Skyrim Campaigns: Civil War (Stormcloaks)

This will be a very short post since the differences between the two sides of this questline are extremely few and far between. Neither civil war rewards you very well at all and the fort sieges get pretty repetitive. The only thing I really liked about the Stormcloak side was the siege on Solitude. It is a larger city and proved to be more visually enticing than Windhelm. Outside of that they essentially just copy the quest-line from the Imperial side and change up the settings a bit. One thing I failed to mention about the civil war campaigns in general was the fact that the scars of the war are displayed in the various cities you siege, namely Whiterun. You can see broken portions of barricades and destroyed scenery, the signs of battle are preserved for the rest of the game which sort of gives you a feeling of influence over how the world develops and allows you to craft it.

Not a long post, not a long campaign. Can't say I enjoyed the civil war stuff very much, it was all kind of a bummer. I feel like they could have fleshed it out a bit more and made the city sieges way more epic.

Thieves Guild Campaign tomorrow! This one was a lot of fun.

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Skyrim Campaigns: Civil War, Imperial side

So I chose to do the Imperial side of this campaign mostly because I like the look of their armor more than the Stormcloak's and I had high hopes that I would be receiving some sort of awesome looking armor set with super cool bonuses and stuff. I was wrong. You receive jack shit for doing this quest line outside of a sort of decent sword and a basic armor set which is nice if you do this right out of the gate and have no smithing skill or the ability to run dungeons to get gear (it really is not hard to get better armor/weapons than this quest line gives you). That is one of the only disappointing parts thankfully and the rest of the campaign is quite fun. Your main missions typically consist of siege style missions where you have to exhaust the enemy troops before they overwhelm you, which is pretty fun, especially for anyone running a warrior class setup since you essentially hack through opponent after opponent with relative ease (if you've got a decent gear situation that is). This also provides you with a great way to level up some skills since one fort siege mission could allow you to tear through about 5 dungeons worth of enemies in quick succession.

Story: The civil war campaign is a pretty straightforward story, you go to each Imperial outpost around Skyrim and systematically push your way through the various regions by taking over key forts and eliminating Stormcloak forces. Eventually you push up to Windhelm and actually siege the city and take on Ulfric himself. Not terribly difficult to do (at least on adept difficulty) but its a visually enticing scene, Windhelm burning and ravaged.

Overall this campaign was not as fun as the DB questline but I am severely biased since my playstyle of choice is the thief setup and this one definitely seemed like it was more of a warrior-type campaign. I thought the siege style missions were pretty nice and a good change of pace from your typical dungeon. I'll be doing the Stormcloak side of this questline probably later today and will post on it once I have completed it.

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