Get either tax collection from a village or getting back borrowed money.
Talk to some nobles, and see about quests (Nobles and towns have better quests, I only take village quests to make the villages like me more and as an opportunity to beat on a bunch of bandits). There's a decent chance of getting some armor that is way better than what you would otherwise have in the early game. Ride around them a few times while they deplete their throwing weapons, pick off any that have bows, then kill the rest. My recommended strategy for where you are would be to pick a fight with the smallest group of sea raiders you can find (less than 10 is ideal). The trick is to just ride, let the lance get couched (you need something with Lance in the name), and aim it at someone for stupid amounts of damage. How do I work myself up the first few levels? Should I just seek out more levels and do minor jobs for them?There's an art to polearms, but they are beautiful once you get them working. I'm clearly not yet powerful enough to get involved with any serious stuff. Sea raiders utterly ruin me each time and quests seem to be fairly spread out.
I've done the opening mission, gotten a party of volunteers, delivered a letter, caught a bounty, fought looters several times and reached level 3. I made a female character focused on shield and sword, with backup proficiency with polearms (though I can't seem to hit anything while riding by), and put points into intelligence and agility. Sea Raider are really tough early on, but they also can drop really good gear for leveling so if you can find a small enough group of them it's worth the risk to try to get some of the equipment they drop. Note: you can get those quests from city lords without finding the lair first, but sometimes it's a huge pain to figure out where it is. I think if you go to the nearest city lord and ask him for a job, he'll ask you to eliminate said lair and that gives a decent exp reward to you and your party. Those are a bit riskier as you have to wager gold to earn a bigger payout if you win.Īs you explore the world map, sometimes you'll uncover bandit lairs. Once you're more confident in fighting that style you can roam from city to city to see if there are any tournaments going on. It can be tricky to win the whole thing but there are lesser payouts just for defeating a certain number of opponents and I think it's free to enter. Other things to do are try out the arena in any city. Some aren't the best fighters, but they are an extra body in the field and because they're companions instead of regular troops, they never die, just get knocked unconscious. Some of them will join you for free (Firentis, Jeremus, Borcha and Ymira to name a few). If you don't mind spending the time, you can go to each city and check the tavern for the special named companions.