Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord

Tuco has looked into what is out there but I believe they have yet to release the modding tools that will be required for full conversions.


So, I'm playing 1.4.1 some retard decided it would be a good idea to go capture random Jamayeh castle in the middle of enemy territory. That's when the kingdom decided it was my turn for a fief. Promptly lost that in a 900+ Aserai army. Retard retakes it later and kingdom grants it to me again. We're now carrying on a war on the other front so I am elbows and assholes trying to hold this castle, which is pretty much impossible considering they're raiding the villages and I can't get any food.

It's been a week since they teased the patch "on its way" and then pulled back from it. Wonder if we'll get one today.

Is it just me or does it not seem like they're just randomly tinkering with shit with no long-term plan? I know that they have a big wishlist but the project management just seems very amateurish.

Punko said:

If you know Taleworlds you know this is what to expect.

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I was late to the party on Warband but I played the shit out of that game. My understanding is that it was a hot mess when it came out. One would think with sales they've gotten that they could hire some designers and project managers that know what they are doing.

Anyone still playing this? I went so far as to uninstall it a while ago. I reinstalled last night to see if they had fixed the "Whole seller" trade perk yet, as I have been wanting to try out Trade on a playthrough. It's been broken damn near 2 months now.

The natives are starting to get little restless over on the forums. TW is looking like a bunch of retards with these patches. They're constantly tinkering and it all looks like code-churn without any real sense of direction. I read that they have, what, like 80-90 members on the team? We're coming up on 25% of the way through their planned EA and the only substantial features we've seen are implementation of some of the weapon perks.

They don't seem to be able to out a patch without completely fucking it up and their velocity seems way below what it should be for a team of that size.

Blitz said:

I wanna buy this so fucking bad, especially while watching The Last Kingdom it would probably fulfill my current "gaming needs".... But I'm trying to hold strong until it gets nearer to official release.

I didn't play Warband much, what's the big features this "should" eventually have that Warband did not?

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There are not a lot of features in the game at the moment that did not exist in Warband. There are many that were in mods, even their DLC, which are not in the game.

Some of the primary differences:
- Kingdoms are now organized into clans and you may lead a clan as a vassal.
- Introduction of kingdom policies that you may vote on as a vassal.
- There is a new currency of "Influence" that you can use to vote on policies and fief assignment. You can also use it to have other lords temporarily join your army.
- Fiefs are now assigned as Town/Castle and Village groups (i.e. you get the main settlement as well as the villages).
- Companions may leave your party to go out and form their own parties and win rep for you. They may also temporarily leave to run quests for you.
- Siege weapons.
- Skills now go up based upon usage (ala Elder Scrolls).
- Mount armors.

As for what is coming, here is the the thread where they laid out their "plan". It's not what I would call much have a development map.

Positives:
- Graphics are obviously vastly superior.
- The UI has been cleaned up with lots of quality of life improvements (but there is still a lot of cumbersome/missing aspects).
- With some exceptions, I think the look and feel of mounted combat is better. I didn't think so initially and you might not either.
- Already a broader assortment of quests (and they are adding more).

Negatives:
- No meaningful interaction/relationship building with lords and they leave kingdoms randomly.
- Marriage is still mostly meaningless and is very easy to achieve.
- Most of the skill trees do nothing or are broken at the moment (there is a mod that fixes some of them but it has been broken too).
- Completely retarded and broken persuasion conversations for recruiting lords and some quests that results in save scumming.
- No feasts.
- No boats.
- Fief upgrades don't seem to do much.
- No auto recruitment (some mods help).
- Mod tools not yet released to enable total conversions.
- Fucky economy.
- Tournaments suck. They run more often in all cities and, IMHO, the rewards suck.
- Cock blocks on almost everything you can do based upon your clan tier: Number of troops you can lead, companions you can have, shops you can own, caravans you can run, even the equipment available in the game, are all based upon your clan tier, which you level up with renown.
- Companions have no personality at the moment and a lot of things they might be able to do to help you don't work.
- Siege weapons don't have much impact and the battles themselves are buggy and unbalanced.

Generally just a lot of shit that is out of balance or broken, even stuff they talked about or demo'd a long time ago. You have to have a lot of mods running to play it and they break all the time, especially if you're trying to stay on the latest code. They've fixed a lot of crashes and greatly improved performance but it is really just a shell of a game at the moment.

So, buy it? That depends on whether you'd be okay with spending $40 to get what is really just the battles. Personally, I'd rather no more people buy it because I think their leadership is shitshow. That said, I have probably gotten my money out of it.

It's a shitshow on the TW forums. No new versions since June 5, which was a fairly small update. About that time, or a little before, they had decided that a pretty substantial refactor was needed to take the code where it needed to be in the future. They have been saying it was almost ready and would be out "soon" or "very soon" for weeks.

One of the devs just let it slip that they have been dealing with scores of bugs from the refactor for the last 5 weeks and that they still know of more and continue to find them. It'll probably be August before we see an update, if I had to guess.

So that will put us at about 4 months into the 1 year (planned) EA and the only substantial feature additions we've seen are partial implementations of a couple of the weapons perk trees. I'm not even going to give them credit for the crash fixes and optimizations because those are sure to negated to some degree by the refactor.

90 people on the team. Asshats.

I think they have a few good arguments.

- Apparently there was a lot of stuff demo'd, even years ago, that isn't in the game. I don't know what those features are but a lot of people refer to it.
- The Steam description of the game gives the impression that the game is more finished than it is.
- Most importantly, they have have been super slow to release content.

It't not the worst EA I have personally seen but I'd definitely agree on the third point.

1.4.3 patch is out.

Singleplayer
Crashes

• Fixed a crash that happened upon leaving villages.
• Fixed a crash that occurred when entering some of the hideouts.
• Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash when the main hero's troops retreated while the main hero was wounded in Radagos' Hideout.
• Fixed a crash that happened when the rogue hero is killed in Notable Wants Daughter Found Quest.
• Fixed a crash that happened when the main hero was executed because of crime rating.
• Fixed a crash that occurred when a player successfully persuaded a hero to join his/her kingdom while sieging the related hero's settlement.
• Fixed a crash that occurred when asking tavern keepers for available issues.
• Fixed a crash which happened on exiting the game.
• Fixed a crash that happened when the game could not parse a bad translation text.
• Fixed a problem that caused crashes while ticking on the campaign map.
• Fixed a crash that occurred during marriage barter.
• Fixed a crash that happened at the start of the conspiracy quest.

Performance

• Reduced memory usage of large settlement scenes by optimizing the memory footprint of game entities.
• General CPU memory usage improvements for missions/scenes. For one of our currently most demanding scenes (Balgrad), which is very crowded, this meant a reduction of 100-150mb.
• UI memory usage was reduced on the campaign map. UI binding system performance improvements were made.
• Optimized weapon mesh loading behaviour for campaign party icons in order to prevent FPS drop spikes.
• Sword parts have been optimized for better performance during crafting.

Save & Load

• Fixed a bug that caused troop formations to reset after saving and loading the game.
• Fixed a bug that caused settlement characters to not to spawn after Saving and loading while waiting in a settlement.
• Fixed a bug that skips the first clan income after loading the game.

Localisation

• Chinese localisation improvements
• Punctuation fixes, spelling corrections and other localisation updates

Art

• Navmesh edits for better ai movement in the bazaar area of aserait_town_c.
• Navmesh edits for better ai movement on ladders for sturgia_castle_003.
• Improvements on empire keep models and scenes.
• Added new ultra-short afro hair
• Fixed some visuals issues in weapon crafting pieces.
• Sestadeim Castle now has a castle scene.
• Added new Sturgian armor set; Northern Lamellar Vest / Northern Short Lamellar Vest
• Fixed a physics issue with falling down and getting stuck near some of the walls
• Visual quality and performance improvements on trees.
• Added 3 new old looking Sturgian shields
• Fixed Northern Sloven Leather armor's clipping problems

Campaign Map

• Pathfinding and navmesh fixes in the world map.
• Army member icons now make a movement animation while relocating during events, instead of floating.
• World Map icon textures/models/materials were improved.

UI
Changes

• New conversation screen on the campaign map
  • This will allow players to open conversations on the campaign map with other parties much faster and without a loading screen.
• Implemented cheering
  • Players can now cheer with the key “O”. A click will play the first cheer animation whereas holding “O” will open a cheer wheel with 4 animations in place. This is a feature in progress and will be implemented for MP with more features in future patches.
• Custom Battle Improvements
  • Now the "Select a Map" text disappears on editable area focus and all maps are visible on dropdown upon area selection
  • Now siege machines slots are selected by default so players can start siege maps right away with pre-selected siege engines
  • Wall state options are now "Solid", "Single Breached" and "Dual Breached" instead of the previous "100", "50" and "0"
  • Some minor text changes and bug fixes
• Now equipment of units in the encyclopedia is inspectable by hovering over their respective icons in their encyclopedia page.
• Added map event (Battle and Raid) sound events.
• The legend of the SP Scoreboard is always visible now for easier reading. Legend header will still be visible after the legend header is scrolled out of frame.
• Right side circle map notifications will open their respective screens with the featured item selected by default. e.g clicking on the newborn notification will open the clan screen with the newborn hero selected by default.
• Added missing One-Handed, Polearm, Leadership perk icons
• The culture of a settlement can now be viewed on the settlement's encyclopedia page.
• Updated Thamaskene steel image in crafting

Fixes

• Fixed the hyperlink in the name of the conversed character in the conversation screen.
• Fixed a vertical placement error in the campaign options popup
• Fixed a bug that caused babies and children to have visuals in Encyclopedia and Clan screen
• Encyclopedia page for children no longer shows enemies/allies

Battles and Sieges

• Adjustments to the hideout encounter.
  • The player now has 2 options to enter a hideout. Either simply charging in, which will select his highest level troops for the mission, or to manage his roster from a party screen.
  • Bandit counts in the mission were balanced.
  • Bandits that do not fight in the duel can be taken as prisoners.
• An auto-blocking option was added for single player.

Character Development System

• Added a new system for XP sharing, where after a battle a portion of upgrade XP earned by troops will be distributed to the rest of the party.
• Character levels now depend on raw experience collected from skills rather than skill level increases. Overall this should make it easier to focus on a particular set of skills.
• Some of the calculations of perks were wrong because primary and secondary increment types were not divided. This was fixed.
• Skill effects were not applied to non-hero agents. This was fixed.
• Added 10 new athletics perks for the campaign side and prepared the UI for the combat/mission perks.
• Added 7 new riding perks for the campaign side and prepared the UI for the combat/mission perks.
• Fixed bugs for the perks Confidence and Public Talker.
• Fixed a bug with the wholesaler and appraiser perks. Profits should now be marked.

Clan and Party

• Adjust clan members to make sure each clan has a number of combatants appropriate to its tier (at least 1 combatant for tiers 1 and 2, 2 for 3 and 4, 3 for 5 and 6). Combatants are characters that are reasonably skilled for leading parties, etc.
• Fixed an issue that prevented the player from naming one of their children if they had twins.
• Parties that fled from players in the mission battle should now also try to escape from the main party on the campaign map.
• Fixed an issue with marrying a hero with a party that caused the spouse to be stuck in a neutral party. The hero should now be added to the player clan while the other clan’s party will disband.
• Fixed a bug that enabled players to create parties with heroes that are on the run from their captors.
• Cultural home settlements are properly assigned at the beginning of the game. The general home settlement selection algorithm was improved. The (non-party) hero wandering algorithm was also improved.
• Fixed a bug that caused home settlements to not update upon marriage
• Fixed a bug that caused some home settlements to be set wrong if a family member was in a different clan
• Skill and trait generation for children was improved. Problems with excessively low or high skilled offspring should be resolved.
• Face and body properties selection for children was improved.
• Fixed an issue that caused children to be born in the wrong settlement.

Armies

• Fixed a bug that allowed mercenaries to create armies.

Kingdoms and Diplomacy

• Adjustments to the War and Peace evaluations.
• Fixed a bug that caused the player party to be teleported after a successful siege barter.
• It is now more difficult for lords to defect: Even when they have no settlements, lords will typically not defect if they have a good amount of money. This means that the money they have affects their desire for defection. The player now also gains relation after a lord joins his kingdom via the defection barter and the defecting lord loses relation with his old king as well.
• Fixed and enabled the succession kingdom decision that triggers on royal death for the player and AI.
• Fixed a bug that led context dependent barterables to have no effect.
• Fixed a bug that caused a wrong dialogue variable to appear while trying to convince an enemy lord to join the player’s faction.
• Fixed a bug that caused the voting system to ignore player participation in some decisions.
• Sturgian default party template strength increased to better match with other factions.
• Added a notification for resolved kingdom decisions that the player didn’t vote in.
• Fixed a bug that caused diplomatic stances to be removed for a kingdom when one of its clans was removed.
• Fixed a bug that caused heroes that are in related kingdoms settlements to not to be captured or released after peace or war declaration.
• Reduced the duratıon of the no-attack/safe passage barter.
• Fixed an issue with persuasion that caused failures to trigger instead of critical failures.
• The king’s chances of being a candidate for and winning ownership of a newly captured settlement were reduced a bit.

Economy and Trade

• Fixed a bug that caused a mismatch between town project bonus descriptions and their actual effect on the town.

Settlement Actions (Town, Village, Castle and Hideout)

• Some raid logs were added twice. This was fixed and raid logs are more informative now.

Quests & Issues

• Added the new quest LandLord needs Manual Laborers
• A new main storyline quest named "Rescue Your Family" was added to the game.
• Extortion by Deserter Updates & Fixes
  • The chance for the deserter party to be spawned too far away from the player (because of path blockers like mountains, rivers etc.) was significantly reduced.
  • The prosperity reward for finishing the quest successfully will now be applied correctly to the village's town or castle.
  • The journal will now correctly show the number of troops sent for the companion solution assuming the player has chosen this option.
  • The player can no longer pick troops below Tier 2 when forming the party for the companion solution.
  • Fixed a bug which let the player take this quest when the player faction was at war with the quest giver's faction.
  • Encyclopedia page now correctly displays the quest giver's entry if the player right clicks on the quest giver's party icon.
  • Quest giver's defence party can no longer be controlled by the player. They will join the ambush battle to defeat deserters but they will be under the command of the quest giver.
  • Fixed a number of dialogue texts.
• Gang Leader Needs Weapons Updates & Fixes
  • Players will no longer be able to get the quest if they are the owner of the quest settlement.
  • Fixed a bug that allowed players to try persuasion multiple times with Save & Load.
• Training for Retainers Issue Quest Updates
  • Reward gold amount increased.
  • Required skill minimum amounts increased for the alternative solution.
  • Required troop count for alternative solution adjusted.
  • Return duration for alternative solution increased.
  • Issue/Quest time limit increased.
  • Issue's prosperity effect no longer exists.
  • 5 relation and 10 power added to the issue owner as a reward for the alternative solution.
  • Borrowed troop count in quest adjusted.
  • Once the player clan becomes enemies with the quest giver's kingdom, quest cancels.
  • Quest success does not affect the issue settlement's militia anymore.
  • Keeping all of the borrowed troops decreases the main hero's honour by 10.
  • Issue/Quest conditions adjusted.
• Required grain amount was increased for the Headman Needs Grain Seed quest.
• Fixed a bug that caused a wrong dialogue option to appear while talking to the quest giver NPC in the Needs Help with Looters quest.
• Players can no longer persuade child nobles in the Company of Trouble quest.
• Fixed a bug that caused the Family Feud quest NPC to change clans.
• Fixed a problem with Lord Needs Horses quest which caused the battle encounter menu to pop up once the player completed the quest through dialogue.
• Minor Faction Heros will no longer give Lord Needs Horses quest.
• Fixed a bug that causes target quest NPC to be duplicated in Lady/Lord Wants Rival Captured quest.
• Destroying Looter parties will also be counted as quest progress in Needs Help With Brigands quest.
• Fixed a bug that changed the location of Radagos' hideout to another hideout.

Conversations & Encounters

• Fixed a bug that caused the lord’s hall guards to act like hireable mercenaries.
• Fixed a bug that caused ally party heroes to act like enemies when the player encounters an enemy and tries to talk to the allied army member.
• Fixed a bug that allowed players to talk to notables via the "Request a meeting with someone" button.
• Fixed a bug when calculating the difficulty of a persuasion option.
• Fixed a bug that caused the wrong encyclopedia page to open upon clicking the name of the conversed character in conversation
• Fixed a bug that caused dialogue problems when the player asked an NPC to find another NPC in tavern missions.
• Fixed an issue that caused players to get stuck in conversations when they tried to talk to wanderers in settlements that were owned by the player’s map faction.

Other

• Troop Updates & Fixes
  • Faction Troops now use a greater variety of weaponry.
  • Mercenary Cavalry Units now uses spears.
  • Mercenary units now possess proper skill points and are in correct unit groups
  • Mercenary Guard and Mercenary Cavalry have slightly better weaponry.
  • Sturgian Brigand, Hardened Brigand and Horse Raider units now also have spears.
  • Basic Level 6 Units of Factions units now have a chance to carry and use Tier 2 weapons.
  • Battanian Oathsworn now use javelins.
  • Battanian Scouts changed their horses to Battanian Ones.
  • Aserai Mameluke Regular and Aserai Youth now count as Cavalry units.
  • Mameluke Heavy Cavalry now uses a different bow.
  • Aserai Tribal Horsemen now have javelins.
  • Khuzait Torguuds now carry swords in addition to their original weaponry.
  • Khuzait Darkhan units carry better javelins.
  • Khan's Guards now also carry one-handed maces.
  • Khuzait Spear Infantry now uses Throwable Spears.
  • Levy Crossbowmen now counts as a ranged unit (as they should).
• Fixed a bug that caused a notification that tells the player their relation with themselves decreased.
• Fixed a bug that caused settlement healing effects to not work.
• Fixed a bug that caused lords not to move when they were asked for a board game.
• Fixed a bug that stopped lords from moving when they were asked for a board game.
• Characters would not properly show their age / look younger in missions. This was fixed.
• Fixed an issue that caused crashes in tournaments for mods that added new cultures to the game.
• Fixed a bug that prevented child nobles from spawning in the lord’s hall.
• Fixed a bug that caused child heroes to be added to tournaments as participants.
• Hideouts will no longer give the settlement healing boost to parties.
• Fixed a bug that caused wanderers to spawn in the same position in taverns.
• Fixed a bug that causes some horses to have the same colours.
• Editor UX cleanup for modding tools
• Asset override systems for the modding tools
• Modding support for sound system.
• Internal Refactoring and code cleanup.

Multiplayer
Art

• Added better barriers to some points that go outside of the map for mp_tdm_map_001.

Animation

• Fixed a common issue of seeing lances in the couched state in clients although it is already pulled up.

Design & Balance

• Voulge chain attack speed reduced.
• Vlandia Knight - Bastard Axe one-handed use fixed.
• Crush throughs are more likely to happen with 2handed maces
• Crush throughs with couched lances don't happen in multiplayer

Game Modes

• Siege servers now stop accepting players after a morale threshold. Also fixed changing stats of players when a game ends while they were loading. This happened rarely on Siege servers.

Other - Miscellaneous

• Matchmaker now balances teams after arranging a match.
• Factions and maps are now distributed uniformly between game types instead of globally.
• You can now leave MP games without punishment if you haven't spawned during the game.
• Fixed an issue causing starting gold not to be 120 when joining the spectator team before a combatant team

Server & Network

• Fixed a bug that caused an infinite wait screen when trying to join an ending custom game.
• Fixed a condition where a player can start a kick action without letting other clients be notified, thus making it invisible to other clients.
• Fixed many cases of disconnects from Lobby. Failed actions will now be reverted and an information text regarding those will be shown on the chat screen.
• Fixed an issue causing the visual count on quivers sometimes not updating on clients.
• Fixed custom servers waiting abnormally long after ending normally.
• Fixed a client crash at the Lobby
• Fixed a crash in mp matches with the aserai faction active

Both
Crash

• Fixed a crash that occurs during mission loading.

Performance

• Cloth simulation now uses fewer CPU resources.

Animations

• Removed given velocities to riders falling backwards from mounts which causes an unnatural movement.
• Fixed wrong movement animations on users while rotating a siege machine.
• Shield hit inverse kinematics improvement.
• Replaced placeholder animations with motion-capture animations for death by fire/explosion.
• Replaced placeholder animations with motion-capture animations for death by arrow/back direction/shoulder & back.

Combat

• Fixed a flaw in the weapon-wielding logic that allowed wielding weapons while mounted that are supposed to be disallowed.
• Active combat actions of an agent no longer get locked while giving an order or using an object/machine.
• Third-person camera height formula is adjusted so that the character covers less space on the screen when the camera is very close to it, allowing a better view while fighting.
• Two-handed weapons can now crush through a block on overswing attacks.
• Crush through was printing two different damages, it's fixed.

Other

• Implemented the first-person camera movement behaviour while mounted option, which actually did not change anything before.
• Fixed a bug where some throwable weapons disappear after the attached agent dies.

Known Issues
In Progress - Known Issues & Crashes

Caliane said:

Decided to load it up, and start a new 1.5.1.

All my mods are broken, and it looks like all the mod makers gave up back in june. nothing is updated past 1.4. going to have to go through and see if new mod makers remade any of them.

Click to expand...

The consensus seems to be that the best option right now is to play 1.4.2 with a bunch of mods. There are some mods that are updated for the 1.5.x branch. I really only use a few that are for quality of life anyway.

I probably won't try it out again until 1.6 or 1.7. Every time they update they fuck things up. The economy is still out of whack. Half the perks are not implemented or broken. Notables disappear. No feasts. Marriage is superficial. Diplomacy is incomplete. UI is janky. Main quest is stupid. The game is a hot mess.