How to Build a Bandit Army - Mount and Blade II Bannerlord Raider Guide Part 3

hello hal here welcome back to my bannerlord raider guide part three to be exact as you're well aware of in part one we've discussed all the rating strategies you can use to enrich yourself at the expense of others and in part 2 we've talked about how to create your bandit character as well as how to properly train his skills among other perfectly legal things today we'll be discussing a topic that's very near and dear to my heart and that is convincing people to join the channel uh i mean your band of outlaws jokes aside today we'll focus on three main topics what troop types to recruit how to recruit them and how to put them to good use throughout your playthrough from the very beginning of your radar campaign up until the end game we might be here for a while so grab yourself something to drink or a snack and prepare to learn something that in all honesty you probably already know if you've played this game but i'm hoping you'll still find out something new today after all this is coming from someone who has spent quite a bit of time in calradia alright let's first talk about the regular kind of recruitment before we dive into alternative methods under normal circumstances you recruit soldiers by visiting settlements talking to the local landowners and paying them a finder's fee for any lads that wants to join you if this whole recruitment bar is gray it means the notables do not like you very much so you'd best improve your relations asap the better your relations the higher the quality and quantity of troops the landowner will send your way there's several ways to do this simply being a part of their faction is enough to free up a few additional volunteers and this can be done when you become a mercenary or a lord of this faction or simply when you conquer the settlement yourself but on its own that isn't enough to make the notables give you all of their recruits so try to look for perks that make people like you more or enact kingdom policies that prioritize the loyalty of your subjects and over time they'll give you access to more and more soldiers another thing you can do to increase the amount of warriors you recruit from towns or villages is to simply do favors for the locals bring them grain or tools or animals refuse their monetary compensation if the option is available and generally be a really nice guy towards them but this guide is for people who do not know the meaning of nice after all i didn't label this as how to be an honorable and merciful lord of the realm no this is a guide for psychopathic outlaws and since you'll have already disregarded everyone's opinion of you in the trash bin where it belongs you're gonna have to look for alternative methods of recruiting manpower for your or raiding operations if you've not pissed off everyone you could still rely on conventional methods of recruitment but if you've done like oak zook and the entire world is painted red then alternatives are all you'll have alternative number one and the first method ux used to make friends is to beat some looters into submission either use a blunt weapon or prayer whichever you prefer the key to this recruitment method is to have the looters get injured instead of outright killed necromancy hasn't yet been introduced as a mechanic in a banner lord if it were this guy would probably practice it after you've knocked some teeth out of looter's mouths take them prisoner and after some time they will offer to join you once your looter party grows you can use them to ambush mountain or desert or forest bandits and if by some miracles you can catch step raiders those as well and just like you've done with the looters if you smash them with a blunt object they can be imprisoned and eventually they'll offer to join your ranks i mean riding along the man who impaired their ability to chew food is preferable to being dragged along as a prisoner at least if they follow you they'll get to vent their frustrations on your next batch of victims and if they're lucky enough even live a long and comfortable life from the spoils you shared with them of course prisoner recruitment isn't limited to bandits you can do this to anyone peasants caravan guards soldiers of lords you've defeated they will all join you sooner or later there are a few perks which speed up that process mainly in the rotary and leadership skills but they are not an absolute requirement one thing i noticed however is that the fewer prisoners you have the faster they will join you so that's something to keep in mind if this is your go-to recruitment method and if you want to use this technique to get a lot of top tier bandits you should equip a mace and the shield and start raiding their hideouts try to score as many takedowns as you can and when you finally face the big boss dual him and after you beat some sense into him his lieutenants will be apprehended as well it's going to take a bit of time for these bandits to suck up their pride and join your gang and if you lack the virtue of patience you can instead take them to the nearest mining settlement and find them some gainful employment in exchange for a large bag of money but what do you do if you have a lot of prisoners and they're slowing you down well you could try to sneak into the nearest town and sell them to the ransom broker but chances are you'll just get caught by the guards and get your ass thrown in the dungeon but that is actually not a bad thing i mean sure you get deprived of your freedom for a few days or weeks but while you serve your sentence you're also freed from your responsibilities such as keeping your soldiers fed or paying their wages and while you're rot in prison your gang will patiently wait for their boss to get out of jail and while you were in there some if not most of your prisoners are now ready to join you as well this isn't the most efficient method of gaining new recruits but hey you might find this info useful but an even better use of this mechanic is to figuratively use it as a get out of jail free card technically you're getting into jail but if you're being chased by a lord and he's closing in it's actually better to try to sneak into town multiple times if you have to and let the guards catch you and throw you in the dungeon because here's the thing if a lord with 200 soldiers catches your party of 100 men you have almost no chance of winning the battle so you will lose all of your troops as well as a large portion of your loot if you surrender to this lord again you'll lose a portion of your loot most of your horses and your 100 soldiers will get imprisoned and you'll never see them ever again but if you let the town guards arrest you all you'll lose is the time you spend rotting away in prison all your loot horses and soldiers will still be there when you finally get out and by that time the pursuing lord will most likely have left to pursue other endeavors and to repeat myself some of your prisoners will decide to join you by the time you get out anyway when your party has enough looters or bandits or whatever and you're no longer hiring throw your mace away and equip a sharp or pointy object and use it to murder your enemies and take their stuff this thing right here called battle loot that's the gear dropped by fallen soldiers and you don't get a lot of it if the enemy just got ko'd so basically if you want prisoners bludgeon your enemies with a mace if you want loot slice them open but i digress once you have 30 lads or more you can move on to alternative number two of making friends forced conscription you see the landowners i talked about earlier are not going to willingly part with their recruits if they don't like you keyword is willingly but if you show enough force they will give you some of their recruits regardless of their personal whims and wishes the only other option they have is to get murdered and have the soldiers taken from the village afterwards but because they prefer their heads to still be attached to their bodies they'll part with the lads after you've helped fertilize their crops with their own militia if you want to know what troops you're about to conscript by using this method you can go to the recruit volunteers window and take a look at the soldiers that are stationed here conscription forces the first three available recruits from each notable to join you which usually means you'll be scraping the bottom of the barrel but if the noobs were taken away by some lord just before your friendly visit the troops you get will be better there's also this exploit which i'd like to share with you if you force notables to give you recruits you'll get the worst ones that has already been established if you try to do this again immediately after this option becomes grayed out but if you save your game and immediately reload you will be able to forcefully conscript the next batch of soldiers which will be better and better and this can earn you some top tier units in no time i'm pretty sure this exploit will be patched out soon and for once i wouldn't mind after all that's why i mentioned it i'm not particularly fond of using exploits myself although i don't mind anyone else doing it for their own enjoyment until the developers do their job and patch them out alternative number three is still about using an excessive amount of force but this time it is for the noble purpose of rescuing people from captivity just like you carry helpless looters and villagers as prisoners so do other parties maybe a group of bandits got lucky and managed to ambush a caravan and kidnap the surviving guards hoping to ransom them somewhere but uh whoops they had the misfortune of meeting you so you attacked these outlaws and after they're either killed or captured the caravan guards you just rescued will voluntarily join your party after all they owe you a life debt that can only be repaid by helping you raid caravans just like the one they were escorting before they got ambushed and if they die in your service that's a small price to pay for salvation this is a rare but rewarding manner of recruitment as the troops you liberate can be a lot better than those you may obtain through the previous methods especially if you rescue prisoners of war from an army that just barely survived a close encounter with their enemies i once managed to defeat an army of one thousand serenades with just a hundred men because 950 of those guys were in no condition to fight after they've been starved for a week as they laid siege to a castle a lot of the soldiers i released that day were elite troops who would have been a great addition to my army if i didn't exclusively employ mounted archers to see who actually carries prisoners and who's not just hold the alt key to see details about all the parties roaming the map if a party looks like this then some damsels are in distress and you shall be the brave knight who will rescue them from the miscreants and when you do they will join your band of miscreants this should not be your primary manner of recruitment but if the opportunity presents itself you should just grab it but the best recruitment method for a bandit king is intimidation which can simply be described as convincing smaller gangs of bandits to join your bigger gang of bandits to bully the outlaws into joining you you need three things the first of these prerequisites is party size they say size doesn't matter but let me tell you that's a lie because if your gang consists of 20 ragged yokels that's not enough to intimidate even a single looter even though fighting all of you is a death sentence for him you need at least 50 men in your party maybe even more because if the bandits aren't hopelessly outnumbered then they'll simply throw their lives away my regiment of 200 men can easily convince a gang of 20 outlaws to join us but parties of 30 or 40 or 50 will usually refuse your generous offer of employment preferring instead to die but if your party is too large then your movement speed will decrease so you have to either legally or illegally obtain some horses or even cavalry units in order to keep your party speed above 5 or even 6 if you can go that high speed is requirement number 2 by the way and the third and final piece of the intimidation puzzle is the scarface perk technically the perk is optional but believe me that 30 surrender chance makes a lot of difference i was never able to convince a party of 30 brigands to join me before obtaining that ability once these three requirements are met all you have to do is chase bandit parties and when you catch up simply tell them to surrender or die some will obviously let pride be their downfall but those who are smart will instead offer to join your gang in exchange for their lives and since that's what you wanted in the first place of course they'll be welcomed with open arms in your band of misfits but as i've said earlier large gangs of 30 bandits or more will almost always refuse to join even if you have 200 men so if you really want to add some of these fillers to your roster you're gonna have to use the squeezing technique i've shown you in part one tell them to surrender and if they refuse you attack after you render a few of them unconscious the remaining bandits will start running away and when that happens stop the attack and let them escape then approach them again and make them the same offer if they still refuse kill half and let the others run eventually they won't have enough manpower to actually put up a fight at which point they might join you but some are extremely stubborn and will refuse to comply out of sheer contempt so don't waste too much time on them my rule is three strikes and they're out if they say no two times i will attack them and kill half each time if they say no a third time i'll simply send my men to kill all the rest and imprison those who refused to die but what if you want to recruit step bandits well that's a real corundum um conundrum because if a party of step brooders is small enough to be intimidated then it's probably extremely fast and you won't be able to catch them and the parties you can catch are probably too large to let themselves be intimidated so what do you do well if you remember the ambush spots i've shown you in part 1 of this raider guide you can try to guide the bandits into a dead end and corner them there or you can just wander around and keep an eye out for small parties that may move slower than others of their kind because you see these nomads are so damn effective at raiding peasants and caravans that they will often be absolutely loaded with trade goods and prisoners and that will actually slow them down to a crawl you could safely say that step bandits are the victims of their own success and that's what allows you to easily catch up to them and force them to join your crew but if they put up a fight try to not let any of them escape because when you win you will take their loot and prisoners which actually were the things that slowed them down in the first place and they will manage to make their escape never to be seen again what i'm trying to say is step bandits are too quick to be squeezed if they say no simply send your soldiers to have them all killed or injured then recruit those you've imprisoned and yeah in case it wasn't clear if you want to completely eliminate a party don't join battles yourself when you do the enemy morale eventually breaks and they will start running away and some of them can escape but if you send your troops to do the dirty work for you the enemy will fight to the last man and a portion of them will just get some minor injuries allowing you to take them captive and eventually added them to your ranks one last thing about intimidation towards the late game when you start losing soldiers by the hundreds this will be your primary method of recruitment say if you want a lot of bandit troops real fast all you gotta do is visit nearby hideouts and keep an eye out for bandits patrolling the area when i'm at this stage i no longer destroy bandit hideouts because they make for excellent employment centers finally there's mercenaries there's not much i can say about these guys you just enter a town or sneak inside if you're an outlaw pay a visit to the tavern and recruit anyone who's available marks are expensive but they're some of the best troops when fully upgraded but i think that's everything let's recap recruitment imprisonment conscription rescues intimidation and mercenaries are there any methods of obtaining soldiers that i've left out probably not but if you think of other alternatives leave them in a comment i'll even pin it if it's particularly filled with new information and i guess that concludes the first chapter of today's guide but before we move on to chapter 2 i'd like you to do something for me if you found this video to be helpful you can return the favor by helping it reach 5 000 likes it only takes a second to press the button and it's the best way of supporting this type of content alright now that we've discussed various methods of recruitment let's move on to the part where we take a look at what troop types are most useful to recruit throughout the various stages of your raider campaign oh boy i'm gonna have to pick favorites aren't i i hate picking favorites all troops are useful in their own way even the lowest of the low but we'll judge these soldiers based on availability utility as well as disposability because let's be honest not every one of your gang mates is going to survive the carnage you'll lead them into and they know it live fast die young that's their motto and they've fully accepted their fate i will absolutely not analyze each and every unit in the game as that would take too much time i'll simply talk about the best troops to recruit depending on what kind of operations you're running because you won't be sieging castles with the same army you've robbed caravans with now i will assume you've followed part two of this guide and obtained this parking leadership or at the very least you intend to do it at some point towards the late game you'll be hiring a lot of bandits and they will eventually need to be upgraded into elite troops let's start with a scum of calradian society the looters these guys quite literally litter the continent they're everywhere sometimes even in large numbers and they're quite eager to join a thriving gang of outlaws but they are only useful in the early game to be used as cannon fodder against peasants and actual bandits until you capture these better troops and have them replace the looters once that's done lutieres are complete trash that should only be recruited if you have nothing better to add to your army but after you've obtained the veterans respect perk these lads become useful once again simply because they can be recruited in huge numbers and then trained into the humble tier 2 imperial infantry which are not the best troops available but at least they have a shield allowing them to draw enemy fire while your archers dish out massive amounts of damage and if these imperial footmen survive long enough they may even see themselves become legionaries which are some of the best infantry units in calradia but let's not put the cart before the horse these are already late game tactics that should be discussed after we've laid a solid foundation on the corpses of those you've raided now because i am about to begin a new raider campaign myself using the same start as in this video in which the entire world is hostile we shall continue discussing this subject from the lens of my bandit character what would balan do when he starts he has absolutely nothing and nobody will join him willingly that much is certain so maybe he'll fight for his life obtain some new weapons and once he's got some basic equipment he can start recruiting a few lackeys to help him climb the ranks as i've already said looters will be the first troops he adds to his roster using a spear and a horse one could easily fight about 6 looters at once and when half of those lie dead the rest will start to scatter at that point you can use a mallet to smack them over the back of the head take them prisoner and wait for them to join you rinse and repeat until you have 15 to 20 looters at which point you're ready to go after your next victims mountain bandits hillman are complete trash there are no better than looters but unlike those monkeys the hillman can be upgraded into useful troops without any special perks brigands are not the sharpest tools in the shed but at the very least they're versatile they have a shield for blocking arrows they have a spear for dealing with cavalry they have an axe to break the shields of hostile infantry and of course they have a bag of javelins that can kill an enemy in one hit best of all they're disposable because mountain bandits can always be coerced into joining your gang as the game progresses and your party grows but if they survive they can be given a cheap horse to upgrade themselves into highway men which are my favorite cavalry units in the game excluding horse archers let me tell you why high women are perfect for a raider first of all they're just as versatile as the brigands shield axe spear javelins if you have 20 of these you can raid any party of peasants no matter how large order them to hold fire until they approach their victims and when that happens fire at will secondly these guys are one of the few tier 4 cavalry units that use a regular mount instead of a war horse and that makes them relatively disposable for such a high value unit but if you have the vet's respect you might be tempted to turn these boys into vlandian champions and if you're a methillionaire who owns hundreds of war horses go ahead and upgrade them for me it's kind of a downgrade because even though they gain a lot of armor and deadly melee equipment they lose their javelins and their replaceability which are the best advantages of the highwaymen after i get some brigands in my party i start chasing sea raiders and forest bandits which are among the best outlaw troops to have c-men are great infantry units who can hold the line with their shields and harass your enemies with javelins while foresters are some of the best archers in calradia especially after they've been upgraded into battalion fiance assuming this perk's unlocked there's also desert bandits but they're kind of a mixed bag their tier 3 cavalry is ok if you want to boost your traveling speed but their lack of shields renders them almost useless in combat the tier 4 harami are pretty good they're slightly improved highwaymen but not only do you have to waste a horse to transform a bedouin into a nomad but then you gotta waste a war horse to upgrade the nomad into the harami and that can get pretty expensive so i don't really bother with them then there's step bandits we talked about these lads already if you can somehow catch them and recruit them they're the only troops you need for early game raiding they move quickly they can shoot and they're perfect for attacking either bandits or peasants actually only marauders can do that the tier 2 step bandit is an even worse version of the desert nomad and the tier 4 raiders require war horses which aren't particularly easy to obtain if you're aiming for a bandit only cavalry only war band highwaymen and marauders are your best options but some step gangs already come with a few raiders and if you get these guys to join you willingly they're some of the best troops you can enlist but do not upgrade marauders into raiders until you've unlocked the perk i keep shoving in your face once you get to that one the raiders can be trained into cons guards which are the scariest things you can see on the battlefield a horde of those will bring the entire world to ruin luckily for the world such a golden horde is not easy to assemble but why bother with bandits when you can conscript actual soldiers now the question is who are you going to conscript sturgeons vlandians assarai they're all good choices but there's only two troops that i'm aiming for in the early game when range and mobility are everything the tier three koseit raider and the tier v imperial busalari let's talk about these two mounted archer troops and draw some comparisons between them if you go to the kosair step and start conscripting people most of your new recruits will be nomads or peasants if you don't dare attack a village after a bit of training the peasants or nomads will become koseit tribesmen which in my opinion are the best but also the most expensive tier 2 units because in addition to their regular upgrade cost you will also need to give them a standard horse which costs somewhere between 200 to 500 dinars if you choose to purchase instead of adhering to raider tradition when the tribesmen score a few kills they can be upgraded into raiders which are exactly what you want decent and affordable mounted archers but when they level up again these raiders could be developed into koset horse archers but in order for that to happen you will also need to give each of them a war horse what happens to the standard horse that the raider was riding on before he got upgraded it vanishes into thin air gone reduced to atoms but if you take an honest hard-working imperial you train him to use a bow and he becomes a veteran ranger you can instead give him the war horse and you have yourself an armored mounted archer that's just as strong as his kosei counterpart without vaporizing a poor saddle horse in the process so if i have a combination of imperial and koseit troops in my warband the step bros are already mounted archers from tier 2 even before i give them war horses but imperials are snotty bastards who won't ride anything but the best and if i give the war horses to the kuzets the imps remain dismounted so instead of wasting two horses on one soldier i give a simple horse to the koset and a war mount to the imperial get it got it good but there is another reason why i recommend training imperials availability crusades are great and i wouldn't have a problem maxing them out but what do i do if i'm stuck in the western part of the map eventually some of my troops will perish and for every horseman that falls in battle my warband loses a bit of cohesion each and every time and the cavalry will eventually be replaced by imperial archers which can only be trained back into cavalry with war horses therefore they get the more expensive mounts while the kosets remain cheap and reliable and whenever i find myself in the eastern part of calradia i'll replace some of my infantry units with carriages once more now to clear any confusion when i say koseis shouldn't get war horses i only mean the raiders but if you manage to conscript kuzeth nobles and you have the option of giving them a war horse you absolutely should because number one they already come with a free horse so you don't waste two months on a single unit and number two the congolese eventually becomes a khan's guard which as i've already mentioned is the best horse archer in calradia but if you want mounted archers shouldn't you also employ asurai mama looks yeah but mostly no if you do some forced conscription in an asteroid village and the notables give you mamluk cavalry that's great but if you get basic recruits you shouldn't bother training them into mounted archers because they are the embodiment of midlife crisis to elaborate on that the recruit trains into tier 2 shielded infantry which can then be given a basic horse to become a tier 3 melee cavalry unit which can then be given a war horse to finally become a mounted archer and you already know how i feel about wasting two horses on the same unit if you absolutely want acetate cavalry stick to the mamolok regular which is a solid tier 3 troop with a spear a sword and a shield these guys aren't great but having cavalry in your army boosts your map mobility and you may find that useful early on in your campaign and if you don't have any horses to upgrade your footmen into cavalry allow me to give you some tried and true methods for obtaining them method number one is to simply buy them if you're a mercenary or a lord and you're still able to enter towns they are your most reliable option but if you're an outlaw that's been completely ostracized from civilized society you can only purchase horses from towns that rebelled against their current masters or from villages that are selling them but what if you don't want to spend your money what do you do then well you can wait for a group of villagers from a horse ranch to visit the market to try to sell their horses so hover on the village see what town it's bound to and put yourself in between the two settlements if the village has this icon on top of it it means the peasants are home so you must wait for them to depart when they do the icon will disappear indicating that it's time to prepare your ambush so give chase to the peasants and when you catch up you can either squeeze them or rob them doing so early on is tricky however because the peasants will ride on those horses and it's possible they'll move faster than you and if that's the case try to guide them into an ambush spot you may also obtain basic horses from caravans you've raided but just like the aforementioned cowboys they'll also move very quickly so you'll have to catch them in an ambush spot or in a forest if you're botanian or in the desert if you're assarai and of course another method of obtaining mounts is defeating enemy lords if a lord had any cavalry in his army you'll get to claim a few of the horses left behind by these fallen warriors but what about war horses after all most high tier riders will require these and it's not like they grow on trees well if you have the money you could buy them but i assume you don't want to do that so the best place to obtain war mounts is the battlefield if a lord had elite cavalry units such as the cataphract or the busalari you'll get a small number of war horses from the battle itself but your best bet is to waylay azeri caravans unlike caravans belonging to the other factions asari convoys are protected by veteran caravan guards who are the only escort units that ride on actual war horses for each mounted archer that you kill there's a chance you'll get a lame asserai horse which can be used to upgrade your soldiers into heavy mounted archers every time i attack desert traders i make it my personal goal to kill these troops first the rest of the loot is just a bonus but anyway to summarize everything i've said thus far if your intention is to raid caravans and villages mobility is key so i advise that you form a solid cavalry focused warband and if you still have some straggler infantry or archers make sure that you have some spare mounts in your inventory for them to ride on the best cavalry units for this playstyle are highway men marauders koset raiders and imperial busalari but any cavalry unit is good they're all able to boost your travel speed so if you have the opportunity to get some mama looks or drizznicks in your party don't turn them away as for the aforementioned sturgeon cavalry unit you can get a lot of droozniks by intimidating seeraters into joining you and then training them with a perk before we move on i also have to briefly mention mounted pillagers imagine a looter with a bow and a horse that's exactly what these guys are cheap and disposable horse archers that you may obtain from caravan ambush quests they cannot be intimidated or conscripted but if you do one of these missions and you happen to knock a few of these guys out they will eventually join your crew like any other prisoner then again if you're an outlaw nobody will give you a job like this unless you make your way into a rebel town but once you've amassed a big pile of ill-gotten gold and assembled a large party you might have greater aspirations aside from extorting robbing or raiding your fellow countrymen you might want to conquer a town or maybe even the entire world now you could just use a party of 100 horse orchards to bait the garrison of an entire city into sallying out and meeting you on an open field where they'd die of arrow poisoning before being able to catch your blood riders but that isn't very safe because while you're preparing to lay siege to this castle an army of thousands could ride to its defense and if they have horse archers as well you will lose your only advantage besides even if you defeat the garrison you will eventually have to defend the city from a reclamation army which is guaranteed to be larger than yours and realistically you will not be able to hold it down with just 100 men unless you use exploits but what if i told you you don't have to defend every castle that you've conquered allow me to elaborate when your clan reaches tier 4 you have the option of forming your own kingdom however in order to have a claim to the throne of calradia you will need to have proven your mettle by conquering a town or a castle so if you don't have a lot of soldiers and you don't want to lose most of them in the assault you shouldn't besiege a fort that's at full strength what you should do instead is keep an eye out for a castle that's already under siege and when the assault comes to an end wait for the conquering army to depart when you feel it's safe lay siege to that castle yourself if you can also build a battering ram and a siege tower before the assault begins that's great but if the army returns to defend its newly acquired land you're better off rushing the assault with just ladders if you've got a lot of ranged units you can use what i've named the arrow storm doctrine and just lay them outside the walls of the castle and have them shoot the defenders on the walls eventually the enemy's morale will break and they'll scurry off and you'll have scored yourself your first castle once that's done form your own kingdom enact the royal guard sacred majesty and two other policies that you might want and then crown yourself bandit king of calradia and once you've taken the castle if the defenders close in you can make one of two choices if you think you can take them on just wait in the fort and let them besiege it once more but if you're greatly outnumbered just leave and let them reclaim their castle it's already fulfilled its purpose of making you king on the day of your coronation you'll see your party size spike from a hundred something men to 200 maybe even more so you will suddenly have a lot of vacant spots in your war band at this point speed loses its importance whereas size becomes the main thing that matters so use your 100 riders to conscript whoever peasants traveling to their markets roving gangs of bandits recruits you've abducted from random villages and the militias that fought back it doesn't even matter if your new soldiers are cavalry or not in fact you should aim to hire as many footmen as possible because unlike the horsemen they're easier to replace when you inevitably send them to their deaths as you enlist more and more people your warband will eventually reach its size limit at which point you can assign one of your companions to be a general and give him as many soldiers as he can manage then you should form an army and take your companion with you and keep conscripting people until your party is full once more after which you assign another companion and you will do this one more time until your clan has four full parties that have been united into a single army and if at some point your army takes a lot of casualties and you need a refill and you've spotted the gang of bandits that you wish to integrate to your war band you can disband the army to improve your travel speed chase the miscreants and when you take some distance from your clanmates call them back to your army to have them follow you and prevent them from wandering into enemy forces and subsequently losing all the soldiers you worked so hard to amass but there is a slight problem as you do this most of your new troops will be looters hillman peasants and volunteers and if you don't upgrade them asap you're destined to a bitter defeat if you're attacked by a competent army as i was saying a bit earlier your soldiers need to at least reach tier 2 in order to be useful so allow me to teach you how to properly train your troops the classic way of training them is to simply take these lads into battle and when they score some kills they're entitled to a bit of the loot you take from your enemies that share of the spoils is then converted into experience points and when a recruit gains enough of those he's ready to be upgraded into a slightly better soldier with these two perks in stewardship you can also force your troops to level up by donating them your own share of the loot only armor and weapons count you can keep everything else because it makes no difference to them a little side note about these perks when this feature was introduced in the 1.6 patch it worked flawlessly but last time i played the game if i donated an entire stack of weapons it would only count as one and i had to discard each and every item individually one by one that took a lot of clicks and when i was done only 10 of my 200 soldiers were trained whereas in previous versions i could train almost everyone provided i reached the xp limit indicated over here i'm hoping that by the time this video is published this issue will have been resolved and gear donations will work properly once more but in case they don't you've been warned also i don't think you need to unlock these perks on your main character if you don't want to waste your focus points on stewardship i'm pretty sure having a companion take this role for you is good enough but do make sure to not risk him or her on the battlefield because if your steward dies you'll have to train a replacement all over again oh and make sure this option is disabled if it isn't your genius companion may take the other perks which are useless in comparison with this option disabled you get to choose how your clanmates developed their skills when these perks worked as intended i would always amass a lot of recruits and throw some of my loot at them to immediately take them to tier 2 and get them in fighting condition my favorite tier 2 troops besides the kuzai tribesmen are the battanian clan warrior which is the best low-level infantry available the vlandion levy crossbowman which is the deadliest tier 2 ranged unit and the imperial archer which is widely available very disposable and can easily be trained into a fearsome heavy horse archer down the line special shout out to looters who can be recruited on mass and quickly trained into a legion of imperial footmen every single troop has their advantages and disadvantages but the biggest advantage of tier 2 soldiers is how cheap reliable and replaceable they are and if they survive long enough they may even become elite units that will set the world on fire at your behest and i nearly forgot there is a third training regimen you can make use of raiding bandit hideouts i mean you can attack these places to imprison the bandits or you can use them as your local job center plus to attract new workforce for your growing enterprise but if you don't care about recruiting new soldiers anymore and you wish to train the ones you already have you can do it here on the battlefield you never know which of your troops manages to score some kills and if you want to speed up the training of let's say 9 imperial veterans you just take them with you as you attack the hideout and they are guaranteed to gain some combat experience and advance to the next tier allowing you to turn them into mounted archers after you and your clan mates assembled an army of about 400 people it is time to conquer a city and establish a permanent base your base could be in any city that you like i personally prefer ortezia because number one it supplies imperial troops and number two because it's close to one of the most frequented ambush spots on the map and to refresh your memory those imperial recruits you can snatch from the city or nearby villages can be given a bit of trash loot to instantly be transformed into imperial archers which are the cheapest and most reliable tier 2 units for castle defense anyway conquering the city is tricky because unlike a castle it's going to be heavily defended so you could do what i recommended earlier and wait for another faction to siege this town for themselves and attacking it soon after but that could take a while so you might have to attack this town at full force but if your army of 400 isn't strong enough to overwhelm the defenders you might want to hire a mercenary clan to your cause if you've got the influence these mercenaries may even join your army and help you take the town now i'm going to skip the siege itself and i'm going to assume you emerged victorious when you do this city will become your home where you'll be able to store your valuables station excess troops and use it to bait your enemies into attacking you and subsequently losing their heads now i could go over all of that but those subjects are better left for another video a kingdom management guide or something of the sort but establishing a headquarters is also relevant for the topic we're discussing today because if you plan to conquer more towns and castles for your bandit faction you might want to leave your cavalry home remember the khans guards i mentioned earlier and how i said a horde of those can bring the world to heal yeah that was a bit of an exaggeration because if you bring them in a siege they'll be on equal footing with the defenders get it equal footing because they no longer ride their horses i will not apologize for the pun because number one it's pretty damn good you have to admit and number two it reinforces the idea that you don't want to risk your cavalry in a place where they lose their biggest advantage the final thing that needs to be done before you can conquer the world is making sure that the capital is well defended so you've already stationed the horsemen in the headquarters garrison as was mentioned earlier but if they were left there to fend for themselves and you took the rest of your soldiers with you that's not very smart because you have what 100 150 units left back home you can't hold it down with that many men and i can guarantee that if you leave your cavalry all alone the city will be sieged within a couple of days and all your faithful knights will either be killed or taken captive do you really want to lose the horde of horsemen you've worked so hard to put together i read your minds most of you answered no to that question with a few rebels who said yes sarcastically i have my eye on you so if you don't want to lose the capital and the cavalry as soon as you've departed you should station as many units as the garrison allows and if you don't have enough soldiers and the garrison isn't full take the riders with you and refill the army then dump as many men into this city until the garrison is filled however before you do any of this make sure that your capital has enough food to sustain such a large garrison because if it doesn't and your soldiers go starving they'll simply quit their jobs without even writing their two-week notice to ensure that your town's food stocks are full you can either manually empty the entire granary of each of the surrounding villages or you can make peace with a few of your neighbors and their caravans will start selling their food here because it's profitable for them oh and this should go without saying but recruits and volunteers are useless as defenders so make sure they're upgraded to at least tier 2 if you want them to stand a chance against the invaders with 600 men stationed in the garrison and another 200 militia ready to take up arms for their new overlord your capital city will be almost unassailable even armies that are a thousand strong will give this city a wide berth because while in theory they could take it victory would come at a great cost and it can mean nothing for them if you just roll up with an army of 400 to stomp them and take back your town some madmen will still put some huge reclamation armies together a horde of 1500 tried to take my capital once you know what i've done i rode back to this city with my own army sacrificed a portion of my troops to fight my way past the gate and closed it shot behind me then i took charge of the defense and added another 350 units to our side the 1500 enemies were expecting to fight 800 but now there were nearly 1200 of us so we would fight more or less on equal terms needless to say the attackers couldn't hope to best us in an assault so they tried to starve us out but i brought enough food to last us half a year and soon they ran out of food and as their numbers dwindled they also started running away trying to reach the nearest allied town for a resupply but i grabbed a few of my mercenaries and rode out in front of them when their army finally disbanded i caught some of the stragglers and added a few more skull-shaped tankards to my mug collection what i'm trying to get at is that once you have a base and are planning to go on a world conquest it's best to leave your cavalry back home along with a sizeable garrison and in their stead take some cheaper more disposable troops to throw at your enemies such a humongous garrison will cost a lot of money to maintain but if you've followed the advice i've shared in part 2 of this guide you'll be able to earn a lot of gold from the loot taken from your enemies and not only will you be able to maintain the wages of your army and garrisons but also turn a profit all from waging endless war but that is starting to sound like a topic that belongs in another video and this one has been going on long enough way longer than i planned but before we say our farewells let's recap everything we've learned today when a new campaign begins especially if you're doing a rock bottom scenario and the world is completely hostile you'll have nothing so all you can do is fight for survival obtain some basic weapons and try to capture a few looters then you'll recruit those looters and use them to fight peasants or mountain bandits imprison those guys and eventually your first gangmates will be entirely phased out of your raiding party in favor of more competent troops then you will raid your fellow calradians until your clan grows after which you'll conscript more people into your warband ideally your raiding party will consist solely of horsemen and with them you'll be able to conduct larger and more profitable raiding operations until you eventually grow filthy rich at some point you'll reach clan tier 4 and when that happens you shall take all the soldiers you can manage to capture a castle and crown yourself king with the right policies in place you will be able to grow your army to about 300 soldiers or more hire a mercenary company or two and once all of that is taken care of you'll be able to establish permanent residence into an actual town which you'll do your best to defend and whenever you want to conquer more towns you will leave your horsemen back home and only take footman with you because in a siege cavalry loses the biggest advantage they have and they're much harder to replace than standard infantry anything that happens past this point is up to you and if you want a guide on this subject you'll have to wait until i've finished at least a few episodes of my own raider campaign which is going to be titled bandit's ballads i hope to see you fellers in that one but i'm pretty sure that was all i had to say about the raider playstyle in mountain blade 2 bannerlord of course most of the knowledge i've shared thus far can be used on any playstyle even if you're not a pure blooded outlaw if you're a mercenary you will fight because you're paid too if you're a merciful lord you will be forced to fight and if you're a corporate overlord you will have to fight to protect the assets you've legitimately purchased from those that now want them back and if war cannot be avoided why not make some profit off of it but i'm starting to go on a ramble again and before that happens we need to close this video so anyway thank you guys for watching i hope you've learned something new today and i will see you next time goodbye for now

Channel: Halcylion

Views: 75,517

Rating: 4.9666023 out of 5

Keywords: bannerlord bandit, bannerlord bandit army, bannerlord raider, bannerlord raider guide, bannerlord raider army, bannerlord how to raid, bannerlord raiding, bannerlord raid tutorial, bannerlord raiding tutorial, bannerlord raiding guide, bannerlord army of bandits, bannerlord raider playthrough, bannerlord bandit playthrough, bannerlord raider build, bannerlord bandit king, bannerlord bandit guide, bannerlord cavalry, bannerlord cavalry guide, bannerlord conquering calradia

Id: 1nP1l4dx9Eg

Length: 49min 30sec (2970 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 08 2021