Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord News

Greetings warriors of Calradia!

Morale is a key factor in warfare. An army can be greater in number, better trained and exceptionally equipped, but without the will to fight, none of that matters. Conversely, high morale can see people through extreme hardships, giving them the determination to press on and continue the fight long after all hope is lost, only to grasp victory from the jaws of defeat. In this week's blog, we take a look at how morale is implemented in Bannerlord, discussing its effects on both the campaign map and the battlefield.

On the campaign map, each party has a party morale rating. Your party’s morale is shown in the lower-right panel. If you mouse over this, you can see a tooltip that shows how it will change day to day and what factors currently affect it. Party morale changes mainly due to the result of your actions. Successful battles and raids will increase morale whereas excessive casualties and actions like sacrificing some troops during retreats will reduce it. Also, failing to pay wages or letting your troops go hungry are also rather detrimental!

If you manage to keep your party’s morale high on the map, you will enjoy a number of benefits. Your party will gain a slight speed boost and will also gain a small advantage in battle simulations. On the other hand, if you allow morale to fall below a threshold, some of your troops may desert your party to look for better employment.

While party morale is quite important on the campaign map, it is arguably more critical during battles. Medieval battles were fought in close quarters, which was no doubt incredibly stressful for the participants. Typically, battles were as likely to be decided on superior morale as fighting prowess.



At the beginning of the battle, each soldier is given a starting morale based on their party’s overall morale rating. After this, whenever a troop is killed or wounded (up to a maximum of ten), friendly troops that are nearby receive a morale penalty. This morale penalty is modified according to the commander’s skills and perks, and also other factors. For example, troops standing in a shield wall receive less penalty. Conversely, troops get a morale boost when one of their number scores a kill nearby. In practice, when two bodies of soldiers meet in the field and a fight ensues, morale will tend to drop over time. If one side is decisively winning, the other side will lose morale rather quickly. On the other hand, if the fight is more or less balanced, then both sides will lose morale, albeit more slowly over time. Whichever way the combat goes, usually some soldier's morale will eventually drop to a point where they will panic and start to run away. This is quite dangerous, because every time a soldier panics, this will also create a morale penalty on nearby troops and a few troops running away can easily create a chain reaction where an entire formation breaks and starts to run away. 



We think that our interpretation of morale in Bannerlord can be summed up by a single historical battle: The Battle of Towton. During the battle, Edward IV led his troops from the front while his Lancastrian opponent, Henry VI, remained in nearby York. Edward inspired his numerically inferior force to a crushing victory over the Lancastrians after battling on for hours until reinforcements arrived, breaking the morale of the Lancastrians in the process. This started with a trickle of men deserting the battlefield, followed by battalions, before eventually, the entire army began to rout, where it is said that more troops were lost during the ensuing panic than died during the actual fighting.


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Greetings warriors of Calradia!

In this week’s blog, we will be concluding our miniseries of blog posts on sieges by discussing the assault phase, with a particular focus on how the game’s AI evaluates and reacts to unfolding events.

Sieges are very much a key event in the game. Whether defending your homeland, aggressively expanding your borders, or simply trying to establish yourself among the ranks of the nobility, sieges are at the very heart of the Mount & Blade experience. With Bannerlord, our goal is to enhance sieges in their entirety, ranging from the tricks you can employ to indirectly weaken a settlement before laying siege, all the way through to driving the last defenders from the keep. In our previous siege blogs, we looked at the bombardment phase on the campaign map and discussed the options that players have at their disposal when either attacking or defending a castle. We also looked at keep battles and talked about their importance and the instances in which they can occur. The one thing we haven’t looked at is perhaps the most important and the bloodiest phase of a siege: the assault.

Assaulting a castle is something that players should carefully consider. Castles will call on a local militia to defend the settlement in times of crisis, but more often than not, they will also house a garrison of professional soldiers that can put up much more of a resistance. And if the castle has a governor overseeing the defense, things will get even trickier still since governors can boost defensive siege engines and garrison quality. But let’s put all that to one side and imagine that you have weighed up the pros and cons of launching an assault and decided to press ahead with your attack.

Firstly, you are met with a deployment phase in which you can choose where to position your troops and siege machines before the battle begins. You can select each formation and move it around a deployable zone, positioning your troops for the best possible advantage. Each castle will have three sections open to attack and you have to choose a method of attack for each of these. For each section, there may be a magnitude of options available depending on the level of your preparation: You can simply ignore a section to focus on other targets, attempt to ascend ladders, use an assault tower, break down a gate with a battering ram, or if you have been able to take down a wall section by bombardment, try to push your way through the breach.

Once you have deployed your troops and siege machines, the assault begins. Your troops will begin to carry out your attack plan according to the way you deployed everything. The game AI will take control of the various assault groups by default, however, you can easily take over control of one or all groups yourself and micromanage everything if you wish to do so.

We believe the availability of AI to carry out the siege plan together with the ability for the player to take over, gives the best of two worlds. Players can carry out a multi-pronged attack on several sections simultaneously without much difficulty while focusing their attention on the most critical location. In this way, you can, for example, let the AI carry out a diversionary attack which forces the enemy to split its troops, while you lead your elite soldiers and attack the most vulnerable point.

The same principles also apply to siege defense. If the player is the commander of the battle or captain of one of the formations, they can give orders to override what the defensive AI would do. However, controlling all the formations and all the sides at the same time from the player's perspective isn't always easy. As such, the player may want to take over the defense of the weakest section as the AI tries to maintain the rest of the defense as effectively as possible while entrusting that side to the player.

Attacking AI
When AI is responsible for the attacking force, it will make a few checks to determine how and where it will launch its assault. It does this by assessing its own strength and that of its opponent and will either choose to press with a coordinated attack on many fronts or attempt a concentrated assault through the weakest point. At the same time, the AI will decide how to split its force to achieve this. It does this according to the number of troops that each front can support. If there is a breach in the wall, the AI will try to send many soldiers through that side, however, if there are ladders, since fewer men can simultaneously attack at the same time from that side, fewer troops will be sent, or in the case of a breach on another wall, the AI may choose not to use the side with ladders at all.

If the attacker side has a battering ram or siege towers while also having ladders or a breach on another side of the castle, and it decides that making a coordinated attack will strain the defenders more because they will be forced to defend all fronts simultaneously, then the attacker side will hold assaulting the breach and ladders until the slower machines can be pushed to the gatehouse or walls. Formations on the waiting fronts will try to stay in a relatively safe spot while threatening to attack if the defenders pull forces from that side.

In terms of prioritising actions, operating primary weapons like battering rams, siege towers and ladders are the most important task for the attacking force as they will be used to open paths into the castle. Apart from that, there is not a strict priority list, but depending on circumstances the strategy level of the AI will try to prioritise what is most important or beneficial.

Defending AI
The defending AI considers both the threat level of the means of attack possessed by the attackers and the actual enemy positioning. Let's say the enemy is bringing a siege tower from the left side and has ladders on the right side. If the attackers are threatening both sides, since ladders are easier to defend against, the defender side will concentrate more troops on the siege tower side. If the attackers are trying to be tricky and attack purely from the ladder side with all of its troops, the defending AI will realise this and bring the bulk of their infantry to defend that side. If in another scenario the defenders were able to destroy a battering ram or a siege tower, thus rendering that side unattackable, they will not waste any men waiting on that wall.

The defending AI will also relocate its archers with similar reasoning, i.e. if the enemy cannot or does not attack from one side, defending archers will leave positions that can only cover that side. In addition to this, when a wall or gate chokepoint is about to fall, archers on a nearby wall may be sent to bolster the numbers in hand to hand combat, whereas when the enemy is approaching the castle from afar, the defending archers will utilise the best positions for shooting at the approaching enemy.

Retreating
Soldiers may decide to run away based on morale, but in many instances, retreating is a strategic decision that is decided with many factors taken into consideration. Ultimately, the AI tries to estimate whether the attack or defense can succeed or not and if retreating will only yield more immediate casualties. For instance, let's imagine a siege assault where 500 men are trying to take a city defended by 100 men. As the assault continues, men die from both sides, but due to the valiant defense by the city's garrison, the attackers now have 250 soldiers against 80 of the defenders without setting foot inside the castle. At this point, the attacker AI commander may decide to call off the assault instead of losing more troops in vain.




If you would like to see what was just discussed in action, we would encourage you to check out the video from the previous blog where you can see the attacking AI split its forces and coordinate an assault on the castle from three different directions. https://youtu.be/cvkZ4RaYSE8?t=395

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Greetings warriors of Calradia!

In this week’s blog, we will be showing you some raw gameplay footage from Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord’s vast sandbox campaign. This particular video was captured from the demo we took to this year’s Gamescom, which put a heavy emphasis on large battles and sieges, dropping the player in the mid-game of Bannerlord’s campaign with a sizable warband of troops. Because of the scale of the sandbox, unfortunately, we are unable to show you all of the game’s current features in their entirety in this one video, but rest assured, as we move closer to early access we will be sharing more videos with you that focus on different aspects of the game and highlight the many different features and mechanics that will be available for you to experience in March 2020.

For now, we hope you enjoy the video and if you have any questions, comments or concerns, make sure to leave a reply in the comments section and we will do our best to respond to them.

https://youtu.be/cvkZ4RaYSE8

Greetings warriors of Calradia!

Last week, we asked for questions from you, our community, regarding Bannerlord's multiplayer closed beta and the early access phase that the game will transition through on its way to a full release. We decided to answer a few more than we originally anticipated, and so, we thought it would be best to save the campaign gameplay video until next week's blog instead (our apologies if that is what you are here for!). We hope that these direct and honest answers will give you an insight into what is happening with the beta and a greater understanding of what to expect from early access. So, without further ado, let's get to it, shall we?

The way of reporting feedback is the first question that comes to mind if I join open beta, would I be able to report feedback/issues with ease, and how?

We have a beta section on our official forums which has been segmented in a way to allow players to provide feedback about specific points while making that information easily accessible by our development team. (the forums are hidden right now, but they will be opened up and accessible next week alongside the first wave of beta invites!). In addition to this, we send out regular feedback forms via email to gather players thoughts on different aspects of the game. We also use automated tools as part of the process which allows us to gather data on a number of different things. One such example is our analytics tool on our servers. This allows us to track events in each multiplayer match to aid us in balancing the game. Another tool is our crash reporter, which automatically sends a crash report to us for review in the event of a game crash.

What criteria are you basing the waves of invites for the beta on? I’m assuming computer specs mostly.

We have identified several key groups and we’ll be allocating quotas for different groups according to the kind of feedback we need at each specific stage of beta testing. For example, at one stage we may invite old M&B MP players because we are particularly interested in how they will adjust to a certain mechanic. At another stage, we may invite players with low-end PCs because our engine team needs to see how the game runs on their hardware.

Will the beta expand to include other game modes? I would love to get a look at captain mode, and possibly some multiplayer sieges, etc.

Of course! To give you an idea of how this will progress, when we started the beta, we launched with Skirmish Mode, two factions and one map. Over time we introduced Captain Mode, Team Deathmatch, a selection of maps, and the remaining 4 factions. At times, such is the case right now with Captain Mode, we will disable some content so that it can be worked on and improved before being reintroduced. Moving forward we hope to introduce more content, including siege as a game mode. However, we should say that people shouldn’t expect new content with every patch. Sometimes the patches will be focused entirely on balancing and bug fixing.

Will you give a chance to SP players to try MP and hear their opinion or will your first choice be MP players for the Beta?

We are interested in hearing the thoughts of people from a wide range of gaming preferences and backgrounds. Bannerlord’s singleplayer and multiplayer share a lot of core systems, in particular, the combat system, which means that changes we make based on the feedback from our beta testers has a knock-on effect with single-player. It is for this reason that won’t strictly select people who prefer MP over SP.

Will beta be ongoing until (or very close to) the launch of EA? If not, when will it close?

For now we plan to run the beta up until the launch of EA, however, there may be times when we decide to close the servers down for certain periods while we make adjustments and improvements. It is also possible that our plans may change as we close in on the start of EA, but if they do, we will let you all know!

How long is it planned to be in early access?

We have some internal estimates of how long the game will stay in EA before making it to full-release, however, at this moment in time, we would prefer not to share those. We are more focused on creating a game that players will enjoy and can keep coming back to and playing well into the future. This means that our estimates could change depending on how happy we are with the state of the game and whether we feel it is ready for a full release or not.

Will the price change upon full release?

We will be sharing more information about the price of the game closer to the start of EA, and whether or not this will differ from the full release price.

Roughly what percentage of single-player features and gameplay mechanics will be in-game upon early access release? Many of the blog posts make it seem as though it will be nearly feature complete, while some suggest otherwise.

Most of the basic features will be there and we can say that it will be possible to play a campaign from start to end with 100+ hours of gameplay. However, some features may be missing or turned off if they are not in the state that we would like to present yet. We encourage players who want a complete and fully polished experience to hold off on buying the game until full release.

Will we be able to host dedicated servers in early access?

This probably won’t be possible at the very beginning of EA.

Which languages will be available in early access?

We will only support English at the beginning of the early access period. We do plan to offer the game in quite a few languages at the full release.

There was a noticeable absence of banners in the battles shown at Gamescom. Have these been removed? Or was it just a temporary measure?

Banners and banner bearers will definitely come back as even better and more polished than before.

On cloth physics: is this feature still in the game? Can we expect any kind of human hair physics?

Cloth physics is in the game, it works and is used in many places. Hair physics wasn’t a priority since it is difficult to get right and you are usually wearing a helmet anyway. However, it is something we can look into if we can find the time.

I didn't notice the pommel bashing in any Gamescom / beta video so far, is it still a thing?

Yes, you can still very much bash someone in the face with the pommel of your sword. The animation is different depending on your weapon type, which might explain why you didn't notice it, but regardless, it is still there!

In earlier instalments of M&B it was always bothering me that I had to choose a flag that has already been used by a lord. I don't know how this will go in Bannerlord, but since it has the word BANNER in it, will we be able to choose our very own unique banner? Or even better, create one without modding tools? I think this would be a small yet great addition to the game!

We were planning to offer a banner editor, however, we eventually decided to limit it such that each clan has a specific charge with the colour scheme of the banner being determined by the kingdom. This has the advantage that it gives clans within a kingdom a more uniform look while retaining their character. Having said that, we already have quite a variety of different charge designs and it is a great idea to let the player select from unique ones that are not used by any existing clan!

Discuss this blog post HERE


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Greetings warriors of Calradia!

As the dust from Gamescom begins to settle, we thought we would use this week’s blog to give you a summary of the events from last week’s show before inviting you to present some questions for us to answer in next week’s blog.

So, let’s get to it, shall we? As we explained a couple of weeks back, this year’s Gamescom was a rather special one for us. For the first time ever, we presented the game in the public area of the show with a hands-on demo of Captain mode, a 6 vs 6 team-based game mode that puts players in command of a detachment of their own AI troops. Meanwhile, over in the business area, we presented guests with a hands-on demo of the mid-game of Bannerlord’s vast sandbox campaign, putting a heavy focus on large-scale battles and sieges.

This was actually quite a challenging task for us. Before this year, we had only shown the game in the business section to a restricted audience. This time, we would not only have a public booth for the first time, but we would also offer the single-player demo separately in the business area. This really put a lot of stress on our team. Although programmers working on single-player and multiplayer could generally work independently, our QA team, level designers etc. had to put a lot of work to ensure that both demos were ready. We also had to design and plan for two separate booths, which was quite a task in itself!

The TaleWorlds team making the final preparations at our business area booth

Thankfully, in the end, our confidence paid off and we were able to show the game in somewhat its entirety, with thousands of guests visiting our booths, and in some instances, multiple times! We won’t lie though, for as well as we feel things went (amazingly if we do say so ourselves!), there were a few small issues here and there, but that is to be expected of a game that is still in development. Barring the odd obscure crash and some minor optimisation issues, overall the demos were stable, had a sufficient amount of content to keep people entertained, but more importantly, they were fun!

Community member, Killbotter, after a game or two of Captain mode

We were blown away by the response from the players at both booths. It was amazing to see people completely fresh to the series standing alongside Mount & Blade veterans, enjoying the game we have worked so hard on for so long. We can’t express how much it meant to us to see the look on people’s faces as they rode head-on into battle with a huge smile on their face.

Visitors at our public booth playing Captain mode

At the beginning of the week, we made the announcement that the game will be launched on Steam Early Access in March 2020. It wasn’t our intention for Bannerlord to launch exactly 10 years after our previous game, Mount & Blade: Warband, was released, however, we do find it to be a rather amusing coincidence nevertheless! Alongside this announcement, we opened up a web form for people to apply to take part in Bannerlord’s ongoing closed-beta, which, by the way, is still open: beta.taleworlds.com

https://youtu.be/yCk6Jk7DvrA
So, why the decision to launch in early access? Well, for a game as huge as Bannerlord, we knew that at some point we would need to get a large pool of players in to play the game and find all of the strange and hidden bugs that are simply impossible for a team of our size to locate. The game has completely expanded in scope compared to anything we have released before, and not just in terms of map size and settlement counts. We are talking about the many new game features and mechanics, most of which are interconnected, meaning that any slight change in one can have an unexpected knock-on effect in another. We are keen to hear feedback from our players on these new features, as well as, the changes we have made to existing features. We want to work alongside our community to deliver a game that achieves our goals and vision while providing them with a unique and enjoyable experience that they can keep coming back to well into the future.

We will be talking a lot more about what you can expect from early access over the coming weeks so that you can make an informed decision on if you would like to access the game in an unfinished state or not, but for now, we just want to make it clear that there will be a lot of content there to keep you entertained for many, many hours.

As for the multiplayer closed-beta, we will start to invite players in from next week onwards. We have made the decision to invite people in waves, so if you don’t get a key next week, please do not be disheartened. We will be targeting different groups at different stages so we can gather feedback from a wide range of players. We have decided to take this approach because we feel it would be the most effective way for us to make use of the limited amount of time we have to gather feedback and data to refine multiplayer in time for the early access launch. This allows us to target and tackle specific problems individually rather than allowing ourselves to be overwhelmed from the get-go.



We would like to invite you to ask any questions you may have about this year’s Gamescom, as well as, any questions you may have about the closed-beta and early access, by leaving them in the comment section below. We will select a few to answer in next week’s blog, which we will present to you alongside a gameplay video from the single-player demo.

Discuss this blog post HERE


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