Mount and Blade Vs War of the Roses - The verdict! Read this before asking which is better!

[Tinzo]

Hello There! Mount and Blade is better, but lets dicuss why!

Population
Well, to start let's talk about population, seeing as that will matter quite a bit for a multiplayer experience. Warband has, as I'm typing this, a peak of 9000 players today with 3000 active at present. Whereas War of The Roses has 1100 peak with 1000 playing currently. Just something to consider.

Mount and Blade Gameplay
The next thing is the gameplay. I'll try my best, but you may also want to look up gameplay footage of each to fully understand how the differ.
In Warband's multiplayer modes, of which there are 7 (Seige, Battle, Team Deathmatch, Deathmatch, Duel, Conquest and Capture the Flag), there can be up to 200 players. When you join the game you pick a side (Different factions, different weapons and classes). You then choose your class (Archer, Footman or Cavalry) and from there you are taken to a 'buy' screen, much like Counter Strike. You need to outift yourself in armour and then buy the weapons you wish to use. Obviously better weapons (more damage) cost more money and therefore you cannot use them all straight away. So you must kill some opponents to gain more 'Dennars' (the word used for gold) and then go back to the buy screen to select better weapons for the next time you spawn. All money earned in the multiplayer matches is lost once the round ends, so use it while you can! Just to be clear: THERE IS NO IN-GAME REA-MONEY CURRENCY, ONCE YOU OWN THE GAME YOU DO NOT PAY A DIME MORE!

So that's how you get started in Multiplayer. Now the actual gameplay. The combat in Mount and Blade is undoubtly the best medieval simulation combat in any game. It works on the basic principle of blocking and attacking, with 4 directions for each (Up, down, left and right). So if someone swings at you with a left strike, to block you must block to the left. All attacking and blocking directions are decided by two options, mouse or keyboard. I have never met a single person who uses the keyboard for directional attacking/blocking, so I'll talk about using the mouse. To attack to the left you simple swipe your mouse slightly to the left, and the same goes for right, up and down. To block, it's much the same, you move your mouse in the direction you wish to block. At any time you can 'hold' a block or attack. Holding just means you press the left-mouse button to ready the swing, but you hold it and therefore hold your swing. This is optional for attacking, but to effectively block you must hold your blocks. You can also block with round and recangular sheilds, which you don't have to aim to a side to block, you just hold right-mouse button and the sheild blocks everything.


YouTube™ Video: Mount & Blade Warband Duels (v.671)
Views: 32,787
Here are a bunch of good fights I've had with people in Warband in patch .671. All fights are done with manual block. The fights with gravish were on a DM server and random meet ups. Autoblock is enab...
This video shows off some blocking and stuff.

Apart from blocking as a footman, you can also do the same on horseback as cavalry. Along with swords, as cavalry you can equip lances. Which you must 'jab' at people (or hit x to couch the lance, meaning it goes limp and anyone hit by it instantly dies) Jabbing is the most reliable use of the lance and can effectively take out any unexpecting (or expecting) targets. Along with cav and footman, you have archers. As an archer it takes a second or so to ready an arrow in a bow and about 2-3 seconds to load a bolt into a crossbow. Once readied/loaded, a reticule on your screen will tell you the accuracy of the shot. The longer you hold a bow at the ready the less accurate the shot will be. Whereas the crossbow will always be accurate, no matter how long you aim for. The downside to the crossbow is the aforementioned loading time.


Napoleonic Wars
Now this may or may not interest you, depending on if you have an interest in the time period and muskets :) If you are even curious about anything remotely do to with muskets and the 1800's I absolutely recommend picking this up! Mount and Blade Warband is great and I still play it regularly, but Napoleonic Wars has become my favourite game and I imagine will remain so for awhile.
Much like Mount and Blade Warband, there are swords and cavalry, and both work the same way. In Napoleonic however, footman are now equiped with muskets. These muskets take aproxx. 10 seconds to reload, they have one shot per reload, you must stand still to reload and they are innacurate. "How's that even fun" you may ask, but darn if it isn't fun I don't know what is! The intensity of firing off your shot, hoping it hits but knowing it will most likely miss. Then the 10 seconds of reloading as you anticipate someone either gets a lucky shot on you or finds you and melees you. Each musket is eqquiped with a bayonet, and you switch between firing mode and bayonet mode with the X key. The bayonet is pretty far reaching, and just like the musket's ammunition, the bayonet is nearly always an instantkill.

Not only is there muskets, but everyone is dressed in lovely uniforms, accurate to the time period. And you can have different classes from normal Musketman, to rifleman, to Cavalry, to Artillery, to engineers and lastly musicians.

Cavalry work mostly the same as Warband, so I won't cover them. But three new units are Artillery, Musicians and Engineer. The artillery units can fire cannons, howizters and mortars. All of which take about 12 seconds to load and skill to fire. Musicians pretty much just walk around playing music, they give certain buffs to team mates in their range, but generally get killed rather quickly due to only a small sword to defend themselves. Engineers can build sandbag barricades, spike barricades, cover for troops, explosives, graves and a few other things. These are useful on larger maps when you have time to set up some areas of fortifications, but are less useful on smaller maps and are not used in line battles.

Napoleonic Wars Gamemodes
The gamemodes are largely the same, you you'll most likely play public battles and line battles and commander battles. Public battles are one life per round matches of two teams (nations) and are rather intense due to the lack of lives, ammo and the time it takes to load and fire the muskets. These battle servers are fun, but the best fun is had in line battles. But before that, commander battles quickly! Commander battles consist of player taking control of around 20 AI bots of the class you choose, you give them simple commands like "Move here", "Fire now", "Fire at will", "From 3 rows" etc. It's like an RTS and an TPS/FPS combined, it's really fun especially when there is 20+ players controlling there own 20 troops, makes for hundreds of muskets going off!

Line battles is the best of the best though!
Line battles in the 1800's were set up so that the two opposing sides literally stood in lines and fired muskets at each other. They moved around the landscape, used cav rushes and artillery to their advantage etc, but at the basics, it was musketman standing in lines firing at each other. In Napoleonic Wars, line battles are largely the same. There are many regiments (groups) set up to join, and each regiment is commanded by someone, who has second in commands and so on so forth. The thing that makes line battles so good is getting on Teamspeak on a friday afternoon, jumping into a 200 player full server, and being part of the regiment that decimates half the enemy's forces. Each regiment, commanded by its own leader, splits off into lines and moves about the map. These battles, however, are done in a gentlemanly fashion. No-one is to break ranks, and everyone stays within their regiments line. Which moves about the map in a one-line formation. As a ranker you follow commands like "Left face!", "Fire" and "March", as higher officers you give these commands.

Really my little paragraph doesn't do it justice. These line battles are the most fun I've ever had online! EVER!


YouTube™ Video: Mount & Blade: Napoleonic Wars Review
Views: 414,225
More at http://angryjoeshow.com/2012/04/mount-blade-napoleonic-wars-angry-review/
That review by AngryJoe sums up the game nicely and if that video doesn't make you want to play it, it just isn't for you :P




War of The Roses
War of the Roses (the last time I played, which was awhile ago) only has a few modes (Deathmatch, TDM and Capture the Flag I think). Much like Mount and Blade it has an up,down,left, right attack and block system, however it isn't implemented as well as MnB. Instead of a store in the round where the money only lasts that round, WoTR uses a persistent leveling system, so you choose a class, you choose some weapons and you then join a server. Once the round ends you earn your XP and use it to upgrade your weapons etc. The weapons are rather detailable in stats, you can make swords double or single or devel edge, you can give them certain handles and all sorts of custimization, but this is just to distract your from the simple "Run, swing, kill, die" that the game revolves around.
The game also has a REAL MONEY in-game store where you purchase, with real money, skins and custimization perks for your character. This means even after buying the game they try to get more money from you.



Verdict
Personally I find War of the Roses rather dull and simple in comparison to Mount and Blade.
Someone once said "War of the Roses is the CoD of medieval and Mount and Blade is the ARMA/Red Orchestra of the medieval games", however I disagree a little. Mount and Blade is certainly more complex and a good siumlation, but it doesn't suffer from the hard-tomanage control system that games like ARMA do.

Really, if you have any sense you'll buy Mount and Blade complete pack. If you buy War of the Roses, you are silly


Edit: Forgot to mention, the Mount and Blade community is excelent! Minus a few not-so nice people, pretty much everyone is happy to help a new player, happy to talk about anything, and happy to have a laugh about how freakin awesome that artillery shot or archer shot just was. Much like the era of these games, people are very gentlemanly and will often congradulate others on killing them :) And everyone has a good laugh!