Perisno can be brutal for new players, even veterans of Warband. The map is crawling with roving bands of NPC's who will gladly take your pony and ruin your day. Here are a few tips to help you get established:
- Speed is essential to the new party, try to keep your travel speed above 7.5 so you can avoid the masses of bad guys by travelling in short spurts and never use auto travel.
- Do the merchant's quest if you want to, just be aware that your inexperienced recruits will slow you down, I do the quest and then disband the recruits and travel alone early game.
- Travel the map and explore to find all the towns (if you have fog of war enabled) and recruit all the free companions especially the healer.
- Pick your battles, listen for battle sounds then assess the conflict and if it is pretty one sided join in on the winning side for easy loot, prisoners and exp.
- Look for parties that have been in battle recently and attack them. They will usually have fewer than optimum available combatants ( 10/40 etc.) and prisoners that you can recruit, especially cavalry.
- Cavalry is king early game, once you get some knights and cav archers the game gets a lot easier.
- Keep your warband small and mobile to start, buy some businesses and/or hire out as a merc to cover expenses and accumulate wealth prior to swearing oath to a faction and getting your first town/castle.
- In 0.8+ Karnoth makes for a good stronghold. As archers are not as big of a threat inside the tunnels. There is a push to make new sieges for the capital of each faction that is unique and favors the original owners.