Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord – How to recruit companions and increase party size
Companions have a specific name, background, and skill set in Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord, so they’re a useful addition to your party. Any perks or bonuses they have will be applied to you and your troops, which is handy, allowing you to access dialogue or do things that would not have been possible otherwise based on your skills. Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord is still in Early Access, so there aren’t many companions to choose from yet, but don’t let that put you off.
When deciding to recruit a companion, there are a few things to consider. While their skills now apply to you, they are expensive to hire and are prone to death if they die, unlike you. However, you can send them out on individual quests on your behalf, equip them with better armor and weapons, and if your party is large enough, they can lead their own small party.
They also occupy a place in your clan, so if you want to recruit more infantry or companions, you will need to increase your party size.
Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord – How to increase party size
Although you are in Early Access, you will be able to increase your party size to almost 200 people, which is pretty amazing. However, you need to level up several skills to do this, so make sure you create a character with the right perks. It would be prudent to have a high leadership and steward, which you can increase by leading an army, maintaining high morale, and keeping your soldiers well fed. Investing in the Quartermaster skill tree in Steward is essential, so make sure you have enough food and you’ll be through it in no time.
You will also need to increase your clan level and if you are lucky enough to have your own kingdom, you will need to gain influence to expand it even more. To increase your Clan Level, you will need to improve your Fame, which you can do by completing quests, winning battles, and being a good guy at all levels across the land.
Troop Orders in Mount and Blade II: Bannerlord
Taking control and leading your troops into battle in Mount and Blade II: Bannerlord is a foundational skill that every good commander should understand. If you want to become a better tactician and gain more leadership with your character, you need to take stronger armies and lead your troops against them. A great way to optimize them on every encounter is to use Troop Controls. You can display these troop commands by clicking the F1 to F7 keys on your keyboard.
When you want to run any of the game commands, you can bring them up by clicking one of the F1 to F7 keys. This clicks on the respective order and you have several different orders below. With a few clicks, you can order your army to charge forward, retreat, or enter a new formation. Here’s how you enter all of those commands:
- F1: Movement
- F1: To position
- F2: Follow me
- F3: Charge
- F4: Advance
- F5: Fallback
- F6: Stop
- F7: Retirement
- F9: Return
- F2: Face
- F1: Face direction
- F2: Facing the enemy
- F9: Return
- F3: Form
- F1: Line
- F2: Shield wall
- F3: loose
- F4: Circle
- F5: Square
- F6: Ball
- F7: Column
- F8: Scatter
- F9: Return
- F4: Fire
- Clicking on it toggles between “Fire at will” and “Hold fire”.
- F5: Horse
- By clicking on it, you allow your troops to mount and dismantle their horses.
- F6: command
- Clicking on it will switch between delegating your command to your troop’s AI where they decide the best course of action and listening to your commands.
- F7: Transfer
- Clicking on it breaks down where you want to transfer specific units on the battlefield. For example, you can transfer all mounted troops to a particular location and then transfer all troops from a distance behind them. You can better eliminate them and have various troops everywhere.
You can display these controls by clicking one of the F1 to F9 keys during playback. Each time you click F9 in any of these menus, you can automatically return to the main Troop Command options. For those who prefer to have your leader in combat, but don’t determine the tactics of your troops, turning the F6: Command key will take control of your troop’s AI, and they will openly attack or retreat against the enemy.
Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord – Development notebook n ° 25: “Armies and Influence”
In this week’s blog, we want to touch on one aspect of the game that you’ve been asking us about for quite some time: single-player play. We think the most interesting way to do this is to discuss the different campaign features and mechanics in specific blog posts. We hope to manage over time to cover many key aspects of the “sandbox”, and give you a better understanding of what you can expect to find in Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord.
In a previous blog, we briefly talked about a new mechanic in the Mount & Blade series: Influence. Influence acts as a bit of currency in the game, and can be earned by serving your kingdom in a number of ways, such as taking out enemy bandits or groups, raiding, capturing enemy installations. , etc. Influence points can be spent to determine the outcome of certain faction decisions, and to submit requests to allied lords. We’ve already shown you that Influence can be used to ask an allied Lord to follow you, but we still have to discuss how players can use our new army building system to carry out this action on a larger scale.
So how does it work ? Well, each allied Lord has an Influence cost based on the strength of their party. Players can spend their Influence points to entice allied Lords to join them to form an army. Only the leader of an army reaps the Influence generated by the victories of his troops, so spending Influence to build a powerful army is a kind of investment, and sometimes a real challenge. If the leader of an army can no longer afford to spend Influence, his soldiers will start leaving him.
The Influence maintenance cost of an army is based on several factors:
- If army morale is high, then its maintenance cost is reduced (and vice versa)
- The distance from her hometown, how long she has been fighting, etc.
- Relations between the army commander and the lords
As long as the army is successful in its efforts and the lord commander manages to keep the other lords happy, then the army can continue to advance valiantly. But if things go wrong, the army will quickly dissolve and the Lords will choose to abandon the countryside and return to their lands.
When an army is formed, it becomes a sort of traveling village, with its own UI layer on the campaign map. The UI indicates:
- Army morale
- Lords and their groups
- Food reserves
- Movement speed (it is possible to see the factors affecting movement speed in a tooltip)
The UI also displays the portraits of the Lords who are currently in the military, as well as their relationships with the player. Dark red indicates they despise you, while light green means you are very close. If a lord has answered your call and is on his way to join your army, or if he is currently separated from the army as part of a mission, his portrait appears grayed out with a distance indicator between him. of the army’s current position, measured in days of travel. If you are an army commander, you can click on a portrait to chat with a lord and give them a specific task, such as scouting, bringing back food, reinforcements, horses, and more. You can dismiss a Lord to send him back to defend his lands, or to lighten the army and better manage his upkeep cost in Influence. If you are a member of an army, its commander or other lords may have missions for you.
Another aspect of the new army system is that armies use pooled resources to support their campaigns. This means that if a lord brings food, for example butter, then all the rest of the army will be fed. Likewise, horses and mules are shared, which increases the movement speed of the entire army.
This new system allows all Lords to call on other Allied Lords to build their own armies. Due to the high Influence costs, it’s obviously easier for a king to do this. However, there will certainly be times when powerful Lords have more Influence and Money than their liege, and therefore they can build up their own armies to embark on a campaign. It also allows players to try their hand at managing an army relatively early in the game, before they’ve even had a chance to rise to the top of the kingdom.
We find that the new Influence and army building systems better simulate the historical feudal system. When the player joins a kingdom, he has obligations to his liege. This system allows the player to pay for the benefit of being a lord by supporting his liege and other lords in military campaigns, while increasing his influence within the realm, for the benefit of his own goals. .
In next week’s blog, we’ll chat with graphic designer Fatma Nadide Öçba. If you have a question for him about his work, leave a message in the comments section, and we’ll pick one.