Mount & Blade: Bannerlord

If I hear one more person in a video or on a podcast pronounce “cavalry” as “Calvary” I can’t be held responsible…

It’s in observation of Good Friday, man.

Doh! With the latest patch my game won’t load! I get prompts warning of different version and mods and click okay on both but nothing happens.

Yeah, latest patch does not seem to be compatible with save games from earlier versions unfortunately. On the plus side, according to the Reddit community, you can rollback to the previous patch on Steam via the Betas function currently and keep on playing your existing save game without issue, if you so desire.

So, now that a lot of us are going to be re-rolling characters, now with a little knowledge what are starting options are you all planning to take.

2HD (don’t need skill to couch the lance anyway)
Bow (i tried crossbow + horse, but getting 60 skill to reload from a horse is hard. On the other hand, crossbows are a lot better for offensive sieges. You can aim forever and snipe down heads.)
Riding
Tactics

Maybe smithing/scouting/engineering/surgery (depends on what wanderers show up)

I went Empire background initially thinking it would pay off later when I had fiefs, but playing reminded me how much movement is king so I think it’s going to be Khuzaits this time.

I never quite leveled leadership enough to get passive training. I think I’m going to invest in that early this time.

I’m wondering if the personal combat skills are even worth investing in. If I’m the CEO of burn and pillage why would I need to spend points on bows and swords when my underlings are going to be doing the grunt work? Wouldn’t it be best to focus on macro skills needed to manage an army and keeps instead?

That’s true, leadership is really nice. 200+ troops let you siege and take over all the castles.

Playing as the Khuzaits calls for one thing though. One cannot simply thunder out of the steppe without some suitable backing music, haha.

At least in the open field of battle, there is nothing quite like an all cavalry army. Catch or flee from almost anyone you want because you typically have a party movement speed above 6.0. Then in battles be that annoying army infantry struggle to touch as the horse archers wither them down riding circles around them, before collapsing in on the survivors from all sides.

Even more fun than original’s Khergits due to the improved AI. And such a chaotic sight to behold in massive battles.

Looks like another patch may have been made for the broken saves. I can’t check at the moment but the patch notes thread in the forums has people saying it is fixed.

Edit: Confirmed. Broken saves was just a temporary bug. All good now.

That song was awesome. Thanks.

jesus, that was some Youtube hole you plummeted me into after watching this - Mongolian Rock is awesome!

Always glad to send people down interesting new rabbit holes, and there ain’t many holes quite like Mongolian music. I imagine when I get around to the Aserai that I shall be plumbing the depths of the internet for material related to their Berber and Arabic inspirations.

As for character skills, some of the more character focused skills come with traits that provide local or party-wide benefits, or alternatively debuffs to the enemy. So focusing on the combat focused skill trees doesn’t come at a complete disadvantage to your party. So worth having a look through them all, then consider what army composition and playstyle you like before coming to a conclusion on what to prioritise.

My current hypothesis is that it may also be wise to consider what skills you use the most often as well, as it can make them easier to level up whilst playing compared to something like Stewardship. My archery skill has a lot more opportunities to improve and rank up compared to some other skills, when I’m fighting battles at least. In contrast, how often do I get to flex my Charm? Probably no where near as often from what I can observe. So which one really could benefit the most from focus points?

Release nobles to get charm.

However, charm doesn’t seem to do anything. All the talking conversation quest percentages never seem to change anyway.

I’ve had my fun and it was totally worth what I paid to roam around and fight some amazing battles but I’m going to wait a while to let this cook some more. There are a lot of the upper level systems that need to be implemented or fleshed out further.

I may still jump in every once in a while just because the battles are so addictive.

Understandable, no need to burn out on the game when there is still much more to come both from the developers and in terms of mods. Geez, there’s still just a touch under 200,000 people playing the game each day on Steam to offer daily feedback, suggestions and report bugs for the devs as is.

In related news, the next patch looks like it will be a big un’ with some new equipment added, levelling made less of a grind at higher levels, some quests reworked, more performance improvements, bug fixes, and other stuff. Plus deployment of development builds/patches will be progressing to an opt-in Alpha -> Beta -> Stable system for those interested in checking out and helping spot bugs in the latest dev builds before they go public (stable). So those should give a good idea of what is in the pipeline for the near future.

Opted in for the new beta patch (2.35GB download), played couple hours, I noticed the leveling is so much better after the beta patch, now both my companion and my player character gain skill points much faster, and lot more fun to play.