I want to be as respectful as I can to the devs. I really love a lot of the new features in Bannerlord like the army formation mechanic and the fact that the AI doesn't cheat (much). I kinda don't give an eff consciosly that the game looks gorgeous because I have no taste, but maybe my lizard brain likes it.
But damn is pretty much everything but the combat broken as all hell in this goat rodeo. I understand that the devs have game-breaking crashes to fix first but damn does it annoy me that my #1 gripe isn't even on the Known Issues list.
So here are my observations of everything that's completely broken and bugging me - not in like a "tee hee we made a whoopsie" way but in a "this has clearly undergone no playtesting at all." These are just my gripes and I'm not knocking the game. Just venting my frustration and warning other players so you don't get blindsided.
1) Personality traits are bugged so that any increase to them actually resets your levels to zero:
I'm not kidding. This is a real thing. I used console cheats to give me my damn personality traits back and then, after earning towards increasing any of them, they'd immediately disappear.
2) Towns starve with maddening speed:
There's something janky about the market mechanics where the slightest whiff of war will send prosperous towns into a starvation death spiral which will annihilate your garrison (as in your actual owned units, not to mention militia troops). There's no way to prevent this (by, say, loading up your stash with grain).
3) Every war quickly descends into endless stupid doomstacks of recruits:
The AI lords almost never tactically retreat, absolutely never sacrifice soldiers to retreat, get into way too many fights they obviously can't win and can't negotiate for their own release. They also escape from parties and dungeons with ridiculous speed: I've had lords escape from dungeons literally the day after I capped them. There's no actually working mechanic for training, so it seems the only way for them to level troops is to win stupid 50-50 fights which kill 80% of their armies anyway. Add to that the fact that autobattle kills Tier 4-6 troops at seemingly the same rate as regulars. Also, on paper, Medicine does basically nothing (I'm not sure about that though because I've seen solid survival rates though it might just be my mind).
4) Some skills are effectively impossible to level, which can make it impossible to level the character or companions for more focus/ability points:
I'm looking squarely at leadership and engineering and combat skills. I made the apparently boneheaded mistake of putting points into Leadership, One-handed, Polearm and Engineering and Trade at character creation... which mean that I can't level combat beyond peaseant-level without getting into bazillions of life-or-death fights and getting more confirmed kills than Chris Kyle dozens of times over. There is no training mechanic so your only option is to dive headlong into grinding stupid.
I also can't level Leadership despite keeping Morale sky-high all the time (which is also partly impossible when you don't have the Leadership morale bonus to begin with) or leading massive armies for weeks on end. And when I say "leading armies" I mean the army mechanic you have to be in a kingdom to use - not simply having a large party, which makes it impossible to level early on, which is maddening since I had hundreds of points of learning limit from having 5 focus points in there from my first couple levels. You can't level Engineering without being in more sieges than Alexander the Great and there's no scenario where catapults etc are viable unless you've whittled down an enemy nation to 1 stronghold + you have a couple weeks to kill with nothing better to do - if you do... congratulations you got like 2 Eng points.
Fun fact: It's not worth getting a surgeon if your learning limit is over 80. All of the medic companions I've found have had like 0-2 intelligence, so it's impossible to level them beyond that. WTF? Why can't we get good medics and train them up?
And Trade... good God Trade... I wish I spent a couple in-game years leveling this crap skill before going Noble. There's literally no way to level it at all except by buying low and selling high while NOT SAVING AND LOADING EVER. Yes. Save/load resets your "price bought" level every single time - so you have to go directly from town to town buying and selling crap and hope to God there's nothing distracting you while you grind. This has happened other times too and I don't know what triggers it. The only times where I've leveled it well have been when I've bought thousands of cheap goods at rock-bottom prices and immediately sold them at sky-high prices - because only the cheap goods maintain their pricing when you start selling them. I've never leveled Trading while selling Velvet, Silver, Jewelry etc. - only with grain, cotton and flax. No matter how in-demand expensive goods are or how long the shortage has been, selling 1 piece drops the price ridiculously. And, again, you can't save or load or adjust your scarf or the profit calculation resets. And, because it all depends on profit, your trade penalty from having low skill makes it harder to level the skill up.
And don't get me started on Smithing. The only way to level up Ira (the way her stats are laid out make it impossible for her to get enough skill ups to level) is to grind Smithing - it's the only skill where she has enough learning limit to trigger a level-up. Apparently even with the exhaustion mechanic modded out, people report spending multiple in-game hours leveling this trash thing... and even at max level you don't have access to half of the options. WITH the mechanic still in... you're looking at spending massive numbers of in-game years on this trash. Empires are formed and die in the time it takes to git gud at making a pointy stick. That may be sort of realistic but we didn't pay $50 for a farming simulator.
5) Inheritance mechanics make me cry tears of blood:
So Rhagaea is looking for a husband for Ira to continue her dynasty and rule the Empire blah blah blah? Nope. As soon as you marry a member of a ruling clan, that member leaves that clan and joins yours and becomes ineligible for succession. I used console commands to kill Rhagaea, then every single member of the Pethros Clan and then every single noble in the Southern Empire... and neither I nor Ira inherited jack. Apparently on ruling clan death the clan with the highest influence takes over... as long as that clan isn't yours. When you kill everybody, then apparently one of the dead nobles gets appointed faction leader anyway and it seems even dead clans still get to vote in kingdom debates.
WHY? I mean seriously... if you can start your own kingdom, why can't you inherit one even as a Tier 4-5 clan with the highest influence? If the tier 3 AI clans can inherit, why can't you if you're married to the EMPEROR'S DAUGHTER?
But damn is pretty much everything but the combat broken as all hell in this goat rodeo. I understand that the devs have game-breaking crashes to fix first but damn does it annoy me that my #1 gripe isn't even on the Known Issues list.
So here are my observations of everything that's completely broken and bugging me - not in like a "tee hee we made a whoopsie" way but in a "this has clearly undergone no playtesting at all." These are just my gripes and I'm not knocking the game. Just venting my frustration and warning other players so you don't get blindsided.
1) Personality traits are bugged so that any increase to them actually resets your levels to zero:
I'm not kidding. This is a real thing. I used console cheats to give me my damn personality traits back and then, after earning towards increasing any of them, they'd immediately disappear.
2) Towns starve with maddening speed:
There's something janky about the market mechanics where the slightest whiff of war will send prosperous towns into a starvation death spiral which will annihilate your garrison (as in your actual owned units, not to mention militia troops). There's no way to prevent this (by, say, loading up your stash with grain).
3) Every war quickly descends into endless stupid doomstacks of recruits:
The AI lords almost never tactically retreat, absolutely never sacrifice soldiers to retreat, get into way too many fights they obviously can't win and can't negotiate for their own release. They also escape from parties and dungeons with ridiculous speed: I've had lords escape from dungeons literally the day after I capped them. There's no actually working mechanic for training, so it seems the only way for them to level troops is to win stupid 50-50 fights which kill 80% of their armies anyway. Add to that the fact that autobattle kills Tier 4-6 troops at seemingly the same rate as regulars. Also, on paper, Medicine does basically nothing (I'm not sure about that though because I've seen solid survival rates though it might just be my mind).
4) Some skills are effectively impossible to level, which can make it impossible to level the character or companions for more focus/ability points:
I'm looking squarely at leadership and engineering and combat skills. I made the apparently boneheaded mistake of putting points into Leadership, One-handed, Polearm and Engineering and Trade at character creation... which mean that I can't level combat beyond peaseant-level without getting into bazillions of life-or-death fights and getting more confirmed kills than Chris Kyle dozens of times over. There is no training mechanic so your only option is to dive headlong into grinding stupid.
I also can't level Leadership despite keeping Morale sky-high all the time (which is also partly impossible when you don't have the Leadership morale bonus to begin with) or leading massive armies for weeks on end. And when I say "leading armies" I mean the army mechanic you have to be in a kingdom to use - not simply having a large party, which makes it impossible to level early on, which is maddening since I had hundreds of points of learning limit from having 5 focus points in there from my first couple levels. You can't level Engineering without being in more sieges than Alexander the Great and there's no scenario where catapults etc are viable unless you've whittled down an enemy nation to 1 stronghold + you have a couple weeks to kill with nothing better to do - if you do... congratulations you got like 2 Eng points.
Fun fact: It's not worth getting a surgeon if your learning limit is over 80. All of the medic companions I've found have had like 0-2 intelligence, so it's impossible to level them beyond that. WTF? Why can't we get good medics and train them up?
And Trade... good God Trade... I wish I spent a couple in-game years leveling this crap skill before going Noble. There's literally no way to level it at all except by buying low and selling high while NOT SAVING AND LOADING EVER. Yes. Save/load resets your "price bought" level every single time - so you have to go directly from town to town buying and selling crap and hope to God there's nothing distracting you while you grind. This has happened other times too and I don't know what triggers it. The only times where I've leveled it well have been when I've bought thousands of cheap goods at rock-bottom prices and immediately sold them at sky-high prices - because only the cheap goods maintain their pricing when you start selling them. I've never leveled Trading while selling Velvet, Silver, Jewelry etc. - only with grain, cotton and flax. No matter how in-demand expensive goods are or how long the shortage has been, selling 1 piece drops the price ridiculously. And, again, you can't save or load or adjust your scarf or the profit calculation resets. And, because it all depends on profit, your trade penalty from having low skill makes it harder to level the skill up.
And don't get me started on Smithing. The only way to level up Ira (the way her stats are laid out make it impossible for her to get enough skill ups to level) is to grind Smithing - it's the only skill where she has enough learning limit to trigger a level-up. Apparently even with the exhaustion mechanic modded out, people report spending multiple in-game hours leveling this trash thing... and even at max level you don't have access to half of the options. WITH the mechanic still in... you're looking at spending massive numbers of in-game years on this trash. Empires are formed and die in the time it takes to git gud at making a pointy stick. That may be sort of realistic but we didn't pay $50 for a farming simulator.
5) Inheritance mechanics make me cry tears of blood:
So Rhagaea is looking for a husband for Ira to continue her dynasty and rule the Empire blah blah blah? Nope. As soon as you marry a member of a ruling clan, that member leaves that clan and joins yours and becomes ineligible for succession. I used console commands to kill Rhagaea, then every single member of the Pethros Clan and then every single noble in the Southern Empire... and neither I nor Ira inherited jack. Apparently on ruling clan death the clan with the highest influence takes over... as long as that clan isn't yours. When you kill everybody, then apparently one of the dead nobles gets appointed faction leader anyway and it seems even dead clans still get to vote in kingdom debates.
WHY? I mean seriously... if you can start your own kingdom, why can't you inherit one even as a Tier 4-5 clan with the highest influence? If the tier 3 AI clans can inherit, why can't you if you're married to the EMPEROR'S DAUGHTER?
Last edited: