Userre
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Right now, creating a new kingdom is really difficult in Bannerlord. This is to be expected; there should be a lot of preparing, planning, and investment in order to create a fully functioning effective kingdom that can ward off other kingdoms.
However, I think that this difficulty should scale with how much investment you decide to put in, and should be easier or harder depending on how you go about achieving your goals. Right now, the difficulty in being a king is heavily frontloaded towards the beginning, and easing that transition through features that the player can use with ample investment would help in my opinion.
For one, clan armies need to be implemented. This would allow player characters to train Leadership without being in a kingdom, and furthermore it simply makes sense that if you can manage to run multiple clan parties on the map, that they can group up with you. This would make taking your first fief significantly easier, as you could multiply your force by quite a bit. This would require monetary investment (i.e. creating parties on the map, recruitment costs, and ongoing wage costs), but players should be allowed to invest in other systems in order to make the actual capturing and securing of a kingdom easier. This will be a theme throughout my suggestions.
Secondly, mercenary companies should be easier to hire, with a streamlined process that exists in the Kingdom tab UI. It can be exceptionally tedious and dangerous to roam away from your kingdom to go hire mercenary clans. The entire point of mercenaries is that they have a high monetary cost in exchange for a greater overall fighting force (and better yet, a fighting force that you don't really have to care about all that much). Mercenaries should be usable as a stopgap for new kingdoms to help get past the hardest part.
Third, there should be other means of getting clans to join your kingdom. One of the most difficult parts of creating a new kingdom is getting clans to join in your cause. Here's the changes I'd like to see:
So those are my main ideas, I'd love to see critical feedback or added suggestions if anyone has any.
However, I think that this difficulty should scale with how much investment you decide to put in, and should be easier or harder depending on how you go about achieving your goals. Right now, the difficulty in being a king is heavily frontloaded towards the beginning, and easing that transition through features that the player can use with ample investment would help in my opinion.
For one, clan armies need to be implemented. This would allow player characters to train Leadership without being in a kingdom, and furthermore it simply makes sense that if you can manage to run multiple clan parties on the map, that they can group up with you. This would make taking your first fief significantly easier, as you could multiply your force by quite a bit. This would require monetary investment (i.e. creating parties on the map, recruitment costs, and ongoing wage costs), but players should be allowed to invest in other systems in order to make the actual capturing and securing of a kingdom easier. This will be a theme throughout my suggestions.
Secondly, mercenary companies should be easier to hire, with a streamlined process that exists in the Kingdom tab UI. It can be exceptionally tedious and dangerous to roam away from your kingdom to go hire mercenary clans. The entire point of mercenaries is that they have a high monetary cost in exchange for a greater overall fighting force (and better yet, a fighting force that you don't really have to care about all that much). Mercenaries should be usable as a stopgap for new kingdoms to help get past the hardest part.
Third, there should be other means of getting clans to join your kingdom. One of the most difficult parts of creating a new kingdom is getting clans to join in your cause. Here's the changes I'd like to see:
- Allow the ability to guarantee fief acquisition for established clans that you're trying to convince to join your kingdom. Yes, I know there's a perk in Trade. However, I think that perk is mostly amazing because you can buy fiefs from lords. Selling fiefs, or at the very least guaranteeing fiefs for clans as payment for joining your faction makes perfect sense and would make it a lot easier to entice lords without fiefs themselves. This is kind of a no-brainer; most of the time I end up paying them a huge sum and then gifting them a settlement anyways, it would be nice if I could just guarantee a settlement in the barter menu.
- More minor clans should exist in the world that you can convince to join your kingdom. As of now, the only clans that can permanently join your kingdom are major clans already inside of a kingdom. Such minor clans could generate randomly if desired. It shouldn't be too hard to convince these clans to join, but it should require some form of investment, whether that be relations, money, or both.
- The last and potentially very interesting option is to create custom, deprecated clans that exist in the lore. These would exist in every culture, and there wouldn't be many of them. The player would have the ability to restore these clans to their former glory via monetary investment (it takes money to "restart" a big clan so to speak), unique quests, or other unique mechanics.
So those are my main ideas, I'd love to see critical feedback or added suggestions if anyone has any.