Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord - Starter Guide: (Best Faction, Skills, Build, Gameplay Tips and Tricks)

welcome back my friends so the mountain blade to start a guide I've actually had the game for a while now before it was even released I was able to play the campaign and I thought you know the games just released so I'll make a starter guide on what faction you should choose which factions like the best faction in theory and also what skills you want to be picking at the start of the game with your characters build and which skills are more important than others at the start of the game and what you should be focusing on just a really general starters guide and some you know behind-the-scenes secrets that you may not have thought of yet because you haven't played the game obviously so let's begin okay so the first choice we have is what faction culture we want to choose now this is really important but it might not be as important as you think it is because we're actually only choosing our characters cultural background so where they were raised this does give them a buff so this bits really important however it doesn't actually matter which background to really come from in the grand scheme of things for example if I'm a sturgeon I can still go and fight for the Empire I can still fight for the betaine ian's it doesn't matter like you know where you came from you're still going to start the game in the same place on the campaign map which is near the empire and then you can just venture off and choose whatever faction you want to join so there's no restrictions you can do whatever you like so what I recommend is choosing your cultural background based on the best buff that you're gonna get from choosing that background so you have six factions to choose from and so all here I'm gonna go over each one of them some of them are more useful than others for example the lady ins have a 20% more upgrade experience to troops from each battle you have so that gives you a huge advantage in upgrading your tubes a lot faster than the enemy whereas the sturgeons only give you 20% less speed penalty from snow so unless you outmaneuver people faster but really in the grand scheme of things like only the northern side of the map is snow so it's not that go really and compared to other factions but for roleplay purposes it will give you some political advantage when talking to certain clans if you grew up in the area but honestly I wouldn't base your decision on that I would base it on what the best buff is so let's start off with a betaine Ian's here forests give you 10% less speed penalty to your parties now this is pretty good because there's a lot of forest all over the map so it's always going to be an advantage in laying ambush and it also lets you outmaneuver your opponents as well and betaine Ian's are good at forest warfare their troops kind of lend themselves to that so if you're siding with a betaine Ian's could be beneficial however there's a lot better things than 10% less speed penalty in my opinion so I'm gonna skip that the cooze eights 10% extra speed bonus four horsemen on the campaign map now if you are siding with the cadets as well as having this background this is really good because they have so much cheap cavalry and you could really spam cavalry and have a whole cavalry force so having 10% extra movement speed to your entire army is pretty damn helpful in out maneuvering everyone you come across and just being able to choose where the battle happens on the open plains draw people out and whatnot however the AI isn't stupid so they're not gonna fight you if you know it's at a massive disadvantage to them so do bear that in mind as well however that's a decent one next we have the as awright so the Asura is one of the best ones actually caravans are 30% cheaper to build and you get 10% less trade penalty so you can kind of roleplay a merchant in this game if you wish and this is a really good way of making tons of money really early in the game and you could really build up a trade empire and make you know a lot more money from your trade empire than you would if you're another faction and then with that money you could spend it on you know troops in the war effort so it's kind of like you know if you want to roleplay that trade aspects of the game this is really the faction to go for it's really good or at least the faction background to go for not not that you have to join that faction to have this bonus but next we have the Empire one of the most popular ones according to my that like put outs Empire one's really good as well 20% construction speed bonus to tower projects will repairs and siege engines so basically this is going to allow you to really go through the map and conquest all the areas in the late game of Mouser blade so when you take a castle you'll be able to keep it repair it quickly and you know make sure you sustain the castle with those repairs and then defend it and then you can go off and siege other castles a lot faster than if you were playing another faction so you know if you want to conquest the whole map the Empire is a good choice for your cultural backgrounds next we have the sturgeons obviously I mentioned this earlier 20% less speed penalty from snow in the northern regions that's gonna massively mean you can maneuver a lot faster than the enemy so yeah really nice but there's much better choices for your cultural background in my opinion so I wouldn't go for this the Valais Tian's really good 20% more upgrade experience to troops from battles now personally i'm actually gonna go for this one because it just means that even from the start of the game to the end of the game my army is gonna have more experience than anyone elses and I can recruit new troops and upgrade them a lot faster than our 20% faster than other people can so no matter what you're doing with your taking castles going on skirmish missions raiding villages this is always gonna be really helpful like sort of buff to your army so I really like this and I also really like the background law of the ville aliens as well which I won't go into in this video so what are the best factions in my opinion there are three best factions the ville aliens the Empire the as Arai potentially the news eight's if you are really going to be taking advantage of having an entire horse sled army however when you're taking castles and stuff that's not going to be as useful so do bear that in mind okay like some of these things aren't as good as some of the others so personally I'm going for lady ins but if you're going for a trading style Azariah the best Empire best for conquering the whole map late-game okay so really simple that's what you should choose your cultural background based on though so now let's press the next button and we can design our character now obviously this is completely up to you how do you design it there's a whole plethora of design options here you can really go to town on whatever you want to play however there is one really interesting thing which is the height of your character and because this game is quite realistic in terms of the physic system and whatnot so if you have a small character your hip box is smaller it's harder to hit you the shields are still the same size so it's easier to hide behind them and but you also run really slowly I noticed that I did a little bit testing I found if you're shorter you seem to run a lot slower because if you're higher you have like a much bigger sort of span of your feet so you actually seem to run faster and you also have a slightly bigger reach as well so I actually think being super tall is a really good benefit yes you are a bigger target to hit but in my experience it's not that much of a problem really so you know having your character reasonably tall is definitely going to be a big benefit I'm 6 foot 5 in real life so I kind of appreciate being able to roleplay myself a little bit and also you can have a super deep voice or you can be hilarious and have a really high-pitched voice but I wouldn't be able to say myself seriously like that but anyway after you've done designing your character and you have like you know loads of options if you guys haven't seen this so you can really take your time here and the oh my god the bid options guys I mean look at all the bid options here it's it's beautiful it's truly beautiful look at that I can be a well-groomed and Viking man I can have Ragnar lothbrok hairstyle it's God amazing I love it character creation fantastic so the next thing we're gonna choose is our family heritage so depending on what you decide this is the same for every single faction by the way you could say oh they were merchants and it's gonna give you a buff to your social skills at the start of the game or you can say they were the Barons retainers so you get extra horsemanship and polo mobility we're going to go through all of this in a moment but first I want to explain to you what all of these skills actually are so I'm going to jump into the game and we're gonna talk about that because each one of our decisions from this point as we go through our characters backstory is going to give us you know different buffs to our character so for example if we chose our families to be merchants they get ten skill levels and one focus point to trade and charm attributes plus one point in intelligence but obviously you don't know what that means yet so we're gonna jump into the game and I'll explain all of this stuff and then we'll come back now before we go any further with our character development I think it would be useful to you guys to explain exactly how your characters skill tree works in this game and what's important what's not really important so let's start by talking about our attributes as you can see it tributes our vigor control endurance and so on on the left here you only get one attribute point every free levels however so you're going to want to spend that wisely and it's a lot harder to level up your attributes so it's really important that you get these right at the start of the game this is just an example by the way but this is vigor starting out if you have a higher vigor skill it makes it a lot easier to learn the melee skills like 1-handed 2-handed and pull on a lot faster so if you want to specialize in melee combat or at least have some meta combat ability this is really important and I do recommend you have some because even going to the arena and taking parts in those aspects of the game it's actually really important so even if you want to use a bow this is still useful and each one of these skills has its own tree which will talk more about how this works in a moment but first let's go over our trapeze so the next one down is control this is going to govern our ability with furring weapons and bows so basically ranged combat bows crossbows throwing really useful obviously if you don't want to do that you can also ignore it however my characters going to specialize in this this will also make you more accurate at archery of course you can train the skill itself but if you have a local Oh control then it's going to affect your ability to fire arrows as well so it's worth having both of hi if you want to specialize in that next we have endurance this governs the skill of riding athletics and smithing really important for any combat situation both riding and athletics so another very useful skill to have on your character and also your health as well next we have cunning cunning is the ability to predict what other people will do and outwit their plans the skills that are bound to cunning attributes are scouting so scouting is basically your ability to see what's happening around you on the map let me just quickly demonstrate this for you so as you can see my scouting ability is quite low so if I look around me I can't currently see anyone but if I like to move around a bit look now I can see oh look there's a giant army over there or I might see there's some enemy bandits over here if I have a high scouting skill I'll also be able to see their tracks even after they've left so I can see which way the enemies are heading and I could track them down and kill them without you know because I have that scouting ability it also gives you some other advantages as well but that's the main thing the next one we have here is tactics as you can see tactics gives you a judgment of how troops will perform in combat this allows you to make a good prediction of when an unorthodox tactic will work and when it won't work and if you look at the Buffs is giving you here cavalry attacks cause 10% more morale loss so if you charge the enemy with cavalry they lose them around even more rapidly this is really good actually really strong because a lot of battles can be won by reducing the enemy's morale rapidly instead of just killing them all so you know I'm not gonna go over every perk in this tree but it could be worth you looking them up yourself if you want to specialize in a certain thing my recommendation at the start would be just to sort of play the game and see what works you and don't obsess too much over your first build the next thing we have in here is roguery now roguery is basically just talking about you raiding other villages attacking other people and getting more money for it so it's quite a fun sort of roleplay element if you want to play like an evil bandit character which is very much doable in this game next we have social social is the ability to understand people's motivations and sway them the skills are bound to social attributes are charm leadership and trade now trade is super important for making money obviously everything you sell can have an increasing amount meaning that you know all the money you get from looting people and whatnot can be sold for a lot more and it even helps you build up a caravan business and make more money from that you know building up your trade empire next we have leadership which again governs kind of like your defensive morale of your troops and it also gives you more defensive bonuses when defending your own land so for example Town garrison is 20% more effective for security the town has a 20% higher loyalty game so really useful for kind of like building up your empire and making sure you maintain it next we have charm now this is more of a sort of social aspect of the game because you meet a lot of NPCs face to face and talk to them and also can talk your way I have a few situations as well so as you can see personal when introducing yourself to Lords for the first time you have a 10% chance to gained +2 relationship with them which is really useful because it's quite hard to gain a relationship with Lords at the start or gain +10 more influence by winning tournaments I mean this kind of like boosts your renowned faster however it's not necessary you can just sort of grind it out anyway like 20% more renowned from battles is obviously going to make you become famous faster but you don't need it so it's kind of less important in that sense next let's talk about intelligence intelligence represents aptitude for reading theoretical learning and the skills that are bound to intelligence and tributes are the steward medicine and engineering so firstly steward this actually is all about kind of managing your town and and making your settlements prosper so food consumption is reduced by 20 percent to 10 plus party size for every vassal enhance mine's 50% more tax income from mines and so on so you can kind of make a build around owning a settlement and making money from it I kind of prefer trade myself but hey that's just me this is like afk income next we have medicine so medicine is really useful because it just helps your character heal faster even if you're playing solo so self medication increases your character healing rate by 10% just makes you play the game faster really and there's a lot of situation this is super useful you can also increase your character's hip points as well and there's lots of buffs to increasing your party's healing abilities however you also get people like followers in the game that can give you good medicine skills if you carry them in your party so there's kind of like a certain hero party class that you can have with you but I'm not gonna spoil that because it's kind of like God build and we can get into that in another video next we have engineering personally I don't care about engineering but you can construct and build castle walls faster catapults are 30% more effective to build fire versions of siege engines and you know you just get advantage in waging war on castles effectively with engineering and also castle defenses as well and building them faster so it's very useful so now we've kind of gone over these skills let's talk about this levelling tree what's this green thing what's the gray bar how does that work all the skills in Mountain played by our Lord too are learnt by using them so it's kind of like a Skyrim system basically the more you use your skill the better you get at it however there are a few things we can do to improve how quickly we learn an ability for example in my one-handed skill tree I'm currently level 11 one-handed skill if I use my one-handed skill more often it will level up however if I want it to level up faster I need to apply something called focus points so you get focus points each time you level up and you're training your abilities basically so if I add one focus point to that you'll see this area becomes green so now I have like a learning limit so that's how I'm gonna improve my skill faster when I'm trading my one-handed skill now so basically you're going to want to focus on certain skills at the style of the game namely combat skills riding skills so you're always going to want to have a green area in these skills so that when you use them you improve them more rapidly and as you can see just to the top you get one focus point every time you level up so if you want to only use one-handed skills then put all of your focus points into the one handed skill tree and just focus on using one-handed skills to kill bandits and whatnot to level up that ability faster what you'll then notice is you can unlock perks so here we have so here we have the marksman perk we can click on that accuracy with bows increased by 10% so you can get that and it just learns the perk so now we do more damage with those however if you look at some of the other skill trees as you progress you unlock multiple perks so you actually have to make a choice here we have a choice depending on how we want to build our character basically you can either pick B appraiser or appraiser which gives you a 5% increase to selling equipment or we have whole seller which give us a 5% increase to selling trade goods so you want to be like a trader and run from one side of the country to the other selling furs and make five percent more money then you're probably giving me making a lot more money with wholesaler however if you're the kind of person just likes so you know raid villages kill bandits and whatnot and then sell their goods you get a lot more use out of them so with this concept in mind on how these skills work now let's go over designing our character okay so now we're back to our first decision on where our family is from and with our understanding of what we know we can now make a you know educated decision about what we want personally I recommend having your character have a back story of being very good at combat because it just really helps you with everything you do in personal gameplay you can roleplay a merchant and fully go for that if you like that's absolutely fine however I just have a lot more fun with a combat aspect of the game so I recommend specializing in the combat ability however there's like kind of a most efficient bill shall we say in what you can choose for example if you really want to use a crossbow and you really want to be a rogue and rob villages and whatnot mercenaries there's a really good fashion for that so kind of make make a plan about 1 million you want to focus on and 1 range skill you want to focus on if it's all you're also going to want to have some kind of riding capability that's quite important but everything else is kind of ups you for flavor and how you want to play the game and I've already described everything to you but just have that in your head when you go through this so I think our parents back story over barons retainers is really good for my combat character because polearms will give you a lot of damage on horseback and it also gives you a riding capability as well most of your gameplay is going to say par on horseback so I recommend kind of focusing on these two things as a melee skill to start off with however you want to specialize in the arena one-handed is very good as well but you know we're going to make full use of both of these skills so let's use that to start off with next as a child you were noted for and then you can choose what you're charged backstory was I think your skill with horses is really good because it gives you plus one to a medicine and plus one to your riding skill another very good one for combat is your attention to detail this gives you one hand of skill and also athletics athletics is really good in the arena as one hand of skill and the arena is just so much fun because it's literally just like you versus the AI and you can just do it repeatedly and a little bit of golden I think my skill with horses will probably be more beneficial at the start of the game we can train up on one handed skill later do remember that if you just keep carrying on using your skills you know you'll train them up very quickly but at the start you kind of want to specialize in something specific so next during our adolescence we're gonna choose what we were doing we can say that we're helping with trade we were hunting small game which gives us archery boost and it also gives us some tactics as well which is very useful for late-game for sure and by the way when you are doing this just think carefully because for example if i say that i herded the Sheep i +12 throwing and +12 athletics now in my opinion athletics is really good but I'm already planning on using a bow for ranged so throwing ability is a complete waste to me so I don't want to do that same with repairing this village smithy yes I get extra two-handed skill but I don't want to do any blacksmithing at all I just want to loop my enemies for their weapons so I don't want to waste any abilities in this so you want to be really efficient you know when you choosing these decisions so I'm going to say that I hunted small game because it gives me plus one archery and also plus one tactics which is just infinitely useful later on in the game when I start employing my army and whatnot next choice this is what we did in our youth my two most favorite options here are going to be trained with the cavalry which gives us another one to our Polo mobility and horse riding skill or rode with the scouts which gives us another archery skill and another riding skill so I'm going to say that I actually rode with the scouts because I'm going to be focusing on an archery early game and there's some really good tactics you can use to form experience from the enemy so I recommend you know if you're interested follow my build and my playthrough I'll link the play free in the description below if you guys want to follow on with this playthrough and I'll be giving you loads of tips for out there before you set out on life adventuring your biggest achievement was you defeated an enemy in battle which gives us two handed and one handed skill now in my opinion this is kind of pointless as well because I only want to specialize in one of these I don't want to use both of them in my opinion successfully leading a manhunt is pretty damn good because it gives you tactics and also leadership leadership is always going to be good for your party next we have kind of like oh we start to get into the story so we have our final backstory about how you drove off some bandits that attacks your family you rode off on a fast horse will really maximize our riding capability you drove them off with arrows personally I'm gonna go for this because you know wow now my artery skills gonna be insanely good you can also say you subdued the Raider then we get one-handed and athletics which is a really nice balance to have so this is effective I'll build as you can see it also tells you what our tributes are going to be as well and I'll load into the game and I'll show you the screen in a moment but I just want to quickly mention you can see I've specialized in one main combat ability which is archery because I really enjoy that I've also got some competence in Poland because you do run out of arrows in some fights so you want to be able to take people out with another weapon so I am somewhat competent in learning Poland's reasonably quickly but I can invest in my vigor attribute later so you're not like tied to this forever okay next we have endurance I've also you know I need one skill to get around which is either athletics or horseback my character specializes as a horseman a horseback Archer so that's what we're going for there you know I recommend going cunning social one of these and having some kind of competence in it you can you know invest everything and have a super high control of tribute and whatnot but you don't need it at all so in my opinion don't waste skill points and things you're not going to use that would be my advice okay so now let's press next and get started okay so based on our choices this is what our character looks like at the very start of the game as you can see he's already very good with a bow we can already get the marksman perk here and that's going to increase our ability with a bow and damaged by accuracy by 10% and we are already on our way to unlocking all of these things in this green area is going to mean we're going to rapidly improve with this skill and as we level up we can add more focus points so you can improve even faster the next thing is obviously our writing skills so we can already buy the writing perk to increase our horses hit points by +6 percent and as you can see yeah we're going to level up pretty quickly with doing what we're already doing which is what you want at the start of the game so as you can see there's already given us a boost at the start of the game and we're really not far from our next level where we'll get another focus point to invest in our character and another three levels later we'll get another attribute and we can choose on what we want to focus on next what you'll notice as well as currently we a control skill of fall if I am level free and I put another attribute point in to make this five we'll have another two blank sort of another one of these blank focus point slots because every time you use a focus point you fill one of these slots and this green area goes up a bit more which means you can quickly learn that green area so if you have a higher control skill combined with focus points you have more points to invest so you won't just fill this out and then you start leveling up slowly you can like continue to level up quickly basically if that makes sense I know it's quite complicated to kind of explain but guys I hope you found this video helpful if you did please do give it a like because it really does help out me and the channel and if you want to continue watching my play for a mountain blade I would really appreciate it I'll link it down below I'm also going to be giving out loads of tips as I play for your game and having fun as well but also I'll be doing some other guides separately which I'll link down below in the description or of course you can just subscribe for it if you're that interested also press the bell icon and so you get notified about those and then just come to the channel and double check that those videos are released because sometimes YouTube doesn't notify people but yeah guys thanks for watching I hope you enjoyed it I hope this helps you out on your Mountain blade journey I will see you in the next video have a great time playing this game guys is absolutely amazing

Channel: ESO

Views: 584,361

Keywords: Mount and blade, mount & blade, Mount and blade 2 bannerlord, starter guide, bannerlord, bannerlord 2, mount and blade 2, faction, skills, build, starter, beginner, Bannerlord, factions, guide, army, tips, tricks, build guide, walkthrough, part 1, open world, ps4, xbox, pc, review, tips and tricks, mount and blade 2 tips, eso, how to, gameplay, mount and blade 2 gameplay, bannerlord gameplay, new gameplay, campaign, best faction, bannerlord best faction, mount and blade 2 best faction

Id: 8rBeztuTNXA

Length: 28min 7sec (1687 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 30 2020