Which Mount & Blade to buy?

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I can definitely recommend the brytweldia mod and the roman mod based off it. They both add great features to combat like permanent wounds, ambushes, bleeding damage and fatigue. Excellent mods. I'm not entirely sure of the historical accuracy, I thought the Hildibra region (forgot the spelling now) was in the Iberian not Ireland but I could easily be mistaken. Anyway, top notch mods, both worlds better than the basic game.

The floris mod is a solid upgrade to warband, no reason the play the game without it, and I tried the peloponnesian war mod, meh, it's in alpha and feels that way.

Totally depends on the player.

Although it's not immediately obvious, new map isn't just a matter of graphics. City location makes a huge different to gameplay, especially if you're playing a merchant and running with the trading simulation aspects. Mount & Blade's trade routes are going to be completely different than Warband's. So if you're into the whole Elite open world trading part of the game, a different map means a lot more than "no lakes."

Another reason to own Mount & Blade: mods that were never ported to Warband.

Did sw:conquest ever pan out to be decent? It felt very beta last time I played it.

There are a bunch of arbitrary changes between the original and Warband that are primarily cosmetic and/or annoying to players of the original. Faction colors and heraldry are scrambled for no reason (and the flag that I conquered the whole world under in the the first game is not even available! I weep now), the map is scrambled (in some lore-breaking ways for Rhodoks, not that anyone cares) even though all the towns are the same, and the art is not always improved (look at Lord -- er, Count Haringoth's face. He looks like a widescreen picture shown at 4:3). So the elements are the same, but (aside from the new faction) you have to learn them all over again for no apparent reason.

The changes that matter are apparently for mulitplayer balancing, which none of us care about, and they nerf cavalry and (I think) archers. In the first game, heavy cavalry feels like heavy cavalry circa the 1200s -- you literally ride over people and trample them down, impale them on your lance, etc. In Warband, lances are so nerfed that I don't even use them anymore (my 300+ polearm skill helps me win quarterstaff fights, though). Charging damage is reduced, and your horse will bog down and stop if you charge into infantry, and one-shot archery kills are much more rare. This may be great for "balance," but reality is unbalanced, and it hurts the simulation aspect in my eyes.

This all applies to the vanilla game, which none of you care about anyway. But what the hell.

I care, Fuxx0red. I care.

I think I'll have to go with the bundle; I kinda want to be able to instant-kill (or be killed) peeps with my horse, lance and bow - or a good axe swing for that matter.

IMO, M&B isn't good enough to be bought in a bundle. One could buy Warband and pirate the original game.

A one-handed axe was my weapon of choice. Nothing quite like the feeling of riding past a mob of lowly footmen, swinging just as they get into range and chopping into their necks.

I'm sorry but commerce/trading is so shallow and poorly implemented I fail to see how anyone could 'play a merchant' -- you buy a few goods at one location for low cost and just sell them in another where your quests/travels take you for a higher price. At a certain point (once you've conquered a castle or been given a village or two) money becomes wholly irrelevant and you're downing in it. The businesses aren't even worth investing in nor are most of the improvements to the towns, castles, and villages. Unless you're playing with some mods.

archers being nerfed is actually a good thing, since the implementation of armor in the game is everything but realistic.

in reality, arrows get stopped by maille, in the game you get killed by a few even when wearing plate. it's been a while since i played native, but i bet bows are stilll overpwoered, especially when compared to crossbows.

Bows are shite, riding around being a cavalry archer seems fun until you buy a good long lance and ride around poking people with it couched, or buy a giant halbred and stand at the top of a ramp and just chop chop chop at people in their goddamn face.

Definitely enjoying this brytweldia mod. My brand new, level one, Irish peasant managed won the first major tournament he came across, I bet on myself every round too so I went from nothing but a pittance of cash to over 4000 buck just in winnings. Plus my victory got me invited to the local feast, I couldn't get in otherwise, and a bunch of renown, I think I'm known enough now to recruit from villages without needing to bribe the elder. Anyway, once I'm in the feast I enlist in the local lords army, not as a mercenary captain, I don't even have any followers, but as a rank and solder. They issued me some starting gear and just like that i've got prospects.

When it comes to single player game balance, I believe in self-policing. I take the, "If it hurts, then don't do it" stance. But when it comes to arena battles... yeah, it's way too easy to bet on yourself and easily make ridiculously large sums of money with no real risk involved. Especially if you stay out of the Khergit arenas, so there's less chance of horseplay.

Arena battles are sort of like Matrix runs in Sega Shadowrun. Even if you aren't a fighter (or a decker, in the case of Shadowrun), it's a good idea to get involved in them, raise a fortune, and then go off to do your preferred play style, questing or trading or working for lords or whatever.

After getting back into the game for a bit I'd have to say that my one big complaint is still the random nature of large battles. Too often, even setting it at the 150 unit limit, you get shafted on army composition. A handful of enemy cavalry can decimate 30+ infantry as the AI simply can't keep cohesion well enough to stop cavalry from riding by and picking off stranglers. The game, core game not mods, really needs a better battle prep system or really any sort battle prep system at all. Something that allows you to choose troop deployment and some system to focus troops onto a specific enemy. Huge battles help alleviate both problems but even on high end rigs 300+ quickly become unplayable even on very low settings. The game definitely gets better as computer tech improves.

My other pet peeve is how every damn mods wants to improve graphic fidelity even though it should take a backseat to total units per battle. It's like an arms race with graphics getting better and better but with unit size always the same, which is a huge shame. This game should support 500+ battles easily by now. Damn graphics whores.

Fire and Sword tried hard to try and fix tactics and it does have some neat tactical advances.

The problem I have with more units on the screen is that the sieges become utter shit. Given that there's only one ladder it's almost impossible to really win with the besieging army when every side has 300 people on the battlefield.

A lot of the mods address that by having multiple access points. The only siege I've done so far in brytenwalda had me running up passed a gate-less, but defended, wall and using ladders to scale one of two entry points. I was the surprised to see that a lot of the enemy army had fallen back to the interior of the keep and were defending from there after losing the outer wall. I even think they threw a huge rock at me, I swear it catapulted out of the sky but it only happened once.

Still it sucks seeing two huge armies clash only for it to be reduced to a series of small skirmishes. I'd really like to see the unit setting around the 300+ mark. I'm sure that it's possible on a new machine but mine can't manage that. Irks me really bad because I feel like I'm missing out on what could be much better gameplay.

Patience is the key to paradise.

Mount & Blade Collection: $7.49

I'm playing with fire and sword right now, and even with the latest patch it's really buggy. Nothing game breaking but still. It has a lot of new options, but it's mostly those new options that weren't polished.
For example, during the siege, you now have multiple ladders, but the problem is, the defendant’s army AI still thinks there is only one ladder. So when the battle starts, my men cluster on one ladder, leaving the other completely unmanned, which sucks. Big time.

Also there are was a lot of balancing done. The pikeman have huge range with pikes and are better in stopping cavalry in their charge (fakedit: actually, this may be the same as warband), the foot soldiers usually have 2h weapons which means a lot because you can no longer use 2h weapons while mounted. That's right, no more wielding huge ass cleavers, claymores and polearms (lances are available while mounted) and cutting men without even getting in their range.

Also firearms.. You get hit, you die. Right now I have (probably) the best armor in the game, and can still take only a couple of bullets before I die. Headshot is instant kill. Also your horse dies much quicker as well cause of this, often leaving you in the midst of the enemy with only 1 point in athletics -.-
So basically, you are no longer the one man army, the jedi on the battleground. You can no longer charge into enemy ranks and reduce their numbers before sending your army in. You can no longer pull out epic wins, and if you do, it was just luck for not getting shot.

Some may like it cause it IS more realistic, and more balanced, but it's just not that fun to me.
There is an actual storyline, which I am following. It gives you some purpose instead of just roaming around endlessly, which makes it easier to stay entertained.
Also many other things, but this is the gist of it.

EDIT: very few mods compared to warband

The lack of mods for fire and sword is a real shame. I really enjoy the game, minus the story aspects. It wasn't very popular and people kept on about how mods for warband already did muskets and how they did them so much better. I loaded up that 1776 mod today only to find that my firearms shot bolts... disappoint. It doesn't really bother me, but to see that happen and still hear praise for how much better warband handled firearms, well... only time will tell for sure but I'm not seeing it so far.

The game feels best to me in small, 30 man, skirmishes and of course sieges are just awkward. The devs really need to address game issues instead of shining up the graphics, especially when all they do is hold back the battle engines overall scale. Same old song and dance I guess.

I've got to say that warband is The first game I've ever played that is literally twice the game with mods and ten times the game with the proper mods. Most mods are on the effort scale of being entire games in their own right. The base game really is little more than a bare bones, unfinished feeling mess without at least the floris mod. If I didn't feel so limited with battle sizes this game would be perfection, maybe with my next rig.

Great fun. Head for the forest in the mountains and say 'Hi' to the Noldor. They love visitors!


Edit: But seriously, you'll be picking their arrows out of your teeth. One Noldor Elite is worth an army of scrubs. He'd slaughter half of them before they got close, then one-shot them while their weapons bounce off. Don't even think about throwing down with them until you have an absolute horde of high level companions kitted out, and top tier troops. Preferably when the Noldor have already gone a few rounds with other parties, but *before* they start recruiting their massive prisoner populations wholesale. Things get even messier then.

I just got the M&B collection yesterday (original, Warband, Fire&Sword, Napoleonic Wars), and I'm downloading what seem to be the most prominent mods for each.

So far I've tried Floris for Warband, and I'm wondering if the scale of the beginning battles is something that the mod does or if it's like this in the vanilla game too: even the very first few battles are against 30+ opponents, which I'm guessing means that you're supposed to have a similarly sized following yourself. Is this correct? Are your troops meant to be completely disposable (like JA2's militia for example)? It just seems somehow wrong to be doing such large scale battles right at the start of the game.

Never played with any mods other than giving Pendor a try so I can't speak to it from experience. With vanilla Warband you basically start off with nothing and recruit maybe half a dozen to a dozen men initially. It's been a while but from what I recall, yes, you could face roving bands of up to 30ish or so bandits depending on what kingdom you started in -- doesn't really take too long to get more money, win some battles, gain leadership, and recruit more men. And, yes, you'll lose troops. The lower the level the more likely they are to die. There's a training hierarchy each type of recruit goes through and obviously the higher tier guys tend to be more durable... but you'll lose them, too.

Moreover, 30ish isn't really that large. Eventually you'll be seeing armies of 200+ and much larger.

(Unless you're talking about the first couple of tutorial fights in which case, yeah, I'd be surprised if you were facing more than five or ten guys).

The only way (Via vanilla) to reliably get high-end units is training up lower units, so they are disposable to a point.
My MHC Warband Protip for troop management is hire a "Hero" NPC for your party, and put every single levelup that character gains in to INT, training, first aid, and... Whatever the other medical skill is. Surgery? Priority on the skills going toward training first, the "Chance your troops won't die when downed" skill second, and "Increased named character heal rate" third. Training really helps get your basic peasants up to starting equipment at least, and fewer troop deaths means longer lasting soldiers which means more XP to reach high end soldiers.
Troop training in Fire and Sword is handled differently and I didn't play enough of it to provide protips.

And as Metro mentioned can take down larger forces, just depends on the enemy, your troops, what level your character actually is, and your personal skill at M&B combat. Before you know it you'll be charging up siege towers in to castles, your character getting covered in so much blood you turn bright red as you swing a halberd back and forth killing hundreds of enemies yourself. Or fighting in an open field, getting your horse chopped out from under you, then proceeding to break 5+ shields and picking new ones off the corpses of enemies littered around.

What I'm trying to say is murder everyone while screaming at your PC.

One useful thing about the "training" skill is that it stacks, once you have a bunch of high level NPCs with high training skills you can train peasants to knights in less than a week.

Are there any mods that tried to do something interesting story wise? I know the game is not really about story but I always felt it would be better if the endgame had a bit more of a point to it, some kind of goal or challenge that didn't necessarily require an endless grind. An ASOIAF type scenario where after fighting it out amongst themselves for a bit there's a zombie invasion or similiar would work really well.