Base Bannerlord is better than base Warband

Is vanilla Bannerlord better than vanilla Warband?


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All this talk about "immersion" is a red herring in my opinion. Neither Warband nor Bannerlord have anything resembling what most people call immersion. They are both gameplay focussed games where you are basically forced to rush and grind in order to get anything done, leaving you no time or motivation to think about anything else. Very few interesting stories emerge from the gameplay, none of the characters or stories are interesting, and the worldbuilding is probably the sparsest I've ever seen in an open world game.

Specifically your new dum girlfriend is a horse archer.

>Dopey steppe wife who can hit a moving target from the back of a horse

wtf i love bannerlord now
 
All this talk about "immersion" is a red herring in my opinion. Neither Warband nor Bannerlord have anything resembling what most people call immersion. They are both gameplay focussed games where you are basically forced to rush and grind in order to get anything done, leaving you no time or motivation to think about anything else. Very few interesting stories emerge from the gameplay, none of the characters or stories are interesting, and the worldbuilding is probably the sparsest I've ever seen in an open world game.



>Dopey steppe wife who can hit a moving target from the back of a horse

wtf i love bannerlord now
While I agree with this statement; the reason it's been brought up is people often cite Warband as having much better 'immersion' then bannerlord. When frankly this aspect was extremely weak in both titles.

Bannerlord (like warband) is a combat sim platform; and tbh I don't have a massive issue with that as Mods can provide their own stories.

Nah I was just tilted that night, you are more than welcome to go post over there! More posts the merrier.

You know what - I do totally get that. This forum keeps making me quit it; I don't have the temperament to remain calm long-term. But why are we doing this to ourselves? We like the game - you don't. No one is going to change opinion on that; can't we just all go our separate ways?
 
>Dopey steppe wife who can hit a moving target from the back of a horse

wtf i love bannerlord now
this is what they took from us
brides-story.jpg
 
I can totally AFK the awful late/end game grind of M&B in BL whereas the idiots in WB can't be trusted to finish off a faction with two castles left.
Being able to viably AFK a video game, and win, as a positive just makes you sound like you don't want to play it.
  • Being able to actually siege out a settlement is nice. In WB it was literally impossible.
It's not exactly a common viable option in Bannerlord either, unless you use exploits. Multiple relief doomstacks will show up, or you'll run out of food first, or your stuff will get sieged elsewhere, etc. So this (being able to rarely outright skip siege gameplay by just sitting and waiting) is a very minor pro.
  • Not having to hunt the guild master or village elder in every single new settlement scene is nice. Quick Talk? Even nicer, especially back when scenes took a few minute to load on my laptop.
Having to hunt for nobles (in fact, specifically the clan leader) around the whole map, rather than having them just visit your hall, is Bannerlord's equivalent of this gripe.
  • Bannerlord got rid of the stupid tax skills like prisoner and inventory management. After improvements it is literally impossible to **** your build up in Bannerlord and you can have some builds up and running in under an in-game year.
However, Bannerlord has introduced the new problem of some skills such as Engineering and Charm being far more pointless and (because of learn-by-doing levelling, which I don't actually dislike) also more of a pain in the ass to level than the weakest Warband skills.
  • The factions are better balanced against one another, instead of the snaggle-toothed troop trees of Warband that had almost everyone stampeding towards Swadian Knights or Nord Huscarls.
In terms of troop balance you can't honestly claim Bannerlord as some kind of big upgrade on Warband when the armor makes all combat massively skewed in favour of ranged troops, and that plus bugs makes lance cavalry, spearmen/pikemen, and mercenaries like Hired Blades a total joke. Khan's Guard, Fians and Sharpshooters are the Bannerlord equivalent to Swadian Knights and Nord Huscarls. Overall, the balance between different types of troop was better in Warband, with infantry, cavalry and ranged all playing a more equal role than Bannerlord, and troop tier also definitely making more of a difference. And while the choice was obviously less, the differentiation between factions was greater for the very reason that each faction has something they do clearly well and can't do at all in Warband, but in Bannerlord, every faction can do almost everything, and their strengths and weaknesses are far less distinct. Plus, three factions are literal clones that occupy the center of the map and lower the variety as a result.

We could write an entire list of the problems of each game and spend all year arguing it. It's obviously been done for Bannerlord, for the major to medium-sized issues. Ultimately, neither game has a straight up "better" singleplayer experience, there are too many pros and cons for each. Bannerlord is a sidegrade, and will remain so until it gets significant improvements, which I expect to take another six months or so judging by what TW has accomplished in the last six months.
 
GTA 5 is so much better then GTA 3.

Is that how we should rate games?
Diablo 2 > Diablo 3

Just thought I'd put that out there.

Not all sequels are better.

I'm honestly waiting on mods for proper faction vs faction balance, which will include total overhauls. Bannerlord has no armor and it needs to be changed. Even a slashing saber does significant damage to good armor, and forget about ranged units. It was my main gripe when I first played this last year. What's the point of expensive, heavy armor? What's the point of blunt weapons like maces and warhammers with short reach? Why is expensive armor so susceptible to simple cutting/slashing swords? All you need is a weapon with high cutting damage and you're unstoppable. Armor historically protected best against cutting. You can slash someone in chainmail for a long time with an arming sword or saber and he will get bruised but not suffer any cuts, but in Bannerlord it doesn't do much.

That's one thing Warband clearly did better, and I'm hoping the dell'arte della guerra mod fixes it by shifting the time period to the late middle ages/early renaissance. But even still, good armor in Bannerlord doesn't do all that much.
 
GTA 5 is so much better then GTA 3.

Is that how we should rate games?

How do we rate games then if we can't use their previous entries at least as a reference of quality though? There is more to judge Bannerlord off of, not just against Warband. If we go off of performance alone, Bannerlord fails. If we go off whether there is a long list of bugs or not, Bannerlord certainly takes the cake of "buggy title". What about poorly implemented or entirely lied about/forgotten or "impossible" features, or the total dead-eyed state of the game depth? There's not even proper balancing, in any aspect of the game, from armor to economy. It's all just a mess.
 
Let's just leave it everyone.

MadVader is right, this is obviously just a flame thread - made to amuse the OP.... but it really achieves and contributes nothing at all. It just pisses off a large number of people in the community. This was his intention. (Even if he may try to disingenuously argue that he is just 'stimulating a debate').

Let's not indulge this any further.
 
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Let's just leave it everyone.

MadVader is right, this is obviously just a flame thread - made to amuse the OP.... but it really achieves and contributes nothing at all. It just pisses off a large number of people in the community. This was his intention. (Even if he may try to disingenuously argue that he is just 'stimulating a debate').

Let's not indulge this any further.
Tell me, who is pissed off?
You accuse me of a lot of things there simply because I am so far away from your own opinion. That is not in good style.
 
none of the characters or stories are interesting
Rolf of the Noble and Puissant House of Rolf is a particularly memorable and funny character. Jeremus has been memed to death but also has a fun story. I remember all the companions' stories from Warband. I'm not saying they were the best RPG writing ever, but they were at least as memorable as, say, New Vegas companions.
 
Being able to viably AFK a video game, and win, as a positive just makes you sound like you don't want to play it.
Who actually liked grinding every single settlement in M&B? It is almost zero challenge past a certain point, there is no interesting gameplay involved once no faction (or combination of factions) can meaningfully oppose you and every victory makes you that much more unassailable. If you think fighting the same sieges where you make 0 meaningful decision is interesting, cool.

I sure as hell don't.

It is awful game design and the entire M&B experience would be 100% improved if the game was called when you were more powerful than the AI factions rather than having to paint the map via repetitive sieges. The last few Total War I played did just that, successfully, by having the objectives be three kingdom capitals. Everything revolved around taking them once the late game is declared, which not only gaves a very obtainable set of end goals but also provided a very interesting set of goals in the mid-game as players jockeyed for a better late game position.
It's not exactly a common viable option in Bannerlord either, unless you use exploits. Multiple relief doomstacks will show up, or you'll run out of food first, or your stuff will get sieged elsewhere, etc. So this (being able to rarely outright skip siege gameplay by just sitting and waiting) is a very minor pro.
It is a completely viable option now. This time last year, yeah, it was basically impossible under all but the most favorable of circumstances but that's been fixed. I've demonstrated it.

Player-made doomstacks can reliably (and sometimes effortlessly) beat the AI's doomstacks and the AI generally only fields one or two armies at once. Sure third and fourth armies (and fifth, etc.) armies might form-up and reach you, but they won't be stronger than the first couple and significantly weaker (~30% less power) is typical. If you don't think it is possible, throw me your savegame and I'll record myself successfully sieging down a town.

As for running out of food, the game is ridiculously generous with how much food you can carry -- easily over 100 days for an army of 1100.
q938dYi.png

It takes roughly a season to starve out a settlement, so anything over 30-40 days of food is fine -- enough for the siege itself, along with a healthy buffer in case something goes wrong. And I'm just going to drop an shonen anime-style "this isn't even my true power!" here because if I cared to optimize things that could go up to 300+ days of food -- enough to take on a whole faction worth of town, one after another.
Having to hunt for nobles (in fact, specifically the clan leader) around the whole map, rather than having them just visit your hall, is Bannerlord's equivalent of this gripe.
...Nobles visit your hall in BL. What makes you think they don't? ? And I had to chase down lords in WB all the time, which was infruiating because there were a number of game mechanics that made it more difficult, like the scatter of armies post-siege when you had to talk to them to gain relations from fighting together, or the way character locating barely worked.
However, Bannerlord has introduced the new problem of some skills such as Engineering and Charm being far more pointless and (because of learn-by-doing levelling, which I don't actually dislike) also more of a pain in the ass to level than the weakest Warband skills.
Engineering is certainly weak but Charm is one of the easier skills to level. Just drop full power votes in favor of a different clan and it shoots right up past 150, fast as hell. And BL still avoids that trap of the single optimal character build that WB had.
In terms of troop balance you can't honestly claim Bannerlord as some kind of big upgrade on Warband when the armor makes all combat massively skewed in favour of ranged troops, and that plus bugs makes lance cavalry, spearmen/pikemen, and mercenaries like Hired Blades a total joke. Khan's Guard, Fians and Sharpshooters are the Bannerlord equivalent to Swadian Knights and Nord Huscarls. Overall, the balance between different types of troop was better in Warband, with infantry, cavalry and ranged all playing a more equal role than Bannerlord, and troop tier also definitely making more of a difference. And while the choice was obviously less, the differentiation between factions was greater for the very reason that each faction has something they do clearly well and can't do at all in Warband, but in Bannerlord, every faction can do almost everything, and their strengths and weaknesses are far less distinct. Plus, three factions are literal clones that occupy the center of the map and lower the variety as a result.
Yes, I am making that claim. Khergits had no armored troops and only low-tier infantry in Warband. It made them near useless in certain battles and a complete clownshoe pushover faction for the player who wanted to siege their settlements early on. And because ranged was somewhat weak while armor was strong, Khergits weren't even good in field battles. It was ridiculously unbalanced.

And infantry,cavalry and ranged all playing a more equal role? Are you joking? You could beat the entire game using exclusively Swadian Knights. And I know because I did just that in native. Sure, there was another faction with a very similar troop type that filled the same niche, but ultimately, you had three OP troop types and everyone else was niche or plain busted. Certainly BL hasn't done that much better making actual combined arms a thing in their battles but at this point I doubt many (if any) players care that much.

At least in BL, I have a reason to use infantry some of the time (garrisoning and construction speed for low recruiting/wage cost) and while ranged dominates, every faction has usable ranged troops. Not equal by any means, but still viable. You can still delete whole other armies with massed Sturgian archers compared to, uh, Nord... did they even have archers? (sarcasm)

In the end, for all the differentiation, most players spammed one of the two (or three, if you count Mamluks) best troop types because that's what the game taught them.
 
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Who actually liked grinding every single settlement in M&B? It is almost zero challenge past a certain point, there is no interesting gameplay involved once no faction (or combination of factions) can meaningfully oppose you and every victory makes you that much more unassailable. If you think fighting the same sieges where you make 0 meaningful decision is interesting, cool.
To be fair, lack of endgame content is a common problem with games. Many replace it with grinding, because there's little incentive to do more, as the minority of players that come that far are more forgiving.
Moreover, some like the god-mode grinding and want the game to go on forever. These guys should be deported to the action RPG genre.
It is awful game design and the entire M&B experience would be 100% improved if the game was called when you were more powerful than the AI factions rather than having to paint the map via repetitive sieges. The last few Total War I played did just that, successfully, by having the objectives be three kingdom capitals. Everything revolved around taking them once the late game is declared, which not only gaves a very obtainable set of end goals but also provided a very interesting set of goals in the mid-game as players jockeyed for a better late game position.
Totally agreed and keep proposing this "domination" victory as the main goal of the game. It's such an obvious and easy answer, but instead you hear from Taleworlds devs about "balancing" efforts to artificially prolong the game.
 
Who actually liked grinding every single settlement in M&B? It is almost zero challenge past a certain point, there is no interesting gameplay involved once no faction (or combination of factions) can meaningfully oppose you and every victory makes you that much more unassailable. If you think fighting the same sieges where you make 0 meaningful decision is interesting, cool.

I sure as hell don't.

It is awful game design and the entire M&B experience would be 100% improved if the game was called when you were more powerful than the AI factions rather than having to paint the map via repetitive sieges. The last few Total War I played did just that, successfully, by having the objectives be three kingdom capitals. Everything revolved around taking them once the late game is declared, which not only gaves a very obtainable set of end goals but also provided a very interesting set of goals in the mid-game as players jockeyed for a better late game position.
I agree that lategame M&B is not fun or interesting in both Warband and Bannerlord. But my point is that you can't call it an improvement. Having zero need to play the lategame at all because it has zero challenge (and zero want because it's boring) is not *better* than needing to play the lategame but it being a boring, low-challenge experience. If you can AFK the endgame you are not playing it. If you have no desire to play it then you would just not play it in Warband either. So nothing is improved.
It is a completely viable option now. As for running out of food, the game is ridiculously generous with how much food you can carry -- easily over 100 days for an army of 1100. It takes roughly a season to starve out a settlement
I was listing food as one of multiple things that could go wrong, because yes you can have enough food to manage it, but players aren't always playing perfectly optimally. Did you miss what I said about the enemy sieging another one of your locations while you're busy waiting a season to starve out the settlement? Or the more important point, that starving out a settlement really is just a way of skipping one of the core features of the game? "You get to not fight sieges by sitting and doing literally nothing for long enough"- how is that a glowing endorsement for Bannerlord?
...Nobles visit your hall in BL. What makes you think they don't? ?
In Warband, nobles who wanted to defect would visit your hall and wait to talk to you. Thanks to feasts, it was also easier to find lords and ladies (if looking to get married) gathered in one location. In Bannerlord, every potential defector or wife has to be hunted down across the entire breadth of the world, and they wait in one place much less frequently. And by the time you do chase them down, you might find they have some ridiculously high defection cost and you just wasted your time.
like the scatter of armies post-siege when you had to talk to them to gain relations from fighting together
That relations bonus would hang around until the next time you talked to them and unless you were playing the game like a speedrunner (which I know is a problem of yours) it wasn't crucial to have right that instant. I never even bothered going and hunting down the individual lords because I knew I'd see them at the next feast and get the relations then.
or the way character locating barely worked.
No, I find it actually works better. Warband tells you a prediction of where the person will be heading which was usually fairly accurate and allowed you to head directly to that point, Bannerlord tells you their last known location which can lead you on a wild goose chase of catching up to old reports.
Yes, I am making that claim. Khergits had no armored troops and only low-tier infantry in Warband. It made them near useless in certain battles and a complete clownshoe pushover faction for the player who wanted to siege their settlements early on. And because ranged was somewhat weak while armor was strong, Khergits weren't even good in field battles
Khergits were a weak point in Warband, Sturgians are a weak point in Bannerlord (both in their underwhelming troop tree and in their map situation). So no, you can't claim Bannerlord as a big upgrade on Warband in the balance department.
And infantry,cavalry and ranged all playing a more equal role? Are you joking? You could beat the entire game using exclusively Swadian Knights.
And you could also beat the entire game using exclusively Rhodok Sharpshooters/Sergeants, or Nord Huscarls, or Mamluks, or Vaegir Marksmen. So what?
You can beat Bannerlord using exclusively Khan's Guard, because they're not only amazing horse archers and also amazing melee cavalry with their glaives who can defeat many many times their own number in the field, but also useful as dismounted archers for sieges.
Certainly BL hasn't done that much better making actual combined arms a thing in their battles but at this point I doubt many (if any) players care that much
It's worse. In Warband every faction except Khergits had a dominant top unit of the melee cav, heavy inf, and ranged inf varieties. In Bannerlord two factions (Battania, Khuzaits) have dominant top units of the ranged cav and ranged inf varieties which stand head and shoulders above the other factions.
Also if you're talking about whether players care much, do you think that same group care too much about being able to starve out sieges so they don't have to do them, or being able to AFK a lategame they just wouldn't finish in Warband anyway?
In the end, for all the differentiation, most players spammed one of the two (or three, if you count Mamluks) best troop types because that's what the game taught them.
And the exact same problem is present in Bannerlord, especially now noble troops have become much easier to get with the last few patches. And in some cases, the noble troops are such a joke despite supposedly being elite (Banner Knights) that you go for the T5 regular unit instead (Sharpshooters in Vlandia's case).
 
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GTA 5 is so much better then GTA 3.

Is that how we should rate games?
According to a lot of forum user, yes.

That´s why some game companies can release yearly sequels with some minor improvements and still sell millions of copies.

On the other hand you have Warband - Bannerlord with 10+ years difference and people are saying that Bannerlord is better because it has better graphics/animations.
 
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