If not Bannerlord .......... then what is the current " best MB experience " ?

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It seems no one mentioned Warsword Conquest so I am going to add it.
It is a warhammer overhaul and is still being updated.
 
Viking Conquest is pretty much my perfect version of MB and - years later - is a far superior product to BL.

Alright, time to play Prophesy of Pendor again. See y'all in a couple of months...
Never played it. Honestly y'all have hyped it up for me to the point where I kinda HAVE to.
 
Never played it. Honestly y'all have hyped it up for me to the point where I kinda HAVE to.

It is by far my favorite mod, and I haven't found anything that comes even close in terms of level of polish and sheer quality (not even other games I own). Of course all of that is highly subjective, so your mileage might vary.
 
Bannerpage - the most polished vanilla experience you can get, with lot of QoL and small features added without even noticing them.

Pendor - really immersive but aimed primarily at veteran players who know what they are doing.

Viking Conquest - really improved over vanilla, but you might get sick of shieldwall battles after first couple hundred.

TLD and Perisno have huge fanbase, but couldn't really pull me in, maybe it's just me.
 
EDIT: I totally forgot that I already responded to this thread LOL.

Bannerlord so far is an appealing - looking facade, evidently awaiting modders ( but not TW! ) to develop a building behind it, if they ever can.
So, if Bannerlord is not the current " best MB ( SP ) experience ", what is ?
Could it be VC Reforged, with the Blood Eagle ( 4.2.5 ) mod ?
( Bannerlord is sometimes compared, unfavourably, with VC on these pages )
Or perhaps TLD ?
Haven't seen VC Reforged or Blood Eagle but - in all seriousness - vanilla VC is worlds better than even modded BL.

The troops actually work. The combat is brutal but fair. The story is surprisingly well-written with a bunch of great little vignettes.

I mean... I got to fight in the Battle of Edington alongside Aeflred the Great and defeated the Great Heathen Army. And I did that after eloping with Ragnar Lodbrok's daughter. And then I became King of Wales for some reason.

I can't believe the devs are seriously saying that they think the SP campaign or even mass combat is mostly done, without basic features like working spears or shieldwalls. It's delusional.

I'm still hoping a real studio will make a game like Bannerlord
This.

I spent 3 hours once killing the kraken only for the fight to not end after I killed it, leaving me to have to redo the whole thing.

I deleted the game off my PC after that XD XD
Yeah Battle Brothers is great in general but a lot of the design is clearly autism-influenced.

There's "edge-of-your-seat tactics" difficult and then there's "spend-hours-working-on-spreadsheets" difficult.

Don't get me wrong... I am a giant nerd and I love spreadsheets... but a game like that can only hold my interest so long before it bores the piss out of me.
 
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I've been playing a lot of 'A World of Ice and Fire' recently, and the amount o content and focus on lore is incredible.

It's a mod based off VC so there are additions like proper ship traveling and an engaging storyline (optional). There are a lot of cool events and easter eggs like White Walkers and Valyrian Steel and Wildfire. It was what got me back into M&B and back onto BL and the forums.
 
How is M&B's combat stupid or grindy?
I didn't say combat specifically but off the top of my head, stuff like high-tier armor poofing most of the time in M&B because they couldn't/wouldn't balance the game around full loot. In BB, you can reliably get that armor. Or M&B always having a clearly superior unit type that isn't balanced against anything else in the game world; Warband had Swadian Knights (or Sarranid Mamluks) while Bannerlord has almost any flavor of high-tier archer you care to name. The man-sandwich of WB sieges was about as dumb as it gets.

Grindy is the only way to describe the end-game of M&B; to do a full conquest, you literally have to chew through every single settlement on the map. In Warband, you had to do it against literally respawning hordes of enemies, which made it feel like the worst slog in the world to accomplish. In Bannerlord, they aren't as awful about that but there are a lot more settlements to take. In either case, it gives the impression that actually conquering was less a coherent goal and more of a thought exercise.
 
I didn't say combat specifically but off the top of my head, stuff like high-tier armor poofing most of the time in M&B because they couldn't/wouldn't balance the game around full loot. In BB, you can reliably get that armor. Or M&B always having a clearly superior unit type that isn't balanced against anything else in the game world; Warband had Swadian Knights (or Sarranid Mamluks) while Bannerlord has almost any flavor of high-tier archer you care to name. The man-sandwich of WB sieges was about as dumb as it gets.

Grindy is the only way to describe the end-game of M&B; to do a full conquest, you literally have to chew through every single settlement on the map. In Warband, you had to do it against literally respawning hordes of enemies, which made it feel like the worst slog in the world to accomplish. In Bannerlord, they aren't as awful about that but there are a lot more settlements to take. In either case, it gives the impression that actually conquering was less a coherent goal and more of a thought exercise.
You didn't get my point and neither does your point have anything to do with combat.
 
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Grindy is the only way to describe the end-game of M&B; to do a full conquest, you literally have to chew through every single settlement on the map. In Warband, you had to do it against literally respawning hordes of enemies
If you build the max int female char like I do and have 14 engineer you dunk the AI's head in the toilet with instant siege's. They can spawn in cheat troops all day they still got no fiefs left :razz:
Free husband garrisons to endlessly swap out wounded troops sets and keep going.... the AI be trying to call tech support on you
 
If you build the max int female char like I do and have 14 engineer you dunk the AI's head in the toilet with instant siege's. They can spawn in cheat troops all day they still got no fiefs left :razz:
Free husband garrisons to endlessly swap out wounded troops sets and keep going.... the AI be trying to call tech support on you
Yeah, I did that. I had a skilled-up Engineer, a steady supply of trained troops and it was still grindy completing a world conquest in WB. Although part of that was the mechanic of having a faction's remaining lords slowly pile into their last holdings and sit there, so by time you went to take down the last one or two of their castles, the garrisons were 900+ men or whatever stupid amount they could get up to in there which meant those siege assaults took like 2 hours+ to resolve, each.
 
You didn't get my point and neither does your point have anything to do with combat.
And the post you originally responded to didn't mention combat to begin with:
It is pretty much Mount and Blade with most of the stupid or grindy parts removed, combined with actual good writing and a scope focused on the fun bits.
The word "combat" is not in there.

@Apocal didn't actually say the combat is stupid and grindy - he was talking about the game in general - but I absolutely will say it is.

MB has always has been a grind, but BL just made it much worse. Most of that grind is in campaign when you're doing repetitive tasks for hundreds of hours so your character + companions can git gud at things. Honestly it's a little ridiculous: you have to lead and take part in hundreds of battles in which you personally murder thousands of people over a series of years in order to get combat skills approaching top-tier units that you can upgrade half-naked peasants up to in a few fights.

Again, this was true in vanilla WB but just got worse with BL.

You have to buy and sell millions of GP worth of trade goods in order to become a competent merchant. It's practically impossible to level Leadership or Roguery or Tactics or Medicine or Engineering until the very late-game - while Trade and Charm and Smithing are just brainless grinds. Leadership, for instance, can only practically be leveled by spending actual years of your character's life personally leading armies non-stop. I play at 2x xp and I'm still bored off my ass most of the time I try to make BL fun, even with plenty of mods backing me up.

Finally to the point: BL combat is grindy AF. There are no appreciable tactics because unit AI is much worse than WB and formations are practically not implemented at all. Spearmen don't know how to use pointy sticks. Archers don't know how to form a line. No unit at all knows how to form a shieldwall and - even if they did - they'd just disintegrate into a blob the moment melee starts.

This means that any large combat will be a 1:1 K/D slugfest unless there is a massive advantage in numbers or quality, at which point it becomes a massacre. And with the costs of raising and training and maintaining armies vs the poor rewards, there are no incentives to get into fights that aren't lopsided massacres.... in other words, grinds.

And, of course, the best way to train yourself and your troops is to grind looters because autobattles/arena/tournaments give 1/10 XP. Meaning dozens and dozens of fights at all levels against half-naked peasants with pitchforks... a grind.

This is much worse in BL since the AI and design got dumbed down, but this problem absolutely existed in vanilla WB. It took mods to get working shieldwalls and competent AI and braced spears and sensible armor. That's why VC was the best - it got practically everything right from the jump and mods just made it better.

If you build the max int female char like I do and have 14 engineer you dunk the AI's head in the toilet with instant siege's. They can spawn in cheat troops all day they still got no fiefs left :razz:
Free husband garrisons to endlessly swap out wounded troops sets and keep going.... the AI be trying to call tech support on you

Using instant sieges and husband's cheese troops to rush sieges faster than the infinitely-respawning enemies can infinitely-respawn sounds a lot like grind to me.
 
I'm still hoping a real studio will make a game like Bannerlord

Sorry mate but this is fantasy speaking. Im assuming by "real studio" your talking about the major AAA title producers? Well trust me if they did decide to venture in this niche they would most likely try and recruit the highest level coders as taleworlds as they have an enormous head start in terms of a foundation for a game of this type. I know people here used to dream that the producers of Cyperpunk "would destroy" Taleworlds should they chose to one up them. This simply is not how it works and look how they failed at delivering in their own niche -how in the world are they going to just come in and dominate in a a totally foreign one?

I get the sentiment but really it would be another small indie or solo team that would most likely develop something really creative that could be a contender against Mount and Blade. The AAA guys are overrated imo and most of their games are microtransaction garbage that have ruined plenty of great titles like Battlefields and Rainbow Six
 
And the post you originally responded to didn't mention combat to begin with:
It implicitly did.
The word "combat" is not in there.
It implicitly is for the combat in Battle Brothers is turn-based, therefore it has nothing to with that of M&B, hence my question in response to him claiming that Battle Brothers is "pretty much Mount and Blade with most of the stupid or grindy parts removed" which means -among other things- that M&B's combat is "stupid or grindy".

Having said this, I myself don't mind grind so long as it doesn't involve repeating a boring activity for too many times. Bannerlord fails in this respect for the most part.

As for formations and their use by the AI in Viking Conquest, the AI is utterly incompetent in making any good use of the formations and it is exceptionally easy to exploit this aspect, resulting in cases of, for instance, my a-few-hundred-men-strong army annihilating a thousand or more strong enemy army with single digit casualties on my side. The formations may look cool but the AI is literally better off just charging mindlessly provided that the player is not less competent than the AI.
 
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Sorry mate but this is fantasy speaking. Im assuming by "real studio" your talking about the major AAA title producers? Well trust me if they did decide to venture in this niche they would most likely try and recruit the highest level coders as taleworlds as they have an enormous head start in terms of a foundation for a game of this type. I know people here used to dream that the producers of Cyperpunk "would destroy" Taleworlds should they chose to one up them. This simply is not how it works and look how they failed at delivering in their own niche -how in the world are they going to just come in and dominate in a a totally foreign one?

I get the sentiment but really it would be another small indie or solo team that would most likely develop something really creative that could be a contender against Mount and Blade. The AAA guys are overrated imo and most of their games are microtransaction garbage that have ruined plenty of great titles like Battlefields and Rainbow Six
By "real studio" I imagine @Fate is talking about one that actually develops games instead of molesting digital sheep on top of a giant pile of our money.

Otherwise agreed: I wouldn't trust a AAA dev to compete with TW. At this point, it's clear that modders are better at making MB than TW is... if one could afford to buy a working engine, then they'd blow TW out of the water. That "if" is pretty much implausible, from what I understand.

Hmm... apparently the Brytenwalda team is working on a post-apocalyptic FPS/RPG:

If they were in charge of BL... or even just contracted to fix BL... the game would be worlds better.
 
By "real studio" I imagine @Fate is talking about one that actually develops games instead of molesting digital sheep on top of a giant pile of our money.

Otherwise agreed: I wouldn't trust a AAA dev to compete with TW. At this point, it's clear that modders are better at making MB than TW is... if one could afford to buy a working engine, then they'd blow TW out of the water. That "if" is pretty much implausible, from what I understand.

Hmm... apparently the Brytenwalda team is working on a post-apocalyptic FPS/RPG:

If they were in charge of BL... or even just contracted to fix BL... the game would be worlds better.

Yup i agree that modders using taleworlds engine could easily blow BL outta the water too
 
It implicitly did.

It implicitly is for the combat in Battle Brothers is turn-based, therefore it has nothing to with that of M&B, hence my question in response to him claiming that Battle Brothers is "pretty much Mount and Blade with most of the stupid or grindy parts removed" which means -among other things- that M&B's combat is "stupid or grindy".
Maybe in your head, but not in the real world.

BB is not a combat-only game. It's squad-management + RPG + TB combat. There's less grind because quests are varied and party management is complex and your bros level straightforwardly through combat... not through repetitively doing one task over and over.

In BB, you often fight close battles and lose men that you've grown attached to. Every decision about quests or combat tactics is a life-or-death struggle where the blood of your brothers has a tangible value in gold. Flanking or playing defensive could make or break a battle. Risking your men to mob a knight and stab him to death with daggers to preserve his expensive armor could mean the difference between your men being bloodstains on the grass or starving to death or becoming heroes. Wounded veterans can be rehabilitated - where they're more likely to die in combat - or sent off into retirement, which depletes your pool of experienced fighters.

In MB, you fight nothing but lopsided battles and spend hours grinding looters or grinding smithing or grinding leadership or grinding honor or what-have-you.

And, as I said, mass combat in BL is broken-on-arrival with practically no tactical nuance other than - say - babysitting archers so they stay on high ground and don't get mobbed. In other words: it's a grind.

There is no comparison to the grind of MB/BL vs the grind in BB. It's night and day. I don't know what your problem is.
 
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