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It's been forever, but I just thought I'd post a reminder that Mount and Blade: Bannerlord drops this month!

Ooooo. Man! Mount and Blade is one of my favourite games...

 Da Boss wrote:
Ooooo. Man! Mount and Blade is one of my favourite games...

Ditto. Love warband despite the poor coding which turns 50% of the siege battles into Monty Python Skits lol.
They claimed to have sured up the AI, and Bannerlord looks beautiful.

Well, for accuracy, Early Access starts at the end of the month.

Will have to see how it develops- it looked really janky in the dev streams last year.

Roberts84 wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
Ooooo. Man! Mount and Blade is one of my favourite games...

Ditto. Love warband despite the poor coding which turns 50% of the siege battles into Monty Python Skits lol.
They claimed to have sured up the AI, and Bannerlord looks beautiful.

I mean, yes. Mount and Blade is one of those "trashcan pleasures" for me where pretty much every aspect of the game is...like how an unreleased early alpha of some other game would look play and feel, but the simple conceit of starting as a single dude in the middle of this vast world, and clawing your way up from walking to the nearest town and fighting a bunch of naked guys in a weird collosseum battle for money to having an unstoppable military force so powerful you can start to change the map of the world is just so goddamn addictive that it works anyway. it's a lot like why I end up replaying Sid Meyer's Pirates or Spore. Part of the charm is that they're so completely open ended unlike a game of Civilization or even an open world like Skyrim that you can basically do whatever you want, and they're so comically broken that you can decide to do something really stupid and commit really hard to the bit like a "Make The Caribbean All Dutch" run of SMP or a "no legs run" of spore.

I love watching the Garry's Mod-esque "battles" play out with your goofy uncoordinated horde of warriors running at one another while your camera wildly spins around and you swing your sword hoping to hear "Splat-AAAARGH", serpentining wildly to try and avoid enough random arrows to keep your character alive to the end.

I am tentatively excited for bannerlord, in that I hope it is the same kind of shlock just...I don't know, better graphics? More of it? I just have to decide if I want to replicate my run as Mountain Blade, barbarian hero who wears no armor and constantly seeks out the biggest thing to hold, or as Rosie the Reaver, committed feminist warband leader who would only ever recruit the peasant women you could get from escort quests and rescue missions, then train them until they're the ridiculously overpowered third upgrade tier you could get them to.

the_scotsman wrote:

Roberts84 wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
Ooooo. Man! Mount and Blade is one of my favourite games...

Ditto. Love warband despite the poor coding which turns 50% of the siege battles into Monty Python Skits lol.
They claimed to have sured up the AI, and Bannerlord looks beautiful.

I mean, yes. Mount and Blade is one of those "trashcan pleasures" for me where pretty much every aspect of the game is...like how an unreleased early alpha of some other game would look play and feel, but the simple conceit of starting as a single dude in the middle of this vast world, and clawing your way up from walking to the nearest town and fighting a bunch of naked guys in a weird collosseum battle for money to having an unstoppable military force so powerful you can start to change the map of the world is just so goddamn addictive that it works anyway. it's a lot like why I end up replaying Sid Meyer's Pirates or Spore. Part of the charm is that they're so completely open ended unlike a game of Civilization or even an open world like Skyrim that you can basically do whatever you want, and they're so comically broken that you can decide to do something really stupid and commit really hard to the bit like a "Make The Caribbean All Dutch" run of SMP or a "no legs run" of spore.

I love watching the Garry's Mod-esque "battles" play out with your goofy uncoordinated horde of warriors running at one another while your camera wildly spins around and you swing your sword hoping to hear "Splat-AAAARGH", serpentining wildly to try and avoid enough random arrows to keep your character alive to the end.

I am tentatively excited for bannerlord, in that I hope it is the same kind of shlock just...I don't know, better graphics? More of it? I just have to decide if I want to replicate my run as Mountain Blade, barbarian hero who wears no armor and constantly seeks out the biggest thing to hold, or as Rosie the Reaver, committed feminist warband leader who would only ever recruit the peasant women you could get from escort quests and rescue missions, then train them until they're the ridiculously overpowered third upgrade tier you could get them to.

I bought it on steam God knows how many years ago for about the price of a Happy Meal and I've probably enjoyed it more than just about any other Game. Easily the best value for money gaming purchase I've ever made. I quit after conquering Calradia on normal difficulty which took a fairly ungodly amount of hours to accomplish. By the end, Lord Garglemenards owned every castle, village and territory in the game. It was a complete autocracy.


Sometimes, a feth-all improvement on feth-all is a big deal. Even if it Bannerlord 3% better, so long as I can have protracted horseback battles against mountain bandits shooting backwards with a longbow while trotting up a vertical cliff face I'll be happy.

Think I have to agree that Mount & Blade falls squarely into the "so bad, it's good" category. I think the comparison to Spore is apt; there is so much potential that it doesn't matter that the game itself is a carcass on fire in a dumpster, it just works anyway. I'm worried that Bannerlord will actually take itself seriously, which would be a blow to the esence of what makes Mount & Blade fun in the first place.

For me it was the Brytenwalda mod allowing me to pretend to be a celtic warlord and work my way up from a brigand to a warlord with an unstoppable horde.
Decided my dude was a worshipper of the old religion and stamped out Christianity in my areas, and focused on capturing and defending religiously significant areas.
What other game is gonna let me do that from a third person perspective? Absolute bonkers brilliance.

And the jankyness can be fun too, holding a gate alone against a huge horde of enemies is epic, even if it is mostly due to jank.

IDK. Maybe if I get some extra money. But right now it's fighting things like the new stellaris expansion, or doom eternal, or any number of other games.

 Da Boss wrote:
For me it was the Brytenwalda mod allowing me to pretend to be a celtic warlord and work my way up from a brigand to a warlord with an unstoppable horde.
Decided my dude was a worshipper of the old religion and stamped out Christianity in my areas, and focused on capturing and defending religiously significant areas.
What other game is gonna let me do that from a third person perspective? Absolute bonkers brilliance.

And the jankyness can be fun too, holding a gate alone against a huge horde of enemies is epic, even if it is mostly due to jank.

The lotr mod (think it was called Last Days of the 3rd age or something) was similarly super fun. You had HILARIOUSLY overpowered elves and dunedains running around with 50-man armies able to take on orks with 200+ strong hordes, and all the crazy factions from the LOTR books like the bear-people, moria gobbos/uruk-hai/sauron orks as different factions, wolf riders, trolls etc.

How did that mod handle the mixing of units within a horde? One of the fun things about Mount and Blade was being able to recruit units from all over, but I would be sad if I played a LOTR themed one and you could mix elves and orcs for example.

 Da Boss wrote:
How did that mod handle the mixing of units within a horde? One of the fun things about Mount and Blade was being able to recruit units from all over, but I would be sad if I played a LOTR themed one and you could mix elves and orcs for example.

There was no mixing of different factions IIRC. You selected a starting allegiance and were basically locked into it, and you had enough alliance points with that faction to immediately start doing the "Recruit" option in cities. You could only see more than 2 factions in a battle by joining a battle in progress with your army.

For orc factions the "Recruit" in cities would net you like 50-100 dudes, for elves you might get 2-3. So there wasn't really the usual Mount and Blade start as a sort of "mercenary"

Heres the mod db page with a manual https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-last-days

The faction list is really pretty impressive

Beornings
Woodmen
Men of Dale
Dwarves
Lothlorien Elves
Imladris Elves
Wood Elves
Gondorians
Rohirrim
Men of Rhun
Dol Guldur
Gundabad
Moria Orks
Mordor
Isengard
Dunlanders
Variags of Khand
Haradrim
Corsairs of Umbar

That sounds AWESOME...

the_scotsman wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
How did that mod handle the mixing of units within a horde? One of the fun things about Mount and Blade was being able to recruit units from all over, but I would be sad if I played a LOTR themed one and you could mix elves and orcs for example.

There was no mixing of different factions IIRC. You selected a starting allegiance and were basically locked into it, and you had enough alliance points with that faction to immediately start doing the "Recruit" option in cities. You could only see more than 2 factions in a battle by joining a battle in progress with your army.

For orc factions the "Recruit" in cities would net you like 50-100 dudes, for elves you might get 2-3. So there wasn't really the usual Mount and Blade start as a sort of "mercenary"

Heres the mod db page with a manual https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-last-days

The faction list is really pretty impressive

Beornings
Woodmen
Men of Dale
Dwarves
Lothlorien Elves
Imladris Elves
Wood Elves
Gondorians
Rohirrim
Men of Rhun
Dol Guldur
Gundabad
Moria Orks
Mordor
Isengard
Dunlanders
Variags of Khand
Haradrim
Corsairs of Umbar

Glossed over this one, but looks very interesting given your description. Thanks for sharing!

Would also recommend Warsword Conquest if nobody has already. Warhammer Mount and Blade with a fairly decent variety of units. That, and Gobbo wolf mounts run roughly three times as fast as your average warhorse.