the bottom tier the the rank five for vladio we start to really get some pace being brought up with the volgier and the sergeant both being standout exceptional soldiers and the vlandian vanguard is a really good solid non-noble line cavalry but i think that's still that vlondian sharpshooter does push against the overall viability of the range units in volandia i think that what's really going to be a telling thing for this army is when spear bracing becomes a thing in single player it's currently in multiplayer and when crossbows get a little bit more figuring out right now they don't do any more or less damage per se than a um a bow and arrow and bolts themselves have a static tier they're always tier one and they always they don't do any additional damage um uh via their their tiers like say the piercing arrows so on and so forth so once that gets figured out i think that vlondy and crossbowmen will be very different and they'll have a different target right i want crossbows to do more damage to armor and i want bows to do more damage to less armor so it kind of balances itself out right now that doesn't exist so overall these are my impressions of the vlondian unit guide here i know this is one that a lot of you guys wanted to see here so i wanted to get it out to you our next one will be on the imperial army and that will conclude all six of our unit guides for mountain blade to bannerlord we will continue to do these as this evolves though so if there is a big kind of swap around a lot of the armor and skills of the units i will do an update updated unit guide probably when we do a full launch of the game and one thing that i know a lot of you are going to make a comment about um i'm from southern california so the way i say the word cavalry sounds like calvary to a lot of you so if you hear me and you think i'm saying c-a-l-v-a-r-y i am not i'm saying cavalry it's just the way i say it quickly because i am an illiterate surfer from southern california but as always guys thank you so much for watching here today go ahead and let me know in the comment section below what you thought about this unit guy do you feel that maybe the billman or the buildman is better than what i said or the volge is garbage and you like the pikeman more let me know what your thoughts are and what your experiences are using vlondia on the fields of coloradia but as always thank you so much for watching have a good one and take care

Channel: ItalianSpartacus

Views: 64,896

Rating: 4.9358602 out of 5

Keywords: bannerlord gameplay, bannerlord, bannerlord review, bannerlord pc gameplay, mount and blade 2 bannerlord, mount and blade 2 bannerlord gameplay, mount& blade 2: bannerlord, let's play bannerlord, mount &blade ii: bannerlord, mount and blade 2, mount and blade 2 gameplay, mount and blade 2 review, mount and blade 2 tips, bannerlord tips, playthrough, commentary, video game, italianspartacus, tips, unit guide, culture, best units, best troops, vlandia unit guide, vlandia, best cavalry

Id: fsqJaHa7gkc

Length: 34min 29sec (2069 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 16 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/TheItalian567]

Ahoy my bros! Finally getting around to continuing my Unit Guide series, this time with Vlandia. There's some interesting issue with the Vlandian "army" as it were. Tier 3 is a HUGE bottleneck for them with the Spearmen/Infantry units being god awful by comparison to other Tier 3 soldiers. They of course shine in the Noble and Tier 5 department, but I think that getting there is quite the slog, especially replenishing your forces in the mid/late game.

Here's the picture if you don't feel like watch the video and just want a quick TL;DR :)
https://imgur.com/SMyMGyn