How hard is bannerlord?

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WhiteEyedSh4rk

WhiteEyedSh4rk

Sergeant Knight
Old Guard Steam
How difficult is bannerlord compared to warband?
In terms of:
  • Leveling up
  • Building an army
  • Getting renown
  • Getting fiefs
  • Getting good relation with other lords
  • Combat system
  • Getting money/ trading system
  • Find companions
  • Conquering castles
  • Raiding villages
  • How long it would take to conquer thw whole map
 
it's adjustable. For a new player I'd say be ready for a bit of a steep learning curve even on relatively easy settings, and don't be afraid to ask for help
 
1. Leveling up is not too difficult early on and depends on how you distribute your focus points. Combat abilities and passive abilities (steward and medic) grow quickly
2.Armies are easy to grow once u have a decent source of income
3. Renown gain slows down mid-game, just battle lots of lords and participate in sieges.
4. Fiefs are harder to get earlier on when u have little influence, but you can start voting for yourself pretty quickly.
5. Relations are kinda hard to increase, there are mods which make it easier
6. Combat is fun and pretty straightforward, not particularly balanced tho.
7. Money is easy to come by, you'll see most people rack up huge amounts of gold
8. Companions are easy to find thru the encyclopedia
9. Castles are a bit hard solo if you wanna avoid losing high tier troops, best to get an army of lords to be met shields
10. Raiding is easy, lords often let u do it or are too far away to challenge
11. Not sure never done
 
WhiteEyedSh4rk said:
How difficult is bannerlord compared to warband?
In terms of:
  • Leveling up
  • Building an army
  • Getting renown
  • Getting fiefs
  • Getting good relation with other lords
  • Combat system
  • Getting money/ trading system
  • Find companions
  • Conquering castles
  • Raiding villages
  • How long it would take to conquer thw whole map
Click to expand...

Combat is faster and harder in sense no more Soloing large numbers of looters and sieges are brutal in sense of high losses for attackers
 
WhiteEyedSh4rk said:
How difficult is bannerlord compared to warband?
Click to expand...
1: Leveling is weird, but has the advantage that you learn by doing. It needs some tightening up but it's workable. You gain skills in the things you do, which makes sense

2: define "building." Getting an adequate starting force isn't difficult, optimizing it to a strategy you like and enjoy can take some time

3: Getting renown is very easy, just do quests and kill bandits until you can start taking quests to clear bandit hideouts, bandit hideout quests are great for renown and farming opinion

4: The fief system is a bit awkward, it's based on Influence that you earn in a coulpe different ways and it's nowhere near an exact science. you can't even guarantee that your clan will beup to receive the fiefs you take even if you use nothing but clan forces, so that's different. You can still amass a large personal empire but it might be pretty spread out.

5: Once you get into the political system with vassals, this is pretty easy. Using your Influence to flatter factions who don't like you is very simple and if you're smart about it it isn't hard to balance thins out so that you're constantly at very high opinion ith everyone.

6: The combat system is fairly similar to Warband with some new tactical wrinkles that make the tactical side of the game more engaging. That said the AI is to some extent a work in progress so be prepared for the odd bit of strangeness. Like having your infantry advance not towrds the mass of infantry threatening your archers, but towards 2 cavalry on the horizon behind them.

7: Getting money can be a bit rough in the very early game but once you figure out what you're doing you're going to be rolling in coins by the midgame. Personally I think the game should introduce some money sinks, like buying Influence from vassals and using a budgetary system to accelerate construction, development and training. We'll see what the devs come up with

8: Finding companions is dead easy. Finding exactly the companion you want is a bit less so. Fortunately all active potential Companions show up in the Encyclopedia along with their locations so you have the ability to "go shopping" for the skillset you want.

9: Sieges are buggy and laggy, but very fun. One thing to bear in mind is that you're never going to be able to be in total control of what your troops do during a siege, since they're somewhat scripted in order to manage the level of complexity the game is trying to handle. you can however issue some orders, place your archers, order a charge, that kind of thing.

10: Villages have Militia now so if you're understrength, they'll give you a bloody nose. Other than that, it's pretty straightforward and not very difficult

11: Don't know, haven't managed to conquer the whole map yet.
 
I sunk roughly 70-ish hours into my first campaign (give or take due to AFK'ing I removed a few hours) -- I had not a clue what I was doing and took started taking over the map slowly, currently I hold the entire south and I have a bigger army than all the other major factions. If I set my mind to it I could probably take the entire map in 10 hours at this point. Mind you this was my first playthrough of bannerlord and with very little expeirence of warband it was a lot of experimenting.

I started a second playthrough due to a consistent crash when finishing battles with too many troops (which is pretty common seen as I run around with 2000+ armies). Until that is fixed I decided to start a new playthrough.

My early game in my first playthrough (before I became a vassal) was about 12 hours. This time I became a vassal within the hour. If I set my mind to it I expect to be able to start a kingdom and take over the entire map in maybe 30-40 hours or so. Although it mainly depends on what you do, if you rush it, you may be able to do it quickly. This time I spent a lot of time doing tournaments (and got some really good gear through it) along with very easy money (betting full amounts because I know how to exploit the AI in combat now), roughly 1500 per win. In no time I started my first caravan and the money started rolling in.
 
I find building a proper army and training troops to be pretty time consuming and grindy. But the combat is very easy even on the hardest settings so it is pretty easy win against bigger parties with a smaller army.
 
Not as hard as me playing it :wink:

Here's my thoughts playing the current "stable" branch (e1.0.11), I have not tested anything in e1.1.0 but I believe there are a ton of changes.

Leveling up
- Painfully slow, but I still like the system. Most perks aren't implemented yet as far as I can tell.

Building an army
- Easy, go settlement to settlement and recruit troops, I'm able to get max army size in a very reasonable time. I get anywhere between 2-10 soldiers from villages depending on how many they have, as well as my relation with the notables. Also I get various tier troops as well, not just Tier 1 recruits. They seem to replenish quicker too.

Getting renown
- About the same as Warband, maybe even a little faster? This seems good to me, I earn renown at a decent rate fighting and winning battles/sieges.

Getting fiefs
- Difficult, I don't quite understand how all the logic works, but sometimes I'm in the running for a fief, even having majority of the votes to receive it, plunging 100 or 300 influence to pump that margin up higher... only to have the faction leader award it to someone else. I've conquered 5 cities and 8 castles with just my own clan army and I only have 1 castle to my name.

Getting good relation with other lords
- I haven't invested much time with this. Early on in my playthrough when I was letting all the lords go that I defeated I had great reputation with them, but they kept coming back to raid my fiefs every day, so I started executing everyone. I always have negative relation with friendly lords because I vote against them in policies or fief decisions. I believe there might be some charm options that you can do but I haven't tried it.

Combat system
- I like it. Spears in tight formations are god awful, archers are king, shields are really powerful, and horse archers are annoying. I can't say from a multiplayer perspective, however I see many threads expressing discontent and suggested changes for multiplayer combat. I don't quite understand stances, but I notice that my character is sometimes right foot forward, or left foot forward, and it changes how quickly I can attack/block from a direction I think. No idea how to control it.

Getting money/ trading system
- Trading is really lucrative, I actually enjoyed it a lot (Started my current character as a trader), I was able to get money fairly easily starting out, and invested in workshops to keep some passive income generating.

Find companions
- Extremely easy, there's usually 1 or 2 in every city. There's a cap on how many companions you can have though (Determined by Clan Rank, I'm at Rank 4 right now and I can have up to 7)

Conquering castles
- As of right now... fairly easy. I don't even build siege equipment, I just use the ladders. I expect these will become more interesting and challenging as the AI is fleshed out more. Now RECEIVING those castles though if you don't have your own faction... good luck.

Raiding villages
- Way easier than warband, you collect loot as you raid, rather than having to complete the raid to receive any loot.

How long it would take to conquer the whole map
- Still working on that myself =)
 
The Luminary said:
Depends on your playstyle (how often you fight battles vs simulate, spend on trade screens, ect). I'd say about 40-50 hours for me.
Click to expand...

As long as its under 100 rl hours, its inacceptable. Conquering the whole world should be really difficult, something you do as an ultimate challenge, not. If its to easy, it just becomes the final goal of the game and there isn't anything worse for a sandbox game then a final goal.
 
The hardest part is learning combat and ordering your troops around.

The challenge in combat is that you have to learn how to angle your camera to hit things correctly and get your timings down. Also if you don't want to mod in Autoblock, you have to learn how to actually use the camera and learn how to time blocks appropriately. It comes with time but it will be very frustrating at first.

Also ordering your troops in combat is a bit clunky where you have to kind of memorize various combinations of number and F-key usage. Also even when you are using these, often troops don't react that way you want them to. For example, I used the 1 key to select my infantry, then F2 to select facing and then F2 again to order them to face the enemy. However, instead of them facing the bulk of the enemy forces, including the archers firing at them, they instead turned around to face the 3 enemy cavalry units behind them, thus exposing their backs to the enemy archers. Basically you have to learn how to use the keys, then also try to predict how your units will react to the various commands.

After that, it is mostly easy though I am finding out that the game can be quit challenging as far as actually winning.
 
The money situation in the game is very weird. You start out struggling for every denar, and then, boom, you've got more cash than you can spend. Its not as well-tuned as in Warband where you gradually built up a fortune over the course of your playthrough. The riches come all of a sudden.
 
Lord Irontoe said:
The money situation in the game is very weird. You start out struggling for every denar, and then, boom, you've got more cash than you can spend. Its not as well-tuned as in Warband where you gradually built up a fortune over the course of your playthrough. The riches come all of a sudden.
Click to expand...

That really needs to get worked on further. In my opinion it would be best to implement an option to change the economys difficulty. Its way too easy for warband veterans (which many of us are!).
 
Last edited:
A big part of it is the insane price disparities. I got rich having my blacksmith make 2-handed cleavers which for some reason sell for 60,000 denar each even though they're only made of wrought iron. If I make a 1-handed sword using the same components, it sells for about 1,000. The prices are all over the place. You can beat up a lord and score 20k worth of loot and still not get a single worthwhile piece of gear.
 
I've got to say. I've found it, in general, a LOT harder than Warband. I mean, I'm able to make a non-combat optimized char in Warband and still have zero trouble with soloing 5 looters as long as I had a horse or a bow. But this one? Hooboy, not even close. Even with a horse, the change in weapon 'swing arc' and such comparatively has made them much harder. Not to mention their laser guided rock throwing can hit me almost every time even when I'm circling them.

Loot in general seems less valuable too. My best money making early game has mostly been trade routes and tournaments.

Other stuff? I haven't really done much with yet. I keep starting over to try and figure out more stuff or see different character styles in action.

Chargen - very unfriendly. I liked the post CG customization we got in Warband to help fill in gaps or such so I could take some non-optimal story choices to get the background I wanted but still be at least semi-competent with a weapon. Or go all out on weapons but still get some 'smarts' to help.
 
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