vemerce
Regular
Start Version: e1.0.5
End Version: Beta e1.1.0
Real Life Hours: 140 (includes certain intentional rollbacks)
In Game Days: 4976
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mods Used Only to Fix Broken/Incomplete Mechanics:
CharacterTrainer (Import/Export)
Developer Console
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Things Learned
1. The main quest is the only way to start your own faction without cheats. Keep the banner or you lose your chance.
2. If you make your own faction, your banner color is locked in FOREVER (without mods) as of now. Pick a color you like before the turn in!
3. Every conversation with random chances listed for responses are a one time opportunity. Fail and you can't talk to them again. Save ahead.
4. Conversations with random chances can sometimes critically succeed +2 or critically fail -2, making them even more frustrating.
5. Player characters that marry can have a ton of children.
6. Women can die of childbirth, seemingly at random.
7. Always ransom (or execute) nobles when you take them prisoner. There's a bug, they always escape super fast if you don't. Get the money.
8. There is no announcement when a tournament happens... You have to stumble upon them or ask an arena master.
9. When you find a tournament and enter it, always bet on yourself. (On the right hand side of the match up window when you're in the match.)
10. The AI does not consider army strength and will attack seasoned armies with peasants.
11. The AI does not like to stay at peace with a stronger power. They attack anyway.
12. Children born during a campaign start with zero attribute points and focus points, making their learning limit capped at 2 for every skill.
13. Children become fully functional companions when they turn 18 years old, and are currently unable to be seen before that.
14. Children start the game at a higher level when they are 18. It appears to be randomly determined.
15. Children are always carbon copies of whatever parent shares their gender.
16. The main hero will never be executed by his enemies when they defeat him. It's always imprisonment.
17. Death by old age is currently not active, and characters can live to be well over 100.
18. Heirs getting married is really buggy. Even making arranged marriages for them.
19. NPC's do not get married and have children. Only NPC's married at the beginning will have kids. This prevents future generations currently.
20. Women can't marry after 34. Men can't marry after 39. (This is based on the Developer Console info.)
21. Women can have children between 18 and 45. This means the babies stop at 46. (Thanks to joshimoo for showing me the code.)
22. Female Heroes other than the Player have a 5% chance to be infertile. Decided at start of campaign. (Thanks to joshimoo.)
23. The game takes every weapon you ever make via Smithing and starts selling it in stores. Nothing will be unique currently.
24. Factions that you take all of the territory from will still exist and run around with parties of 0-40 troops constantly.
25. You can't abandon leadership of the kingdom you founded. (Can't really leave it.)
26. You can't abandon your Clan and/or start a new one. You're stuck with it, no matter how large it gets.
Things Fixed/Changed After My First Playthrough
1.You have exactly 10 years in the game to finish the main quest. (Not 10 years from each step. 10 years from start to end.)
^ The above is listed as having been fixed as of version e1.0.11. (Updated 04/13/2020.)
2.Faction leaders will never defect and join any other kingdom.
^ As of Beta e1.2.0, when you do the main quest and beat down an Imperial faction, they'll disband and join other factions, including the leader.
The Rundown
Okay, so I finally feel like I'm done with my first playthrough of Bannerlord. (Far from done with this game.)
I tried to keep my playthrough as "natural" and unmodded as possible, but there are certain features that are bugged/incomplete that I did use the above mods to circumvent. Namely, children not having any stats whatsoever, and not being able to "die" as a main hero yet.
In my playthrough, I went through 3 different generations of heroes. My original hero had the longest time invested on him. I played my first hero until he was 57, then used the console make him ill and continued as his daughter. I played her until she was 55, then console killed her, and resumed play as her son, which was my final hero.
Hero # 1 - First Character
Started the game and joined the Southern Empire as soon as I could. Helped them fight some wars, ended up getting a couple of fiefs given to me.
Decided that since I had some property, it was time to get married. Used the encyclopedia to find my character's bride to be, which was Phaea, and then set off to talk to her. I'd also read about this process online, so I saved the game before we started talking each time. It took me 19 tries to clear the dialogue successfully with her, and then I set off to talk to her father, Crotor, to get married. I was disappointed to see that the entire marriage was just the game telling me that we were married now. (I hope that's going to get improved at some point.) I immediately took Phaea into my party and started using her as a companion. Problem was, every time I'd rest somewhere with her, she'd get pregnant.
During the course of playing this character, I noticed that tournaments would be going on in certain towns and the only way I'd find out about them was by going to the "Arena" section on the town menu. There aren't any announcements about them like Warband had. (Hopefully that will be coming.) You can, however, visit an arena and ask the arena master where the closest tournaments are happening.
After a long time of just playing and exploring, I eventually got a popup that said I'd failed the main quest to talk to 10 lords and ladies. I was at 7/10, because I had just been talking to them as I saw them out in the wild. I came to the forums here and found out that if you don't do the main quest, you can't start your own kingdom. I rolled back to a previous save, and finished the main quest. During the quest, I had to leave the Southern Empire, and I did so by telling Rhagaea that I wished to be released from my oath. That made me have to give up my fiefs. So my fiefs were the ones I took when I needed property for the main quest.
After finishing the main quest and founding my kingdom, I noticed that the Southern Empire was getting huge. They had pretty much all of the territory that the original empire factions all held, and they'd taken the territory above Vlandia as well. My fiefs were dead in the middle of the Southern Empire's territory, so I decided to trim the fat a little and start conquering their holdings. Pretty soon, I'd taken over all of the Southern Empire's fiefs that were around me, and they were stuck with the little area above Vlandia that they held. Around this time, the Aserai had come up from the south and were constantly attacking my eastern border. I kept making peace with them, but they just kept attacking. I also actively rode around the land finding vassals and trying to recruit everyone I could in the process. (Saving before each conversation, of course.)
Around this time, Phaea suddenly died in childbirth, giving birth to her 15th child. That was a terrible surprise, but rather than roll back the save, I let it happen. I used that as my character's motivation to go to war with the Aserai and beat them back. But, admittedly, I may have taken that too far. I pushed the Aserai until they only had a couple cities left. In my mind, I thought I could leave them with those cities and the AI would stop making them attack my holdings. Instead, Vlandia then swooped down and gobbled them up.
That was the point when I realized that Vlandia had been spreading like wildfire during my war with the Aserai. Vlandia had wiped Battania, Sturgia, and half of the Khuzait Khanate off of the map. I tried to coexist with Vlandia, but war was inevitable. We were about equal sized at this point. Finally, they started the war by attacking my western border. We actually had some competitive battles at first over a couple of fiefs. But after I destroy their armies a few times, they started running with peasant armies that I'd just slaughter with my experienced troops. I tried to hold the borders with them after that and kept paying them for peace.
I switched a lot of my focus onto Smithing around the time my character's first daughter had turned 18 and was able to come into my party. That's also the point when I realized that children born into the game are terribly broken right now... They have no attribute points and their Learning Limit is stuck at 2 for every skill. This is the point where I had to use the CharacterTrainer mod to actually fix the daughter and give her attributes and focus points. I started using her as a second smithing character, and did the same when the next two children came of age shortly thereafter. I tried to marry one of my sons off to someone's daughter, thinking she would then join my clan and that would give me another companion, but it was really buggy. The guy kept wanting my daughters and my SONS to marry his son... And it wasn't until I offered a daughter to that son was he willing to talk about marrying my son to his daughter. Then he told me to go introduce myself to his daughter, which I did, and she kept saying she wasn't allowed to talk to me. I had +6 Influence with her entire family and we weren't at war, so I have no idea why. I gave up on marrying my son off at this point. I also noticed some family heirloom weapons I'd made specific for my character's children were now showing up for Trade in cities... Those were supposed to be one-of-a-kind items!
After a while, when my main hero was 57 I decided I wanted to try out the heir system and see how it worked. First I tried rushing enemies as a one man army, but they would always imprison me and never execute me, even with hero deaths enabled. Soon or later, I realized that must not be a thing. (I would have let him die of natural causes, but dying of old age doesn't seem to be active in the game yet.) So I installed the developer console and made him ill to kill him off. The popup came up and asked me to select an heir, so I picked his eldest daughter.
Hero # 2 - First Character's Daughter
She was 22 years old and level 24 when I took over playing her, and the map situation was where Vlandia only controlled their original territories now and the rest of the map belonged to my kingdom. I tried not to mess with them, and only engaged in battles when they attacked our holdings.
For my first order of business, I searched the encyclopedia for a husband and realized there was only one eligible husband in the entire game now. He had been born into the game around the time of this character, so he was also in his twenties. I went out to make the marriage happen. Problem was, he was from the Aserai and he was a castle sitter, who never seemed to go out onto the battlefield. Every time I'd track him down, he was in one of my faction's castles and he was be promptly thrown into the dungeon. It was a nightmare to stay at peace long enough to talk to him and get married. Then when I went to talk to his father to seal the deal, his father wanted him to marry EVERY GIRL IN MY CLAN, all of my original character's daughters. Thinking that was a bug, I accepted. He immediately made 4 girls his ex-spouse and married the youngest. Weird. So I rolled back and used the developer console to force a marriage to just that one character. (I also learned from the console that 39 is the hard limit on getting married for men. Male characters over 40 cannot.) Once my hero was pregnant and had her son, I used the console to kill off that sicko father. (Encyclopedia updated to say he was assassinated. lol.)
For the most part, I played a peacekeeper during this time and worked on smithing. I did everything I realistically could to keep Vlandia and my kingdom from going to war. It was a struggle to keep them on the map. I disavowed every policy that made it beneficial for my kingdom to have large armies and engage in battle, but it didn't matter. My lords and ladies just kept declaring war on Vlandia. Right around the time her son came of age, my kingdom had conquered the entire map without me doing anything personally to wipe out Vlandia.
I decided now it was time for a change. I used the console to kill this hero off at 52, and took over playing as her son.
Hero # 3 - First Character's Grandson
This guy was actually 30 when I took over playing him, so it was almost like starting anew. First thing I had to do was change his appearance, he was a carbon copy of his dad/grandfather on that side and was short and ugly as heck. Then I had to use CharacterTrainer to give him attributes and focus points. He started at level 26 when he was of age.
This guy I decided I wanted to leave the big empire I'd established and join the Aserai and try to rebuild their holdings. So I opened the kingdom menu and clicked to leave the kingdom. It asked if I wanted to relinquish my fiefs and I said yes. I "left" the kingdom, but kept my fiefs. I looked in the encyclopedia and I was also still the leader of the kingdom I'd founded, according to that.
I pressed on and found the leader of Aserai. I used the developer console to set my relation with him to -10, since that's the minimum to become a vassal. I entered the conversation and the option to join them was grayed out. When I moused over it, it said "Your Clan must be rank 2." Which made no sense, since my Clan was rank 6 at this point. I figured this wasn't intended as a game mechanic, so I used the console to put myself into the Aserai faction. It worked. But it was weird... I was in the Aserai faction, and listed as leader of the kingdom I founded still.
Didn't matter though, I set off to raise a new army from the Aserai villages and towns, and began attacking my old kingdom wherever I could. They would always regard me as "lordship" like I was still their leader, but the game still let me attack them. It was difficult at first, but after a while they too started returning with peasant armies and my Aserai army was getting quite strong. It was a long and difficult process that probably took 12 hours or so of real time, but I conquered the map for a second time as an Aserai warlord.
Additionally, none of the NPC's had gotten married and had children, so there was literally no female left in the world under the age of 35 for my original hero's grandson to marry.
At the end of this playthrough, my final character's great grandfather, Crotor, was still alive and kicking at age 107.
Conclusion
At that point I figured I should be done with this playthrough, because who knows what all I broke on the back end by using the console so much in the later hours. I'll probably wait until the next Beta patch, or when the Alpha branch comes live, but I'll definitely be jumping back in there. This has been a rundown of my experiences in the first playthrough. There's been bumps and bugs along the way, but it's been very fun... I really enjoy this game in its Early Access state, and I can't wait to see what it becomes when it's done.
I'm also open to any questions that anyone might have. I tried to include all the details I thought were needed and important, but feel free to ask below if you have any questions you'd like answered.
End Version: Beta e1.1.0
Real Life Hours: 140 (includes certain intentional rollbacks)
In Game Days: 4976
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mods Used Only to Fix Broken/Incomplete Mechanics:
CharacterTrainer (Import/Export)
Developer Console
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Things Learned
1. The main quest is the only way to start your own faction without cheats. Keep the banner or you lose your chance.
2. If you make your own faction, your banner color is locked in FOREVER (without mods) as of now. Pick a color you like before the turn in!
3. Every conversation with random chances listed for responses are a one time opportunity. Fail and you can't talk to them again. Save ahead.
4. Conversations with random chances can sometimes critically succeed +2 or critically fail -2, making them even more frustrating.
5. Player characters that marry can have a ton of children.
6. Women can die of childbirth, seemingly at random.
7. Always ransom (or execute) nobles when you take them prisoner. There's a bug, they always escape super fast if you don't. Get the money.
8. There is no announcement when a tournament happens... You have to stumble upon them or ask an arena master.
9. When you find a tournament and enter it, always bet on yourself. (On the right hand side of the match up window when you're in the match.)
10. The AI does not consider army strength and will attack seasoned armies with peasants.
11. The AI does not like to stay at peace with a stronger power. They attack anyway.
12. Children born during a campaign start with zero attribute points and focus points, making their learning limit capped at 2 for every skill.
13. Children become fully functional companions when they turn 18 years old, and are currently unable to be seen before that.
14. Children start the game at a higher level when they are 18. It appears to be randomly determined.
15. Children are always carbon copies of whatever parent shares their gender.
16. The main hero will never be executed by his enemies when they defeat him. It's always imprisonment.
17. Death by old age is currently not active, and characters can live to be well over 100.
18. Heirs getting married is really buggy. Even making arranged marriages for them.
19. NPC's do not get married and have children. Only NPC's married at the beginning will have kids. This prevents future generations currently.
20. Women can't marry after 34. Men can't marry after 39. (This is based on the Developer Console info.)
21. Women can have children between 18 and 45. This means the babies stop at 46. (Thanks to joshimoo for showing me the code.)
22. Female Heroes other than the Player have a 5% chance to be infertile. Decided at start of campaign. (Thanks to joshimoo.)
23. The game takes every weapon you ever make via Smithing and starts selling it in stores. Nothing will be unique currently.
24. Factions that you take all of the territory from will still exist and run around with parties of 0-40 troops constantly.
25. You can't abandon leadership of the kingdom you founded. (Can't really leave it.)
26. You can't abandon your Clan and/or start a new one. You're stuck with it, no matter how large it gets.
Things Fixed/Changed After My First Playthrough
1.
^ The above is listed as having been fixed as of version e1.0.11. (Updated 04/13/2020.)
2.
^ As of Beta e1.2.0, when you do the main quest and beat down an Imperial faction, they'll disband and join other factions, including the leader.
The Rundown
Okay, so I finally feel like I'm done with my first playthrough of Bannerlord. (Far from done with this game.)
I tried to keep my playthrough as "natural" and unmodded as possible, but there are certain features that are bugged/incomplete that I did use the above mods to circumvent. Namely, children not having any stats whatsoever, and not being able to "die" as a main hero yet.
In my playthrough, I went through 3 different generations of heroes. My original hero had the longest time invested on him. I played my first hero until he was 57, then used the console make him ill and continued as his daughter. I played her until she was 55, then console killed her, and resumed play as her son, which was my final hero.
Hero # 1 - First Character
Started the game and joined the Southern Empire as soon as I could. Helped them fight some wars, ended up getting a couple of fiefs given to me.
Decided that since I had some property, it was time to get married. Used the encyclopedia to find my character's bride to be, which was Phaea, and then set off to talk to her. I'd also read about this process online, so I saved the game before we started talking each time. It took me 19 tries to clear the dialogue successfully with her, and then I set off to talk to her father, Crotor, to get married. I was disappointed to see that the entire marriage was just the game telling me that we were married now. (I hope that's going to get improved at some point.) I immediately took Phaea into my party and started using her as a companion. Problem was, every time I'd rest somewhere with her, she'd get pregnant.
During the course of playing this character, I noticed that tournaments would be going on in certain towns and the only way I'd find out about them was by going to the "Arena" section on the town menu. There aren't any announcements about them like Warband had. (Hopefully that will be coming.) You can, however, visit an arena and ask the arena master where the closest tournaments are happening.
After a long time of just playing and exploring, I eventually got a popup that said I'd failed the main quest to talk to 10 lords and ladies. I was at 7/10, because I had just been talking to them as I saw them out in the wild. I came to the forums here and found out that if you don't do the main quest, you can't start your own kingdom. I rolled back to a previous save, and finished the main quest. During the quest, I had to leave the Southern Empire, and I did so by telling Rhagaea that I wished to be released from my oath. That made me have to give up my fiefs. So my fiefs were the ones I took when I needed property for the main quest.
After finishing the main quest and founding my kingdom, I noticed that the Southern Empire was getting huge. They had pretty much all of the territory that the original empire factions all held, and they'd taken the territory above Vlandia as well. My fiefs were dead in the middle of the Southern Empire's territory, so I decided to trim the fat a little and start conquering their holdings. Pretty soon, I'd taken over all of the Southern Empire's fiefs that were around me, and they were stuck with the little area above Vlandia that they held. Around this time, the Aserai had come up from the south and were constantly attacking my eastern border. I kept making peace with them, but they just kept attacking. I also actively rode around the land finding vassals and trying to recruit everyone I could in the process. (Saving before each conversation, of course.)
Around this time, Phaea suddenly died in childbirth, giving birth to her 15th child. That was a terrible surprise, but rather than roll back the save, I let it happen. I used that as my character's motivation to go to war with the Aserai and beat them back. But, admittedly, I may have taken that too far. I pushed the Aserai until they only had a couple cities left. In my mind, I thought I could leave them with those cities and the AI would stop making them attack my holdings. Instead, Vlandia then swooped down and gobbled them up.
That was the point when I realized that Vlandia had been spreading like wildfire during my war with the Aserai. Vlandia had wiped Battania, Sturgia, and half of the Khuzait Khanate off of the map. I tried to coexist with Vlandia, but war was inevitable. We were about equal sized at this point. Finally, they started the war by attacking my western border. We actually had some competitive battles at first over a couple of fiefs. But after I destroy their armies a few times, they started running with peasant armies that I'd just slaughter with my experienced troops. I tried to hold the borders with them after that and kept paying them for peace.
I switched a lot of my focus onto Smithing around the time my character's first daughter had turned 18 and was able to come into my party. That's also the point when I realized that children born into the game are terribly broken right now... They have no attribute points and their Learning Limit is stuck at 2 for every skill. This is the point where I had to use the CharacterTrainer mod to actually fix the daughter and give her attributes and focus points. I started using her as a second smithing character, and did the same when the next two children came of age shortly thereafter. I tried to marry one of my sons off to someone's daughter, thinking she would then join my clan and that would give me another companion, but it was really buggy. The guy kept wanting my daughters and my SONS to marry his son... And it wasn't until I offered a daughter to that son was he willing to talk about marrying my son to his daughter. Then he told me to go introduce myself to his daughter, which I did, and she kept saying she wasn't allowed to talk to me. I had +6 Influence with her entire family and we weren't at war, so I have no idea why. I gave up on marrying my son off at this point. I also noticed some family heirloom weapons I'd made specific for my character's children were now showing up for Trade in cities... Those were supposed to be one-of-a-kind items!
After a while, when my main hero was 57 I decided I wanted to try out the heir system and see how it worked. First I tried rushing enemies as a one man army, but they would always imprison me and never execute me, even with hero deaths enabled. Soon or later, I realized that must not be a thing. (I would have let him die of natural causes, but dying of old age doesn't seem to be active in the game yet.) So I installed the developer console and made him ill to kill him off. The popup came up and asked me to select an heir, so I picked his eldest daughter.
Hero # 2 - First Character's Daughter
She was 22 years old and level 24 when I took over playing her, and the map situation was where Vlandia only controlled their original territories now and the rest of the map belonged to my kingdom. I tried not to mess with them, and only engaged in battles when they attacked our holdings.
For my first order of business, I searched the encyclopedia for a husband and realized there was only one eligible husband in the entire game now. He had been born into the game around the time of this character, so he was also in his twenties. I went out to make the marriage happen. Problem was, he was from the Aserai and he was a castle sitter, who never seemed to go out onto the battlefield. Every time I'd track him down, he was in one of my faction's castles and he was be promptly thrown into the dungeon. It was a nightmare to stay at peace long enough to talk to him and get married. Then when I went to talk to his father to seal the deal, his father wanted him to marry EVERY GIRL IN MY CLAN, all of my original character's daughters. Thinking that was a bug, I accepted. He immediately made 4 girls his ex-spouse and married the youngest. Weird. So I rolled back and used the developer console to force a marriage to just that one character. (I also learned from the console that 39 is the hard limit on getting married for men. Male characters over 40 cannot.) Once my hero was pregnant and had her son, I used the console to kill off that sicko father. (Encyclopedia updated to say he was assassinated. lol.)
For the most part, I played a peacekeeper during this time and worked on smithing. I did everything I realistically could to keep Vlandia and my kingdom from going to war. It was a struggle to keep them on the map. I disavowed every policy that made it beneficial for my kingdom to have large armies and engage in battle, but it didn't matter. My lords and ladies just kept declaring war on Vlandia. Right around the time her son came of age, my kingdom had conquered the entire map without me doing anything personally to wipe out Vlandia.
I decided now it was time for a change. I used the console to kill this hero off at 52, and took over playing as her son.
Hero # 3 - First Character's Grandson
This guy was actually 30 when I took over playing him, so it was almost like starting anew. First thing I had to do was change his appearance, he was a carbon copy of his dad/grandfather on that side and was short and ugly as heck. Then I had to use CharacterTrainer to give him attributes and focus points. He started at level 26 when he was of age.
This guy I decided I wanted to leave the big empire I'd established and join the Aserai and try to rebuild their holdings. So I opened the kingdom menu and clicked to leave the kingdom. It asked if I wanted to relinquish my fiefs and I said yes. I "left" the kingdom, but kept my fiefs. I looked in the encyclopedia and I was also still the leader of the kingdom I'd founded, according to that.
I pressed on and found the leader of Aserai. I used the developer console to set my relation with him to -10, since that's the minimum to become a vassal. I entered the conversation and the option to join them was grayed out. When I moused over it, it said "Your Clan must be rank 2." Which made no sense, since my Clan was rank 6 at this point. I figured this wasn't intended as a game mechanic, so I used the console to put myself into the Aserai faction. It worked. But it was weird... I was in the Aserai faction, and listed as leader of the kingdom I founded still.
Didn't matter though, I set off to raise a new army from the Aserai villages and towns, and began attacking my old kingdom wherever I could. They would always regard me as "lordship" like I was still their leader, but the game still let me attack them. It was difficult at first, but after a while they too started returning with peasant armies and my Aserai army was getting quite strong. It was a long and difficult process that probably took 12 hours or so of real time, but I conquered the map for a second time as an Aserai warlord.
Additionally, none of the NPC's had gotten married and had children, so there was literally no female left in the world under the age of 35 for my original hero's grandson to marry.
At the end of this playthrough, my final character's great grandfather, Crotor, was still alive and kicking at age 107.
Conclusion
At that point I figured I should be done with this playthrough, because who knows what all I broke on the back end by using the console so much in the later hours. I'll probably wait until the next Beta patch, or when the Alpha branch comes live, but I'll definitely be jumping back in there. This has been a rundown of my experiences in the first playthrough. There's been bumps and bugs along the way, but it's been very fun... I really enjoy this game in its Early Access state, and I can't wait to see what it becomes when it's done.
I'm also open to any questions that anyone might have. I tried to include all the details I thought were needed and important, but feel free to ask below if you have any questions you'd like answered.
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