Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord

[IDtenT]

I like Warband, but I am not trying this until 2021 at the earliest. It has the potential to be an excellent game, so I would not spoil my experience by playing it while it is still not really patched up and while it retains many weird decisions that will be changed for the better down the road.

Simulation / sandbox games are, in my opinion, more fun to play when devs are constantly making changes - forcing you to refine your own strategies. If the game bores you after one install then it's probably not the right game for you.

 

[The_Sloth_Sleeps]

I'm 8.5 hrs in. Really, its just Warband with a couple cosmetic differences. The siege AI is very very dumb/broken. So maybe even a step backwards, I'm not sure yet. What were they doing for eight years?

 

[Nathaniel3W]

Finally. I can't tell you how many times I've wanted to off load prisoners en I couldn't find a slave trader nearby. I often tried to recruit them or let them escape.

Dude, never recruit your prisoners in Warband. It drives your morale into the dirt, and then half of your newly recruited troops will run away during the night. The only reason why you would want to do this is if you just captured your first castle, and you're hurting for troops, and you have a bunch of captured high-level enemies. Then you can recruit them and immediately put them in your castle garrison where they won't desert.

 

[Spectacle]

I'm amazed that everybody can even play the game. I bought it yesterday and tried several times to get past the tutorial/map screen only for the game to crash every time. Changing the settings didn't seem to do anything either.
And the weirdest part is that it didn't seem to use the gpu at all. My CPU was melting while the gpu still at 40°. I mean the gpu is top of the line while the CPU is getting old but still, I never had such a extreme discrepancy. Had to refund due to concern of my pc catching fire...

But I might try some warband mods. Always played without until now.

It's possible that for some reason the game has picked the integrated GPU your motherboard probably has instead of your video card to render the game.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

Protip: other than Tournaments, "Escort Merchant" missions are possibly the easiest way to make lots of money, relatively fast. I've been escorting a Caravan for the past 10 minutes until it visited 2 cities, didn't really have to fight anyone along the way, and got almost 5,000 as a reward.

I did one of these with my 20 lowbie infantry party, had to defend against 30 forest bandits, lol rekt.

Save before attempting!

 

[moon knight]

So, does it have permanent death as it was promised? How does it work? How do you make babies?

 

[Jimmious]

Protip: other than Tournaments, "Escort Merchant" missions are possibly the easiest way to make lots of money, relatively fast. I've been escorting a Caravan for the past 10 minutes until it visited 2 cities, didn't really have to fight anyone along the way, and got almost 5,000 as a reward.

I did one of these with my 20 lowbie infantry party, had to defend against 30 forest bandits, lol rekt.

Save before attempting!

These sound awfully a lot like the caravan contracts in Battle Brothers. You can get very fucked or get money for nothing

 

[Trans-Financial-Man]

10 years in development to make a fucking Eroge

 

[AwesomeButton]

Fuck, Turkish software development is worse than Russian! Crash on trying to open the launcher. Reddit says it's fixed if you install .NET framework 4.8. What the fuck is so hard about checking if a dependency is installed, Taleworlds, did you write this game for 8 years on your weekends and after-work hours.

 

[RK47]

New feature in Warband:
Side quests let you delegate the task to your companions if they have the right set of skills.
Like scouting when you want to take out a bandit camp, or Charm when you need to escort a negotiation etc.

So you can just delegate the companion + X number of men (varies from quest to quest) and it will auto-complete on its own over a couple of days. Collect pay.

Also - just had a Looter survive an 89-damage stab from horseback spear.
Holy shit. They should really improve the damage model to add bleeding of some sort. I find it ridiculous that looter is still standing and can sprint away at full speed after taking that sort of hit.

 

[Van-d-all]

Also - just had a Looter survive an 89-damage stab from horseback spear.
Holy shit. They should really improve the damage model to add bleeding of some sort. I find it ridiculous that looter is still standing and can sprint away at full speed after taking that sort of hit.

I have looters taking arrows to face and still running around on regular basis.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

Played it for awhile last night. For better or worse, it does feel like a graphical update/map mod/unit mod for warband. Maybe a good thing, may be a bad thing.

Protip: press N for eNcyclopedia. Didn't see a button for it anywhere in the interface.

-Combat is the same old directional attack/block. Feels too fast to really react to. Foot combat feels better with keyboard controls, mounted feels better with mouse controls. No option to set controls separate for each style.
-I did see some kind of 'special block' maneuver pop up, are there counters or other hidden mechanics?
-Lance couching now a special ability limited to specific weapons (it will say it in the description). Icon indicates when you are up to speed, then hit X. Aiming is still floaty and annoying.
-Empire tier 2 infantry seemed better than most other factions, good for early game when you want to keep costs low. Note that their crossbowmen have better stats in bows than crossbows, possible oversight/bug?
-Also, holy hell, only crossbows I see for sale cost 22000 denars! So much for my sniper build.
-Vlandia has a decent mix of infantry, crossbows, and cavalry. Seems like the new 'swadians.' Their low level guys are pretty weak and fragile though.
-Desert guys are the new Khanate, Forest faction has archers, Northern guys have offense-oriented infantry (Bare-serkers!).
-Every faction has a second "noble" troop line that I assume you need to move up the ranks to access. So the game now distinguishes between "men at arms" and true knights. Realistic!
-Haven't done any sieges yet. Town quests seem too hard, have to start on village quests. Same old Looter grind mambo.
-Did an auto-resolve vs. 2 mountain bandits, they killed 8 out of my 10 troops. Not sure how the mechanics work out but I probably won't be using that option again for awhile.
-New encumbrance and movement system is weird. Very slow at start, can't catch basic looters. Filling inventory with horses increases speed and carry capacity, no idea if it increases food consumption. No more gamey 'box' inventory, if you have the weight cap you can carry it. Makes it easy to loot everything.
-Skills go up through use, Skyrim-style level every X skill increases. Skills are capped based on stats and "focus," you can put up to 5 focus points in a skill which puts the cap to 150. Stats increase cap by +10 per point over 1, To hit the max of 300 you need 16 in the underlying stat. Stats start around 2-5, one stat point every 3 levels, don't seem like you're going to get over level 30ish. Meaning specialization is huge.
-Companions (wanderers) seem mostly combat focused. Going through the encyclopedia, I only found two with Medicine (Rhia and Meyla?) and one with Scouting (something Frostbeard). A few rogues. No Engineers, Stewards, Leaders, or Smiths. Maybe there are noble recruits when you go up? Seems like it will be hard for the player to cover all of these skills themselves.
-Seems unoptimized. Annoying load times and hitches/pauses when navigating menus. I'll see if a restart improves anything.

Overall it's fun but yeah, deffo early, needs more polish. Wouldn't blame anyone for waiting.

 

[Aemar]

Also - just had a Looter survive an 89-damage stab from horseback spear.
Holy shit. They should really improve the damage model to add bleeding of some sort. I find it ridiculous that looter is still standing and can sprint away at full speed after taking that sort of hit.

I have looters taking arrows to face and still running around on regular basis.

''Realistic''.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Fuck, Turkish software development is worse than Russian! Crash on trying to open the launcher. Reddit says it's fixed if you install .NET framework 4.8. What the fuck is so hard about checking if a dependency is installed, Taleworlds, did you write this game for 8 years on your weekends and after-work hours.

At least installing .NET Framework 4.8 really fixes it.

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

I see it's full retail priced but listed as being early access.

You were to stop the Jews, not convert into them.

 

[curry]

"Army of Poachers" quest breaks the game. It starts with a negative time to finish the quest which crashes the game after you leave the own.

 

[Hellion]

^
This happened to me once, but I've done this quest 5-6 other times and it worked as intended.

 

[Aemar]

Taleworlds wasted 7 months on MP testing instead of doing a closed SP beta. A lot of current issues would have been resolved by now.

 

[Peachcurl]

So here's my own impression of the game:

Still downloading.

Yeah...

 

[TheEntitledOne]

Them Looters are way stronger than in Warband or base M&B. There goes my dream of soloing Looters->Sea Raiders.

 

[Aemar]

Any word on the first major bug fixes update?

 

[Frank Capicoli]

What were they doing for eight years?

Writing blog posts about camels and interviewing everybody down to the janitor.

 

[Alienman]

Joined a faction as a mercenary yesterday and holy hell, following war parties have been improved a lot! First off you join the group instead of following it. You can clearly see its objectives, what they are doing and why. When the war party visit towns and villages to replenish troops or supplies you are allowed to do so as well. When you travel you can see war party cohesion and how much supplies it has. I guess higher cohesion means they don't run off if attacked? Or maybe it's just a morale thing, not sure! But man, is it ever improved. I joined and had my first real big battles. What is cool in the battles is that the commander delegates officer roles to the war party. Like someone controls the horses, another the archers and so on and if nobody else have taken the role you can ask for it or just go solo. I went solo for the most part and joined in with the cavalry. It felt like being just that one random dude in a large scale Total War battle.

What this experience also made me realize is that the game is much more simulated/sandboxy than Warband. Since the vassals now have to replenish their troopers and supplies from actual towns and villagers, instead of just popping into existence. They cleaned house on all the towns and villages we visited and left none for me to recruit Really impressive. They might get some small starter army if they die though, so I don't want to say that they exclusivity have to go from zero to hero this way, but I have seen some lords with a really small amount of troops running around from town to town. I'm curious on how they make money - do they actually have a budget to go after from earnings? Time will time!

A problem with being a merc though is that it's way too profitable compared to Warband. I got so much freaking loot that it came out of my ears. Stuff sells for more and generally stuff is much cheaper. Food was a real money sink in Warband, but here... it's cheap as dirt. I want it tougher! Can't verify this myself, but I read on the Steam forums that the caravans act like real caravans/merchants now, so supposedly they aren't set in forced trade routes. They make their own routes depending on what goods they have, and what they sell for. So they will only sell stuff in towns that makes them profit and will continue to other towns to sell the rest of their goods. If this is true, which I hope and it seems like it when looking how it works in game, I assume by raiding towns, villages etc you can cripple the economy and unit replacement for a faction.

Love this simulated stuff!

 

[Lithium Flower]

It seems to me like there is some sort of collision between troops.

Like they held the line, not transform into a blob.

Sure, there is *some* collision, otherwise they would just float past each other like spooky ghosts. But the collision is very loose, and if you just watch the turbans/helmets in your screenshot you can see that 2-3 people are occupying what should be space for one (hence heads clipping through shoulders). The gameplay implications of this are visible in your screenshot : the right flank is completely overrun because formation has squeezed itself into 1.5 lines (I hesitate to even say there are two) and so the desert friends have looped around them like a lasso of meat - this inevitably turns into severe blobbing (now, of course you eventually want the cohesion of the formation to disintegrate and become a chaotic melee, but this should take time, not happen within seconds of the engagement because the AI doesn't understand personal space). Then there are the enemies that at are inexplicably hanging out 5 meters behind the second line, too sparse to represent substantial reserves, too far away to be an effective backline.

Load up Viking Conquest, Any vs Any 200 men fight in Welsh village and witness the stark difference.

You can see that even once engaged, both sides are maintaining distance and using the reach of their weapons to their advantage (instead of hugging face), have their weapons raised so that they are able to attack anyone who steps in range (as opposed to waiting to be attacked by one target and then hyper-focusing on them at the expense of staying in formation) and are protecting themselves from being flanked (because even if the enemy line was longer than theirs they would still need to contend with 4 rows of men). And while you will eventually see some clipping, you can clearly see that the minimum distance between characters is much more strict than in Bannerlord (try to hug one of your men in VC and you can see that the closest you can get isn't even touching him, whereas in Bannerlord you will squish past each other like two well-lubed dicks.)

Tell me, which screenshot looks like 2 formations clashing, and which looks like an ant line?

Now, the distance between characters in VC's "shieldwall" is much more than it would be in real life, and it does have the detrimental effect of making them weaker to missiles than it should be as opposed to the same formation in Bannerlord where the characters actually overlap their shields, but the additional space is clearly a design choice to make the game's combat system in mind - you need space to either side of you to initiate your attack animations, and you need distance from the enemy to actually complete them - and thusly VC does an excellent job of representing useful formations that still allow for the individual skill of combatants to show (and aren't yokes like in Bannerlord where characters straight up fight worse when in formation). And to be fair, there is an obvious quality of life benefit of looser collision detection, that being the fact that you can easily wade through your own formations and probably won't get pushed off ladders during sieges anymore, but I question those benefits if the result is that the nuance and cohesion of field infantry engagement is so crippled.

The point isn't to say that VC is better than Bannerlord. The point is that somehow this shit got figured out in VC and Bannerlord seemingly not only didn't learn from it but did infantry combat less sensibly than even the original Mount & Blade.

Many of you guys seem to think that this is eventually going to be fixed. All I can say is that I hope you are proven right.

 

[AwesomeButton]

I see it's full retail priced but listed as being early access.

You were to stop the Jews, not convert into them.

40 pesos for a key at CDKeys. It's all legit, man.

I played around in the face editor for about half an hour, and when I went on with character creation and the tutorial area, I had the craziest HDD activity. Given the fact I have 50GB free on the SSD, what the hell does this game want with my HDD?