I've been dumping all of my thoughts in a Discord server as I was playing, but now I'm posting them here. I'll be leaving out most of the bugs I've experienced, but there will probably still be a few.
Here are my thoughts / rants after having played one playthrough for 30 hours since release. The post is maybe a little long.
Kingdoms & World Map + AI
- The pace of the game is completely off. In my save, the Northern Empire started snowballing around 20 hours into the playthrough. I am now around 30 hours into the playthrough and they have wiped everything on the map except 5 towns in Vlandia. My character is only level 10 and the game is already about to end in a Speedrun Any% fashion. At first I was afraid that my character would die of old age before anything happened in the game, but now I'm afraid the game will end before he even turns 33.
- Edit: While writing this part I had the game fast forwarding in the background to see what would happen. The game is actually over now, as the Northern Empire has captured every single fief on the map. Nothing actually happens when a faction has conquered everything. The world keeps turning but no one can do anything.
- At first I thought this happened because the Empire factions decided to unite, but the faction was still just called 'Northern Empire' so I guess they must've conquered the others.
- Factions should instead stay relatively stable without player involvement. I think this is very important. My game literally finished itself after 2 days of playing without my involvement.
- The campaign AI will sometimes capture fiefs in the middle of hostile territory instead of sticking to frontlines - just like in Warband.
- The Battanian campaign AI doesn't seem to match their personality. They should be more isolationist, but are instead waging war on multiple fronts and capturing fiefs miles away from homeland very early on in the game.
- Why are weak lords chasing me and then turning tail when I go after them? On one occasion I had 3 enemy lords chasing me, but every time I turned around they ran off in different directions. Felt like I was getting pranked. This also happened in Warband, but I was hoping it would've been changed by now.
- Why can I pay a hostile lord 300.000 gold in order for him to let me go, just for him to immediately attack me again?
- Why do I have to sign a 10 day please-don't-attack-this-faction pact after having paid them 300.000 gold to be let go?
- Why does this 10 day pact stop me from defending my own army when the same lord decides to hunt me down again immediately?
- You're literally left with 3 options after having made that pact:
- Keep paying him more and more gold while trying to run away inch by inch on the world map.
- Leave troops behind in order to run away except you don't get away because they attack you again immediately.
- Surrender and get captured.
- Factions will sometimes wage war on multiple fronts for no reason only to just ignore one of them and lose fiefs because of it.
- In a similar vein, Battania was completely incompetent in my playthrough. I quickly lost count of how many times the text box told me they got captured.
- Bandits have run rampant. While chilling in my castle I saw 8 bands of looters using my courtyard as their playground. If I run over to Sturgia I can count 30+ bands of Sea Raiders dominating the area.
- Similarly, bandit parties get really big the further into the game you get. Later into my playthrough I was seeing bands of 30-50 looters all over the place. Earlier on those would have been very rare to find.
- Lords are sometimes unbelievably incompetent. I've seen kings run around with 0 troops and getting taken prisoner by a band of 7 looters multiple times. Lords' parties in general seem really small. I very often see them running around with no more than 20-30 troops. They literally get chased around by bandit parties later on.
- Please let me move around the map without the game resetting the time speed every time I click to move somewhere. Also, please stop sliding the camera over to my party every time I click to move somewhere. Also, is there a button I can press to instantly center the camera on my party on the map? If not, there definitely should be. Think spacebar in League of Legends or other buttons in any RTS game.
- Lords are always running around the map and I very rarely stumble upon anyone chilling in a castle or town. In fact, I don't think I've seen anyone stay at a town for more than two days in a row. This also makes it really hard to track down lords that you need to speak to, as by the time you arrive at the location they were last seen at, they will be two kingdoms away.
- Do lords even feast anymore? Is that a thing? I hope this is just an Early Access thing.
Battles & Battle AI
- Here's a bug: If I command my cavalry, my character's voice line will be referring to them as infantry.
- Here's another bug: Sometimes the text box refers to my infantry as archers. I'm guessing this is because they also include skirmishers?
- The Empire battle AI will just form a square with their entire army and camp in spawn for up to 10 minutes.
- The battle AI will sometimes send its cavalry in a suicide charge right at you despite the rest of their army being miles away.
- Your troops will sometimes not use their ranged weapons. Around half of my army consists of skirmishers and archers, and in some battles they simply decide not to fire unless I press F4 twice to first tell them to hold fire and then fire at will again.
- The battle AI will sometimes send its army, few by few, straight into the enemy army only to be slaughtered. It was literally a meatgrinder, and we lost battle advantage because the Battanian king somehow forgot that tactics existed.
- Enemy troop morale seems to fall very quickly. Most of my battles just consist of 5 minutes of showing off formations and dancing around, and then finally a charge lasting 20 seconds wherafter enemy troops start running away. This even happened when I was battling actual lords with 100 troop armies. The only times where it didn't happen was when I had 500+ vs 500+ type battles.
Sieges
- Why is there a pre-battle deployment screen that allows me to position troops and manage formations if none of it matters anyway since the game sends every single troop into a charge as soon as the battle actually begins?
- The siege camp scenes are mostly dull. The attacking party will build 1 trebuchet and destroy 1 of the defenders' ballistae before being destroyed itself. The attackers then proceed to build a new trebuchet while the defenders are also building a new ballista. Rinse and repeat until the stars align or I pass out from banging my head into the castle wall.
- The attackers often seem to run out of food before actually managing to complete the siege camp scene. Makes sense, but happens too often.
- A town fell (simulated battle between two AIs) in less of a second out of nowhere despite the defenders having 500 troops left (with only 200 lost so far) and the attackers also having 500 troops left (with 600 lost so far).
- Ladder sieges are complete suicide. The attackers will climb up a ladder and die before they even get off at the top. Sometimes they decide to climb in intervals with groups of 2 like some sort of gym exercise. It's not very effective.
- Friendly archers bunch up with the rest of the infantry at the bottom of the ladders instead of shooting at enemy archers atop the walls.
Troops & Companions
- The default Battanian troop tree has no archers at all - only infantry and skirmishers. You can only get archers straight from nobles. Weird.
- Some skirmishers go in the infantry group by default while others go in the ranged group for some reason.
- Does it matter which horse you get for your cavalry? Can you just buy a mule and call it a day? Not really sure how it works.
- I was fighting an Empire lord that had an army consisting of Battanian troops. I was also Battanian myself. Do you still suffer a morale loss from having the same cultures fighting each other as in the previous games?
- Western Empire parties seem to field too many recruits. I often found lords that ran around with armies where the majority were recruits.
- In my opinion, the companion recruitment system is inferior to the one in the previous games. Not all companions should cost money. I'd love to be able to recruit some knife-wielding back alley bathkeeper for free and training them up myself.
- Companions should not enter tournaments with their personal gear. It seems like you can just buy yourself to victory by unequipping all of their gear (or giving them trash gear) and then entering the tournament.
- Honestly, tournament participants shouldn't start in personal gear at all. I prefer the previous system where everyone was just handed actual tournament gear.
Levelling
- Every experience gain in the game is undertuned and doesn't match the pace of the rest of the game.
- When I started out today, my character was level 10. After having played for 10 hours today, I still haven't levelled up a single time. I don't even remember the last time I got to spend a perk point or what I did with it. There seems to be a hard cut off point at level 10 where it takes immensely longer to level up.
- I picked up some companions right at the beginning of the game, and none of them have levelled up a single time after 30 hours of playing.
- Skills also level way too slow. I have several skill points available, but no perks to spend them on despite having several skills maxed out with focus points.
- I really don't like the "Choose 1 perk per tier" feature. Just let us choose whatever we have unlocked, please. This particularly sucks for the smithing tree.
- As a friend of mine pointed out, due to the current pace of the game, the game will have ended before you even unlock the perk that lets you recruit bandit prisoners to your party. That's pretty funny in an absurd way.
Quests
- Quests also seem a bit unbalanced. In the beginning of the game you rely heavily on quests, unless you want to hunt looters and do tournaments for the first 14 hours like I did, but some of the quests you get are just too difficult for fresh characters. It sucks when the difficult ones are the only ones you can find. Maybe introduce the more difficult quests further into the game instead of giving them all at once(?).
- Going back to the pacing of the game, while the Northern Empire controlled all but 8 fiefs and was busy cleaning out the 2 remaining factions, my main story quest was to reduce the amount of fiefs controlled by the Empire to 4 or less. Good luck, pal.
- The "Go talk to these 10 nobles all around the world" quest is boring and tedious. Especially when it sends you to one end of the map just to have to go to the very opposite end to talk to the next guy afterwards. By the time I found the next person I had already forgotten the story that the previous guy told.
- The game has already given the player freedom to do whatever they want at this point, so the main story may actually require the player to go speak to nobles that they're at war with. Very annoying. This quest should be part of the tutorial if it requires you to do those things.
- One of the very first quests you get requires you to attain 1000 gold (on top of the 1000 you start with) and hire a companion. The companion, however, usually demands around 1000 gold as well in order to join your party, so it gets sort of funky. Let the player find a free starter companion or something to fix this.
Items & Trade Screen
- Some weapons / armor seem to have some kind of perk icons, but I can't find where to read what the perks do. I assume these are similar to the "Unbalanced" and "Can't be used on horseback" modifiers from the previous games except now you have to guess which is which.
- The rules for civilian loadouts are weird. Some perfectly normal clothes are apparently not allowed in towns, and the game even started my civilian loadout with an axe that I couldn't re-equip after accidentally un-equipping it because it wasn't allowed.
- Battanian towns have the worst collection of armor I have ever seen. In half of them I can't find any type of helmet or hat, and in none of them have I been able to find actual pieces of armor. Only clothes.
- Why are items sorted so weirdly in the town trade screen? Horses are at the very top of the list, but horse armor is at the very bottom. Food and other resources are in the middle separating weapons from armor. Should be something like Weapons --> Armor --> Horses + Horse Armor --> Food & Resources.
- Please let us revert our last action in this trade screen. The big reset button is nice, but sometimes I've already sold 30 items but then accidentally sell something I didn't want to, and I just want to quickly revert that one item.
- Please also let us complete a transaction and continuing to trade without having to close the entire menu and re-enter. Just a small quality of life feature.
Fiefs & Towns
- Why can the kingdom award me a fief without letting me decide if I actually want it? Why do I not even get a notification telling me that I was awarded it? I didn't even know that I had 2 castles until I looked at my economy and realized that all my money was being spent on garrison wages.
- How do I even get rid of a fief after being awarded it? I dun' wan' it.
- Fiefs don't seem to change cultures at all. If you conquer a Vlandian village, you will only ever be able to recruit Vlandian troops there.
- Similarly, why does my castle garrison automatically train recruits of its original culture? If I took a Sturgian castle I definitely don't want it to start training Sturgian recruits to defend from the attacking Sturgians. I don't even want it to automatically train troops at all - it's just more wages that I have to pay, and the troops are always of the absolute worst tier possible anyway.
- Why are we not able to upgrade garrisoned troops? I'm pretty sure that I built a castle upgrade that gives garrisoned troops experience over time, but I can't actually seem to upgrade them.
- Village taxes, as all other incomes in the game, are all over the place. One day my village will be generating 40 gold, and the next day it suddenly generates 400 gold.
- Please stop spawning us outside of the town walls. The towns are bigger now and we're only getting older.
- Why do I not spawn on horseback if I have a horse equipped in my civilian outfit?
Workshops & Caravans
- The new cap of +200 gold income daily is a decent fix to the completely busted wood workshops, but the cap is way too low. The player has too many expenses to pay, and you can only own a handful of workshops, so it just doesn't add up. My 4 workshops are currently making a total of 800 gold, and that's barely enough to just break even on my own party wages alone.
- Several workshops are horribly undertuned and will net you an incredible daily profit of just -400 gold. If we're not allowed to make more than 200 gold on our workshops, why are we allowed to lose over 400 gold per day after already having invested roughly 15.000 gold on just buying the run down shack it's based in? I had a Wine Press going for about 2-3 in-game weeks in hope of it eventually turning profitable, but it only got lower and lower everyday.
- Please bring back the feature from Warband that lets you see a rough estimate of the profits of the workshop before you buy it.
- Why is it so hard to find out that workshops even exist? You literally have to enter a town scene and talk to a worker in one of the workshops to even know that it's a thing. Or did I just miss some notification? I had to ask people on Discord to figure out they existed.
- You seem to just lose your workshop completely if it's located in a town that you later go to war with. I didn't get it back after we made peace either. Meanwhile, if you buy a workshop in a friendly town that later gets captured by an enemy faction, it stays there and nothing happens.
- Workshop incomes, prior to the 200 gold gap, were insanely volatile. One day your wood workshop would be making 600 gold, and the next day it would be making 8.000 gold. Most incomes and expenses in the game are like this.
- Apparently you have to level up your clan in order to unlock additional workshop slots (you get 1 per clan level), but I don't think this is explained anywhere. It's not even mentioned when you hover over your clan level where it shows all the other perks you get from levelling up.
- Workshops need to be cheaper or something. They're crucial in order to progress from the early game to mid game, as you need that steady income to fund your army. The game really just isn't fun before you get to this point. People don't want to farm gold, they want to play.
- Maybe let us buy a plot of land rather than an existing workshop, and then change the cost of purchase depending on which type of workshop you choose to buy - Warband style.
- Caravans, like workshops, are just slot machines that costs 15.000 gold to use. In my case, I paid 15.000 gold for the privilege of losing another 300 gold per day until I eventually disbanded it.
Hideouts
- The only way I got close to having fun while attacking hideouts, was when I started telling my troops to follow me instead of charging. If you tell them to charge, they will run off without you, eventually split up to attack different groups of bandits and die one by one. Either that, or they will slaughter everyone before you see what happened.
- Edit: Apparently the tutorial hideout also tells the player to tell the troops to follow rather than charge. Either I missed it or forgot.
- There's some snowy hideout scene where you run up the side of a cliff. When you get to the middle level, your troops' AI will attack a group of infantry while enemy ranged troops are standing to their side obliterating them with various projectiles. Your troops will ignore them and die.
- Hideouts are unbalanced, as you only get to bring a handful of troops, and you don't even get to pick which ones (I assume it's based on the order of your troops in the party screen though). A hideout can contain 30-40 sea raiders, but you only get to bring 6 or 7 troops to fight them.
- Troops are horrible at using their shields when attacking hideouts. They will sometimes run face first into an archer without defending themselves.
Player archers don't seem to actually use their bows when attacking hideouts. Probably to stop the player from bringing in all archers and sniping the bandits from afar. Edit: Apparently they do, but you have to command them to fire at will first.- There are way too many hideouts, man. The player seems to be the only party actually caring about them, so it just gets out of hand real quick unless you want to attack hideouts for the entirety of your playthrough.
Relations
- Your relations do not increase if you give a character a gift. What's even the point then? I gave someone 20.000 gold in hope of increasing relations, but nothing happened. A friend of mine gave someone 500.000 gold in hope of mending bad relations, but nothing happened.
- Relations also do not go up when helping lords in battle anymore. This was a thing in Warband and still should be.
- When I gave the Battanian king the almighty banner quest item from the storyline, he expressed his immense gratitude. The game, however, did not, and my relations remained at 0. I also joined his faction afterwards, and relations still did not change.
Romancing & Families
- I realize that we're in Early Access, so a lot of features are probably missing here, but I'm still going to weigh in on some things.
- I can't really seem to find lords' families. Occasionally I'll find a single person, but in my playthrough I never found anyone's family members other than the daughter of some guy. This was the first and only lady I saw, and therefore I decided to marry her.
- The romancing system in Bannerlord is a complete step down from the one in Warband.
- In order to romance ladies you have to complete skill checks in dialogue. The first time you have to get 3/3 skill checks correct in order to succeed, the second time you have to get 2/2 correct, and the third time you have to get another 3/3 correct.
- These skill checks are not a "reach 20 in this skill in order to succeed" but a "your skill is 20, so we'll give you a 56% chance of succeeding." This feels awful because you can be doing absolutely nothing different, but on the first attempt get 0/3 correct and on the second attempt get all 3/3 correct.
- You don't have to get to know the character or deduce their personality in order to choose the dialogue options matching their personality. You just choose the one with the highest chance of succeeding and the actual words don't matter.
- The whole feature where you learn poems from bards in order to tell them to your mistress is also gone.
- There doesn't seem to be any interaction with your spouse yet. You can tell them to join your party, and assign them clan roles and have them govern your castle or town, but that seems about it. Probably an Early Access thing.
- Here's how my personal romancing experience went:
- Went to several empty town keeps before finally finding one housing a single lady.
- Completed 1 bugged quest (Spy Party, check my previous posts) for her in order to get to +18 relations.
- Told her that I was interested in her, and she said okay let's try it out.
- Did a 3/3 skill check after reloading once. Went outside, waited a day or two. Went back in and did a 2/2 skill check on first try. Went back outside, waited another day or two. Went back in and did another 3/3 skill check after reloading twice.
- She told me to go speak to her father. I did that, and the game wanted me to give him a gift, so I gave him around 14.000 gold. He said that we'll get preparations ready and then nothing happened. We were married off screen and lived happily ever after.
- Basically, I gamed the skill check system and bought a wife, whom I know nothing about, for 14.000 gold.
Miscellaneous
- I absolutely hate that wages are now daily rather than weekly. It stresses me out more than it should.
- Your party eats slightly too much food, in my opinion. I have to fill up most of my inventory in order to travel for more than 10 days, and my party isn't even that big. Can't imagine what it must be like when you have around 200 troops. I don't think it's too bad but still something to look at.
- The short spear + shield duel in tournaments is incredibly dull. There's no room for outplaying, as the spear is so slow that your opponent will block 95% of your stabs, and you will block 100% of theirs. The duel takes ages and just consists of you stabbing once, then blocking, and repeating. They don't fall for fakes.
- The early game is too dull and repetitive - it needs to be spiced up. As I mentioned earlier, the game only really gets fun when you get workshops, as they actually give you the freedom to do whatever you want. Until then you're forced to run errands, hunt looters that you can't catch anyway, and win tournaments over and over again.
- Prison breakouts aren't optimal. I was held in a town in the middle of hostile territory, somehow got broken out, and was forced to sneak through an entire hostile kingdom in order to get away. I did not make it very far before being taken prisoner again and having to wait before getting broken out again. I didn't get away the second time either.
- The music sort of comes and goes. Sometimes you can go a while without any music and you start wondering if the audio broke.
- There is absolutely no point in capturing territory from thugs in towns. First you have to kill the band defending the area, and then you have to defend it from the gang leader coming to take it back. If you win both fights, congratulations, they still control the territory, and you achieved nothing except decreased relations.
- New: The game needs some sort Paradox type notification system with notification boxes at the center of the screen that pauses the game until you close it. I feel like there were many important notifications that I missed due to there being so much text constantly refreshing on the screen. For example, I would've loved a notification when I was awarded a castle, when we had to vote on something within the kingdom, when a clan member got taken prisoner, and when a fief upgrade had finished.
- New: In my opinion, the game uses text shadows and outlines to the point where it starts looking cheap. I honestly think that the text would look much cleaner and sharper if the text shadows and outlines where thinned a lot more. The "PAUSE" text that shows while the game is paused is a good example of this. On a similar note, a lot of the text in the game feels a bit low resolution / quality compared to other games? I don't know if this is just me.
That's all for now. I'll probably be adding more as I start my new playthrough after my first one ending prematurely. Despite the ranting, you can still tell that things are in place and that the game has a ton of potential. It just needs a lot of touches still, and hopefully Early Access will allow them to do that.
