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

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!

 

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.

 

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?

 

If the writing is currently "so-bad-it's-good", I think I'll buy in before Early Access fixes all this.

 

I see what you mean Lithium Flower but groups moving in and out of combat didn't feel very fluid in VC. Actually I remember it looking pretty funky, instead of individual soldiers they moved like one robotic entity.

You can see how they dance around in this video:



I do hope though the make some improvements since I want a bit slower infantry battles. When everyone clashes together as infantry it's usually over in seconds. It's just too damn deadly! Cav is great though, and I have seen the AI use archers as skirmishers. Running around taking potshots at the infantry and going in and out from combat.

 

When you start battle in First Person Mode.
World map looks beautiful for me.

 

Sure. And again, this is what I would assume lax collision in Bannerlord tried to address, only I think it ended up the equivalent of amputating a foot to fix a broken toe. Personally I will take a good gameplay flow with some clunky implementation to the smooth implementation of a clusterfuck any day.

You don't have to take my word for it, of course. Play a VC and Bannerlord custom battle back to back and see which one you like best.

 

ready for VR

 

Sleeping in while the modding community kept raising the bar with Warband.

 

who was the guy that yesterday posted the config file edit to remove the directional markers?

 

Like I said, I wish the infantry play was better, the current form of it's just too deadly/suicidal, but I wouldn't want to go back to dancing armies. I guess some balance between the two would be great, but I'm not sure what and how they would change it. Playing as cav is heavily improved though, they don't suicide and lords themselves don't either from what I can tell. That is a huge + for me in Bannerlord.

 

so the game is shit, I am shocked and upset

 

I'm liking this a lot, it feels like refined warband with a couple new mechanics and quality of life changes (like being able to know where a lord was last sighted at any time from encyclopedia FINALLY), which is pretty much all I've wanted from it. It also seems to somehow run really well despite having more troops and better graphics. It's a bit buggy right now and the starting quest is mind-bogglingly shitty (find 10 NPCs strewn around the map, happy hunting), but otherwise I'm pretty happy with it.

 

The main quest seems to essentially be a segway towards joining a kingdom or starting your own.

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You declare yourself either for or against the Empire, you find a famous thingamabob and either pass it on to one of the faction leaders and pledge yourself to him/her or you use it to create your own faction.

Nothing ground-breaking. I'm not sure it's enough to appease the "WHER IZ TEH STORI" crowd that trashed Warband back in the day because it was purely open-ended sandbox.

 

I was being facetious

 

Im kinda disapointed that after so many years we only got better version of Warband, but then remember thats is not a bad thing, Warband was good.
The fact that we can have more than just one mod active already make Bannerlord superior. I hope that engine is much more modable than Warband engine was.

But still Bannerlord must be polished to stable and bug free version, without infinite loadings and crashes, we have a long way to go, well Taleworlds has, we just must wait... again.

 

Yes, and that's the mentality I've put myself in knowing I'm buying an Early Access game. I'm sure many of the bugs we're bitching about will be addressed and/or fixed by the final release, whenever that may be.

Good to know. I guess I'll just execute all my prisoners. Fuck it.

 

how are the crashes with everyone else? I'm not sure if I'm the unlucky one but I got to a place where the game will crash right away when I try to leave the village I'm currently at. Unfortunately, I only had one save file and that's where it loads.
I think I will have to reroll.

 

Ive got first crash during tutorial, second during clicking something in trade and i cant enter sea raider camps or i get stuck in infinite loading.

 

Had no crashes so far but frequent hitching makes it unplayable. Settings don't matter. My system is outdated but plays Doom Eternal, Witcher 3 etc just fine at 1080p with either maxed settings (almost any game) or just a bit reduced (doom eternal, dunno if I could increase). I've only ever had issues with a few very badly optimized games before iirc.

People with NASA Mainframe-level PC's are reporting the same issue seemingly irrespective of OS or HD/SSD, graphics card, processor... None of the suggested fixes do anything. Note that not everyone has these hitching issues, but so far no one has figured out what specifically causes them on some systems.

Lots of reports of the game eating any amount of RAM people have (no matter the amount) and whatnot.
EDIT: They often state that the ram usage is close to or at 100% but task manager still says that there's RAM left for some reason. Some weird bug?

Loads of issues like entire lines of goods missing from stores (certain faction's armor and such), quest bugs, some bandit types bizarrely overpowered and murdering elite faction infantry easy, bizarre item stats...

There's a lot of stuff wrong which even a basic internal SP test should have caught... Weird.



For the long dev time this is disappointing... Time to wait even longer, I guess.
If there's one thing you can say for Taleworlds it's that while they're not super-competent on a technical level and never were, they do support their products seemingly forever.

So I'm hoping this will be playable for me eventually...

 

Alienman. This post may be of help.

 

It's even less polished than I thought, looks like I won't be buying it this year

 

Either I really lucked out with my first workshop, or wood workshops in general generate absurd amounts of money - I recouped my initial investment of 12k in less than a week.

 

Haven't had a single crash in about 10 hours of play. It really seems to be hardware dependent or there is some setting that is fucking up people with lower end hardware's shit.

It also sounds like the game hates HDDs. I hate to say it, but you guys still running your OS and games off an HDD, it's time to do yourself a favor and switch to an SSD.

 

Crashes are frequent for me. Have about 5 now + now this one, which breaks the game everytime, which forces me to load a older save game. Gametime so far is 74 days. Well was, I have to play those 5 days again.