Fight on foot

[StatelyPuddle]

I am trying out a character with 2h and on foot, without a horse. The question is. I need atlethics, right? How do i gain xp with that? Then, do i travel the world on foot? How do i enter the battle on foot? Doing these halves your movement speed on the map. Is there something i can do?

[Stanley]

If i remember correctly, you get athletics when you attack people while on foot. Just walking in a battle map doesnt do ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

I m not sure about about travelling on foot. Never tried it.

[Yasahi]

Moving on the world map on foot does level the skill but slows you down considerably. The easiest option is to be mounted and then just dismount at the start of the battle and fight on foot.

[Zerosaiko]

So for map travel, there's the cavalry bonus, which goes up to +2 iirc. Pretty sure it's based on the proportion of mounted units to non-mounted units.

There's two types of horses. Pack horses like mules and sumpters, and horses that are actually for riding, regular and warhorses. If you have a non-pack horse in your inventory, it will give a portion (pretty sure it's 75%) of the cavalry movement speed bonus for that unit, under the footmen on horseback bonus or whatever it's called.

Traveling unmounted, even if you're getting the footman on horseback bonus does increase your athletics.

I haven't played a mounted character yet in Bannerlord, but until I get a party large enough that my own character won't change the cavalry bonus much, I just travel mounted and dismount at the start of battles. The athletics XP on the world map doesn't feel like much once you've gotten a few levels in it.

Training your Athletics through combat can be a pain because it falls under the category of skills that are easier to train when you already have them, like Scouting, except possibly even slower.

The safest way is probably to sit back with a bow and plink enemies to death. Iirc, with ranged combat the base athletics xp is roughly half of the ranged xp gained.

Melee combat is where you can start to see higher gains, but actually getting those gains is difficult unless you already have Athletics, because your melee athletics gain is heavily reliant on Relative Movement Speed.

The best melee weapons to train Athletics with are polearms, since you're less likely to bump into your enemy and slow down on your approach. If you're already in close combat, try darting in closer to them when you hit, but if you're fast enough to run away and then reapproach with a polearm, you can start to cheese your Athletics up.

Cavalry are amazing for training Athletics as long as you're up for the risk. You'll probably want a very long polearm too. If you can get a decent hit while they're charging at you, you can get a ton of Athletics XP, but that speed also works against you if you take a hit.

[Qen Adar]

Athletics is one of those skills you have to increase while at lower lvls, if you wait until 10+ it will slug along. 100 is more then enough in the skill to be decently fast on foot and pick up a few skills. Once you get to 20+ it could take hours upon hours real time to get a single point of athletics.

[StatelyPuddle]

Thanks for the tips, guys! I will try them out!