Wartales by Shiro Games, pits your band of mercenaries against a world of warring kingdoms, bandit outlaws, and religious fanatics. You'll frequently be outnumbered and facing uphill odds in challenging turn-based combat, testing both your tactical awareness and your ability to build a strong team.
Related: Wartales: Best Animal Companions
One morally dubious way of padding the odds in your favour is to recruit new members from these factions as you fight them. Each faction offers unique passive abilities that can strengthen your team if you manage to recruit them. This guide details how to get prisoners and which faction is best.
How To Capture Prisoners
Capturing human prisoners is much simpler than capturing animals in Wartales, as you only ever need one item: Chains. Chains can be purchased from any of the regional prisons across the map.
Capturing prisoners is done in combat via a unique skill prompt that only appears when the conditions are met. The person you are trying to capture must be below half of their maximum health and be engaged in melee combat.
Approaching a weakened and distracted target in this way will show a new prompt to attempt to capture them. Unlike melee attacks, this has a chance to miss completely, wasting the action.
In most cases, the chance to capture will be between 60 and 80 percent. Some enemies will have the leader or seasoned status, which prevents them from being captured.
The Crime and Chaos path ability Non-lethal gives a 20 percent bonus to knock out attempts. To level it up, you must perform criminal and underhanded actions such as raiding merchant caravans and stealing from shops.
How To Recruit Prisoners
Prisoners taken will not initially be willing to join you in combat and have a chance of escaping when you stop to rest.
Right-clicking on a prisoner to examine their character sheet will show several unique stats for prisoners. The first of these is their Escape Ability. This will start at 100 percent and should be reduced as much as possible to recruit them.
- Injuries will provide a 20 percent decrease. Most prisoners will start with an injury from the fight in which you caught them.
- Each companion adjacent to a prisoner gives another 20 percent decrease. An easy way to achieve this is to place your prisoners around the campfire, with your crafting stations in a circle around them. Animal companions can be used here, but this will make recruitment harder.
- The watch stool camp item gives a 10 percent decrease for all prisoners.
Be careful what you give prisoners to hold. They will take any items they are carrying with them when they escape.
The stocks can entirely prevent a prisoner from making escape attempts but will heavily reduce their trust, preventing you from recruiting them. This camp tool is best used when planning to turn in an outlaw for a bounty.
The recipe for stocks can be purchased from aprison and then built by a tinkerer. When fully upgraded, it can hold four people. Other actions that can decrease trust are whipping slaves and making them sleep next to animals.
Once you've got their escape chance as low as possible, it's time to start raising their trust. This is done by treating them well. Keep them well-fed while you travel, provide them with a barber kit purchased from a prison or town, and treat their injuries.
You can view their current level of trust on their character sheet by clicking the icon in the bottom left corner. The tinkerer recipe Personal Cup provides a large bonus to trust while equipped: Who wouldn't trust the jailor when they give you a mug with your name on it?
After gaining a sufficient level of trust, the prisoner will offer to talk, indicated by a white question mark over their head. Speaking to them with a right click will offer the opportunity to recruit them for a price in influence, the game's social currency.
Related: How To Capture Animals In Wartales
What Is The Best Faction To Recruit From
Prisoners do not have complete skill trees like your mercenaries do. Instead, they have a set of passives that change depending on the faction they come from.
Faction | Effect |
|---|---|
Brotherhood (rival mercenaries) | Often found guarding merchants, Brotherhood members gain powerful bonuses when engaged in melee combat. The rivalry buff is gained at level five, which halves the damage taken from the engaged enemy. The Duel Mastery passive at level seven blinds engaged enemies, giving a 50 percent chance for their next attack to miss. These make Brotherhood recruits useful for frontline positions, while as archers, they will not be able to make use of these benefits. |
Zealots (inquisitor faction) | Zealots make powerful assassins. At level five, they learn relentless which grants +50 critical chance versus targets engaged in combat. At level seven, their attacks apply the vulnerability debuff if they have no guard, achieved by wearing light armour. Frontline zealots will not be able to make full use of these abilities as they will need heavier armour and will be engaged in combat too often to effectively use the Relentless passive. |
Outlaws (bandit faction) | Outlaws are given a more mixed set of passives. The Oath of Cowards at level five grants a 30 percent damage boost versus targets engaged in combat. This leans into a similar backstabbing role as the zealots. Their level seven ability is Dishonourable Trick which boosts their next attack when they are hit by the same enemy multiple times. This ability is more useful in a tanking role where they can tie up the enemy damage dealers to charge up powerful counterattacks. Captive outlaws can also be handed over to a prison in exchange for a bounty. |
Legion (military faction) | Legion soldiers get strong defensive abilities that are dependent on team composition and positioning. Their level five ability Military Formationgreatly increases their defence when standing next to allied units. Their level seven ability, One Against Many, provides a continuous boost to damage and defence when your team is outnumbered. This makes them strongest at the beginning of a fight, when the enemy numbers are higher, and you can control your starting unit placement to set up their Military Formation bonus. |
Guards | Guards are powerful duelists. In a one-versus-one fight, they can easily activate their level five passive Forced Disengagement, which gives an attack of opportunity if they both start and end their turn in combat. At level seven, this is upgraded with Lawful Fervour which increases the damage of attacks of opportunity by 25 percent and applies the confused debuff when landing them. In a longer battle, these abilities combined can more than double the damage a guard deals in melee combat. Guards encountered in any region willalways match the player's level, providing a challenging battle but a good source of recruits. |
Trappers (Ludern Region) | Trappers have powerful synergies with animal companions but are only encountered in the Ludern Region. Their level five ability, Animal Unit, provides passive healing to the nearest animal that scales with the animal's constitution. Keep them next to a bear with an infused collar, and the creature will become functionally immortal. Wild Opportunism, unlocked at level seven, gives a flat 50 percent damage boost against any enemy engaged with an animal. Since these passives don't care about melee engagement, trappers work well in the front and back lines. |
Recruiting from captured prisoners offers its own advantages and disadvantages compared to other ways of building your company. The biggest downside is they cannot generate valour points, the currency used to perform special moves.
They also do not learn any special moves themselves. This makes a recruited prisoner slightly weaker than a mercenary of the same level.
They will begin with the Freed Slave trait, which halves the wages you have to pay them.
A mob of converted prisoners will benefit greatly from abilities that provide buffs in a wide area, like a Protector's Encouragement or a Sentinel's Battlecry.
When upgraded, these skills provide long-lasting and powerful defense and attack buffs. A Captain's ability, Galvanise Troops, provides a strong way of restoring valour points that a team of former slaves wouldn't normally have access to.
A final consideration is that the size of enemy groups will scale in proportion to the size of your party. If you find enemy groups too large and combat takes too long to resolve, you may wish to bench some party members.
The Travel Post building unlocked at level fourTrade and Craftsmanship allows you to store extra party members instead of dismissing them from your company.
Next: The Best Classes In Wartales
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