The StunLock

Bannerlord is simultaneously the best game in its own genre while also being mediocre in a lot of ways. Here are some changes TaleWorlds Entertainment could introduce to change that.

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1 | Overhaul the Trading Skill

First, and arguably least important, is an overhaul to the trading skill. As it stands, trading leads players down a rabbit hole of frustration: the skill doesn’t level through assigning companions to run profitable trade caravans, nor does it level through maintaining profitable workshops.

The only way to level this skill is through trading equipment and goods for profit. Because of the XP scaling of this one and only method, leveling trading to max level takes far more time than what taking over the entire map generally requires.

Not only does this make roleplaying as a merchant boring, but it makes it comparatively weak compared to other archetypes if the player plans on leading a war party of any girth.

To overhaul the trading skill:

• Make profitable caravans and workshops level the skill passively
• Introduce both passive and perk benefits that buff expensive mercenaries for players with high trade
• Tie the ability to trade fiefs to vassalage or ownership of land

2 | Introduce Meaningful Resource Management

After getting to the mid-game, resource management in Bannerlord is a joke: you’ll have infinite food via victories in combat and your troops equipment is upgraded and maintained without any relationship to what the player owns (cavalry not withstanding).

This means that the player and AI can wage war in an endless loop without regard to resource management at all. Somewhat confusingly, TaleWorlds created resources in-game that could serve purposes to solve this issue, but for some reason didn’t make them useful beyond crafting. Hardwood, for example, could be used as a resource to develop siege equipment. Those players who do not spend time collecting hardwood for war would find themselves without a paddle when trying to take fiefs (or vice versa for defended fiefs not stocked with plenty of wood).

How to introduce meaningful resource management:

• Make hardwood, iron, and charcoal essential for sieges.
• Make troop upgrades change in strength depending on resources allotted to each troop instead of dependent on strictly money.
• Limit food availability in regions devastated by pillaging and warfare
• Tie fief upgrade speed and defenses to available resources in specific lands

3 | Fief Management Should be More Meaningful

When interacting with their first fief, most players will opt to take the best garrison troops, set the town to increase in loyalty, and then never interact with that city, village, or castle again except to recruit more troops.

Interacting with a fief should be a game of strategy in the same way any other part of Bannerlord intends to be. Interacting with the notables in fiefs should be a game of weighing costs and benefits while yielding tangible benefits to the function of that fief.

Right now, fief management begins and ends with ensuring conquered fiefs remain loyal and the garrison to tax ratio is profitable. In a game that revolves around conquering land, this is a depthless endeavor.

To improve fief management:

• Give notables political beliefs and personal desires that conflict or align with fief management. The better a relationship with certain notables, the better their (currently non-existent) passive benefits to said fief is.
• Let the player govern a few fiefs to make governor perks less useless.
• Allow greater flexibility for engineering defenses, such as allowing trebuchets to be built in towns and castles for greater defenses, making defending fiefs against large, hostile armies more consistent and more than a game of auto-resolving with a healthy number of archers.

4 | Yes, We Need Better Diplomacy

In a game that has relationship and diplomatic mechanics embedded into its DNA, the fact that declaring war or peace are the only two options available to the player is beyond silly.

If a player takes the time to develop a great relationship with the leader of another faction, that should have a great impact on whether or not that leader wants to declare war on the player-led kingdom.

In its current state, Bannerlord’s diplomacy acts more or less as a timer for factions to cycle through declaring war and agreeing to peace. It’s also upsetting that the only terms allowed for conditional surrender include tribute payments and not lord recruitment or fief trading.

To create better diplomacy:

• Make a permanent peace between two rulers possible through affectionate disposition and aligned visions for the future.
• Make waging warfare through economics and logistics more viable
• Make declaring war and brokering for peace involve more conditions: fief trading, lord recruitment and banishment, and trade rights should be a bare minimum consideration when the lords of a realm vote for peace or war.

5 | Minimize Recruitment Speeds

In the time between capturing an enemy lord and their sale/escape, other lords of their realm could have recruited upwards of fifty men or more.

This means that to make fights on the battlefield actually matter in terms of affecting a greater war, the player is forced into capturing enemy lords and keeping them locked away in castles or, alternatively, keeping them in their party’s prisoner ranks while teching into two perks that make prisoner escape impossible.

While keeping lords held as prisoner indefinitely is definitely both realistic and wise, a defeat in battle should be costly on a long-term basis on not just an annoyance.

If a lord loses a battle, but manages to escape, the underlying punishment should be a long-term handicap in troops available for a long while and not 5 minutes of visiting villages and sapping garrison troops.

While it may sound like this would lead to more annoying gameplay, the fact is that the lows experienced in defeat would be matched by greater highs when dealing a decisive blow against an enemy army, who would scramble to sue for peace when the field battles began going against them.

The end-game goofiness that is chasing enemy lords down while trying to take fiefs one by one in a speed-test against your opponent’s ability to recoup their troops can be solved in this manner, and make victories (and losses) infinitely more meaningful.

How to minimize recruitment speeds:

• Keep village recruit capacity, but tie restocking time to village hearths and decrease the AI’s inherent disposition with village notables
• Decrease garrison default recruitment speeds for fiefs surrounded by villages experiencing hardship in times of war
• Make low morale lords unable to recruit very many troops to their cause

TLDR; Bannerlord currently acts as a sandbox game with potential for modders, but wasted potential for its own self. To start fixing this, the developers should make resource management more intrinsic to warfare, upgrading troops, and sieges. The trading skill should be reworked for better merchant roleplaying and passive leveling. Additionally, Bannerlord needs better diplomacy options and greater punishment for players and AI when losing battles.

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