Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord News

Greetings warriors of Calradia!

Picture the scene. You find yourself deep in enemy territory. After seizing an enemy stronghold, you pause for a respite. The campaign has been long and costly, and supplies are running low... And then, on the horizon, you see your worst fears realised. At first, a low rumble and a blur of colour, but then, slowly, the standards and banners of the enemy army come into focus. Your army is ill-prepared for a field battle, and so, you dig in.

The situation seems hopeless. You are vastly outnumbered and time is not a commodity that you possess. Morale is wavering and your troops look to you to make a decisive decision. Do you hold your position and pray that reinforcements arrive before the walls are breached, or worse, you starve to death? Do you sally out to meet the attackers head-on in a brave, but ultimately, suicidal final charge?



While we have already talked about certain siege mechanics in previous blogs, we didn’t discuss the different ways and trade-offs that are involved in any amount of detail. So, in this week’s blog, we’ll try to present players’ options related to sieges in a more comprehensive manner.

Sieges in Bannerlord are dangerous affairs for both the besieged and the besiegers. If you are defending, you already may be facing bleak odds. The enemy may be bombarding your walls with trebuchets with the hope of creating a breach to exploit, or may be preparing an assault with siege towers and battering rams. You may be running out of food and losing your soldiers to starvation. But even in the direst situations, you have a number of options. You can keep waiting behind your walls, hoping that you will be able to beat off the assault or that a relief force will arrive soon and drive away the besiegers. Or alternatively, you may use your tactics skill to break out of the siege with relatively little loss and save yourself and the majority of your army from annihilation. Lastly, you may try to parley with the besiegers in the hope that they will allow you to pass through the siege lines unmolested in return for handing over the walls.



If you are outside and have come to the aid of a besieged castle, you again have options. You can attack the besiegers right away, and in general, the forces in the town will sally out to join the fight, and together, you may hopefully overwhelm the attackers. Another option is to stay mobile outside of the siege camp, harassing the enemy, attacking foragers and reinforcements in the hope that the enemy will run out of provisions before they can take the castle. If neither of those options has a good chance of success, you can also make use of your tactics skill and force your way through the siege, this time going into the castle rather than out, bringing much-needed supplies and troops as part of the relief effort!

All in all, understanding the available options in dealing with sieges is hugely important and may mean the difference between successfully defending and enlarging your domain, or sitting out the rest of the war in a cold and damp dungeon.

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Greetings warriors of Calradia!

Earlier in the year, we told you about our intention to hold a multiplayer beta for Bannerlord. This is something we have some experience with from our previous title, Mount & Blade: Warband, so we are fully aware of the value of including our community at this stage of development. Our preparations have been proceeding quite nicely and we thought it would be a good idea to share what we have been up to in this period.

The first stage of the beta preparation process was to set up things so that we as the developers could experience the game as players, downloading and playing it from our homes. This was quite exciting for us and many team members commented that playing the game felt very different when played from home, although of course, it was very much identical to the version in the office!

After making sure everything was working, we went on and invited some of our friends and family members. By inviting people close to us, we were able to ensure that both our game and servers were working as intended - without having to worry about providing a perfectly polished gameplay experience quite yet. Still, our intention with this was to lay the groundwork for inviting members of our community to play the game.

While doing all of this, we kept on polishing the game as well as developing the necessary infrastructure for a smooth multiplayer experience. We created a matchmaking system, as well as systems for deploying servers and monitoring their performance. We also started working on systems that would collect data from played matches so that we could analyze this information and make more informed decisions for future development. In addition to collecting data, we thought about the best ways to receive feedback from players and put it into use, creating questionnaires and special forum sections for this purpose.

And that leads us to where we are right now! This week, we started inviting members of our community to participate in a closed beta. We think that at this stage, this is the most productive route to take, as it allows us to draw from their collective knowledge, understanding, and experience of our previous games, as well as, allowing us to show some appreciation for the continued passion and support that they have shown for our games over the years.

Our friends from the clan Unity posing for a photo during a closed beta playtest

With this being the early stages of testing, we have decided to keep the player count rather small and manageable, allowing us to more directly engage testers and make better use of the feedback provided to refine Bannerlord’s multiplayer and make it the best that it can be. The game is far from feature and content complete, and these early tests are very much focused on testing the game’s systems and mechanics, as well as, stability before it’s ready for a more general audience.

After this stage of closed beta tests, our plan is to transition to an open beta, meaning a large number of players will be able to access the game and be involved in the testing process. When that time comes, we will make an announcement detailing how you can apply to take part. Until then, we hope you take heart from knowing that we have taken the first steps towards releasing the game and that after such a long wait, it’s finally almost harvesting season!

Skirmish - A 6vs6 Team-Based PvP Game Mode

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Greetings warriors of Calradia!

In Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, players are able to engage in a number of hostile and criminal activities. However, just as in real life, these actions have consequences. And while some of the more obvious actions may be engaging an enemy in a pitched battle or laying siege to a castle, in this week’s blog, we focus on some of the more unconventional options that players have at their disposal.

Raiding Villages
First on the list is something that Mount & Blade veterans will be familiar with: raiding. Raiding in Bannerlord is built on the mechanic from our previous games, but with various additions and improvements to how the system works.

Players are free to initiate raids on neutral or enemy villages to steal the assets of the villagers. After dispatching the local militia, the raid continues on the world map, with the inventory of the village being transferred to the player party over time. The player can choose to abandon the raid at any time, taking whatever goods they managed to gather with them. Once a village has been fully raided, it takes some time for it to recover and be fully operational again.

Forcefully Recruiting Villagers
Bannerlord sees the introduction of the ability to press gang villagers into your army. This is an act of coercion that takes some time to perform, but won’t necessarily lead to an encounter, providing there is a character with a high roguery skill in the player party. Villagers can choose to resist this coercion, at which point the player needs to decide if they should escalate to fighting the villagers, or back down and abandon their attempts to forcefully recruit troops. If the player decides to back down, then there are no penalties for their actions.

Forcefully Taking Supplies
Forcing supplies from villages is the least aggressive of the hostile actions, and villagers will only put up a fight if they believe you have absolutely no chance of taking on their numbers. Otherwise, they will allow you to take some supplies from the village’s stores while spending some time there. The yield from forcing supplies will be significantly smaller compared to a raid, but at the same time, you will create much less ill will against yourself.



Attacking or Coercing Villagers and Caravans
But of course, it isn’t just settlements that are subject to hostile actions. Caravans and villager parties moving on the campaign map can also be attacked, coerced to join the player or forced to hand over a portion of their items and gold. In addition to this, they can also be intimidated into surrendering, which gives the player full access to their inventory. Just like with hostile actions against settlements, the severity of the hostile action is taken into account to determine consequences. Forcefully taking a few items from a caravan can be regarded as relatively unimportant, whereas outright attacking it will be considered as a major provocation.

Consequences for Hostile Actions
If you are not at war with the kingdom of the target, hostile actions are considered to be criminal acts and thus increase your criminal rating in the region. However, if your criminal rating exceeds a certain point, the other kingdom will be provoked to declare war. Otherwise, you may be able to repair the damage and atone for your sins by paying compensation.
But apart from the threat of war, there are many other consequences to hostile actions. In all instances, the player will receive a relation hit with the owner of the targeted settlement and notables that reside there. Moreover, if the player is a vassal of a kingdom, they will receive a relation penalty with their liege and lose influence within their realm. Finally, if the player is the ruler of their faction, their influence within their realm will again be negatively impacted.

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Greetings warriors of Calradia!

During battles, hierarchies are of key importance: keeping the chain of command intact and knowing exactly who is in charge is vital… especially if that someone is you! That rang especially true in medieval times when the chain of command was also a reflection of how society was ordered as a whole.

In Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, politics and tactics can overlap as well, and you won’t always be the one in command of every army you’re fighting for. In the early and middle game, you will usually find yourself following an army led by a king or a high ranking noble. When this army enters battle, you may be able to take the leadership of one of the formations, but which formation you may lead has to be determined realistically, so we came up with a system for that.

For determining who will lead what, the game first assigns a seniority rank to each lord present, including the player. Calculation of the rank takes into account clan renown and power, and of course, faction rulers are given a huge boost to reflect their position within the realm. The system also takes into account the leader of the army itself, as well as, the number of troops that each lord has brought to the field of battle.

The lord with the highest rank is selected as the commander for the battle. Following this, captains are allowed to choose the formation they will lead in order of their rank. For NPC lords, an AI routine selects the most appropriate formation (usually the largest and most prestigious one remaining).



When it’s the player’s turn to choose, the game displays the menu above. Formations led by higher ranking lords are shown as locked and may not be selected. Players may select any of the remaining ones, or choose not to lead any formation at all (entering the battle as just a warrior with no special responsibilities). Once the player makes a choice, any remaining AI lords are also assigned to their choices in the order of their rank. Players may then review this order of battle and then click done if satisfied with how things look.

Conversely, if the player has the highest rank and is assigned as the commander, then they will be given total control over the entire army during the battle. In this case, the player is still shown the menu but can’t change anything and just has to proceed after reviewing the information.



We feel that the order of battle system helps to provide players with a sense of a greater power structure that one would expect to find in a medieval society. It eliminates these strange scenarios where prestigious lords and rulers are commanded by some random lord’s nephew. It also helps to give players a sense of progression as they rise through the ranks to become a renowned lord that commands both respect and, well, more troops!

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Greetings warriors of Calradia!

In Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, you need to keep your head about you at all times. And with the game’s new death system, this rings especially true, lest your adventures come to an abrupt end to the executioner’s axe!

Executions make for quite a natural addition to the series. The medieval period is infamous for some of its troubling, if rather inventive, methods of execution. From dealing with treacherous vassals to striking fear into the hearts of the ruled, executions were a simple solution to otherwise complicated problems.

Our approach to this feature is like with most systems in the game: it should be simple enough to understand and use, yet achieves complexity through its interaction with the larger simulation.



As shown in the screenshot above, players are able to execute characters through a button on the party screen. Choosing to do so leads to another interface for confirmation that the player wants to carry out this action, with a short animation that follows if the player decides to press ahead. The execution itself has a number of consequences that help to ensure that it is a powerful, yet costly action. These consequences differ in severity depending on whom the player chooses to execute. Executing a dishonourable lord is a lot more acceptable in the eyes of your peers than killing an honourable one, but it is still frowned upon. After all, lords are part of the ruling elite, and such punishments are not befitting of their status! Likewise, the executed character’s clan and faction won’t take too kindly to seeing one of their kin slain in such a manner, and as such, relations between the two sides will be severely affected. What’s worse, executing an honourable lord will decrease your own honour rating, so you may end up being marked as dishonourable yourself.



If you do end up as dishonourable due to executions you carry out or for any other reason, it’s not exactly the end of the world. You’ll receive some penalty to your relation with most other nobles, but you can still make it work. However, you will now need to be very careful. Executions are an option available to AI lords as well, and now that you are dishonourable, your enemies will be much more likely to chop your head off if they manage to capture you. When deciding whether or not to execute the player, the AI lord’s personality, the honour rating of the player, and the relationship between the two are all taken into account.

In the end, we think that executions are a solid addition to the game. Like many of Bannerlord’s mechanics, if used wisely, it can help to further your goals within the game. Likewise, it opens up new avenues for roleplaying and feeds into the emergent narrative that the sandbox encourages.

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