Battlefield Commands Guide - Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord

a large portion of mountain blade to banner Lord takes place on the battlefield as you would expect in a game that is essentially a medieval combat simulator but one of the big things about banner Lord is that that battle system is quite complex and there are a number of ways that you can actually execute your attacks on the enemy from simple commands to a whole wide range of formations and approaches so if you have no interest in learning the battle system pressing f6 is a pretty carefree way to approach combat right now up until this point I think I was just letting my units charge in anyway so you don't need these advanced tactics until you start fighting bigger and scarier armies ones with more unit diversity that require more finesse hopefully this should help you get there to start this video we aren't going to jump directly into the battlefield but instead we're going to jump into the party screen the proper execution of tactics relies heavily on setting yourself up for victory out of the gate so let's start there so here we are at the party screen again this is where your success is gonna start and one thing I want to note is that in war bandit you could simply organize your party through this screen and it would have an effect on what things went to hideouts and how the actual battle map warmed up it's not that way anymore unfortunately so what you have to do is I've got all my guys organized by tier and then their respective unit type you don't need to do that I'm just in awe retentive but let's go ahead and click on these Imperial trained infantryman in the upper right corner here we get their level we get their wage but we also get their formation number so what you have to do is then set the formation number to all the things you want to your corresponding what I'll just call control group you think of a control group in your standard RTS it's the same as it is in this game you're not pressing one to control that group directly it's when you press f12 then issue commands you'll have them preset up to their formations and the game has some pre like cooked informations one is infantry two is ranged three is calves force horse archers five skirmishers six is heavy infantry seven is Lightcap and then eight is your heavy cab now you can do it that way if you want I'm not going to I just everything a little bit easier for myself so all my infantry I'm gonna set to one and then all of my archers let's set this yeah all my archers should be set to two the game will just Auto assign these sometimes so keep in mind it should set them properly but I think there's enough bugs in the system that it'll set them kind of willy-nilly so okay you too so one last note though before we jump into the actual battlefield is that take a look at your characters to your companions they can also be set to formations your early Col biter here is a beast with a two-headed axe and he's a really good writer so I'm gonna set him to my calf para willow bark is a pretty decent range combatant though so I'm gonna send her to two in my range two units so make sure you set your companions to their respective formation as well as in accordance with their skills but this is how you really kind of bacon success for your battlefield campaigns alright so here we are on the battlefield so before I actually get going with some of our battlefield commands I just want to give you guys some real quick little tricks that I learned and this one actually comes directly from the comments section on my nine useful tips I'll link that in the upper right corner but if I press W and on the Trop forward and if I press s I just kind of stops well if you double press W you will immediately jump into a gallop and if you double press s you will immediately come to a stop so and those those alone are like total game changers for me so another little thing I want to show you guys is if you hold down alt on the battlefield you can see where your units are the corresponding unit type and where the enemy is as well as the distance relative to you the player so I think this is a really good idea as far as giving you a good sense of where the battlefield is and what what your allies are around you and where your enemies are so let's also bring up f1 here real quick so you see at the very top are formations one two and three so how do you select all of it well all you have to do is press a number that is in bound to a formation though for instance we don't have a fourth formation but pressing for everybody listen to me I get the whole entire group selected so this is a great way to select the entire army on the fly if you just don't remember which numbers however selected just press f1 then press a number that you know is not a formation boom set also let's say you don't want your cab to charge or you don't want your cab to do anything you can select just a set number of formations holding down control then pressing 1 and 2 sorry 1 2 3 however you want allows you to stack up as many formations as you want let's say I've got one selected I hold down control and plus 2 and now my archers and my infantry are selected or let's say I've got multiple CAV forces and I want all of them to charge well I can select all my multiple cab forces or the control then give that order so this allows you to get a lot more flexibility with your formations and now one last thing one last little quick trick is our dialog boxes on the left this is what we're going to be clicking through and moving through to make our commands across the battlefield so by pressing f1 I can bring up all my positions then I press f9 to go back to 4 facing f9 to go back 3 4 form f9 to go back well you don't need to press f9 if you bring up movement you can simply right click and it will go back to the parent menu and so on so forth or further down the route so if I press f1 again though and you see that I've got f1 through F 7 bound to commands here well if you press f8 or any F key that is not bound to a command it'll jump you back a menu so for instance f2 facing I'm just gonna press f4 jumps me back a command so you have a lot of flexibility with that don't think that you're bound to pressing f9 to get everything done that helps you out quite a bit but let's jump into movement our very first portion of this and we have a number of different ways to do this so before we really get into movement I want to talk about how easy it is to actually move things on the map and it's it's not really laid out this way in the tutorial so if I press f1 and movement it makes you think you have to press f1 again to make them move to that location you don't you just press f1 and then you press left click boom there you go I mean you can press f1 and then hold down alt and do it too but you don't really need to do that just press f1 it use your movement flag and then left look it's gonna make it so much easier on you to just get things moved around at the battlefield now another thing I want to talk about real quick with movement is holding down left-click you're probably familiar with this when you take a look at other RTSs and making formations what you see these little green flags they denote where your characters are walking and running all that action so if I were to bring up f1 I'll bring over here and I can see all these flags it shows me the direction they're facing if I hold down left click though I create an access point and a X is and I can move this around to make this a wider or a tighter formation and we'll see how this expands out information for sure but that's a quick way to get your movement done quick and easy so jumping down into follow me we can have all this unit follow me now the way that this would be explained in the the tutorial almost seems like a guard stance it is not that this unit will follow you no matter what may be attacking what comes in contact but if you push through a unit they will attempt to fight their way out so basically use follow if you want them to attack what you're attacking not if you want them to go off and fight things as you come in contact with them that's a different command let's move these guys back here and look at our next so we've got charged Old Faithful right this is what I'm sure the majority of us were pressing to get things done now the tutorial lays it out as the best way to get your units in combat wrong charge sends all units will whatever ones you have selected regardless of class into melee this means any archers will pull out swords in hybrid horse calves or javelin infantry will not use their ranged abilities we want to avoid this unless we're explicitly selecting a melee unit instead so that's what I say but if you want to do a little bit more you want to use advanced so think of advance kind of like a tack move for other RTS --is this will replace your muscle memory for charge this allows all units to immediately move forward towards the enemy and even if you aren't giving them a command in that direction so if I face over here let me just press my archers because it'll exemplify the next point and I press advance I follow my archers here they will move to in range of the enemy and then they will attack and that's the important thing here actually they won't attack as I have them on uh I have them on not fire will so that the enemy won't charge me but still advance allows it so that all of your range units will get in range and then use their ranged abilities melee and calves will immediately charge into combat but one thing I've noticed what this command is that archers will skirmish you know if something gets into range with them they will attempt to maintain max range and they'll run backwards so it's really really useful I I cannot stress this being the new norm now that I've discovered how it really works I'm moving over further into our lists we have fall back fall back they're not gonna fall back to that distinct distinguished point the fall back is nice because it's not a full-scale retreat your unit will maintain a distance from the enemy and fall back in an orderly fashion attempting to maintain unit cohesion and some semblance of a formation the nice thing acid that this is not dependent on any set direction from you you just select it and they'll take care of the rest advance and fall back are very strong in that regard we can really use advanced or fall back if you're dealing with horse calves that you want to keep just outside of reach of the enemy you can use fall back they'll continue to shoot with their bows and arrows and stay out of reach now your next one here pretty self-explanatory its stop it stops things that's what it does and last we have a retreat and retreat works by doing the same thing fall back does but just not in an orderly fashion and they will go off the map completely which is over in that direction so now we've talked about positions let's talk about pacing and how that works so you've got two options here base direction and face enemy base direction if I press you can you can already see that if I press f1 here you see a little little flag that pops up o f2 for facing you see this little green arrow that arrow is gonna direct where they are now going to face this means that when I go to move them they will always try to face in that direction sorry I think I have the wrong yeah they're real actually sorry about that there we go if I go to move and out they're set on facing the direction I want they'll always try to face that direction no matter what so if I move them in a direction over here they'll face the way that I want them to point now the difference here though is face enemy charge it will face towards the enemy no matter where I move them so if I move them over here they will spin as if the enemy is their axis and they will always face towards that enemy no matter the location now the thing here with face enemy versus face position is that a face Direction allows you to customize and manually select where the way they're facing based enemy will select the closest enemies though if you are in a siege with a lot of enemies around you face enemy can sometimes be a little cumbersome because they're facing the closest enemy and you might not want that to happen you might want your cab force to circle around something in a different enemy so you have them face different directions so use I did the face Direction enemy is gonna be a little more advanced as you get through your your playthroughs of the game but facing is still going to be important in those latter portions of your combat our next little menu here is form and this seems self explanatory let's go over a few things about formations for one you can assign different formations to different units by by pressing the corresponding number for the unit then setting their formation so for example let's just go here let's press here the most specialized and then let's press 2 and let's go to the line and then let's just set it to the loose unfortunately the AI is not to the point where it recognizes that a loose line of archers should be behind a shield wall if you select both units together what I mean by that is by pressing control one and two then pressing f1 here see they'll they'll stay on the same they'll stay across the same plane they're not gonna try and bunch up and say okay shield walls in front loose formations behind though this might change in the future but as of the creating of this video they all line up on the same plane now another point is that all these formations can be manipulated by holding down left-click to make them wider or tighter but for example for us these guys let's go to formation let's go to scheme they'll all jump into that ski information but I can make this ski information tighter with more layers to it like this or I can hold a left-click and make it very very wide as one large wedge and they'll do that run over there I mean the same thing can be done of course with my infantry in making a very tight shield wall like this or making again a very wide shield wall like this so just take a look at those things usually you're left click to really kind of drag and drop how you want to do this but let's jump really quick through the formations I'm not gonna just tell you every little thing about them it's because there's a lot of it's gonna be home-brewed to total the way you're gonna be fighting but lion is pretty straightforward it's a straight line it's best used for archers or just infantry I mean there's nothing inherently bad or good about a straight line of men so don't worry about that one whatever you want to do a shield wall is gonna be ideal for infantry with shields as you would have expected larger shields will benefit from this especially sturgeons who use this as a centerpiece to the tactics of their army this can be helpful during sieges but be wary that it does make for a juicier catapult target now we also have loose I recommend the next one down of course that you use this to keep your archers in this formation it'll reduce damage from masked charges and return fire this is also beneficial during sieges if you're charging through artillery and Archer fire force a cab I mean you could use on your infantry as well too now circle is nice first spearmen if you're dealing with lots I'll just press the circle button if you're if you're dealing with lots of cab and you want to have archers in your center or even horse archers to have them in a fallback stance constantly firing at the enemy but keep in mind though if you put them in circle and fall back and shoot and such they won't do the cool moving pinwheel that you see in other wargames and is famous from history it'll just be a sloppy circle moving backwards and lastly what not lastly but well there's important ones I'd say is uh jump back here and there is skiing or your typical wedge formation now you also have column which is gonna be pretty self-explanatory they're going to form up into a column you also get scatter which is kind of cool look at Scout Rock what it does not what it was supposed to do I've had I work before but basically scatter is kind of like they'll just dart around on a bunch of different directions to try to avoid artillery fire so it shouldn't put them in a line that's a little bugged right now so we'll see how that goes I've had it you work on some units clearly not on these but again this is early access so keep that all in mind all right so let's take a look at some last little options here to close our video out so we've got F 4 5 and 6 as well as F 7 MF 4 is pretty self-explanatory pressing f4 will make it so my archers were no longer fire at will oh now if I look at it you can see there's a little bracket around it it's highlighted I know they're no longer going to fire at will now if I jump on over to my horses now I can see something else well we'll press 3 I can press f5 and they'll get off their horses now this is kind of buggy sometimes they won't fully get back on their horses so be careful with this one we'll press f5 they should hopefully all get back on that guy that guy's not gonna guess not yeah ok whatever dude um but you can really get your guys off of horses if they're in the middle of a siege anything like that and last thing here is transfer so press f7 and I've got will happen finally let's take a look at the top we already have our number 3 selected which is a CAV unit but press f7 and then we'll select f4 and we'll pick all of them and put them into that unit well they'll combine into one whole unit once more now this is if you didn't do it in the party screen but keep in mind here take a look at this you're only selecting numbers you're not selecting set actual values here so you're not moving archers from one unit to the other unless that one unit was already all archers this is beneficial I want to say take this unit and divide it into two there we go now I've got two forces so oops I put them the wrong thing my bad but still my point is you put them in their own force over here there you go now I've got like two forces over there like that so you can you can set them up to to break apart your army as if you want to and have CAV force to set up into multiple ones but the last thing here is f6 and that's gonna whole army for that and they'll actually go do what they're supposed to do the AI will take care of it from there so hopefully this video helps you guys out in getting a better idea of how to really deal with combat in mountain blade you don't always have to press f1 to bring this menu up f1 will bring up all of the commands for moving but any number that you press f3 to bring up all of the formations f2 to bring up your directions you don't have to press f1 to start that so hopefully these little tips and tricks will help you guys out in breaking in to combat with banner lord I know that for me personally it took me just starting a custom battle and jumping into this like going hog-wild so I recommend you do the same and just see how you can really manipulate these individual menus and really get a feel for it you know that this game has a lot of nuance to it and it still is an early access so I think a lot of this is going to unfortunately be changed over time as they fix some of these bugs but as always guys thank you so much for watching here today if you want to share any other battle formation tips that's gonna help out any new players old players or people just coming in to batter and Lord for the first time please go ahead and leave a comment below about that but go ahead and like subscribe all that kind of fun action but as always thank you so much for watching here today have a good one and take care

Channel: ItalianSpartacus

Views: 197,265

Rating: 4.9443078 out of 5

Keywords: bannerlord gameplay, bannerlord, bannerlord review, bannerlord pc gameplay, mount and blade 2 bannerlord, mount and blade 2 bannerlord gameplay, mount& blade 2: bannerlord, let's play bannerlord, mount &blade ii: bannerlord, mount and blade 2, mount and blade 2 gameplay, mount and blade 2 review, mount and blade 2 tips, bannerlord tips, playthrough, commentary, video game, guide, italianspartacus, unit guide, units, troops, army, best units, best army, best faction, culture, commands

Id: fND81LqiPbI

Length: 19min 44sec (1184 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 03 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/TheoMuchosBuenos]

Been looking for this. Thank you!

[u/TheItalian567]

So following up in the useful tips guide, a lot of people were requesting help with the commands on the combat map, so I slammed around the custom battles for a few hours to make a video outlining what the options do.

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Some things are subject to change with patches or not working as intended, so don't be afraid to use F6 if you're struggling with combat until the bugs get ironed out!

[u/studmuffin2269]

I’ve never played Mount and Blade before and this was super useful! Can you do one on the political system of the game? I just don’t get it. I’ve taken a number of castles and a few cities, but do I own them? No. Some idiot lord does. Also, is it bad that I execute nobles? Skulls for the Skull Throne.

[u/Skelguardian]

This is actually really cool. Thanks for this!

[u/Pewling]

But why is the crossbow so expensive?

[u/Darkbyte]

Thanks for this! It helped a lot. I have one question, when the AI commander tells you to skirmish, is that just using advance?

[u/el_kabong31]

Great video, thanks for sharing! I can't believe the difference between charge vs advance was made more obvious in the tutorial.

[u/clineaus]

This deserves more upvotes, so helpful.

[u/Call_Me_Joris]

Written summary?