SP - General My ideas on how to streamline the new kingdom process

[Userre]

Right now, creating a new kingdom is really difficult in Bannerlord. This is to be expected; there should be a lot of preparing, planning, and investment in order to create a fully functioning effective kingdom that can ward off other kingdoms.

However, I think that this difficulty should scale with how much investment you decide to put in, and should be easier or harder depending on how you go about achieving your goals. Right now, the difficulty in being a king is heavily frontloaded towards the beginning, and easing that transition through features that the player can use with ample investment would help in my opinion.

For one, clan armies need to be implemented. This would allow player characters to train Leadership without being in a kingdom, and furthermore it simply makes sense that if you can manage to run multiple clan parties on the map, that they can group up with you. This would make taking your first fief significantly easier, as you could multiply your force by quite a bit. This would require monetary investment (i.e. creating parties on the map, recruitment costs, and ongoing wage costs), but players should be allowed to invest in other systems in order to make the actual capturing and securing of a kingdom easier. This will be a theme throughout my suggestions.

Secondly, mercenary companies should be easier to hire, with a streamlined process that exists in the Kingdom tab UI. It can be exceptionally tedious and dangerous to roam away from your kingdom to go hire mercenary clans. The entire point of mercenaries is that they have a high monetary cost in exchange for a greater overall fighting force (and better yet, a fighting force that you don't really have to care about all that much). Mercenaries should be usable as a stopgap for new kingdoms to help get past the hardest part.

Third, there should be other means of getting clans to join your kingdom. One of the most difficult parts of creating a new kingdom is getting clans to join in your cause. Here's the changes I'd like to see:

• Allow the ability to guarantee fief acquisition for established clans that you're trying to convince to join your kingdom. Yes, I know there's a perk in Trade. However, I think that perk is mostly amazing because you can buy fiefs from lords. Selling fiefs, or at the very least guaranteeing fiefs for clans as payment for joining your faction makes perfect sense and would make it a lot easier to entice lords without fiefs themselves. This is kind of a no-brainer; most of the time I end up paying them a huge sum and then gifting them a settlement anyways, it would be nice if I could just guarantee a settlement in the barter menu.
• More minor clans should exist in the world that you can convince to join your kingdom. As of now, the only clans that can permanently join your kingdom are major clans already inside of a kingdom. Such minor clans could generate randomly if desired. It shouldn't be too hard to convince these clans to join, but it should require some form of investment, whether that be relations, money, or both.
• The last and potentially very interesting option is to create custom, deprecated clans that exist in the lore. These would exist in every culture, and there wouldn't be many of them. The player would have the ability to restore these clans to their former glory via monetary investment (it takes money to "restart" a big clan so to speak), unique quests, or other unique mechanics.

The important thing here is to allow the player to feel invested in the clans they have in their faction. By allowing players a more active approach in finding and giving home to minor or deprecated clans, I think this would go a long way in improving that invested feeling. It's not so dissimilar to Warband, where most players would inevitably make some of their companions lords in their own right. The feeling of investment was huge when that finally happened, and I'd like to see something similar here in Bannerlord at the clan level.

So those are my main ideas, I'd love to see critical feedback or added suggestions if anyone has any.

 

[Nodice83]

I don't know man... I myself find it too easy compared to Warband. The end game would not make sense at all if it'd become even easier. Mercenary companies are not hard to hire... Selling fiefs have been too OP and was purposely nerfed in the recent updates - it ruined all fun in your late game. Your assumptions are completely different than mine. I do not say all you write is wrong, but I guess you should play more and confront this post with your future experience in-game, your future self.

 

[Userre]

I don't know man... I myself find it too easy compared to Warband. The end game would not make sense at all if it'd become even easier. Mercenary companies are not hard to hire... Selling fiefs have been too OP and was purposely nerfed in the recent updates - it ruined all fun in your late game. Your assumptions are completely different than mine. I do not say all you write is wrong, but I guess you should play more and confront this post with your future experience in-game, your future self.

For context, I have around 1100 hours in Warband and 800 hours in Bannerlord.

I don't disagree that creating a kingdom can be easy, but you have to take into account the incredible bias that players like you and I have. Hundreds, even thousands of hours playing Warband and Bannerlord have taught us to minmax and prepare in such a way that starting a new kingdom is never hard.

I'll just gather a party of fully noble units at tier 6 and take whatever I want with a fat 1 million denars, fully married clanmates, 4 parties on the map, all my relations with the clans I want at 100, and plenty of money to convince them to join.

You can make anything easy in Bannerlord, same as Warband, but my point is more about addressing the difficulty spike that creating a new kingdom has, and how that can be eased with features that allow for additional investment from the player (much like how we all already invest in features, monetarily, socially, and militarily).

I think the late game should be more challenging than it is. I think the kingdom creation difficulty curve currently trends downward from start to finish, where it should really trend upwards. I didn't get into ideas for how to make late game more difficult because that's not the theme of the post, but I do think that as you expand to be a greater power in Calradia, difficulty should increase along with that. Warband had a neat feature where kingdoms would declare war to curb other factions' power, and I think Bannerlord could use a feature like that.

 

[Nodice83]

I don't disagree that creating a kingdom can be easy, but you have to take into account the incredible bias that players like you and I have. Hundreds, even thousands of hours playing Warband and Bannerlord have taught us to minmax and prepare in such a way that starting a new kingdom is never hard.

I must disagree, EUIV, HOI4, and CK2/3 are min-max-centered nowhere to be compared with M&B. Even though, what is wrong with it?

I'll just gather a party of fully noble units at tier 6 and take whatever I want with a fat 1 million denars, fully married clanmates, 4 parties on the map, all my relations with the clans I want at 100, and plenty of money to convince them to join.

Again, you want them to betray their current liege, that's a prize I am willing to pay.

You can make anything easy in Bannerlord, same as Warband, but my point is more about addressing the difficulty spike that creating a new kingdom has, and how that can be eased with features that allow for additional investment from the player (much like how we all already invest in features, monetarily, socially, and militarily).

I think the late game should be more challenging than it is. I think the kingdom creation difficulty curve currently trends downward from start to finish, where it should really trend upwards. I didn't get into ideas for how to make late game more difficult because that's not the theme of the post, but I do think that as you expand to be a greater power in Calradia, difficulty should increase along with that. Warband had a neat feature where kingdoms would declare war to curb other factions' power, and I think Bannerlord could use a feature like that.

If there is something that player's kingdom mechanic requires is IMO support from extended diplomacy features. This can make the game equally balanced and challenging in all its stages.