Mount & Blade II; Bannerlord

Back in 2016 I posted on the up and coming PC games I was looking forward to get a hold of and play in that year. All the games were purchased sooner or later except one. Yup, you guessed it Mount & Blade II; Bannerlord.

After being in development for the last five or so years the game has finally been released recently and I quickly purchased to help with whiling away a few extra free hours suddenly available recently for some reason.

Always a fan of the Taleworlds Entertainment Mount & Blade series in 'Warband' and 'With Fire and Sword' and played through both included mod versions they hold enough interest though the graphics are now pretty basic looking. This is the first and obvious update on M&B II with the graphic input ten times better than the original.

Having a strole round one of the many townscapes

First Character after a few game days adventuring
Still pretty lowly equipped

The graphics are very nice and the game map is much improved and much more appealing to the eye (the original Calradia and Eastern Europe maps being graphically sparse, travelling could get quite tedious) and with a lot more going on and more information for locations of objectives and info on encounters and so on.

There's a lot going on generally but follows the same basic premises of the genre set up in M&B Warband so familiar enough ground though the controls are much more involved and with more alternatives as well.

The milieu is new as well, with Calradia gone and a new realm peopled with the same technological level as before, roughly 12th Century (ish) medieval times. The eight various factions you can choose to play (Aserai, Battania, Khuzait, Northern Empire, Southern Empire, Sturgia, Vlandia and the Western Empire) in all, follow general Medieval tropes and are recognizable from their inspirations; from Byzantines, Norman's, Viking/Scandinavian's, Rus, Mongols, Anglo-Saxon and Saracen types and so on.

The art work for the loading screens (which you see a lot of going from battle to map to town to dialogue) all give a good idea of the artistic look and feel to the game and are pretty good on the eye as well which is just as well really;

The foregoing artwork by a Turkish artist Ilker Serdar Yildiz, is very eye catching and evocative work and must of been involved in the art direction in the game build as the aesthetic is maintained throughout the game.

I'm still early on in my first game play but so far it is interesting and worthwhile play, especially if you're into RPG style games in the medieval period. The game does have a pretty steep character development curve. It takes a fair bit of grinding through early missions and hunting looters to get anywhere. The cost for failing missions is noted and can be quite prohibitive sometimes finacially, cutting off lines of trade or limiting future access to a town. There are lots of lines of character development, in social standing, finances, local and faction standings and notoriety that all play a part in developing and advancing your career, not just killing folk and taking their money as was pretty much the previous norm.

I do quite like this as it gives a decent challenge and can be quite political as well as militaristic in flavour. Lots of depth.

There are a fair number of mods available for the game already and  include the inevitable LotR make-over and I believe a GoT as well plus the usual AI tweeks and so on. I'll play the vanilla game through before having a look at these.

All in all, pretty favourable opinion so far and generally recommended for anyone into the more 'believable setting' RPG genre. An early Warblog rating of 8 out of 10 'Worth Watching' easily merited and worth the wait.

Medieval Tabletop Wargaming Day - Lion Rampant

Last weekend saw my first wargaming outing of the year in the form of attending a Medieval wargaming day organised by messrs David Imrie and Ian Beal over in Leven.

There were twelve participants in the first game if the day which was a six a-side barney using the Lion Rampant rules. The terrain and setting provided by David along with a good dollop of the troops with some of the others bringing along a goodly amount of re-enforcement's.

The battle was a grand affair and lasted slightly longer than planned but I think the Lancastrian's getting the advantage by the end the game overall.

The second game of the day was aa slay of three tag team games with everyone teaming up with their previous opponent against another tag team with a 25pt a piece force made up of troops you had available again using the Lion Rampant Rules.

This game played a bit quicker as was to be expected and my team mate and I fought to a defeat by a narrow margin.

Great day out and thanks to David and Ian for organising the day. Looking forward to the next one.

War & Conquest - Further Trials

Last week myself and Dave K wound up the WaC machine and had another outing for our Berbers and Andalusian's for another trial game with a bit more knowledge behind us.

We went for 2500 pts a piece to give a bit more scope for troops on the field even though this was probably a bit too large a game to be likely to complete on a club night.

My line up was fairly similar to the previous game but the change was to ditch the skirmishers and add a small unit of mercenary knights plus a unit of Mercenary Spear. The Archers being added to the spear units to make up two large combined Spear/bow units, and the addition of a Captain. The General upgrade was ditched as well. Dave's line up was pretty much the same as before with the addition of more jinete types to fill out the points values but still went for the big unit of knights.

We went for clear and boring table to simulate the plains of Spain (and more importantly, keep the rule's simpler so we could concentrate on the moving and combat).

With a better understanding of the rules this time round we got much further through the game but still didn't manage a conclusion, though this was more to do with army size than rule checking this time round, though there was still a fair bit of that.

The game was much more balanced this time and produced much food for thought.

The combined arms units were quite powerful but more aligned for defence as the bows massed fire could only be used stationary so Dave pretty much avoided these keeping clear of their fire power especially the Merc's. In future I would probably field more but smaller units to give a bit more flexibility.

The small unit of Merc Knights proved to be too small to be really useful (at 6 Figs) but still held up the cavalry flank but were really too fragile.

The Berber Cavalry faired pretty well against the Knightly types causing mild casualties and remaining out of contact with their feigned flight and would hopefully draw the knights off the table or put them out of position for long enough for the game to be decided else where.

With the bulk of the Infantry not coming to blows before we ran out of time, not much was picked up here, but I did do a unsupported advance with my Guard Cavalry to see what would happen and a few points were noted here in rules terms mainly about counter charging.

Another interesting game with much food for thought, though Dave has a slightly jaded view of the rules we will have some more games to try and at least get a game to a conclusion. I find the rules fairly light and quite easy on the brain, just needing some familiarity to smooth things and certainly take out the extreme results that WaB was prone to quite nicely.

Antidiluvian New Medievals on Horizon

Recently announced forth coming releases from Antediluvian Miniatures are some additions to their historical offerings in their 'Wars of the Bruces' range. Announced are as below, Scots Spearmen;

Great looking sculpts from Matthew Bickley and with more to come, I'm looking forward to seeing what comes next in these most useful mini's.

War and Conquest - Four Year hiatus

OK, its took a bit longer than I thought, a lot longer in fact. Four years in fact. That is to say when I said four years ago we would have another trial game of War and Conquest rules, I didn't think that it would take that long, but it did. But at least it finally happened.

The game was a 2000pt affair keeping things simple with my opponent of four years ago Dave K taking the Andalusians and myself the Almoravids again, probably with similar lists.

We did take a bit of time to get into the swing of things with both of us struggling to find rules we were looking for but knew existed but managed to track things down eventually.

We did struggle a bit as the first contact produced a fairly complicated melee with light troops fleeing through friends on both sides and a strong flank attack with multiple knock on effects, so this did pose a good test of the rules and a stronger test on ourselves to find the appropriate solutions to the problem. As a result we didn't get very far through the game which is probably just as well for me as things were looking pretty dicey by the end of round two.

We'll dig the rules out again (soon this time) to have another, more informed bash with the rules as they do have some nice points though as last visited they are very WABish. Looking at the army lists, I think these need to be re-visited but no tinkering with these until another couple of games under the belt.

I suspect we did get a few things wrong but thats all part of the process, we even talked about digging out WAB 2nd edition to see how that compares.

Steel Fist Knights & Men at Arms

Recently received these very nicely done knights from the Steel Fist Kick-starter recently run.

Sculpted by Oliver James they are all late Medieval or Renaissance period armoured Men at Arms. The Kick-starter had five sets to choose from (I picked up three of the five sets) and all were very nicely done. The standard Bearer is the add on it you choose three or more sets.

Mr James is looking to do another project which I believe may be mounted figures which if so, I will definitely stump up for.

Really looking forward to get these painted up.

More Medieval French - Claymore Castings

More Medieval French goodness recently available from Claymore Castings are these French (or allied) Pavasiers. Aimed at the later half of 14th Century period they could at a pinch, creep into very early 15th Cent for the more lowly types

Good additions to the range of French types available from Claymore Casting which also include 3 packs of Crossbow.

French Perry Plastics 2

More news posted on the Perry's website on their Plastics Workshop in the form of some '3 ups' of their forth coming French Knights for the French Infantry box set and they look to be a very promising addition to their Agincourt to Orleans range.

As the pics show, and their press release indicates, there will be one frame of these knights along with 3 on the French (read European) infantry as shown on my previous post French Perry Plastics and interestingly, and probably a good move on the Bros' part, a separate box set with 3 sprue's of both the French Knights here along with 3 sprue's of their English Knights.

The release of these are promised for sometime in the New Year and once again I'll look forward to their release as they promise hours of joyous assembly and conversion ahead.

The Army of King Matthias (and other stories)

These three rather splendid books dropped through my letter box the other day.

The three titles; The Army of King Matthias 1458 - 1526, Warriors of the Hungarian Frontier 1526 - 1686 and Hungarian Military Flags are all by the Hungarian graphic artist Gyozo Somogyi.

I caught up with these titles from a book review in the latest issue Hobilar, the Journal of the Lance and Longbow society which reviewed the first title but went on to point out where these Hungarian publications could be purchased, both from Military Matters but also from bookline.hu (the Hungarian version of Amazon apparently) the later being where I picked the titles up from. They were ordered and received within a week, so definitely no complaints on the service.

The three volumes I picked up (there are several more from the same author who specializes in Hungarian Military History from earliest times right up to the current day) are all each full of illustrations with only an introductory page of text on the background history of the chosen title in both English and Hungarian and the rest of the volumes full of plates only with captions, again in English and Hungarian.

I thoroughly recommend these titles for source material for the period and locale and a search on Google for Images of Gyozo Somogyi's work will give you a good taste of his other work available.

Perry Light Cavalry sighted!

The Perry's have now confirmed that they're releasing the awaited Late Medieval Cavalry in April, nice to know.

I've been looking forward to this release as I think they are going to be very useful kits, both for their 'on the box' stated use obviously, but also for a great number of uses in conversions. More so because of their Light status than the knights, good as the knights are.

I'll be picking some of these up so after their released in any event.

For a bit more gen (and some nice piccies too boot, head over to Simon's blog Je Lay Emprins for more on these early testers and more.