Bah, NerdLord: To Battle!

Mount&Blade made its name initially as a sword-swinging physics demonstration, so perhaps it's not surprising they didn't bother changing their winning combat formula. While it's hard to tell at first, foot movement makes it slightly easier to sidestep attacks without letting you get away from your opponent, and horses maneuver a smidge less like motorcycles, but I might be imagining even those small momentum tweaks. I took a while to notice (due to fighting on foot with my crossbow) that in contrast to horses being able to bowl over infantry endlessly in the old game, now polearms have a ridiculous amount of stopping power to where half a ton of cataphract will occasionally dead stop like a sparrow into a window... on a half-starved shoeless bandit's pigsticker. Might need some finessing there, TaleWorlds. There's also some incongruity in skill gain. For example even with a lower learning rate, riding levels up an order of magnitude faster than athletics.

As far as battles go, they also overcompensated their terrain generator's friendliness. The playing field for each combat is supposed to be generated from your surroundings on the overland map. In the old game, this meant fighting in mountainous areas could sometimes land you in some dauntingly jagged locales (as my screenshot here demonstrates) but now?

 

It's a bottle map, get it?

In lowland areas you'll be fighting on a plain dotted with mounds or dunes no taller than waist-high. In mountains or hills or cliffs or ravines you'll be fighting on a suspiciously flat plain flanked by mounds or dunes marginally taller than waist-high... situated between all that unreachable rougher terrain. While it looks nice the first few times you quickly realize too much variety has been sacrificed for contriving cavalry-friendly encounters, or in the Simpsons' words: "every week there's a canal - or an inlet - or a fjord!" Yes, it was necessary to tame the original's randomizer. Now you could do to relax a few parameters.

Overall, I found my focus on crossbows served me well in early fights. Most bandits lack cavalry, and even the most notable exception (khuzaits a.k.a. tartars) lose most of their mounted archery advantage against a good high-accuracy volley from massed imperial sergeants. Even storming bandit camps by night is easier this way, as you can pick half of them off piecemeal with easy headshots without risking your troops. And, given completing such quests finally gives me more renown, I've been making quite a name for myself quarreling the querulous. I am the bolt in the dolt, I am the terror that twangs in the tundra, the dart in the desert, the flechette in the forest, the sureshot on the shore, I am the beam in my brother's eye!

 

It helps that the AI could use some work.

 

Leeroy, you are just stupid as hell.

Bandits just charge blindly at you, which is fine, they're supposed to be fodder. Empire troops with a leader will hold back, hold ranks and send horse archers to skirmish... even when they only have one horse archer. And even when their numbers are more threatening, the fact they always split widdershins oversimplifies your troop deployment.

I discovered all this by finally enlisting in the Southern Empire's armies as a mercenary clan. The political side of things will require a separate post. Militarily, your role as a landless mercenary is less tied to major offensives, leaving you to farm bounty money by cutting off reinforcements or hitting targets of convenience behind enemy lines (the danger of that follows below) but given the Southern Empire's first war was against the Khuzaits, I lucked out that my first serious fight took place in a village.

By my scutus and tribus, Metachia shall not fall this day!

All those houses and fences broke their damnable light cavalry's momentum making them easy targets, and a friendly merc clan provided frontline fodder.

However, the next few battles also bring up a major new feature, and one way in which it detracts from the standard RPG angle. Time in Bannerlord is far from some meaningless measure of your game length. Characters are born, age and replace each other. You may notice the calendar in the bottom right of some screenshots has gradually been counting up through my original incarnation's lifespan. As one consequence, your companions are now randomly generated and no longer immortal, which is my longabout way of saying: RIP Artimendros the Robber, we hardly knew ye. Unfortunately, this also precludes any pre-written characters, and while the original's line-up weren't overly-verbose (to about the level of Baldur's Gate 1 companions) they nevertheless added qite a bit of charm, like the abusive drill sergeant, the dashingly promiscuous exotic adventurer or the noble girl who knows everything she needs to about adventuring and warfare because she can recite all of the epic poems.

Nevertheless, as in city simulators where you might find yourself tracking the misadventures of some hapless laborer, stories sometimes write themselves. At one point the enemy took the town of Onira, which inconvenienced me personally as I had a quest to hand in there. Seeing an army assembling nearby I joined it, and sure enough it headed to recapture the town.

The fact that I, a lowly mercenary, was contributing more troops than any of the nobles, already worried me. I outright facepalmed when the army's leader, one Rustica of Clan Hongeros, one-eightied the army at the last minute to spend the night at a nearby village, thereby delaying the siege just long enough for enemy reinforcements to arrive and weaken us before siege towers could be built. It took several days for a new force to gather and retake our property, too late for my quest. So now I have my first grudge within the Southern Empire: clan Hongeros.

Sieges being a contentious topic in M&B will require further observation.

I will say that while superficially similar in the focus on choke points, the siege of Onira resolved faster with less tedium than the old variety.

 

Large battles in general now play differently from medium-sized ones, despite being basically the same deal with more waves. Individual formations can now benefit from your companions' bonuses, and you yourself can lead one and will be relegated to this role when subordinate to a lord during a siege. Cavalry will sometimes break off their charges and regroup, archers are harder to bait into switching to melee weapons by just riding near them, infantry are less sprone to waste their throwing weapons at long ranges. Where a medium-sized fight of around a hundred will be decided by the initial clash, a battle with 200-1000 on each side keeps evolving from that point, looking more like old-timey warfare with small clumps of warriors duking it out here and there, forcing you to keep an eye on whether your infantry or your cavalry are currently getting mobbed and regrouping them appropriately. In fact (being an adventurer like me) I took an arrow to the... face... (maybe I shouldn't wear my stylin' wolf pelt into battle?) so I got to observe NPC commanders doing very little fighting aside from picking off a straggler now and then, mostly riding back and forth as if actively giving orders.

 

I won't deny all this nuance caught me off-guard. Some encounters were real nail-biters oscillating advantage between myself and the enemy to the last handful of combatants.

 

Two cataphracts and three crossbowmen left standing still counts as a victory, damnit! Also, under those conditions, my one deserter to the enemy's seven means morale more or less decided the outcome, so keep your buttered grapes well stocked, bannerlords!

And yet, woe is me. Mine luck runneth outeth and disaster struckest mine army-eth.

After some time in the khuzait and northern wars I got a bit overconfident and decided to raid one of the far villages, thinking the local lords would be called off to join armies. I was just barely wrong enough to lose.

 

For all that's changed, defeat seems much the same as it was in Warband. You irrevocably lose all regular troops in your army, your named companions are scattered to the wind and may require ransoming, and you yourself are dragged around by your captor... which, if you're particularly unlucky, will land you at the far ends of the Earth when you do finally receive a (costly) ransom offer or manage to escape. Alone in enemy lands, potentially far behind the lines, you'll have a whole new adventure trying to reach some friendly villages and begin the arduous, seasons-long reconstruction of your forces. While this is a rather unique mechanic among cRPGs, it tends to result in a damn near impossible situation for some character types, as even a looter band might re-capture you... and re-capture you, and re-capture you. In a show of poor planning, the system was not adjusted for Bannerlord's far larger map and therefore greater distance to safety as a ransomed loner.

 

Dear reader, I don't mind admitting that in this case... I cheated. I crashed the damn game. I cheated and I cheated, again and again, until I lucked out and made it out of enemy lands to the Sturgians. Through the subsequent year of painstaking recruitment and training, I could not help but think it sure would've been nice if I had a fief of my own where I could've stockpiled some reserves.

Thus, it seems, I must wheedle my way into the nobility.

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edit 2022/03/05

Sadly, my deliberate game crashes corrupted my ironman mode save file (cheaters never prosper, kiddies - except they usually do) and I'll need some time to mourn my original self before I reroll. This will likely be the last post for my original playthrough.