My Bannerlord Feedback

[-Caesar]

These are just my thoughts and opinions. I really enjoyed Warband, and like Bannerlord a lot. Lots of potential. I played it a bunch when it first released in early access and didn't stop until around patch 1.3 I think. I recently came back to play a bit on patch 1.5 (the latest beta).

LEVELLING, ATTRIBUTES AND PERKS

I have to say I really don't like the levelling system or the perk system (even the reworked perk trees I'm not a fan of). I think character builds would be more interesting if you got all of your attribute points on character creation and could allocate them how you please, and then maybe there could be some rare non-repeatable quests or one-time books in-game that could net you a bonus point in each attribute (but not beyond the cap of 10).

I think you should probably also get more focus points from the beginning and less as you level up. The actual levelling up system (like how you get from level 1 to level 2) is a bit weird and admittedly I don't fully understand it. It seems that you can level up the low levels really quickly but it slows down a lot when you get to level 10ish+? So maybe some balancing there to flatten that progression curve a bit so you level reasonably consistently.

With the perks system, I don't mind a lot of the perks but it seems bizarre to me some of the perks are mutually exclusive? I feel like all the perk trees, particularly the weapon perk trees, should be more branching than just two railroad tracks. For instance, with one-handed I think it might be more interesting to have perks which specialise you in axes, or maces, swords. But idk, to me the perk system is just a bit boring atm and doesn't allow as much variability/specialisation as I'd like.

As an aside I also think you should be able to assign companions perks when you recruit them, or at least pay some sort of cost to reset their perks (and your own).

SMITHING/CRAFTING AND TRADE

The smithing and crafting system needs a total overhaul, it's really bad and unenjoyable right now. I think it should be redesigned from the ground up. Not sure exactly how but yeah just my 2 cents on it. It's also odd that you can craft melee weapons but not ranged weapons, and also no armour. I think smithing overall needs to be made more useful too and should have more noticeable/noteworthy effects on your character/your party.

I'll also say that Trade probably needs to be looked at, it's really easy to make money through trade (particularly early-game) and I find that all of my games I inevitably start out by doing lots of trade. Maybe the other forms of revenue earning should be made more competitive/viable versus trade, like quests, tourneys, trade and fighting looters/bandits and selling prisoners.

TOURNAMENTS

Tourneys in particular need to scale better as you level, I suggest having different tourneys for different tiers of renown. When your renown is low you get small rewards which are still decent for when your renown is low, and you just fight against commoners and soldier units basically. Next tier of renown up you fight against a mix of commoners/soldiers and other nobles in the game with low renown (e.g. the bottom 10 nobles in the game by renown), but you have to pay a certain amount of money to enter the tourney. Next tier up you fight against a mix of low and mid-tier renown nobles, but you have to pay even more to enter. Last tier you fight against mid and top-tier nobles (clan leaders, kings, etc. as well as the tourney champs), the reward for winning is very high but you have to pay a lot to enter and also be a landowner.

BATTLES AND COMBAT

I can't really fault the combat/battles too much, they look great and are a huge amount of fun. If I had some feedback it would be the following:

• I think it needs to be possible to do basic strikes while holding your shield up (so overheard strikes with 1h weapons, and pokes with polearms), particularly with spears so that shield-walls and phalanxes are more effective.
• I think Pikemen/Spearmen need to be able to brace against cavalry charges. In fact spears need a big buff/upgrade to how they work, infantry wielding spears should really be able to jab with the spears a lot faster than they currently do.
• I think a lot of the unit types should be automatically categorised into Infantry/Cavalry/Archers/Skirmishers as they aren't at the moment (at least the Battanian units I've been playing with). Not a big deal as players can do this manually I guess.
• I think some of the throwing weapons need to be buffed to be guaranteed kills on lower-tier unarmoured infantry if you hit them in the chest. The javelins seem to be for the most part, but the throwing axes are quite underwhelming. I've not used throwing knives so no comment there.
• I think, for gameplay purposes, picking up throwing weapons should occur more easily. It can take up a lot of time to manually pick them up, so maybe automatically pick them back up if you run back over them? Or have it so you don't have to aim down to look at them and press F, but rather can just stand on/near it and press F to pick them up. Idk but atm throwing weapons (except javelins) seem a bit crap to use (particularly if you are infantry).
• I think infantry with javelins/throwing spears tend to throw them at the enemy when they're a little bit too far away. I think also they should (if they dont already) prioritise hitting enemy infantry over cavalry first, and then with infantry they should prioritise hitting infantry without shields before infantry with shields (and if they do throw at infantry with shields they should try to throw it, as best they can, to get a hit and avoid the shield).

BUGS, OVERSIGHTS AND MISCELLANEOUS

• I've noticed there are some texture streaming issues going on (where textures won't load properly) and that crossbows are still not produced and available enough.
• Workshops also seem to not be very profitable and it's weird that you get no projection of how much different workshop types might make in any given settlement.
• Not sure if it's still the case but it used to be that if you spend money to make a caravan if the caravan got destroyed it wouldn't reform automatically and all the initial capital just disappears. It's a bit **** from a gameplay point of view, I'd rather that once I assign a comp to a caravan they run it and if the caravan is destroyed it'll lose any profits/capital from that trade run and then just disappear for a bit while the companion automatically remakes the caravan.
• I really like that they've been adding more armours to the game, though I think the stats and prices need some balancing work and normalising. The progression curve at the moment when it comes to armour is a bit odd, and with trade being a really easy way to make money it can be trivially easy to get the best-in-slot armour before you even hit Clan Tier 1.
• Crossbows still seem to spawn far too rarely.
• There needs to be something to indicate to the player how many animals they can have in their party before they start getting a 'herd' speed penalty.
• There needs to be an icon or something that better distinguishes pack animals (mules/sumpter horses/generic camel?) from regular cavalry horses (better breed of camel?) and again from warhorses.

 

[thefirst1nvad3r]

This is really accurate and well-written feedback. Many cool suggestions.
I would like to see more challenging tournaments with better prizes, too.

For the pack animals thing, there's actually an icon in the description when you hover the mouse on a horse. There are two icons: a "bag" means they're intended for carrying goods, a "horse head" means they give a small speed boost to infantry units.

 

[-Caesar]

This is really accurate and well-written feedback. Many cool suggestions.
I would like to see more challenging tournaments with better prizes, too.

For the pack animals thing, there's actually an icon in the description when you hover the mouse on a horse. There are two icons: a "bag" means they're intended for carrying goods, a "horse head" means they give a small speed boost to infantry units.

Ah, cool! It would be great if that were made a bit more clear. Maybe if the icons were coloured?

 

[-Caesar]

Some additional feedback I have...

MAP ICONS

Villages and towns should each have little coloured icons next to their names which indicate the primary good they produce (for villages), if any notable quests are available, if any higher-tier retinue troops are available, if the town is under siege, and lastly if the village is being raided with a different icon for when a village has been raided and is abandoned (one that fades the closer the village gets to coming 'back online' as it were).

I find it very difficult to see what villages produce what at a glance, particularly at night time. Icons would help immensely, they'd also help in being able to see at a glance if villages have quests or retinue troops available without having to manually go and check every single one.

ROCK DAMAGE

Looter throwing rocks do entirely too much damage (at least when the game is set to 'realistic' player damage).

Whether wearing armour or not, these things do a heck of a lot of damage. The average brick weighs 5lbs (about 2kgs), I don't know if any of you have ever tried throwing a brick... but you can't really throw them very far or very accurately. Now these rocks are smaller (let's say the size of a baseball), so maybe it's possible to throw them further and a bit more accurately... but only because they weigh less and should therefore do less damage.

One issue is that every rock that hits you seems to be calculated as hitting you squarely, as in there's no glancing hits if the rock hits you at an angle even though in real life it might glance off your arm and do less damage. Another issue someone pointed out to me is that throwing rocks count as blunt damage which makes them more effective against armour, when really they should be less effective against armour and do far less damage.

Anyway I think the damage balance of rocks, the distance they can be thrown, the accuracy of the looters throwing them, and how the hits translate into damage (i.e. if it's a glancing hit as opposed to square, dead-on hit) should really be reconsidered.

BUGS, OVERSIGHTS AND MISCELLANEOUS

• A bug I encountered is that when setting different troops to different formations (e.g. setting some infantry to be 'Skirmishers') on some maps they spawn really far away from you and the rest of your troops, resulting in them being slaughtered by the enemy quite quickly.

 

[stevehoos]

Some additional feedback I have...

MAP ICONS

Villages and towns should each have little coloured icons next to their names which indicate the primary good they produce (for villages), if any notable quests are available, if any higher-tier retinue troops are available, if the town is under siege, and lastly if the village is being raided with a different icon for when a village has been raided and is abandoned (one that fades the closer the village gets to coming 'back online' as it were).

I find it very difficult to see what villages produce what at a glance, particularly at night time. Icons would help immensely, they'd also help in being able to see at a glance if villages have quests or retinue troops available without having to manually go and check every single one.

ROCK DAMAGE

Looter throwing rocks do entirely too much damage (at least when the game is set to 'realistic' player damage).

Whether wearing armour or not, these things do a heck of a lot of damage. The average brick weighs 5lbs (about 2kgs), I don't know if any of you have ever tried throwing a brick... but you can't really throw them very far or very accurately. Now these rocks are smaller (let's say the size of a baseball), so maybe it's possible to throw them further and a bit more accurately... but only because they weigh less and should therefore do less damage.

One issue is that every rock that hits you seems to be calculated as hitting you squarely, as in there's no glancing hits if the rock hits you at an angle even though in real life it might glance off your arm and do less damage. Another issue someone pointed out to me is that throwing rocks count as blunt damage which makes them more effective against armour, when really they should be less effective against armour and do far less damage.

Anyway I think the damage balance of rocks, the distance they can be thrown, the accuracy of the looters throwing them, and how the hits translate into damage (i.e. if it's a glancing hit as opposed to square, dead-on hit) should really be reconsidered.

BUGS, OVERSIGHTS AND MISCELLANEOUS

• A bug I encountered is that when setting different troops to different formations (e.g. setting some infantry to be 'Skirmishers') on some maps they spawn really far away from you and the rest of your troops, resulting in them being slaughtered by the enemy quite quickly.

This highlights the problem with the armor damage in the game in general, not every hit is going cause damage, that's why people wore armor. A looter's hammer should never do 30 damage to a fully armored NPC or player, the looter rocks are absurd.

 

[Trueten]

You can hover a mouse cursor over a village and the lowest line indicates what village's specialization is. Grain/Flux/Sheep etc.
But yeah a clearer colored icon would be very useful.

 

[-Caesar]

You can hover a mouse cursor over a village and the lowest line indicates what village's specialization is. Grain/Flux/Sheep etc.
But yeah a clearer colored icon would be very useful.

Yeah, I know that's what I've been doing. Just that icons would make it much easier/better.

 

[MinhTien]

• I think Pikemen/Spearmen need to be able to brace against cavalry charges. In fact spears need a big buff/upgrade to how they work, infantry wielding spears should really be able to jab with the spears a lot faster than they currently do.

I won't be holding my breath for this. I'm pretty sure Taleworlds hate spear. Look at the patch note for beta1.5.5, the one time spear wielders are effective, they straight up remove the spears.

Basic units will no longer use polearm type of weapons as they were getting too good at stopping cavalry charges.

That's the whole point of spear, it allows even relatively untrained and poorly equiped people to fight effectively.

 

[stevehoos]

One of the elements I don't like with the recent unit changes is the fact that recruits have farmer tools, there's nothing to distinguish them from farmers.

 

[Ananda_The_Destroyer]

Lots of good points I agree with, especially the disappointment in the character/skill/perk system and of course those looter rocks (armor problems).
I like the idea of getting more control in where your attributes and FP goes in char creations.
YMMV with trade though, many find it to becomes very slow or impossibly to raise the skill up after awhile , though that doesn't mean you can't make early money.

 

[-Caesar]

I won't be holding my breath for this. I'm pretty sure Taleworlds hate spear. Look at the patch note for beta1.5.5, the one time spear wielders are effective, they straight up remove the spears.



That's the whole point of spear, it allows even relatively untrained and poorly equiped people to fight effectively.

Well they should really be looking at buffing cavalry when they charge into the sides/rears of units, rather than nerfing spears.

One thing I've noted that REALLY annoys me and that, if changed, should make cavalry more effective, is that units have a sixth sense about what's coming up behind them in the heat of battle. You might see some units running away from you and towards other units, so you decide to charge them down with your horse and right as you get close to them and are about to swing they pivot around and attack you. It's really annoying/unrealistic. Changing that would probably make cavalry better when they get the flanks on units, without having to nerf the ability/attack potential of spearmen when they are facing the enemy.

 

[-Caesar]

Lots of good points I agree with, especially the disappointment in the character/skill/perk system and of course those looter rocks (armor problems).
I like the idea of getting more control in where your attributes and FP goes in char creations.
YMMV with trade though, many find it to becomes very slow or impossibly to raise the skill up after awhile , though that doesn't mean you can't make early money.

Yeah so, just to be clear, I'm not talking about how quickly you level trade. I'm just talking about how easy it is to make quite a bit of money with trade from day 1 compared to other ways of making money. They probably ought to make the perk that marks your profits and marks the average price of goods be a little higher in the perk tree, but again I'm in favour of them totally reworking the levelling/attribute/perk system in line with what I wrote in my original post.

 

[vmax]

You might see some units running away from you and towards other units, so you decide to charge them down with your horse and right as you get close to them and are about to swing they pivot around and attack you. It's really annoying/unrealistic.

This would have been unrealistic if horses moved silently, which they don't.

 

[-Caesar]

This would have been unrealistic if horses moved silently, which they don't.

Yeah but in the heat of battle with blood, guts, gore and screaming/yelling men around you. Horses hooves pounding all about you... very unlikely with the adrenaline pumping and you charging at an enemy that you would be able to hear the horse behind you and instantly turn around and strike it without falling over or slipping (particularly when fully armoured).

 

[Moton]

Yeah but in the heat of battle with blood, guts, gore and screaming/yelling men around you. Horses hooves pounding all about you... very unlikely with the adrenaline pumping and you charging at an enemy that you would be able to hear the horse behind you and instantly turn around and strike it without falling over or slipping (particularly when fully armoured).

Yes but a adrenaline pumped and afraid human react to absolutely everything. It's a hard one, in real life I think some would react and some wouldn't but that's not the best design either.

 

[-Caesar]

Yes but a adrenaline pumped and afraid human react to absolutely everything. It's a hard one, in real life I think some would react and some wouldn't but that's not the best design either.

Yeah, fair I guess so. I'm sure they could make it a bit more random as to who reacts and who doesn't. Or at least make it so they can't turn around so quickly. Currently they do a total 180 almost instantly and zero in with pinpoint accuracy on exactly where the horse and rider is to strike back.

 

[niekdegrijze]

These are just my thoughts and opinions. I really enjoyed Warband, and like Bannerlord a lot. Lots of potential. I played it a bunch when it first released in early access and didn't stop until around patch 1.3 I think. I recently came back to play a bit on patch 1.5 (the latest beta).

LEVELLING, ATTRIBUTES AND PERKS

I have to say I really don't like the levelling system or the perk system (even the reworked perk trees I'm not a fan of). I think character builds would be more interesting if you got all of your attribute points on character creation and could allocate them how you please, and then maybe there could be some rare non-repeatable quests or one-time books in-game that could net you a bonus point in each attribute (but not beyond the cap of 10).

I think you should probably also get more focus points from the beginning and less as you level up. The actual levelling up system (like how you get from level 1 to level 2) is a bit weird and admittedly I don't fully understand it. It seems that you can level up the low levels really quickly but it slows down a lot when you get to level 10ish+? So maybe some balancing there to flatten that progression curve a bit so you level reasonably consistently.

With the perks system, I don't mind a lot of the perks but it seems bizarre to me some of the perks are mutually exclusive? I feel like all the perk trees, particularly the weapon perk trees, should be more branching than just two railroad tracks. For instance, with one-handed I think it might be more interesting to have perks which specialise you in axes, or maces, swords. But idk, to me the perk system is just a bit boring atm and doesn't allow as much variability/specialisation as I'd like.

As an aside I also think you should be able to assign companions perks when you recruit them, or at least pay some sort of cost to reset their perks (and your own).

SMITHING/CRAFTING AND TRADE

The smithing and crafting system needs a total overhaul, it's really bad and unenjoyable right now. I think it should be redesigned from the ground up. Not sure exactly how but yeah just my 2 cents on it. It's also odd that you can craft melee weapons but not ranged weapons, and also no armour. I think smithing overall needs to be made more useful too and should have more noticeable/noteworthy effects on your character/your party.

I'll also say that Trade probably needs to be looked at, it's really easy to make money through trade (particularly early-game) and I find that all of my games I inevitably start out by doing lots of trade. Maybe the other forms of revenue earning should be made more competitive/viable versus trade, like quests, tourneys, trade and fighting looters/bandits and selling prisoners.

TOURNAMENTS

Tourneys in particular need to scale better as you level, I suggest having different tourneys for different tiers of renown. When your renown is low you get small rewards which are still decent for when your renown is low, and you just fight against commoners and soldier units basically. Next tier of renown up you fight against a mix of commoners/soldiers and other nobles in the game with low renown (e.g. the bottom 10 nobles in the game by renown), but you have to pay a certain amount of money to enter the tourney. Next tier up you fight against a mix of low and mid-tier renown nobles, but you have to pay even more to enter. Last tier you fight against mid and top-tier nobles (clan leaders, kings, etc. as well as the tourney champs), the reward for winning is very high but you have to pay a lot to enter and also be a landowner.

BATTLES AND COMBAT

I can't really fault the combat/battles too much, they look great and are a huge amount of fun. If I had some feedback it would be the following:

• I think it needs to be possible to do basic strikes while holding your shield up (so overheard strikes with 1h weapons, and pokes with polearms), particularly with spears so that shield-walls and phalanxes are more effective.
• I think Pikemen/Spearmen need to be able to brace against cavalry charges. In fact spears need a big buff/upgrade to how they work, infantry wielding spears should really be able to jab with the spears a lot faster than they currently do.
• I think a lot of the unit types should be automatically categorised into Infantry/Cavalry/Archers/Skirmishers as they aren't at the moment (at least the Battanian units I've been playing with). Not a big deal as players can do this manually I guess.
• I think some of the throwing weapons need to be buffed to be guaranteed kills on lower-tier unarmoured infantry if you hit them in the chest. The javelins seem to be for the most part, but the throwing axes are quite underwhelming. I've not used throwing knives so no comment there.
• I think, for gameplay purposes, picking up throwing weapons should occur more easily. It can take up a lot of time to manually pick them up, so maybe automatically pick them back up if you run back over them? Or have it so you don't have to aim down to look at them and press F, but rather can just stand on/near it and press F to pick them up. Idk but atm throwing weapons (except javelins) seem a bit crap to use (particularly if you are infantry).
• I think infantry with javelins/throwing spears tend to throw them at the enemy when they're a little bit too far away. I think also they should (if they dont already) prioritise hitting enemy infantry over cavalry first, and then with infantry they should prioritise hitting infantry without shields before infantry with shields (and if they do throw at infantry with shields they should try to throw it, as best they can, to get a hit and avoid the shield).

BUGS, OVERSIGHTS AND MISCELLANEOUS

• I've noticed there are some texture streaming issues going on (where textures won't load properly) and that crossbows are still not produced and available enough.
• Workshops also seem to not be very profitable and it's weird that you get no projection of how much different workshop types might make in any given settlement.
• Not sure if it's still the case but it used to be that if you spend money to make a caravan if the caravan got destroyed it wouldn't reform automatically and all the initial capital just disappears. It's a bit **** from a gameplay point of view, I'd rather that once I assign a comp to a caravan they run it and if the caravan is destroyed it'll lose any profits/capital from that trade run and then just disappear for a bit while the companion automatically remakes the caravan.
• I really like that they've been adding more armours to the game, though I think the stats and prices need some balancing work and normalising. The progression curve at the moment when it comes to armour is a bit odd, and with trade being a really easy way to make money it can be trivially easy to get the best-in-slot armour before you even hit Clan Tier 1.
• Crossbows still seem to spawn far too rarely.
• There needs to be something to indicate to the player how many animals they can have in their party before they start getting a 'herd' speed penalty.
• There needs to be an icon or something that better distinguishes pack animals (mules/sumpter horses/generic camel?) from regular cavalry horses (better breed of camel?) and again from warhorses.

I agree with every point, I hope this tread gets enough attention

 

[Terco_Viejo]

What do you think about this type of icon on the campaign map?

Knights of Honor II: Sovereign

 

[geala]

Good points, although I never have many problems with looters. The one thing where I totally disagree is the wish to be able to craft more stuff. I don't want to craft in a game about becoming a kind of clan and kingdom leader, that's ridiculous. But that's not the problem. The problem is that the crafting system makes controlling crafted weapons damage and behavior very difficult. As I see mods as essential for further game success, expanding the crafting system to ranged weapons or armor would be extremely frustrating for me.

 

[Moton]

Yeah, fair I guess so. I'm sure they could make it a bit more random as to who reacts and who doesn't. Or at least make it so they can't turn around so quickly. Currently they do a total 180 almost instantly and zero in with pinpoint accuracy on exactly where the horse and rider is to strike back.

Yes, maybe it is way to easy for them.

Good points, although I never have many problems with looters. The one thing where I totally disagree is the wish to be able to craft more stuff. I don't want to craft in a game about becoming a kind of clan and kingdom leader, that's ridiculous. But that's not the problem. The problem is that the crafting system makes controlling crafted weapons damage and behavior very difficult. As I see mods as essential for further game success, expanding the crafting system to ranged weapons or armor would be extremely frustrating for me.

Nah you dont have to become a king or head of a clan. It's actually a full Sandbox game and they should leave as many doors open for you as possible. I would even go so far as to say it would be a great idea to let you open your own smithy in a town where you can make weapons and suff and sell on the street in real time and not only in a menu, this is ofcourse taking it way to far but it wouldn't be a negative thing.