Sieges are the most grueling part of the game. You can be a freelance mercenary and work with one of six factions only to join one of their rivals at the end of your contract, try your hand at buying low in a given city to sell high in another, steal from villages and attack wandering peasants (running the risk of angering the local lords), join a faction as a vassal (after proving your worth by winning battles and tournaments, especially if your character is female and/or not a noble), join the effort of a claimant to the throne of a kingdom to overthrow the current king, or capture a castle or city and proclaim your very own kingdom…although if you haven’t been properly prepared by bolstering your claim to the throne, the other rulers will be all too happy to deem you a renegade and crush you into dust. That’s right, a sandbox game you can choose to do whatever you want. But above all, M&B is a medieval sandbox game. For instance your character gains experience when fighting and completing quests, which will allow your to improve some of their abilities, whether combat-related or not using a certain weapon type will also increase the character’s proficiency with it, gradually increasing damage and swing/shooting speed (and accuracy for ranged weapons). Mount&Blade: Warband is at heart an action game – you will often shoulder a lot of the fighting and cause the most casualties – with shades of a RTS (you give broad orders to your men on the fly) and also some RPG mechanics. The region is very large it takes several in-game days to go from one end to the other.
#Mount and blade warband best faction free#
You’re free to go wherever you want, and visit all the towns (there is even an achievement for that), castles and villages. Warbands also move at different speeds depending on the number of people, how many are on a horse, and so on. Thankfully, time only flows when you are moving, unless in special cases where you can’t do anything but wait anyway. Of course, they won’t remain stationary, and will either ignore you and take care of whatever task is currently on their hands, actively chase you (if hostile and they think you don’t pose a big threat) or run from you. Likewise, other warbands (peasants, bandits, lords…) are represented by a single character, and moving over to them allows you to fight or talk to them, depending on the circumstances. On the world map, your warband is represented by your character on a horse (or on foot if you don’t have one). And THIS is what later battles may look like. That’s what your first few battles will most likely look like. A bunch of peasants fighting a handful of raggedy bandits. You can safely ignore the starting quest if you so wish, although it can help getting a little idea of the game. From this point on, you have complete freedom over what to do. You are tasked with recruiting some people and defeating local bandits. Once the threat is dispatched, a local merchant comes to give you shelter and a little serie of quests to get you started. You start the game as a stranger who came to Calradia to seek a better fortune after choosing the gender and background of your character, shaping their face and choosing a capital city to start in, you get attacked by a bandit. The Kingdom of Swadia, for instance, is largely based on Western Europe, with a mostly balanced force and an emphasis on heavy calvary the Kingdom of Nords is based on Scandinavia and has the best melee infantry but no cavalry, the Khergit Khanate is very obviously inspired by the Mongols and has a force made up almost exclusively of cavalry units, and so on. The purple Khergit Khanate is also visible.
The Kingdom of Nords is in light blue, Vaegirs in gray and Swadia in orange. Each faction is loosely based on real-life Medieval countries and has its own types of troops, with strengths and weaknesses. I’m going to talk about the most popular one, Warband.Ĭontrasting with the three expansions, which respectively take place in Dark Age Britain, the Napoleonic Wars and 17th century Eastern Europe, Warband, just like its predecessor/beta/older version, is set in the fictional land of Calradia, which is divided in six factions often at war with each other, each claiming to be the rightful heir to the Old Calradian Empire. The Mount & Blade franchise is made of the titular Mount & Blade, Mount & Blade: Warband, which is pretty much the finished, updated version of the original, its two expansions – Viking Conquest and the multiplayer-only Napoleonic Wars – and a third, stand-alone expansion: With Fire & Sword. This little contest allowed me to redeem myself.
#Mount and blade warband best faction series#
I went and bought the series without a second thought. During last year’s Steam Winter Sale, there was a intriguing game with a mind-boggling proportion of positive reviews, many clocking over a thousand hours of play and telling epic and absurd stories of gameplay.