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I have the same issue, very frustrating.

The entire game is too easy currently, you have maybe a few challenging moments in the early game and then it's just grinding it out from there. Also the fact that there is no real endgame except just running around and steamrolling the map.

Now you can up the challenge a litttle with mods and by giving yourself thematic limitations and so on, but you should also be able to simply play the game as well as you can and have a decent challenge throughout the game on hardest difficulty.

The combat itself is also capped at a too low level, so the player is a bit too much of a superhero. Best units and lords should be much much harder to fight. Now you can cheesekill so much and again have to artificially limit yourself to avoid deciding battles on your own.

Economic balance is out of whack with fiefs being more of a vanity project than a main source of income and resources, even fully developed they are nowhere close to just doing an easy battle and selling the loot. And then you have to actively avoid cheesing smithing of course if you don't want unlimited money.

Another thing that makes the game too easy is the way you can farm relationship by not taking prisoners, this is the same problem that warband had where you always become best friends with enemy lords rather than your allies. And then once you make a kingdom you have a bunch of maxed out relations to farm for vassals.

So many problems like that.

Another one that bugs me is how it's always best to be in war with your own culture so you can get penalty free fiefs, so there is never an incentive to be battanian fighting for battania and so on. Needs a rework so it makes sense to join your own faction.

Hopefully we see some of these weirdnesses ironed out and the challenge at bannerlord significantly increased. Or mods will fix it I guess, I like RBM a lot but it currently just makes the game better not harder.

When patches are big and intrusive enough to break mods, but at the same time don't add a lot in terms of modding possibility and QoL changes for modders, it's no wonder that modders get burned out quickly.

The ideal state for modding is a stable base game that no longer has intrusive updates to the fundamental systems, and where patches are mostly bug fixes and content rather than mechanics and code changes. You can have the rare mod breaking update if it also comes with some big new interesting mechanic that modders can play with, so there's a reward for the effort of keeping up, but it shouldn't happen often.

This is the problem with these very long EA periods and unfinished releases, a lot of modders burn out on the game before it reaches a good state for modding. The ambitious TC teams that were planning to make that awesome big mod gets tired of waiting or their team drifts apart etc.

I'm so incredibly grateful for the RBM team and others who keep up the most essential mods for making the game worth playing, it's gotta be so frustrating but it's thanks to them that I don't regret buying BL.

I agree that perk should be removed.

Instead there should be several perks in the bow tree where you choose between specialising in foot or horse archery, and a finished maxed out build should give enough advantages in terms of accuracy, speed and damage to the foot archer to be balanced against the mobility advantage of a horse.

For melee builds I feel like being on foot is already pretty good if you are skilled at blocking and kicking etc. A dedicated 2H or polearm + athletics build can rack up kills extremely fast and carry the infantry fight. You can't solo cheese armies the way you can with a horse of course.

This reminds me of the old wizardry games (6 and 7) where you typed in your questions and got answers, it was obviously very primitive and based on keywords that triggering responses from a database, nothing procedural, but each character had a lot of unique possible responses fitting their personality so it was still quite immersive. You could ask all sorts of things and get answers, it wasn't limited to just the story relevant answers or generic replies but you could ask things like who their friends were and what they like to do etc.

It's actually weird to me that this hasn't been picked up in newer games, I hope the AI chats like this revive that type of system.

Yeah, imo voice acting only works when you have a story driven game and a massive budget to minimise repetition. It's just the wrong type of game for this.

The worst thing about it IMO is that it hampers TW:s ability to diversify the dialogue in the future. Having more varied procedurally generated greetings would be awesome but now that will only be a possibility through mods since TW is going to feel like there must be audio for every variant of the greetings. Not good.

TW please understand that what is missing from the game is depth. It doesn't matter if the dialogue is voiced if there is no sense of meaning or uniqueness to the characters you meet. The problem is that every character says the same lines and offers the same lack of gameplay incentives to talk, voiced greetings makes this problem worse rather than better.

You need to implement gameplay incentives to go into villages and towns and talk to the inhabitants, there needs to be interesting things that can happen when you do so. You also need the lords to have personalities and different things that dialogues can lead to. Relationships needs to feel like more than a number. Come on you are an amazing bunch of talent, you can do it if you want to!

Still having the red eyes bug. Gpu is a 5700xt

Late game definitely needs more content.

But it's also way to easy, playing on bannerlord once you are leveled and have elite troops you run around like a superhero capturing everything with minimal losses while neither the enemy vassals or your own manage to accomplish anything. It often feels pointless to make armies too since you can easily defeat huge armies on your own. A combination of exploitable troop balance issues, incredibly weak AI, broken economy and the ability to kill a huge number of enemies on your own.

I'm glad the devs are responding a bit here but honestly the evasiveness around this issue is super weird.

The problem is clearly non trivial and very clear cut, as in armour literally not making a difference in many cases like shown in the videos. TW already released a game in which armour worked with warband, so they know what working armour looks like. How is it some super complicated thing that requires lots of testing and development etc?

I think doing so might be less straightforward than it seems, especially if they already have their own plans for those areas of the game.

Personally I think making the game as open to modding as possible and as stable and optimized as possible is much more important than integrating modded features into the game. I don't mind playing the game with a bunch of mods if updates stop breaking them.

Core systemic features like ai behaviour, physics, pathfinding and so forth are the things that must be polished and advanced because those things aren't easy to mod. Those are also the things that are currently causing the most problems imo. I want them to put the priorities on those aspects if there is any question of resource priorities involved.

Balancing is also important I think, because even if that's easy to mod bad vanilla balance means modders don't have a good baseline to start from, and it also leads to a situation where multiplayer and singleplayer combat feels too different which isn't good. So I think looking at vanilla balance, especially missiles and armour, and getting those right before release should also be more important than features that mods can fulfill anyways.

Also other mod friendly games don't do this either, for example you don't see rimworld taking in the vanilla expanded mods as official even though many people consider them direct upgrades to the game. There is probably a reason for that even if I don't know exactly what it is.

I would say overall TW has worked with modders more than most devs, even if there are lots of issues. Just looking at the mod based versions of warband VQ and so forth is a pretty unusual thing to happen in game development.

Csatádi said:

And what's the gain? He's a powerful gang leader. If I get a weak gang leader instead the quality of their troop slot will drop.
Gangs have no visible effect on towns.

Click to expand...

I think the whole Rougery portion the game is just unfinished or not fleshed out, this seems to be true of many aspect of the game and it's unclear how much of it will be.

There are already good mods that flesh out gangs and crime though, probably more than TW ever will, so I recommend playing with them if you want that experience.

I find this quite annoying too.

I'm not really annoyed that the former ruling clan keeps trying to reclaim/restart their kingdom for some time, that part makes sense to me. But I'm annoyed that there is no reasonable way for the player to resolve the situation.

A quick fix could be that executing the king of a faction that has no fiefs, are at war with you and only one clan left doesn't carry any relationship penalties except for with that clan. And doing so ends that kingdom and turns the clan into a "normal" clan that will join one of the remaining factions. Alternativly captuing all the lords of a fiefless faction could lead to a final surrender ending the faction.

In any case there needs to be some kind of resolution to this issue, could be done in lots of ways but the way it is now is bad.

The worst thing about is how you can "lose" the war against those destroyed factions because you can't be bothered to chase their little 20man party around the map over and over, and you end up having to pay tribute from war exhaustion. That just makes absolutely no sense.

Yes I definitely think it should be removed as a player/companion skill. It just doesn't fit, it's completely unbelievable. Especially now that it's the easiest way to make money to a degree that feels like a cheat.

However I like the weapon customisation system, and I think it should be converted to a very expensive service that you can buy from the smith. It should be a "bad deal" economically compared to the normal weapons just like specialised custom items are in real life.

Perhaps the weapon part tiers are unlocked by clan tier simulating that the smith won't make the good stuff for just anyone, and the absolute most luxurious parts might even be reserved for kings/queens.

Alternatively there could be quest lines to unlock better smiths or something like that.

To say that it's ok to leave a badly fitting and exploitable feature like this in the game because "you can choose not to use it" sounds ridiculous to me, the vanilla experience should only have features that fit well and aren't exploitable.

Very nice patch, here are some feedback and requests.

Ambience changes for taverns etc.
Ok, that's nice. But the problem is that it's more of the same "wax cabinet" style content where an animation or behaviour is repeated indefinitely on the same place. I still feel like I'm in a museum rather than a town/tavern/village and so forth. People should come and go in the tavern, the barmaid should actually go and get my drink and bring it, it should feel like people have lives that they live, things should be happening. I was hoping this type of stuff was a placeholder and that civilians would become more dynamic and interactive down the line, but when more in the same style is added it seems like it's gonna be the same just with more "dolls" added doing some more loops. It's a little disappointing.

Battle system
Like it a lot. Needs some quality of life improvements but very promising.

Requests
One thing I'd really like to be able to do is prioritise the groups by troop tier, so I can put elite units in one group and rookies of the same type in another. It would also be nice to be able to access it outside of battles to set up the formations and captains and save it whenever you like.
I really want to be able to tell my units which enemy unit to attack or fire at (or maybe already possible but I missed how?). Another nice thing would be the ability to tell your captains/formations what general approach they should use when I delegate command to them, like aggressive/defensive/skirmish/flank or something like that. Another small request is that infantry with bracable spears should brace for incoming cavalry even if not set to hold fire.

Sieges
Great fixes. Looking forward to further improvements here.

My biggest issue with sieges was actually not the dysfunctional towers but rather the weird AI behaviour where units look like they are magnetically pulled towards their destinations in a really strange way. Of course they should go to reinforce different positions but if a soldier gets close to enemies they should stop and fight back or help friends in combat before moving on. In regular battles if I attack an enemy on it's way to form up it will react individually and fight me in a way that feels pretty natural, you need to replicate that in sieges. Things just feel a bit too scripted and like soldiers don't stop to consider the situation around them at all.

Speaking of that, another issue that happens in both battles and sieges but more in sieges is the way soldiers behave when getting crowded, and this was the same in warband. It just breaks apart and doesn't look real anymore when they start wobbling and bouncing around like crazy. There needs to be a more believable interaction and behaviour between bodies that get crowded, and ideally they should try to make a bit more space for each other before rushing in rather than everyone looking like they don't even know the others are in the way.

I'm glad archery is being looked at a bit, high tier archers are still very overpowered compared to other elite units but yeah. I still feel like I need to use RBM or Drastic battle to make the balance, armours, encumbrance etc make sense.

Addressing the broken smithing economy and overpriced equipment is nice. The rest of the economy is still very much in need of work though, workshops, caravans, trading and fief economy still seem very weak compared to just fighting, selling loot and ransoming prisoners which doesn't make sense. Getting your first fief should be a paradigmatic shift in your clans economy, it should be the gateway to another level of warfare and involvement in the kingdom but it doesn't feel that way at all.

That would be great, but there's also the problem that towns and taverns are like wax cabinettes where the people/NPCs just stand around like dolls or repeat the same movement. I feel like more scenery is pretty meaningless as long as the civilians of the game world world don't feel alive.

But yes of course each town should have it's own tavern, and there should be a reason to roam the cities, and interactions with NPC on the street and elsewhere should feel meaningful so there is a point to making contact. And so on. All of the RPG elements are seemingly in a skeleton state.

I'm not expecting something revolutionary, but cities feeling lively has been done before. If you look at games like Oblivion you have the citizens with daily routines and their own interests so if you asked them what they were doing they answer something relevant and so forth. It's was rudimentary and simple and you can argue that much of it wasn't all that relevant for the player, but it still does a lot for immersion. Bannerlord can have something much simpler obviously since it's not that kind of RPG, but at least talking to townsfolk or patrons of the taverns should not feel like talking to robots without aim or purpose.

Is it a priority? I guess not, because even lords and companions currently share the same problem of feeling like simple robots without variance or personality, so those more important characters are obviously a higher priority than making all the other people lifelike.

It seems like Taleworlds want's all of that stuff to be procedural, as can bee seen with the approach to companions. That can be done, just look at the pawns and relationships in a game like Rimworld that are all generated and it works great, but that is a game completely dedicated to being a storytelling engine and that takes some doing. I don't think taleworlds can do that, so I think they should go back old fashioned handcrafting of the personalities and backstories of companions and lords. I mean the Warband companions and lord felt pretty good compared to Bannerlords.

It all contributes to the feeling that Bannerlord is a pretty engine with nice scenery and a good combat system, but the more you play the more empty the world feels. It's a damn shame, because while mods can fix a lot of things it's not easy to fix fundamental AI issues like the general model for NPC behaviour.

As the game currently is I never want to go into taverns or towns because it's just depressing, so I use the menus for everything as much as possible. That shouldn't be the case.