Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord - now available on Early Access

That was a failed military coup that lasted like what, 5 hours? I mean I can imagine it being "disruptive" for maybe a week but not more than that..

 

Coil whine normally happens when the FPS is too high.



But yes, I also have some coil whine from my PSU.

 

Fetch quests (take these sheep to the city) are also relatively easy and a great way to get out of a hole.

 

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.

 

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?

 

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.

 

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.

 

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

Save before attempting!

 

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

 

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

 

10 years in development to make a fucking Eroge

 

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.

 

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.

 

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

 

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.

 

''Realistic''.

 

At least installing .NET Framework 4.8 really fixes it.

 

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

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

 

"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.

 

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

 

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.

 

So here's my own impression of the game:

Still downloading.

Yeah...

 

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

 

Any word on the first major bug fixes update?

 

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