Gear, gold, and other things

[Foohy]

Hello everyone. Before we start I do realize that this may have been brought up before, but let's be real, I can't be bothered to search through hundreds of threads just so I can give my 2 cents on the matter.

I have a few suggestions based on my experience playing the game so far. Each point is directly or indirectly linked to the next, so I will try my best to order them this way.

For the TL;DR people, I have underlined the basic points that I want to get across in each category

Let's first talk about troops.

Your ultimate goal is obviously to create a kingdom and rule over the continent, so we have to create an army.​

Leveling up your troops is unreasonably hard, as in annoying, not difficult. Your options are to fight bandits across the map, declaring an independent war so you can fight lords, join a faction so you can fight enemy lords without having to fight the war alone, or level up your Leadership to get some skills similar to "Trainer" in Warband. I will give my opinion on these options one by one.​

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Bandits​

Bandits are by far the easiest way to level up your troops. The issue is that, while they are not hard to find, they are definitely hard to catch up to. You likely have a larger army and ambitions to siege some fiefs in order to create your kingdom, but having a large army makes you slower on the map compared to bandits, which literally makes it impossible to catch up to them. So at a certain point, trying to catch looters is out of the question, and you are stuck with a 100+ army with mostly recruits that you cannot level up.​

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Declaring independent war​

Ok so bandits are out of the question now, as they are too fast to catch up to with your big army. To hell with them, they didn't give great XP to begin with.​

We need to fight better troops to level up our army, so the obvious option seems to be to fight lords. The thing is, if we fight a lord without any kind of support to fight the war that follows after is basically suicide. Plus the lords have much better trained troops than your 80% recruit army, so unless you want to take the risk and screw yourself over in the long run, this option is out of the question.​

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Joining a faction to fight their wars​

At least this time you have the support of a whole faction. However, you get no immediate fiefs when you join a faction, you get no request to join an army to go to war. You do get a notification that an army has been assembled somewhere by your faction but sometimes you can't get there in time and the army already left by the time you do. But the thing that is the biggest no-no to this option is that you cannot control your own troops in armies, you hand them over to the army leader and maybe you get to control a group of 20 troops. This is not fun, and A LOT of your troops die because of the AI controlling them instead of you. So you just wasted time leveling up your troops, as well as upgrading them, just to have the AI get them killed for you.​

Why not fight the lords alone instead of joining armies so you can control your troops? Because you have an army of mostly recruits, that's why.​

Also, not a secret, but a faction always steamrolls the map in the first year, so you would want to avoid helping anyone out if you want to start your kingdom later on.​

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Leadership​

I will briefly touch on this one, but leveling this skill up is really slow and dumb, but it is the only option I have found to PASSIVELY level up your troops. I have won many battles, have pretty much every kind of food available for my army, and the morale of the troops is barely rising, thus making this skill very slow to level up. Your other options are to raise armies, for which you need armies to begin with.​

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As you can see these points can be, to some extent, linked together in a terrible circlejerk that never ends, making raising an army a serious pain.

My suggestion would be to:

• revisit the Leadership skill or make high morale actually achievable
• bigger bandit parties on the map and lower their speed/raise our speed in the early stages of our army
• let us control our armies when fighting with allies

Let's talk gear and gold

Oh boy, now if this isn't busted I don't know what is.​

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You might remember how Warband had stat requirements in order to wear certain types of gear. If you wanna use a good bow you need to level up that agility boi. It was fair and most importantly, it made perfect sense. To some degree, it is the same in Bannerlord, at least for bows and horses. Not sure why you had to give up the STR,AGI,INT,CHA system in Bannerlord, but that's a different issue.​

The only thing stopping you from wearing the best armor in both games is your wealth. In Warband that wasn't an issue, as money was not too easy to come by, but not too hard to come by at a certain point. Warband had great pacing when it came to wealth, you would get a lot of wealth at a point where you felt like you should indeed be able to get that wealth.​

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Not in Bannerlord tho! I have tested trading yesterday, and started from scratch.​

In around 10 hours of playtime of only trading and doing a few tournaments at the beginning to get me started, I have managed to amass SO MUCH WEALTH that I can literally just buy a kingdom and the best armor for me and all my companions in order for them to defend their caravans better. In 10 hours I managed to raise 2mil gold. At the in-game time, the most prosperous city had 10.000 prosperity, which I bought for 550k. Average prosperity cities around ~5000 give or take cost about 200k to buy. Daily gold change AT LEAST 15.000 gold, which are rookie numbers.​

So to link it to the Troops section, the most reasonable way to start a kingdom, is to buy it.​

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The only fighting I have done in this game is through tournaments and a couple of looters here and there, but I was decked out in the best gear money can buy, without ANY kind of penalty for not leveling up my combat skills.​

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Since the wealth pacing in Bannerlord is really bad, I would seriously recommend:

• add stat requirements for armor
• seirously nerf trading and caravans
• raise the price of gear
• give bartering fiefs more requirements, such as having a good relationship with the lord

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[Kreu2009]

but having a large army makes you slower on the map compared to bandits, which literally makes it impossible to catch up to them.

You just need to have enough horses. Even if your army is ten times bigger than the bandit army, if you have enough horses you can still catch them.
My problem is that hunting bandits to level up troops simply isn't fun.

My suggestion to this topic:

https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php?threads/to-big-focus-on-leveling-your-troops.421646/

you cannot control your own troops in armies

In a battle you always have controll over your soldiers as far as i know. Are you sure your army leader gets controll over your men?
I normally never join AI controlled armys. I always create armys.

You might remember how Warband had stat requirements in order to wear certain types of gear. If you wanna use a good bow you need to level up that agility boi. It was fair and most importantly, it made perfect sense. To some degree, it is the same in Bannerlord, at least for bows and horses. Not sure why you had to give up the STR,AGI,INT,CHA system in Bannerlord, but that's a different issue.The only thing stopping you from wearing the best armor in both games is your wealth. In Warband that wasn't an issue, as money was not too easy to come by, but not too hard to come by at a certain point. Warband had great pacing when it came to wealth, you would get a lot of wealth at a point where you felt like you should indeed be able to get that wealth.Not in Bannerlord tho! I have tested trading yesterday, and started from scratch.In around 10 hours of playtime of only trading and doing a few tournaments at the beginning to get me started, I have managed to amass SO MUCH WEALTH that I can literally just buy a kingdom and the best armor for me and all my companions in order for them to defend their caravans better. In 10 hours I managed to raise 2mil gold. At the in-game time, the most prosperous city had 10.000 prosperity, which I bought for 550k. Average prosperity cities around ~5000 give or take cost about 200k to buy. Daily gold change AT LEAST 15.000 gold, which are rookie numbers.So to link it to the Troops section, the most reasonable way to start a kingdom, is to buy it.

Yes currently the economy is absolutely broken. It needs a lot of rebalancing.

 

[Dr-Shinobi]

you can only controll your troops if your are comming in to an battle as an outsider. If you are inside an army the only way to control troops is by choosing given units that command entrust you with. So in other words if your soldiers are inside an army they are gonna follow the command whos been given to controll em.

However most of this post seems just a bit whiny to me especially the training troop part because that is one of the easiest in game and have been buffed not to my liking so wanting it even more is just rubbish... And please send us a pic of your 2mill along with year. Because raising 2 mill in 10 hours sounds a bit fishy to me and i smell cheese and mods long way (or perhaps its an old version). Prob its doable if all youre doing and nothing else then trading and cheese it but still seems a bit to fast.But everything is reachable as they say

But yes your right... the economics needs to be fixed. But people have been back and forth complaining about prices being to high and companions to expensive so it comes hand in hand since people either complain about this then when they get that then no they want this instead and so on...so you see we go back and forth wanting handouts here and there.

P.s What they need to change as well since you where mentioning the bows along with throwing weapons are the damn accuracy you get straight from the bat

 

[Foohy]

And please send us a pic of your 2mill along with year. Because raising 2 mill in 10 hours sounds a bit fishy to me and i smell cheese and mods long way (or perhaps its an old version). Prob its doable if all youre doing and nothing else then trading and cheese it but still seems a bit to fast.

Here is a pic with my wealth.
As you can see I have already bought two cities, which both cost me around the 2mil mark as I have 1.3 mil left
I confirm as I said in my post that all I have done is trading.
I use no trade enhancement mods, just buy green sell green with the trading perk and went across all cities making multiple continent tours to trade my items.
The only "cheating" thing I guess could be the "Better Time" mod which gives one more fast forward time option, which isn't too big of a difference.

 

[Dr-Shinobi]

thnx and guess its possible then and sorry for my doubts. However youre playing an older version from my understanding since your workshops generates above the 500 marker which i havent seen in a long time (or scrap that i just saw that my tannery produced 515 atm) Thought they limited em to 500 some patches ago but guess i was wrong. Ive also run some Trading Empires in the past but guess i did other things in between.

But yes still the economics needs to be balanced which is an issue in later game. Even if your ransom or bribe cost is bit higher the richer you get

 

[durbal]

• raise the price of gear

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NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO. NO MORE PH4T L3WTZ ECONOMY. You think trade is broken? Plunder and loot are 10x worse. The whole economy is broken.

 

[Foohy]

thnx and guess its possible then. However youre playing an older version from my understanding since your workshops generates above the 500 marker which i havent seen in a long time. Ive also run some Trading Empires in the past but guess i did other things in between. But yes still the economics needs to be balanced which is an issue in later game. Even if your ransom or bribe cost is bit higher the richer you get

Nope my game is up to date, my workshops have just been running for a long time, got them early on to boost the daily income as much and as early as possible in order to reach these ridiculous numbers.
Also flooding the cities with the materials that your workshop needs to produce in order to lower the price as much as possible helps, even if you lose profit on that material sale it's worth it.

 

[Dr-Shinobi]

Nope my game is up to date, my workshops have just been running for a long time, got them early on to boost the daily income as much and as early as possible in order to reach these ridiculous numbers.
Also flooding the cities with the materials that your workshop needs to produce in order to lower the price as much as possible helps, even if you lose profit on that material sale it's worth it.

yeah i just saw it in one of my workshops and corrected my statement. Thought they limited it to 500 when Totalwarlegend "cheesed" the wood shops..Also buying wood and selling coal can be very profitable which i tried to adress to em some time back. And i think you shouldn't see straight from the bat what the products lays compares to the market value. that should come with later perks. Since now you can spot easily by checking the product if its green or not and see how many percentage it differs by which makes it so much easier from the start

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO. NO MORE PH4T L3WTZ ECONOMY. You think trade is broken? Plunder and loot are 10x worse. The whole economy is broken.

Also good points given because the higher the prices you gonna earn more on the battlefield but they could lower the percentage of getting higher tier stuff

 

[MisterDanny8]

The issue is that, while they are not hard to find, they are definitely hard to catch up to.

Thats because the bandits are in to small uh' numbers. I go into a bandit invested area and i see a 20 ants running around with single digit numbers. It's pointless to chase them because it will take so long to get to them and it won't even be worth it. So your only practical option is to look for the rare large groups. All they would have to do is make them travel in larger packs. That would both make leveling troops quicker and more fun, and also making them a legit threat to caravans and small lords. Those small groups are just straight up not relevant at all.

Ok so bandits are out of the question now, as they are too fast to catch up to with your big army. To hell with them, they didn't give great XP to begin with.
We need to fight better troops to level up our army, so the obvious option seems to be to fight lords.

No, sadly. I have not noticed a difference in xp gain between killing high and low tier troops. Neither have i seen anyone else say there is a difference. From what we know, it does not matter who you fight. It just matters the amount of kills they get. Defeating a lord with 20 men would be the same as defeating a band of 20 looters. Also yeah read that thread that @Kreu2009 mentioned.
https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php?threads/to-big-focus-on-leveling-your-troops.421646/

 

[damashkin]

Economy did need a bit of a rework but posts like this one caused them to drop a nuke on economy and trading which did way more harm then good.

Their best option at this point IMHO is to give an option for bigger smaller price variety or prices of cities, caravan pricing etc. because for every post I have read like this one where they are complaining the economy is too cheap, I have read even more saying the recent patches went too far the other way.