My take on Bannerlord Online

_{Taken from Bannerlord Online's official website.}

It has been over a week since Bannerlord Online released for public testing and I have been playing with @deathwing since then, and this is my take about it. Bannerlord Online is an ambitious project that has one developer, while he works fast and diligently, I think it is not enough for a project of this scope. Do not get me wrong what he has done is momentous.

Currently, the gameplay loop consists of farming/trading and then recruiting some tier 1 units from cities and fighting looters. That is it. Nothing else to do, unless there is an event going on and I'll talk about problems about events later. If you missed the first days of the mod's release and got hundreds of thousands of denars, this is quite frankly unsustainable. While there is not enough to use denars for, unit upgrades and party wages are a substantial cost. You are not going to maintain a 30-40 party consisting of Tier 6 units with farming.

For farming, @deathwing and I usually find an empty village and farm there all by ourselves while healing from battle. If you need healing, rather than staying in a city, go to a village and farm, that way you'll also earn denars while waiting to get healed.

_{Farming in the first days of the mod. Screenshot, courtesy of @deathwing.}

Let's talk about unit compositions. Unit compositions are dominated by Horse Archers because people do not want to lose their units as upgrading a unit from T1 to T6 cost around 2k denars. You can see why you do not want to use Infantry, as they are quite likely to die in melee when overwhelmed. Another reason for HA's dominance is caused by where the Looters spawn in battle. Unlike normal Bannerlord, Looters spawn really close to you, which decimates the effectiveness of archers and crossbowmen. Also, Horse Archer's easily hunt down Looters, as there are no counters for HA in Looter parties. I have to admit at first @deathwing and I decided to run Vlandian crossbowmen for our unit composition. After some frustrating party wipes and reading global chat, we also decided to run Horse Archers for foreseeable future.

Events are simple, an event manager comes and spawn other units than Looters. You can join these battles with other players like any other battle in the mod. But this system fails when compositions that do not complement each other join the same battle. They mess up your strategy or you mess up their strategy and when you add people joining your battles with 0 soldiers to the mix. You can see how events stop being fun and turn into a slugfest. When you lose a T6 Heavy Horse Archer because some random guy joined with 5 recruits and messed up your strategy, you really feel frustrated.

This is also true for other unit compositions, if you join a battle with some guy that has Horse Archers, you will see him run off and watch from afar till your Infantry dies. Then, you will wait and watch him kite for hours. It is not fun, but if you want good items, you have to join these events.

_{Somebody needs to pay for those units. Screenshot, courtesy of @deathwing.}

Another gripe I have with Bannerlord Online is that its code is obfuscated. In a game that is all about modding and in a game that does not have obfuscated code. Bannerlord Online having obfuscated code, just shows me that this mod is not about modding, it is about profit. Also, might be a reason for TaleWorlds to shutdown this mod. If this Bannerlord Online had been like any other mod in Mount & Blade, we could have seen this mod develop much faster, and we could have seen different servers with different rules and different flavours. As it stands, I do not like this obfuscating practice.

I will follow the development of this mod, of course, to see what it will become. It has boundless potential and with Patreon support, the developer has the means to realise that potential.

I'll see you on the battlefields, and if you are on EU1 do not hesitate to say hi.

That's it for today folks.