The party screen. Note the weekly cost, morale display, party composition, prisoners and hero abilities.
Your party is one of the most important aspects of the game. It is built up from hired troops recruited from villages, taverns, or even prisoners.
Heroes are important members of your party because they cannot die in battle (only wounded). There are sixteen heroes in the game you can hire from taverns. It may be necessary to level up your Persuasion so you can handle inner party disputes, as not all heroes will like each other.
Morale
Morale influences your moving speed and when it becomes low your troops will start deserting. You can increase your morale by winning battles or tournaments, having a variety of food, completing quests, razing villages and raising your leadership skill. You can lose morale from starvation, losing battles, and failing quests. Morale of nation-based troops is also greatly negatively affected if you are waging a war against their home nation. Also, fighting more than 1 or 2 times a day will lower morale.
Morale Modifiers
- Base morale: your base morale will always be 50.
- Party size: the more troops you have in your party, the higher the morale penalty will be. When removing party members, this penalty will decrease by 1 each, but a temporary 1 point penalty will be incurred to Recent Events. This means you are left with no immediate net change.
- Leadership: morale bonus provided by your Leadership skill.
- Food variety: every type of food has a morale bonus in its description.
- Recent events: any events like winning tournaments, battles, or completing quests will give a morale bonus.
Size
Party size represents how many troops you can take with you. Party size is affected by your renown, charisma, and leadership skill.
Size Modifiers
The player's maximum party size is calculated differently than NPCs. In With Fire & Sword, the campaign difficulty setting influences how your party size is calculated.
| Modifier |  |
 |
 (Poor) |
(Avg) |
(Good) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Base size | 10 | 30 | 30 | 20 | 10 |
| Leadership | 5 | 5 | 10 | 7 | 5 |
| Renown | 1/25 | 1/25 | 1/15 | 1/20 | 1/25 |
| Charisma | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
NPC lords receive the following bonuses. Other randomly generated AI parties, such as bandits, are selected from a specific range. Viking Conquest applies the same NPC party bonus rule to the player, in addition to your hero's leadership skill.
| Modifier | |
|
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Base size | 10 | 10 | 10 |
| Leadership | 5 | 5 | 5 |
| Renown | 1/25 | 1/25 | 1/25 |
| King | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| Marshall | 0 | 20 | 0 |
| Castles | 0 | 20 | 0 |
Wages
Wages will be paid to your troops every 168 hours, which is seven days. If you don't have enough money to pay your troops' wages, your party will lose morale, and you will incur a debt. Wages are primarily based on your troops' level, as well as several other calculations and discounts based on your leadership skill.
Your troops are paid every Friday, which means that you can garrison your army just before Friday afternoon to only pay them half wages.