Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord Preview – Armies and Politics of Scale & Size
Last year, during my impressions piece of Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, I made it quite clear that this is a game that’s extremely exciting to me. Being able to lead your troops and wade into battle as a regular human being is something that is just missing in games. The power-fantasies of being some deific like entity, slaughtering masses, is entertaining of course – it just doesn’t scratch that strange itch I’ve got.
This is something that Mount & Blade does very well for me and while last year I said that my hands-on was very much treading familiar ground to that of the first game, and its spinoffs, this year my time with the game offered something different. This time Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is showing a level of size and scale, as well as a glimpse of the politics of the world that you will possibly be looking to conquer. It may not be completely new, but it’s certainly a big push forward.
So the first thing the game wanted me to do, once I jumped into the single-player story they were offering, is to use my position in whatever nation I was a part of to draw more people to my side. Your personal force, much like the first titles, is limited in size based on the funds you have at your disposal, the supplies you have and also your own personal abilities. Hundreds upon hundreds aren’t going to completely trust somebody with no leadership abilities, that’s completely reasonable. Nor are they going to follow somebody who can’t pay or feed them.
So, using my position, I was able to bring more generals that are part of my nation to my side, using what I think was a sort of diplomatic currency or influence. You can also seemingly hire roaming captains that don’t belong to your faction at all, for a cost of course. Once I’ve built up an army of thousands – this is the scale I was speaking of – it was time to pick a target. Fortunately, I’m in a nation that is at war with another nation.
I didn’t bother raiding the first village or two that I came across, that was a little too easy to do. The game was kind enough to suggest a castle to siege so off we went. Smaller bands of rebels and enemy forces weren’t exactly fond of the idea of challenging us, deciding to go the other way quite sharpish. This is something those who have played the other titles will be quite familiar with. What is new is when you actually start sieging an enemy.
When you siege now, you’ll actually see your army laying siege to the enemy castle or city. Selecting what you want to build, you’ll see time passing and your equipment getting built up. At the same time, the enemy will be building up their defences and, understandably, reinforcements will be coming. In the case of my first siege, I was more than happy to get a trebuchet, a tower and a battering ram built. It was just in time, as an army just as large as mine was visible on the horizon. It was time to lay siege.
There was no way I was going to auto-resolve this fight. As I’ve said, I like to jump in with my units. I’m a hands-on manager if there ever was one. This is where the real difference in Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord can be seen. No longer will you be essentially watching a small fight with a few hundred units, with the remaining units in your armies slowly trickling in as resources to fill the gap. The same system of remaining units coming in as reinforcements still exists, but the unit cap in a battle has been increased dramatically.
Three years ago we posted a piece about how a battle was shown with around five-hundred units. I couldn’t give an exact number, but I would bet my arse that the number I saw was higher than that. Particularly so when it came to the second battle I participated in. I won the siege and captured the castle, then I decided it was time to go for the enemies’ city. I was laying siege to it, my force of over 1000 units sieging a city with a defence of around 400.
That’s when an enemy force of over 1000 came to its assistance. I was outnumbered. The enemy general was fair, he requested I surrender. I was a little too proud in mine and my soldier’s abilities. I tried to haggle and request his surrender and we took to the battlefield. This wasn’t a siege, this was a wide-open battlefield and to be fair to the game, it didn’t slow down once, even when over one hundred cavalry units were seen charging into the throng of battle. Even the AI seemed more intelligent, flanking my infantry. It was engrossing, exciting and I was losing. It was time to tuck tail and run.
I had a little more time then to explore the recent place I captured, talking to people. Fortunately, it’s my castle. I led the army and the votes following its capture was to give it to me. Only two people voted not to give it to me – I may have to keep an eye out for them in the future. Exploring here, and seemingly anywhere in the game, you’ll find a myriad of conversation paths and mini-games to play. Each name of a person or place you’re told, expanding your encyclopaedia.
Sadly, due to the time limit of my session with the game, I didn’t get to explore much more. I saw some aspects of policies you can implement, changing the direction of your villages, castles, towns or even the empire as a whole. You’ll have a lot at your disposal to use both internal and external, showing how much TaleWorlds has expanded the way that politics works in the world.
It was recently announced that Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord will be coming to the PC on Early Access in March next year. When the final game will be released, well who knows? There’s little doubt that this is something much larger than the first game, with considerably more to do and manage. This will be a living, breathing world for you to work your way through and survive however you can. I, for one, can’t wait for it to be released even in Early Access.
Greetings warriors of Calradia!
In this week’s blog, we will be concluding our miniseries of blog posts on sieges by discussing the assault phase, with a particular focus on how the game’s AI evaluates and reacts to unfolding events.
Sieges are very much a key event in the game. Whether defending your homeland, aggressively expanding your borders, or simply trying to establish yourself among the ranks of the nobility, sieges are at the very heart of the Mount & Blade experience. With Bannerlord, our goal is to enhance sieges in their entirety, ranging from the tricks you can employ to indirectly weaken a settlement before laying siege, all the way through to driving the last defenders from the keep. In our previous siege blogs, we looked at the bombardment phase on the campaign map and discussed the options that players have at their disposal when either attacking or defending a castle. We also looked at keep battles and talked about their importance and the instances in which they can occur. The one thing we haven’t looked at is perhaps the most important and the bloodiest phase of a siege: the assault.
Assaulting a castle is something that players should carefully consider. Castles will call on a local militia to defend the settlement in times of crisis, but more often than not, they will also house a garrison of professional soldiers that can put up much more of a resistance. And if the castle has a governor overseeing the defense, things will get even trickier still since governors can boost defensive siege engines and garrison quality. But let’s put all that to one side and imagine that you have weighed up the pros and cons of launching an assault and decided to press ahead with your attack.
Firstly, you are met with a deployment phase in which you can choose where to position your troops and siege machines before the battle begins. You can select each formation and move it around a deployable zone, positioning your troops for the best possible advantage. Each castle will have three sections open to attack and you have to choose a method of attack for each of these. For each section, there may be a magnitude of options available depending on the level of your preparation: You can simply ignore a section to focus on other targets, attempt to ascend ladders, use an assault tower, break down a gate with a battering ram, or if you have been able to take down a wall section by bombardment, try to push your way through the breach.
Once you have deployed your troops and siege machines, the assault begins. Your troops will begin to carry out your attack plan according to the way you deployed everything. The game AI will take control of the various assault groups by default, however, you can easily take over control of one or all groups yourself and micromanage everything if you wish to do so.
We believe the availability of AI to carry out the siege plan together with the ability for the player to take over, gives the best of two worlds. Players can carry out a multi-pronged attack on several sections simultaneously without much difficulty while focusing their attention on the most critical location. In this way, you can, for example, let the AI carry out a diversionary attack which forces the enemy to split its troops, while you lead your elite soldiers and attack the most vulnerable point.
The same principles also apply to siege defense. If the player is the commander of the battle or captain of one of the formations, they can give orders to override what the defensive AI would do. However, controlling all the formations and all the sides at the same time from the player's perspective isn't always easy. As such, the player may want to take over the defense of the weakest section as the AI tries to maintain the rest of the defense as effectively as possible while entrusting that side to the player.
Attacking AI
When AI is responsible for the attacking force, it will make a few checks to determine how and where it will launch its assault. It does this by assessing its own strength and that of its opponent and will either choose to press with a coordinated attack on many fronts or attempt a concentrated assault through the weakest point. At the same time, the AI will decide how to split its force to achieve this. It does this according to the number of troops that each front can support. If there is a breach in the wall, the AI will try to send many soldiers through that side, however, if there are ladders, since fewer men can simultaneously attack at the same time from that side, fewer troops will be sent, or in the case of a breach on another wall, the AI may choose not to use the side with ladders at all.
If the attacker side has a battering ram or siege towers while also having ladders or a breach on another side of the castle, and it decides that making a coordinated attack will strain the defenders more because they will be forced to defend all fronts simultaneously, then the attacker side will hold assaulting the breach and ladders until the slower machines can be pushed to the gatehouse or walls. Formations on the waiting fronts will try to stay in a relatively safe spot while threatening to attack if the defenders pull forces from that side.
In terms of prioritising actions, operating primary weapons like battering rams, siege towers and ladders are the most important task for the attacking force as they will be used to open paths into the castle. Apart from that, there is not a strict priority list, but depending on circumstances the strategy level of the AI will try to prioritise what is most important or beneficial.
Defending AI
The defending AI considers both the threat level of the means of attack possessed by the attackers and the actual enemy positioning. Let's say the enemy is bringing a siege tower from the left side and has ladders on the right side. If the attackers are threatening both sides, since ladders are easier to defend against, the defender side will concentrate more troops on the siege tower side. If the attackers are trying to be tricky and attack purely from the ladder side with all of its troops, the defending AI will realise this and bring the bulk of their infantry to defend that side. If in another scenario the defenders were able to destroy a battering ram or a siege tower, thus rendering that side unattackable, they will not waste any men waiting on that wall.
The defending AI will also relocate its archers with similar reasoning, i.e. if the enemy cannot or does not attack from one side, defending archers will leave positions that can only cover that side. In addition to this, when a wall or gate chokepoint is about to fall, archers on a nearby wall may be sent to bolster the numbers in hand to hand combat, whereas when the enemy is approaching the castle from afar, the defending archers will utilise the best positions for shooting at the approaching enemy.
Retreating
Soldiers may decide to run away based on morale, but in many instances, retreating is a strategic decision that is decided with many factors taken into consideration. Ultimately, the AI tries to estimate whether the attack or defense can succeed or not and if retreating will only yield more immediate casualties. For instance, let's imagine a siege assault where 500 men are trying to take a city defended by 100 men. As the assault continues, men die from both sides, but due to the valiant defense by the city's garrison, the attackers now have 250 soldiers against 80 of the defenders without setting foot inside the castle. At this point, the attacker AI commander may decide to call off the assault instead of losing more troops in vain.
If you would like to see what was just discussed in action, we would encourage you to check out the video from the previous blog where you can see the attacking AI split its forces and coordinate an assault on the castle from three different directions.
There will be a clause hidden in ToS saying that by accepting, you approve of Turkish invasion of Syria and consider Kurds to be a terrorist people.Now we might never see Bannelord if Trump shuts down Turkey economy because they invaded Syria
Greetings warriors of Calradia!
Morale is a key factor in warfare. An army can be greater in number, better trained and exceptionally equipped, but without the will to fight, none of that matters. Conversely, high morale can see people through extreme hardships, giving them the determination to press on and continue the fight long after all hope is lost, only to grasp victory from the jaws of defeat. In this week's blog, we take a look at how morale is implemented in Bannerlord, discussing its effects on both the campaign map and the battlefield.
On the campaign map, each party has a party morale rating. Your party’s morale is shown in the lower-right panel. If you mouse over this, you can see a tooltip that shows how it will change day to day and what factors currently affect it. Party morale changes mainly due to the result of your actions. Successful battles and raids will increase morale whereas excessive casualties and actions like sacrificing some troops during retreats will reduce it. Also, failing to pay wages or letting your troops go hungry are also rather detrimental!
If you manage to keep your party’s morale high on the map, you will enjoy a number of benefits. Your party will gain a slight speed boost and will also gain a small advantage in battle simulations. On the other hand, if you allow morale to fall below a threshold, some of your troops may desert your party to look for better employment.
While party morale is quite important on the campaign map, it is arguably more critical during battles. Medieval battles were fought in close quarters, which was no doubt incredibly stressful for the participants. Typically, battles were as likely to be decided on superior morale as fighting prowess.
At the beginning of the battle, each soldier is given a starting morale based on their party’s overall morale rating. After this, whenever a troop is killed or wounded (up to a maximum of ten), friendly troops that are nearby receive a morale penalty. This morale penalty is modified according to the commander’s skills and perks, and also other factors. For example, troops standing in a shield wall receive less penalty. Conversely, troops get a morale boost when one of their number scores a kill nearby. In practice, when two bodies of soldiers meet in the field and a fight ensues, morale will tend to drop over time. If one side is decisively winning, the other side will lose morale rather quickly. On the other hand, if the fight is more or less balanced, then both sides will lose morale, albeit more slowly over time. Whichever way the combat goes, usually some soldier's morale will eventually drop to a point where they will panic and start to run away. This is quite dangerous, because every time a soldier panics, this will also create a morale penalty on nearby troops and a few troops running away can easily create a chain reaction where an entire formation breaks and starts to run away.
We think that our interpretation of morale in Bannerlord can be summed up by a single historical battle: The Battle of Towton. During the battle, Edward IV led his troops from the front while his Lancastrian opponent, Henry VI, remained in nearby York. Edward inspired his numerically inferior force to a crushing victory over the Lancastrians after battling on for hours until reinforcements arrived, breaking the morale of the Lancastrians in the process. This started with a trickle of men deserting the battlefield, followed by battalions, before eventually, the entire army began to rout, where it is said that more troops were lost during the ensuing panic than died during the actual fighting.
Graphics look so on a par with Warband. This screenshot could have easily been taken from a Warband mod. It gives some hope the game will be able to run on most decent rigs.
I've played the beta. It looks significantly sharper than Warband.Graphics look so on a par with Warband. This screenshot could have easily been taken from a Warband mod. It gives some hope the game will be able to run on most decent rigs.
I agree it looks sharper but, then again, something that's been in development for so long isn't going to require high end tech to run smoothly.
They did say they scraped it like twice I think.
Donald Trump said:
I believe breaching the castle walls can only be achieved during the bombardment phase (on the global map), if you choose to do so. During the consequent assault phase the player can attack those already present breaches. You can only destroy the battlements during the assault phase, not the walls themselves in order to create breaches on the spot.
According to a few people I know in the beta it's for 2 main reasons. The first one being that they didn't send out enough beta keys and the second being that the beta sucks in terms of balance and design with their awful new class system, perks that don't even work, lack of game types, and general decline compared to Warband. For example, some of the gamemodes are only playable when you use matchmaking and you get kicked to the main menu after the game ends (clear console pandering). Based on everything they've told me and looking at the beta forums I'm actually glad I'm not in the beta right now as there is a significant number of people complaining about the current state of the game.
