Bannerlord is an amazing sandbox. Some features in it are aimed for a long campaign:
- Characters aging
- marriage & children
- the potential to have dynasties and to play the game of marriage politics.
- Clans competing with each other for influence in a kingdom
All of these require a slow character progression in terms of skill, money, influence, renown and relation, otherwise the player would be left to fast forward through the decades once all of these stats have reached a sufficiently high level.
On the other hand, Warband was fun precisely because levels came fast and often early on and you could start a new game and grow into your desired role (bandit, merchant, army captain,...) in a relatively short time. I rarely went on to conquer much of Calradia.
I feel that it may be next to impossible to have both types of play-style balanced within one set of game rules.
I therefore suggest to have two campaign modes available when starting a new game:
One mode, where leveling is faster, and initial gain of renown, influence and relations are higher, to reduce the early game grind. In the second mode, everything is balanced toward a long campaign. Further parameters that could be adjusted between the modes would be e.g. travel times, penalties for winter campaigns, spawn rate of looters/bandits, speed of game-time fast-forward button, amount of tournaments, ...
(Alternatively, provide sliders for leveling speed, etc. at the start of the campaign, so that the player can finetune the settings.)
- Characters aging
- marriage & children
- the potential to have dynasties and to play the game of marriage politics.
- Clans competing with each other for influence in a kingdom
All of these require a slow character progression in terms of skill, money, influence, renown and relation, otherwise the player would be left to fast forward through the decades once all of these stats have reached a sufficiently high level.
On the other hand, Warband was fun precisely because levels came fast and often early on and you could start a new game and grow into your desired role (bandit, merchant, army captain,...) in a relatively short time. I rarely went on to conquer much of Calradia.
I feel that it may be next to impossible to have both types of play-style balanced within one set of game rules.
I therefore suggest to have two campaign modes available when starting a new game:
One mode, where leveling is faster, and initial gain of renown, influence and relations are higher, to reduce the early game grind. In the second mode, everything is balanced toward a long campaign. Further parameters that could be adjusted between the modes would be e.g. travel times, penalties for winter campaigns, spawn rate of looters/bandits, speed of game-time fast-forward button, amount of tournaments, ...
(Alternatively, provide sliders for leveling speed, etc. at the start of the campaign, so that the player can finetune the settings.)
