Mercenary playstyle: Fief and army functionalities

Users who are viewing this thread

This would also be great for independent traders, I'd note. Possibly bandits as well.

With Vlandia having a mercenary based culture bonus I gave staying mercenary a try recently.

It was a PITA. The money is poor, gaining leadership skill is incredibly slow without armies, and you have poor options for storing gear and troops.

I think being Clan Leader in general, maybe at tier 2 or 3, should come with some basic options to lead small armies, and set up bases similar to bandit hideouts.

Perhaps there could be something between a party and an army to serve this function. Like a ... "Warband" or something. Limited to three parties, Clan members only.
 
Doing a similar playthrough and I agree. It would be nice if your "warband" idea worked for rebellions too, I think it would make them a bit more of a threat if they could actually group together. For storage, it would be nice if workshops came with at least a few spaces to store stuff.
 
Sucks to be a mercenary.

A guy needs a place to put his stuff. Even a mercenary guy. But if you do capture a fief, even the crappiest castle, you can no longer be a mercenary.

So if you capture a fief, you have to limit yourself to busting bandits. Or rebels.
 
I would like the option to make army as solo clan too, but I'd rather just gain leadership FAST without an army. The only reason I ever lead armies is for leadership gains. I would much rather just use 1 party then drag around a big slow party forever and ever. I actually dislike the army mechanic all together and I would rather it was just like warband. The game just functions less and less the more units are involved and it's really unfortunate that they made large battles the norm without making the game really support them.

I also don't like that you can't be a mercenary if you have a fief. I wish we could just have a base to store troops in and have stash for items that wasn't taken from a faction.

The advantage of being merc is you can pick and choose who you fight at any time.
What I do is get clan rank 1 and join whoever fight the khuzaits and go force recruit all thier good troops, then dump it and change yo whoever is fighting and easy faction like imperials and beat them up for easy money until clan tier 2, the go back to fight khuzaits and take more troops and so on until I decide what to do that playthrough.

It's slightly better then just fighting the khuzaits alone because you can easily get out of war to get married (again...) or whenever without having to pay for peace and it's much easier to not fight the khuzaits for $$$, just fill up on troops and change to fight an easy enemy. You even get a little extra pay, though it's pretty petty, of course, like anything but loot in bannerlord.

This is the only fun part of the game IMO, being a vassal is too easy and being a ruler is too boring.
 
Don't know it helps.. As a mercenary with some income issues, you can feed their armies. It will give nice influence = money, afaik. You don't even need to fight with them side by side. Just be their sugar daddy.

Hunting lots of nobles and giving them to allied castles / towns also can give higher influence. Which is basically a good money.

Beating parties, participating battles and sieges won't give that much influence.
 
Last edited:
I still don't get why mercenary or independent clan can't have clan-only army. What the point of this restriction?

If someone will mod it, I bet this mod will be in top 10 forever.
 
Very much agree with the gist of this thread - would favour both access to Clan-only army creation and some sort of Mercenary hideout option for Merc clans (functionally identical to a castle but with no associated income, in a first iteration. I guess we'd all dream of a Pendor-style later iteration where the hideout spawns a slow trickle of expensive-to-recruit, player-customised troops...).

I do like the concept behind the Vlandian culture bonus, and think it just needs a material revision upwards (from 15% to more like 50 or 60% increased income from influence). I've just ended a full playthrough as a Vlandian Mercenary. 20 years in and at Clan Tier 6, my Golden Company has kept Calradia in complete balance, always fighting for whichever faction was losing (which also meant, would pay best: they'd typically offer 220-260 denar per Inf, baseline).

I think a lot of players underestimate how much money you make from Influence farming as a high-calibre Merc party. It's worth noting: if you go around stomping enemy parties or winning quick easy sieges, you're collecting baseline 20ish Inf per battle, plus anywhere between 4 and 30 Inf for depositing a captured noble in an allied town or castle's prison. Between the 'Glorious Leader' charm perk and the Vlandian bonus (meagre as it is, presently), it is already possible to be racking in 8-10k denar per day in Influence fees alone, which is a sizeable addition to the mercenary's earnings from loot.

I'd still want the Vlandian Merc earning potential raised because 8-10k daily ticks required the kind of continuous victory streak that Bannerlord minmaxers eke out, and I'm not sure the game should be tuned around that playstyle. You also can't sustain that rate forever; you eventually run out of 100+ stacks to fight, and need to wait out the Influence daily drip-feed before you swap sides again. Letting mercenaries form Clan-only armies would make it much easier for Mercs to spend that time taking on the game's most lucrative contracts, like the 30k paydays from quests to capture a settlement.
 
Last edited:
They had something like this in viking conquest, "refuge", basically a little base that you could build up and store troops at. I would love to see something like that implemented in bannerlord.
 
I do like the concept behind the Vlandian culture bonus, and think it just needs a material revision upwards (from 15% to more like 50 or 60% increased income from influence). I've just ended a full playthrough as a Vlandian Mercenary. 20 years in and at Clan Tier 6, my Golden Company has kept Calradia in complete balance, always fighting for whichever faction was losing (which also meant, would pay best: they'd typically offer 220-260 denar per Inf, baseline).
I'd prefer if it were turned into a 30-50% reduction in influence decay. That would better reward consistent activity.
 
I'd prefer if it were turned into a 30-50% reduction in influence decay. That would better reward consistent activity.

I'm guessing this means, a 30-50% reduction in Influence decay, while still paying out as though you were decaying the normal, baseline rate, right? Otherwise the reduction in decay rate would also mean you earn your drip-feed more slowly, which would make Vlandians the worst at mercenary life.

I'm cool with the idea of rewarding a more 'loyal' mercenary, and if I read you correctly, you're suggesting an effective 50-100% buff to Vlandian merc rates vs the non-Vlandian baseline. We're in-line on that; however altering decay rates (but not earning rates) feels like a counter-intuitive use of the existing system... You'd earn at a clip that is different from the Influence tooltip decay rate. I still think Vlandians earning more from Influence - or earning more Influence from mercenary actions - are more intuitive implementations.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top Bottom