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I do want to like this game. It has a remarkable number of interesting features – from medieval battles to trading to politics. Unfortunately, getting to the good bits usually requires waiting through an hour and a half of the boring bits.
I never played Mount and Blade: Warband. I almost did, but the limited graphics and obtuse game systems stopped me after only a few minutes. I didn’t even intend to pick up Bannerlord until I read more about it. It was a tempting proposition – a medieval simulator where you can raise armies and lead them into battles in a first person RTS. Even now, those moments are unique among my gaming recollection, and it’s that which made me stick with this game for a good 20 hours.
At least, it was the desire to create of those battles that made me stick with the game for 12-15 hours and it was the attempts to find one of those battles that kept me going for the last 5-8. You see, the rhythm of Bannerlord is a dance between being so underpowered that you’re barely scraping by and being so overpowered that you can’t level up.
Starting out the game, your first priority is making money. Troops cost money each day and your profit margins are probably going to be slim for quite a while. I had initially started with the intention of being a full-time trader (which is my preferred method of world domination) – slowly amassing wealth and power until none could oppose me. My efforts were hampered as I would trade from hamlet to town to city, but without breaking out an Excel spreadsheet (which was Chezni’s idea) I wouldn’t be able to keep track of my cost basis for the five or six different products I was carrying (because the economy is dynamic, flooding the city market with one product is a sure way to tank your profits). After beating my head against the economy for several hours and with a few strokes of luck, I finally had enough money to start a caravan.
Almost immediately, all my money concerns flew out the window. Though caravans take a significant capital input and take a while to start making money, I was quickly netting 1,000 denar a day without doing a thing (where making 500 in a day was fantastic before). I was quickly able to start several more caravans and was rich beyond my wildest dreams. “Finally,” I thought, “I can start playing the game.”
But it was not to be. Now that I had enough money to raise and maintain an army of practically any size, I ran up against two problems. The first being that once my troops were upgraded, none of the bandits posed any threat against me. The second being that I could not raise a larger army because my “Clan Level” was too low. The quickest way to raise your clan level? By fighting tougher enemies. But, of course, I was far more powerful than all the bandits and far less powerful than any of the cities, so the XP (or “renown”) gains I could find were minimal, and raising your clan level requires a not insignificant amount of renown.
After many hours I was finally able to raise a small army and attacked one of the kingdoms. This, finally, gave me people to fight and I had to learn the basics of strategy on the battlefield. I had several glorious battles (lasting several minutes if I was lucky), until I had to run back and recruit/level up more troops to do it all over again. And again. And again. Because my army size was limited by my clan level, I wasn’t making any progress, so I stopped.
This is the real problem with the game. The clan level is an arbitrary limiting factor. If it were tied to your leadership skill and slowly increased over time1 (similar to how many other skills work) or if your profits were smaller so you couldn’t afford a larger army, these would be reasonable limits. But to be a millionaire in-game and unable to raise an army because the game says so feels weak. After laying siege to a castle, to be told that you lose because your number is too low is disappointing (not to say I hadn’t beaten armies twice my size, just that 400 vs. 100 is almost insurmountable – though I got close once).
There were other problems, but I’m willing to chalk most of them up to Early Access. Raiding bandit Hideouts only allow you to take a small (randomly selected, for some unknown reason) group of your army with you – if your character is not a melee combat focused fighter, they pose a greater challenge than raiding castles. If your character is captured by bandits or an enemy empire, you just sit staring at the screen for minutes until a random number generator says you break out. Entering battles/towns require jumping through several loading screens (to the point that I moved the game onto an SSD so I wouldn’t have to wait). Allowing your troops to battle without you apparently makes them brain dead, even when all you would have told them to do is charge. Et cetera, et cetera.
For now, Mount and Blade II: Bannerlord must go to Tier Two. I think, given the amount of effort TaleWorlds put into Warband, there’s a chance my complaints will be addressed. I hope so – the few times I was able to go into battle against a force close to twice my number and pull out a victory was pretty fantastic. Between the realistic battle physics, the first person commands on the field, and the dynamic political system behind it all, it’s already a remarkable and unique game experience.
1 ETA: Oh. Of course. There’s a mod to fix everything I complained about and do exactly this. For a game that came out a week and a half ago. I promise I didn’t know that when I wrote this.