Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord

[Zanzoken]

Vlandians are at war with the Battanians, who occupy Lageta, a former western Imperial city.

Is anyone running a game where Western Empire didn't get steamrolled? I am on my third run and they've been conquered every time.

So far for me it's been like this.

Strong factions: Battania, Khuzait, Southern Empire
Mediocre: Vlandia, Northern Empire
Weak: Aserai, Sturgia, Western Empire

I wonder if this is similar for others or just a small, insignificant sample size.

 

[Hellion]

Yeah, Western Empire seems to be everyone's punching bag so far, with Sturgia coming in second. These two are usually the first factions to be annihilated. Battania, Vlandia and Khuzait have been the "snowballers" of my first three respective playthroughs, conquering most of the map before we've reached 1090.

I think I've read on TaleWorlds' forum some cases where Western Empire conquers everything, but such instances are rare compared to how often they're being stomped.

 

[Alfgart]

Vlandians are at war with the Battanians, who occupy Lageta, a former western Imperial city.

Is anyone running a game where Western Empire didn't get steamrolled? I am on my third run and they've been conquered every time.

So far for me it's been like this.

Strong factions: Battania, Khuzait, Southern Empire
Mediocre: Vlandia, Northern Empire
Weak: Aserai, Sturgia, Western Empire

I wonder if this is similar for others or just a small, insignificant sample size.

Same thing in my campaign. Western Empire got demolished by Vlandians and Battanians, and the Sturgians are losing against the Northern Empire. Just joined the Southern Empire to help my waifu Raghaea and we just beat the khuzait.

Speaking of which, after getting constantly wrecked by those damn horse archers I just discovered the ultimate weapon of mass destruction: mounted 2H long glaive. Just keep riding while swinging that thing and everything dies in a 2m radius

 

[AwesomeButton]

The new patch finally makes the No Intro Mod unneeded. I'm a bit worried that they are not listing their swap file issue in the list of known issues, although they are aware of it as evidenced by their forum posts.

Versions
Native: e1.0.0
SandboxCore: e1.0.8
Sandbox: e1.0.8
Storymode: e1.0.8
CustomBattle: e1.0.8


Crashes

• Fixed a crash that happens mainly when exiting the game or leaving a scene.
• A crash that occurred when making peace with lords in an army through barter has been fixed.
• Fixed a crash that occurred when trying to execute a prisoner.
• Solved some memory leak issues related to loading a game and entering a scene.
• An infinite loading issue that occurred when the player was leading an army and attempted to defend a castle was resolved.
• Fixed an infinite loading screen bug while starting a battle as an army.

Save & Load

• Loaded games now start in a paused state.

Battles and Sieges

• Fixed a menu bug that appeared when the defender side of a siege sallied out.

Clan and Party

• Fixed a bug that allowed players to repeatedly create and destroy new parties after reaching each clan tier to take the starting troops of the new party into their own. Player created parties now start with just 1 hero.
• In rare cases, a lord’s party was spawning at the centre of a settlement and was unable to move. This is now fixed.

Kingdoms and Diplomacy

• Fixed a bug where ending your mercenary contract with a kingdom resulted in a loss of relationship with the lords of the kingdom.
• Kingdoms at war with powerful enemies will now offer higher payments for mercenaries. In addition to this, the ruler's economical situation is important too while determining payment. With this change, mercenary factions will now generally prefer to take a contract from factions which have powerful enemies and rich rulers.
• Mercenaries are less likely to join kingdoms immediately and will instead wait for a decent offer. With these additions, there is a bigger difference between payments offered by different kingdoms to mercenaries (changes between 30-300 denars per influence).
• Players can now hire mercenary factions to their own kingdoms via dialogue (using the same formula as above).

Quests & Issues

• Dialogue screen now returns to normal conversation after discussing the “Battle of Pendraic” with related nobles instead of closing.
• Fixed a bug that showed some issue quests’ days remaining as a negative value.
• Fixed a bug that caused some quests to fail immediately when activated.

Conversations & Encounters

• Fixed a conversation bug that caused the conversation to get stuck after returning to the menu while the persuasion conversation is still active.
• Fixed a bug that caused prisoners to smile.

Other

• Made the splash screen intro when launching the game skippable.
• Fixed the age of “Watchman” troops.
• Fixed an exploit where hitting a shield in a town gave combat XP.
• When we entered a scene, the clothing colours of our clan members are now the same as our clan colours.

Known Issues
https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php?threads/known-issues-updated.401168/

 

[AwesomeButton]

Just in case you have the time to spare, could you try to play with your HDD connected now (since the page file is on the SSD)?
I'd like to know if Windows/your BIOS defaults to the HDD for the page file again in spite of your settings. Don't have an SSD myself so I can't try, unfortunately.

Windows stopped resetting my settings for the SSD as page file once I ran ScanDisk on it. I think the issue was that the game was preferring HDD instead of SSD regardless of settings. However I just tested again, and can confirm that when only SSD is allowed for pagefile in the Windows settings, you do not need to unplug the HDD. The game won't use it. I could also check if the game would use the HDD if both HDD and SSD are allowed for pagefile in the Windows System settings.

 

[Obsequious Approbation]

Fixed a bug where ending your mercenary contract with a kingdom resulted in a loss of relationship with the lords of the kingdom.

Fucking finally.

 

[Ezeekiel]

Just in case you have the time to spare, could you try to play with your HDD connected now (since the page file is on the SSD)?
I'd like to know if Windows/your BIOS defaults to the HDD for the page file again in spite of your settings. Don't have an SSD myself so I can't try, unfortunately.

Windows stopped resetting my settings for the SSD as page file once I ran ScanDisk on it. I think the issue was that the game was preferring HDD instead of SSD regardless of settings. However I just tested again, and can confirm that when only SSD is allowed for pagefile in the Windows settings, you do not need to unplug the HDD. The game won't use it.

Excellent! Thanks for testing this stuff.

I could also check if the game would use the HDD if both HDD and SSD are allowed for pagefile in the Windows System settings.

Would be interesting to know for sure, but I don't want to take up too much of your time with this either. Your call!
But if the HDD gets used then, that might still be down to some Windows default thing maybe.

Most important thing now is for the devs to fix the RAM reserving behavior (or whatever it really is) so that the stated system requirements are no longer bs...

 

[vota DC]

Are mercenaries faction the subfactions? I would like in future for my mod use a mercenary faction that has cities as well because the lore is that.

 

[Alienman]

Is anyone running a game where Western Empire didn't get steamrolled? I am on my third run and they've been conquered every time.

On my first campaign, mind you this is from 1.0, but patched, the Western Empire have conquered almost everything.

By the way, the most essential mod so far:

https://www.nexusmods.com/mountandblade2bannerlord/mods/238

I recommend turning of auto-cheer if you use it. It's annoying because your character starts to cheer when the enemy starts running which interrupts "harvesting season".

 

[Damned Registrations]

So, what is actually new in this (or missing) compared to the older games, aside from graphics whoring?

Are seiges still a retarded pileup of dudes standing on a ramp getting shot to death?
Is collecting a library worth of books still the way to raise all your skills?
Is there any way to acquire better gear besides looting or buying from random shops, like crafting or custom ordering?
Is it still basically impossible to catch a faster enemy force?

In short, why would I want to buy this if I don't give a fuck what it looks like?

 

[ArchAngel]

It seems that Retreat option during battle is extremely abusable and cheesable. Devs need to fix that shit.

 

[ArchAngel]

So, what is actually new in this (or missing) compared to the older games, aside from graphics whoring?

Are seiges still a retarded pileup of dudes standing on a ramp getting shot to death?
Is collecting a library worth of books still the way to raise all your skills?
Is there any way to acquire better gear besides looting or buying from random shops, like crafting or custom ordering?
Is it still basically impossible to catch a faster enemy force?

In short, why would I want to buy this if I don't give a fuck what it looks like?

Yes to all questions if it is better. Except catching faster force. But there are many elements to why one force is faster than other and you can make your force faster with multiple decisions.

 

[Alienman]

It seems that Retreat option during battle is extremely abusable and cheesable. Devs need to fix that shit.

In what way? Never used it.

 

[XenomorphII]

So, what is actually new in this (or missing) compared to the older games, aside from graphics whoring?

Are seiges still a retarded pileup of dudes standing on a ramp getting shot to death?
Is collecting a library worth of books still the way to raise all your skills?
Is there any way to acquire better gear besides looting or buying from random shops, like crafting or custom ordering?
Is it still basically impossible to catch a faster enemy force?

In short, why would I want to buy this if I don't give a fuck what it looks like?

Sieges are quite different and much improved. Besieging army now builds assorted weapons to take the walls/smash defenses, and the defenders can build counter weapons (though there are some weird flaws in implementation, things are built in range of city defenses instead of in reserve, trebuchets have to be in range of the defenses to be used). Rams can be rolled up to gates to smash them in, while towers and ladders hit the walls. Characters actually climb up the ladders in a clean fashion. Defenders have things they will drop on you from the walls. Taking fortifications may be too easy right now.

Books are not in yet that I have seen.

You can craft weapons in theory, but because the leveling system is so fubar right now, it would require massive grinding.

There are some things you can do to boost speed (increase morale, have extra horses for footmen) but you aren't going to catch small groups of horsemen with your army unless you herd them well. I haven't had issues with catching any parties except steppe bandits (note I run around with mostly cavalry).

 

[ArchAngel]

It seems that Retreat option during battle is extremely abusable and cheesable. Devs need to fix that shit.

In what way? Never used it.

If you use mostly archers you can cheese combat. When you retreat and then enter combat again, armies again start wide apart and all ammo is refilled...

 

[ArchAngel]

So, what is actually new in this (or missing) compared to the older games, aside from graphics whoring?

Are seiges still a retarded pileup of dudes standing on a ramp getting shot to death?
Is collecting a library worth of books still the way to raise all your skills?
Is there any way to acquire better gear besides looting or buying from random shops, like crafting or custom ordering?
Is it still basically impossible to catch a faster enemy force?

In short, why would I want to buy this if I don't give a fuck what it looks like?

Sieges are quite different and much improved. Besieging army now builds assorted weapons to take the walls/smash defenses, and the defenders can build counter weapons (though there are some weird flaws in implementation, things are built in range of city defenses instead of in reserve, trebuchets have to be in range of the defenses to be used). Rams can be rolled up to gates to smash them in, while towers and ladders hit the walls. Characters actually climb up the ladders in a clean fashion. Defenders have things they will drop on you from the walls. Taking fortifications may be too easy right now.

Books are not in yet that I have seen.

You can craft weapons in theory, but because the leveling system is so fubar right now, it would require massive grinding.

There are some things you can do to boost speed (increase morale, have extra horses for footmen) but you aren't going to catch small groups of horsemen with your army unless you herd them well. I haven't had issues with catching any parties except steppe bandits (note I run around with mostly cavalry).

As soon as your catapult or trebuchet is built pause the game and click on it and send it to reserve. Then when you got 4 built make all 4 active and then let them fight enemy siege defense and then they can also bring down walls.

 

[AgentFransis]

Fixed a bug that caused prisoners to smile.

 

[AgentFransis]

Hear my name and despair.

 

[RK47]

I got bored so I started a new character.
I was surprised that some skill only takes effect if you simulate battles.

Then I decided to just make a high Tactics, Leadership and maybe Medicine character to see how it goes from there.
I will simulate every fight. And take the +20% Exp culture to speed up the troop promotions.

Something is definitely off.
After 5 battles with looters of varying size, I noticed my gold is slowly draining away, and my troops are constantly promoted and suffered from 0 casualties.

By the 14th day in-game, the 100% White Warband has this composition:

I could go bankrupt just promoting these.
I guess I could take these guys for village raiding. Still, it's funny that you can advance way faster with just simulating battles than fighting actual ones.

I'm guessing the following factors will need tweaking:
1. Calculations favor the player's Warband heavily vs looters. No casualties after 5 engagements are VERY rare when you fight actual battles.
2. The EXP reward seems way higher.
3. The amount of captives is increased as well. I was battling 25 looters with my band of 20 veteran archers.
I captured 13 and suffered only a few wounded.

Long live Iren's warband I guess. This 100% White Clan will prosper.

Edit: latest test vs 23 Sea Raiders

1 Casualty... 15 captives. holy shit.

 

[PulsatingBrain]

Jesus Christ, how is the hair colour so terrible? All the light colours are greyish, washed-out versions. I'm ginger goddamn it!

 

[Harthwain]

Hear my name and despair.

Strangely enough his name is displayed on the box above his speech bubble.

 

[Dakka]

Jesus Christ, how is the hair colour so terrible? All the light colours are greyish, washed-out versions. I'm ginger goddamn it!

Sorry lad, if Bannerlord doesn't acknowledge your existence, neither do I.

 

[PulsatingBrain]

Sorry lad, if Bannerlord doesn't acknowledge your existence, neither do I.

That's your path to choose bro, but still, the lighter colours are greyish and dull and just bad. I hope there's a mod for it.

I wonder why they didn't just go with a slider like Warband

 

[IDtenT]

I got bored so I started a new character.
I was surprised that some skill only takes effect if you simulate battles.

Then I decided to just make a high Tactics, Leadership and maybe Medicine character to see how it goes from there.
I will simulate every fight. And take the +20% Exp culture to speed up the troop promotions.

Something is definitely off.
After 5 battles with looters of varying size, I noticed my gold is slowly draining away, and my troops are constantly promoted and suffered from 0 casualties.

By the 14th day in-game, the 100% White Warband has this composition:

I could go bankrupt just promoting these.
I guess I could take these guys for village raiding. Still, it's funny that you can advance way faster with just simulating battles than fighting actual ones.

I'm guessing the following factors will need tweaking:
1. Calculations favor the player's Warband heavily vs looters. No casualties after 5 engagements are VERY rare when you fight actual battles.
2. The EXP reward seems way higher.
3. The amount of captives is increased as well. I was battling 25 looters with my band of 20 veteran archers.
I captured 13 and suffered only a few wounded.

Long live Iren's warband I guess. This 100% White Clan will prosper.

Edit: latest test vs 23 Sea Raiders

1 Casualty... 15 captives. holy shit.

I've noticed that you'll never lose soldiers simulating against looters, and get a lot of promos - so I just do that all the time.

Against bandits I've not been as fortunate.

 

[Van-d-all]

I've noticed that you'll never lose soldiers simulating against looters, and get a lot of promos - so I just do that all the time.

Against bandits I've not been as fortunate.

Yup. That's probably because auto resolve uses default weapon, and the Looter's rock deals blunt damage resulting in injuries at worst, while majority of ranged weapons are ridiculously OP ATM making troops like Forest bandits inflict losses even on elites.