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[Farce]

Smithing isn't necessary at all, it's just an easy way to get shit you want!

It's BORING.  It's BORING and EASY.  And being EASY means it's a simple and effective way to do a thing, which in turn means most people do the thing.  Players optimizing the fun out of their own playing is a well-noted phenomenon, it shouldn't be controveral that people do smithing to try and level up even though it's shitty.

I haven't really played since release but levelling up was so goddamn slow and tedious that I absolutely did smithing to try and powerlevel so I could play around with the cool new perks and stuff.  Because I hate joining kingdoms and have never had positive experiences joining a kingdom as a mercenary, all I really had were trading, kicking bandits around, and smithing, and smithing was fastest and not as tedious.

Also, by kicking bandits around, I mostly mean kicking looters around, because Bannerlord suffers from what most of Mount & Blade suffers from - a lack of dudes to beat up if you're not in a war or I guess a raider.  Even when I max out my troop cap, I'm still not even remotely a threat to most lords, so even if I want to jump into vassal bullshit it's kinda just, like, "this is almost certainly suicide!" but then bandit fights become more of a chore than anything, because there's no danger of you losing them.

One of the biggest issues I had with the versions of Bannerlord I played were how almost everything had such obnoxiously high skillpoint reqs.  Almost every horse beyond the shitty starter ones needed huge numbers for riding.  All the cool weapons did too.  Raising your numbers was a long and tedious process because you had to work for every goddamn single point increase and you probably needed like fuckin 50 or whatever.  Like.  I thought the starting horses that I could get were sluggish and felt shitty, but in order to even try out new ones I had to just ride them around and fucking endure how much I disliked them until the game deigned to allow me to attempt to improve my experience with it.  Warband, you just go do whatever, get some xp, then level up and bang.

Like I GUESS it's a more realistic design but also I don't care about that, I just wanna make pretend that I'm a cool sword guy making his way in a tough harsh world by being a cool sword guy.  I like assigning points and seeing my numbers go up, I don't want to ACTUALLY fucking struggle with dull swords and slow horses.

I guess this is even less valid than the rest of my bitching but also man I hate the even-earlier-medieval aesthetic.  Fucking -everybody- is just a guy in a shirt.  The big cool guys are just guys with the bare edges of their metal shirts sticking out from under their regular shirts.  It's also like realistic now I guess instead of being shoddy analogues to stuff so everything just feels kinda samey?  I knew who the Nords were vs the Vaegir, and such.  I absolutely can't tell you what the diff is between the Battanians and the Vlandians are, they're just the west forest guys and the north forest guys to me.  Their rabble have shirts and trash weapons, their higher-tier guys are dudes in mail with a surcoat or someshit over it.  That might also just be the Imperials???  The only reason I even sorta know the Imperials is that in multi the menavlion was fucking obscenely strong for like no reason.  I was able to score moderately-decently with my shitty Hawaiian ping with them.  Ugh I wish I could be less chud-y about not liking the aesthetic but fuck that Renaissance-style armoring just looks and feels so cool.  Breastplates, silly hats, etc.  Whatever, I'm rambling really hard I guess.

[EuchreJack]

My biggest gripe is that it's a 50+ GB download.  I'm probably never going to have enough free space to reinstall it.  It was a bit fun a year ago, can't say anything has encouraged me to try and find the space to try it again.

[Cthulhu]

My problem with the game is that it sucks.  Warband sucked too but it had enough high points that you'd push through the terrible shit.  This one doesn't.  Eurojank is a tightrope and Bannerlord falls off the wrong side.  Was too irritated by weird decisions and frustrating moments to keep powering into the higher levels.

[ndkid]

Smithing isn't necessary at all, it's just an easy way to get shit you want!

Like I GUESS it's a more realistic design

I'm pretty sure there's nothing realistic about skill caps. If they wanted to make you swing a difficult weapon slowly, or have you get thrown off horses if your riding skill isn't high enough, cool, that sounds like versimilitude/realism. Just saying "you can't swing $weapon, n00b" is the opposite of realism.

[nenjin]

I seem to recall the only place skill caps matter for weapons is bows, crossbows and mounts. I think all melee and thrown doesn't care what your current skill level is? Been a while, I might be misremembering.

[Mephansteras]

At least the last time I played I didn't find any of that to be an issue. The skill restrictions were still there, but generally only mattered for super expensive stuff. Especially if you started your character out with skills that you wanted (like horsemanship or archery).

I can only really think of one instance where I got a horse as loot that I simply couldn't use any time soon, and even then one of my companions could use it, so it wasn't a total loss for me. And I feel like riding skill raises pretty quickly these days.

Smithing also got nerfed a good bit at one point, and I no longer find too much need for it. Though I like making stuff, so I always make at least one of my companions a smith. But it's longer the must-do strategy for easy XP and money that it once was.

[ThtblovesDF]

Multiplayer is pretty good though, but I still find myself using warbands instead or napolic wars :I

Oh - if you guys didn't try out the "1000 players on the map" mod, I gave it a try and its just so strange, like playing a Bannerlord-MMO. Dozens of people wiggling across a field, farming virtual foods for 3 Cash a action, its cute. Felt to grindy to continue however and I am a guy that played CRPG for 300 hours. (Man that was good back then).

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Bannerlord Online is developing nicely. Hopefully it gives cRPG a run for its money, although given the difference in how far along in development they are, BO might end up supplanting cRPG.

I do not enjoy vanilla multiplayer sadly, I think it's a huge step down from Warband.

On skillcaps: Ambivalence. I don't hate the idea, but potentially becoming OP is yknow a very enjoyable aspect of M&B-esque games. It's just an unnecessary addition. Fluff, as it were.

[EuchreJack]

My problem with the game is that it sucks.  Warband sucked too but it had enough high points that you'd push through the terrible shit.  This one doesn't.  Eurojank is a tightrope and Bannerlord falls off the wrong side.  Was too irritated by weird decisions and frustrating moments to keep powering into the higher levels.

Or mod the character file.  On Warband, it was a text file where you could just add another zero after the experience, change the skills from 0 to 10, change the denars from 100 to 100,000.  After a while, I never bothered trying to turn Joe Nobody into a King: I just created Hercules and grabbed what I wanted.

Also, my experience from Bannerlord one year ago was that the developers weren't able to balance out the skill/exp system properly.  Anyone playing lately (2021) know if that is still an issue?

[Robsoie]

No idea with bannerlord, but i remember on warband there was an editing that was recommended to never do : editing your character level.

People had reported that character level was apparently one of the ingredient in the AI decision making, so if you gave yourself a too high level, you would notice that no AI army would ever leave their castles to fight your army anymore, leading into an utterly boring campaign.

[EuchreJack]

No idea with bannerlord, but i remember on warband there was an editing that was recommended to never do : editing your character level.

People had reported that character level was apparently one of the ingredient in the AI decision making, so if you gave yourself a too high level, you would notice that no AI army would ever leave their castles to fight your army anymore, leading into an utterly boring campaign.

I never had that problem, from what I recall.  Of course, editing character level was always guessing, as you couldn't edit the level directly, just your xp.  So I was never much past level 30, which is less than most AI lords and probably didn't trigger that behavior.

Besides, what is so boring about a campaign of siege warfare? 

[Robsoie]

I guess if you're wanting to go the cheating path, i guess you would then probably have a character one-shotting everything and able to resisting thousand of arrows between his eyes, so maybe siege castle being also too easy would probably be a bit boring too

[EuchreJack]

I guess if you're wanting to go the cheating path, i guess you would then probably have a character one-shotting everything and able to resisting thousand of arrows between his eyes, so maybe siege castle being also too easy would probably be a bit boring too

How is one-shotting everyting and being able to resist thousands of arrows boring? 

It's also an inaccurate depiction of the battle system of M&B: Warband.  Even the best of armor can be penetrated by ranged fire (bolts, arrows).  Eventually, those 0-2 point damage with the occasional critical hit adds up to player death.

The boring part is lining up the army of crossbows and waiting all night for them to win the siege.  Using the Nords to rush the walls is the more fun but bloody option.
Getting the army trained up is the real grind, which is where the level 35 training 10 character comes in.  Otherwise, day 1 noob with tons of gold can wreck things.  Hence why mods that allow the purchase of large number of elite troops are "broken".

[Robsoie]

I guess if you're wanting to go the cheating path, i guess you would then probably have a character one-shotting everything and able to resisting thousand of arrows between his eyes, so maybe siege castle being also too easy would probably be a bit boring too

How is one-shotting everyting and being able to resist thousands of arrows boring? 

It's also an inaccurate depiction of the battle system of M&B: Warband.  Even the best of armor can be penetrated by ranged fire (bolts, arrows).  Eventually, those 0-2 point damage with the occasional critical hit adds up to player death.

Not inaccurate depiction if you're cheating, because if you cheat with the ones that are built-in the game you can also heal yourself with a simple couple of key press, so basically it's not a thousand arrows you can resist but technically an infinite amount.  Though i'm not sure what i am arguing about

[EuchreJack]

I've never used the heal cheat.  Guess I have principles.