Tips for beginners

A couple tips for people new to Bannerlord.

Tips

1. In the tavern game for the empire, defenders have a large advantage, making it easy to get 500 from the max bet at each city every week. In the tavern game for Battania, wolves have a massive advantage.

2. Early on, using the tip of an arrow in first person is much more accurate for aiming than the reticle. Reticle is better when moving fast on horse or using thrown weapons.

3. When you get to a city or village, missions will be displayed on the top right. For missions such as wiping out enemies, escorting, or gang fights you can assign a companion (which costs ~700-1400) and around 10 troops to the task for easy completion and easy (large amounts of) money. Missions like this generally take about a week (~3-9 days).

4. Troops and horses are the main factor for storage capacity. Horses other than sumpter and mule also increase speed when you have foot soldiers. Sumpter and mule give more storage capacity than other horses.

5. If you lose your companions (Death off), you can go to the clan menu to see where they are located.

6. If you place fodder forces in front of more important forces (and yourself), the fodder will draw most of the fire. (Add to empty group in party menu)

7. Turning your body mid-attack can sometimes make up for early lack of speed.

8. If you are in a small fight (such as tournament) you can tank enemy attacks with a shield while your teammates attack them or you can attack them from behind while they're attacking your teammates.

9. Early game prisoners and most early game equipment are worth little coin and can slow you down. Unwanted melee weapons can be recycled at the smithy. Ransoming prisoners levels roguery.

10. Holding left alt can tell you where enemies and important characters are.

11. Some missions (Fencing) are often not worth it as they give you criminality and lower your relation with certain characters.

12. Some missions can get you more renown than early fights. (Most looter/bandit fights give ~1 renown each)

13. If you plan on staying around a city or village for a while, doing missions for the characters there can improve your recruiting (relation). *Some missions (crime) lower your relations with others in the city.

14. The character screen shows how to level your skills and (some of) their effects.

15. Equipment on your character/companions does not contribute to storage use.

16. You can buy cheap horses and food in bulk from travelling villagers.

17. By talking to shop workers at the workshops (during the day) you can buy a workshop (around 15000). (Use left alt to look for things like tannery, smithy, olive press, ...)

18. You can bring your companions into town with you to anywhere with thugs (waterfront, clearing, back alley) and fight them which leads to a larger fight where you can get valuable loot. (Only civilian outfit [limited weapon/armor usage])

19. After leveling your clan, you can assign companions to parties. With this, you can passively gain relation with various characters. (This costs around 1500 wages at first)

[[[From @Bubbles The Great :

20. Cavalry troops require horses (depending on type) for upgrade.

21. Simulated battles will have relatively low deaths for victory. (Often zero deaths)

22. Recently sieged/captured cities will often have lower quality soldiers.]]]

23. Melee looters can be killed with spear on horseback out of their weapon range.

24. You can circle around armored enemies while hitting them to win 1v1 battles (Tournaments).

25. You can headshot with melee weapons for crit hit.

26. Focus points are effectively exp boosts.

27. Shield bashing stuns enemies for a short time.

28. Value of items in inventory show as green for profitable and red for unprofitable.

[Mattbat64]

what would you recommend to the ratio of the amount of infantry to calvery/mounted archers, to archers to have in your army? Is it faction dependent or playstyle

[Ty Fusker]

Excellent tips! The videos were short and to the point, but as a FYI - when you're showing trading, click the item to expand it so it's clearer when you're selling/buying things/how they're changing. Thanks for the hard work!

[Synaries]

This helped a lot, thank you

[31ectricEye]

@Rawls You won't need leadership until the mid/lategame really but the best way to level it is to always have party leaders from your clan in an army with you, generating experience without costing influence. You also get experience from recruiting.
Eventually you'll have more influence than you know what to do with and can drag whatever faction you're in around in a deathstack that will build up your leadership skill well enough.
Also good tips about smithing but once you have clan member party leaders you can get huge income and train their trading skill by gifting them all your javelins/smithing spam (I think after rebalance your best bet is elite menavlion head with DLP shaft)

[Mr_GEM_Bones]

Harpoon headed Javelin with the basic handle, both at max size sell for as much as the game can compute, over 100000, for materials that cost only a couple hundred.

Bannerlordisaperfectlybalancedgamewithnoexploitswhatsoever.

[Softcakes]

make a javelin and sell it for 40K.
Make a two handed sword and sell it for 100000.
Smithing. Do it.

[Sir Kage Minowara]

I wish they had not changed the way lance couching was done in Bannerlord. I much preferred the original system of your lance automatically couching once you were going fast enough. Its a change I don't understand the purpose of.

[Nurmurfuf]

@Rawls couching lance is done with the alternate attack when moving above a certain speed on a horse. Leadership is mainly raised through recruiting and later, leading armies.

[Rawls]

How to a couch a lance? (i think thats the right word?) Also what are some other ways to level Leadership?

[Kingy]

Ah what confused me is the imperial game literally requires no thought and it looks like your saying that's easier ? I actually had to think on the wolves one, my char was very disappointed with his lack int ;) haha