Top 10 ESSENTIAL TIPS - Mount and Blade 2 Bannerlord

mount and blade to banner Lord is quite possibly one of my new all-time favorite games the title is phenomenal and from everything I can tell a worthy successor to mount and blade warband however for all that brilliance intricacy depth and control the game is a very lackluster job educating a player as to how or what to do in order to maximize their own enjoyment and today I want to cover 10 essential tips for any new player that I truly truly wish I had known within my first few hours of gameplay the format here is gonna be slightly different normally i script the entire video or at least most of it but this time I just have bullet points and I'll be explaining in game in real time without a script because I feel it better suits the task these are tips that will come into use during the main campaign mode and probably be helpful after the first couple hours of gameplay maybe an hour or so when the complexity really opens up and the game has stopped explaining as much to the player without further ado let's get started tip number one is the encyclopedia if you press the N key on your keyboard you will open up this the encyclopedia and this is probably the most valuable thing that the game never really explains to you or tells you about any veterans of the series will know about this it's fairly simple but what you have here is a complete encyclopedia of everything in the game and it's extremely comprehensive you have the kingdoms where you have all the different factions you have all the different clans and the factions all the people in all the different clans all the things that they own all the locations which you can track a nun track which will then put a marker on your map for that location then you have all the settlements attached to them and then there's a little descriptor of the settlement you can see what they actually you know what the settlement has for sale in that location there's so many different things in here and the game never really tells you about it not to mention the fact that a lot of times there's gonna be certain NPCs or characters that you need to find in the world for example this guy right here so let's say I need to find him for one of the main quests all I have to do if I'm struggling to do that and people keep telling me about him is go to his encyclopedia page and there I can see where he was last seen click that click track and then I can go to that location it makes it so much easier it really does have everything you could possibly need in the encyclopedia and the game doesn't do a very good job telling you about it we're telling you how to use it the tip essentially boils down to hit the N key open the encyclopedia and then type whatever you are having trouble understanding into the search bar it could be as simple as typing infantry so that you can find all the different infantry units and then learn more about them it could be something like the location if you're really struggling to find it on the map just type start typing the name and you'll be able to find it this search bar is your best absolute best friend and it will make the game so much better the earlier you start utilizing it tip number two is kind of broad but it mostly revolves around looters which are these guys right here with a brown and black little banner they're very basic units you'll get familiar with them even after just a couple of minutes of gameplay you'll find them right off the bat so the point here is that there are a couple of different reasons why you want to keep track of them especially in the early game number one is that for certain quests you're gonna need to be getting to a higher clan to your rank and then especially on top of that if you go to your clan page getting to clan tier two is very very important for opening up a broader aspect to the game but getting to clan Tier two can take a little bit of time you need a certain amount of renowned to do that and there's a lot of options that only open after that point when you are a client here too so the fastest way that I've found to get to clan tier two and unlock all those things is to hunt down specifically only looters and make sure that you're killing them as often as possible now I'm a lot stronger than this group because I've been playing for a lot longer and this you typically be doing this early on in your playthrough but basically all you're gonna be doing is finding the looters who are extremely weak surrender or die and then you're just gonna auto resolve the combat this is the fastest way that I've found maybe there's faster ways but this is pretty high up there this is one of the fastest ways to get through and level up your clan quickly just spamming these looter encounters so that you can get to clan Tier two and unlock you know joining a faction which opens up a broad spectrum of gameplay yeah so that's the fastest way to do that however there is another use for them as well and that comes when you actually do have a stronger army so as you can see I'm about 85 and if I go into my party this is my second playthrough right now I had another one where some stuff went wrong but whatever that's a different story my stuff is pretty highly leveled it's fairly well leveled up and if I continue to level it all all up I can show you here if I want to train things looters seem to be the best way to do that because for some reason or another after a certain threshold let's say probably around 40 to 50 army strength when you've upgraded them to tier 2 or tier 3 units in that range looters never ever actually kill your troops they will injure your troops and I've never once seen them kill one of my troops over the past I don't know probably like 12 hours of gameplay unless I have a full army of specifically recruits now that doesn't mean that you're not getting a ton of experience though so if you ought to resolve a whole bunch of looter conflicts even though they seem tremendously weak compared to you it will still be worth it you will train your units you never ever lose anything it's the easiest way to farm quickly and up your army strength now there are other bandit types that are more lucrative in the sense that you will get a lot better gear you might get more gear or you can capture better troops but looters by and large despite being the weakest have the most utility and are the easiest to farm safely and have you know a lot of benefits to doing so tip number three has to do with unit speed and pathing which is either very convenient or very inconvenient depending on how you approach it and it's also super convenient early on in the game when you're trying to track down all those looters to level up your clan so the thing is that every single unit has its own speed so if I approach this Caravan here you can see that their speed is 6.3 and my speed is 5.8 technically speaking I should never be able to catch them they are faster than me but the thing about the enemy AI is that it always runs directly away from you so what you can do instead of just double-clicking and having time go very quickly you see how if you double-click time speeds up to fast forward 3 instead of doing that you can go one click at a time very slowly and try and pin a faster unit in a corner and then all that's gonna happen is it's gonna go back and forth trying to get away from you and if you just keep cycling back and forth you can gain distance on it without it getting away and slowly over time you'll get to the point where you can actually attack it so this is a way to take down caravans that are much faster than you and that you otherwise would never be able to touch and get a lot of money very quickly and it's actually very very effective so if you ever have an enemy that's faster than you that you really want to take down it's kind of easy to find one of these things one of these places a peninsula or some place where a river is or anywhere where there's a little bit of a push back where they can't cross something or go over some mountains and all you have to do is trap them and then swivel back and forth until you get close enough to attack them the second portion of this tip is that horses in your inventory will speed up your travel so it seems to me and I could be wrong about this this is actually slightly speculation here it seems to me the travel speed is a function of carry capacity mostly and then troop size versus horse count so having a ton of horses I don't know if there's a specific threshold but having a ton of horses in your inventory will tangibly increase your movement speed and make it easier to run down bandits or or track down enemy armies or things like that so having a bunch of horses in your inventory and then when you are slower than something else being able to trick the AI into going doubling back on to you and then you can attack them anyways that is extremely useful tip number four is influence now influence is a kind of currency that you're gonna unlock after joining a major faction which you can do again after clan Tier two which opens up a whole different aspect to the game but influence is basically a currency that you're gonna need a lot of and I've found that the fastest way to form this once you are starting to utilize it heavily is to go to any allied city that you do not personally control let's say wrote a for example go to the keep go to the dungeon and donate prisoners all you're gonna be doing is donating every prisoner that you've gotten here it's sometimes you can be ransoming these for profit as well which is also kind of good but for interest for demonstrational purposes here if you're trying to farm influence you're gonna be donating all your prisoners and as you can see I'm at 349 with this is after one caravan fight from the the tip that just did and if I donate here I went from 349 to 392 this is by far as far as I can tell the fastest way to gain influence which allows you to do a whole bunch of different things and unlocks a different aspect of the game so whenever you need influence just donate a ton of prisoners that you've captured from other factions or a ton of bandit prisoners doesn't really matter to any key or any town that you do not actually control yourself tip number five is passive income and this should honestly be your top priority early on in the game until it's been taken care of and you have at least a couple hundred gain per day if not a few thousand it's very easy to do all you need is about 15 to get started and go to any you know friendly allied town or major hub and then enter once you're inside and as soon as it loads in I'll demonstrate it's pretty simple again have about fifteen thousand gold and you should be able to do it without an issue hold the Alt key right here and you'll see a bunch of names pop up and you can see a linen Weaver e or a tannery or an Olive Press those are called workshops and if you go to any one of these with over 15,000 gold perhaps it's like sixteen thousand or fourteen thousand a little more or less you can buy them and they will give you passive income and they'll start to give you maybe three four hundred gold per day as opposed to losing that gold so this is just one example I already have the maximum number so I can't actually buy it and show you but inside these workshops there will be NPCs that you can tell heart to talk to and then you need purchase it the other thing is that some of these NPCs around here let's say I'm not sure which one would have it but if you talk to some of these named NPCs that are around the market some of them will have the opportunity to set up a caravan and all you need to do again is have a similar amount of coin if you talk to them and let's see if this guy has it and it would be a good example there we go I wish to form a caravan in this town all you need is a free companion and I'll talk about how to get companions in just a second right after this all you need is a free companion at fifteen thousand gold and you can set up a caravan which will earn you quite a bit of money and travel to and from that city that's just yet another way to to earn passive income and if you combine that with the workshops you'll have enough that will basically keep you topped up and make it so you're gaining money every day instead of losing it and then for those that are wondering where to find companions though that's a pretty easy one you go to the tavern right there enter any major city you can go directly to the tavern you don't have to walk there go to the tavern just talk to anybody there any named NPC there can probably be recruited into your party for about you know five or six or seven or eight even sometimes a couple thousand but typically for about five to six hundred gold tip number six is vendor scouting which is probably going to be one of the easiest methods to earn at that initial fifteen thousand that you're going to need to establish passive income and as you can see there there's caravans there's you know taxis from certain regions there's all sorts of things smithy tannery winepress etc to do this you know scouting vendors all you need to do is check in with the trade option at every single place that you go to and all you need to do is click on miscellaneous you can do it with with other things but miscellaneous to look at all the goods and then check mouse over them and you'll see a red or a green or a yellow icon for the price this this unit right here grain is more expensive red is more expensive more expensive all of these are much more expensive right now except for for linen here however if there was a green one and this is a really bad example because there's there's nothing worthwhile to trade there let's go to Sargon and see if there's anything there you're looking for green icons to buy you always want to be buying from green icon you know various different raw materials and then selling those raw materials somewhere else let's see if this has anything better if we go to miscellaneous there is here we go flex so this item is 33% cheaper than average now I typically wait until it's about 50% cheaper than average I only look for green you know cheap units that are 50 percent under price that gives me a lot more profit and I can buy in a larger bulk if there's a large supply like this however raw materials with green prices are going to be profitable to on to onboard into your inventory so you can buy a bunch of them it goes up 26% cheaper and then once you have all the flax you mouse over it you can see the rumors of where it will trade best so if I go all the way to lug I don't know how to pronounce that but if I go to these other places I can sell it for a substantial increase over what I just paid so if I go here and then this feeds back into the Encyclopedia press the end key cuz I don't know if the top in my head where that is and then I go here and I can track once I've tracked that good to go it is right over here so all I need to do is leave go there and then sell the goods that I just got now the price the prices can't change in transit which is kind of annoying when you get there and it's a completely different price but for the most part if it's anywhere in the near vicinity you can get there without the price changing too much and you can offload all of the cheap goods that you just got for a much higher price and get to that 15,000 bare minimum or thirty thousand forty five increments of fifteen thousand to establish passive income in major cities tip number seven is about smithing which orig during my first like 16 hours of gameplay I had no idea about and I really really wish that I had so smithing is a complicated thing but the the primary use is gonna be to Forge different weapons etc but there's another secondary use that I didn't even think of that is honestly more important for the first like 12 hours of your campaign session which I want to talk about now so the thing that you want to look at is let's say you have an iron scimitar scimitar I honestly don't know how to pronounce that or any one of these things here they cost about a hundred goal or they would sell for about a hundred gold if I sell one of these I get 134 gold done now if I go into the trade section and I go to materials and I go to hard wood I can get a bunch of the hard wood for 15 each because they're they're under priced here but even if they were overpriced this would still work by a huge margin so you get a bunch of hard wood you take the hard wood you go to the smithy you turn the hard wood into charcoal and you refine it and then once you've refined a bunch of charcoal you go to smelt and you take all of these different things that you were going to sell for about let's say a hundred to one hundred and thirty gold and you you smelt them down into materials so this this sword right here this iron sword which I was selling for I believe 130 something hundred thirty-four if I smelt that down gives me five wrought iron and two regular iron and then if I go back into the trade section and I were to sell these materials where are they wrought iron and iron so five wrought iron and two regular iron you can see that the the amount of money that I'm getting is completely disproportionate to what I would have gotten if I sold the actual you know piece of gear so you always always always want to be smelting down all of this stuff that you get because not only will you get smithing experience and be able to Smith things later on with that skill set if you want to be using that mechanic in the game but you'll also be drastically increasing the amount of money that you get each and every single time on top of this and something that I forgot to put in on the first edit of this video when you're in the smithy if you have a party member who is very very good at smithing already and has that skill set you can select them so you do not have to smith as yourself if you have a high skilled smithing campaign you can actually use them as a mule to do all of this the game has incredible depth tip number eight revolves around individual autonomous parties so once you level up your clan to tier one or two and once you have party members especially you go into your clan page you go to the party's tab and you can create parties with your different party members your different clan members as the leader now I can't do it right now because I have a bunch of caravans going I have another party all of my guys are busy at the moment however once you create a party you can populate that party with its own army so this guy right now is running around with his own squad of people he's earning me reputation and the great thing about this is that you don't lose reputation from these guys at least not any time that I've seen they only gain you reputation with certain NPCs that they interact with so having a couple of parties going around one to two at least as early as you can is going to be great you want to deck out all the gear that they have as well make sure that they're you know combat ready etc but once you've created new party selected your whatever party member or clan member you have as the leader and then populated it they will run around and earn you money not only will they earn you money they'll earn your reputation and they'll be doing this autonomously and you can forget about them so it's a really good thing to do as early as possible tip number nine comes when you join an actual large faction and you start to play the politics of the game if you go to your kingdom panel what you'll see is that there are a bunch of different options you have diplomacy armies policies clans thieves but policies is what you're gonna care about so once you're in an actual large faction you have to play politics it's gonna come down to how much people like you and there's ways to check that and go to your encyclopedia and check who your enemies and friends are but the main point is that you want to be generating positive reputation with a lot of these people and one of the easiest and fastest ways to do this though it is kind of a one-off you can't do it multiple times necessarily but one of the easiest ways to do this is to search through all the different options for laws and if you find any that are universally praised especially ones that are up towards a hundred percent favorability all you need to do is select one of them and I can demonstrate with one that's not because I've already done this myself but let's see especially if you agree with the law or it's a bonus that you actually want so you need to be taking a close look at these but just for demonstrational purposes let's say let's do state monopolies I don't want him to have that the leader I don't actually like the leader of my clan but that's beside the point state monopolies this has a 66% approval rating so an easy way to get reputation with the majority of the clan is to support is to propose that 450 influence and then support that 420 influence now once I do this you're gonna see that my reputation is increasing even with people that dislike me so from by five to twenty four by five to twenty four by five to twenty eight so I'm gaining reputation with the majority of my clan we're then going to support me in other decisions and it's easy as far as I can tell it's the easiest way to gain faction clan reputation with the surrounding lords that are a part of your your social structure here it is mostly a one-off though you can't do this multiple times with 100 percents and sometimes you can reject proposals if everybody is against it up here you can overturn them so there's kind of a back and forth that happens but that's a good thing to keep in mind policies are an important part of the endgame here the last tip that I have revolves around your character sheet and leveling up which is something that I didn't fully understand for an embarrassingly long period of time when I first started basically there's a multi-phase component to this number one these skills right here all of these different things crossbow bow riding etc athletics they will all increase as you're doing them so as you're using your bow it will go up as you're riding it will go up so that's the first aspect and then the hidden kind of you know subsurface aspect is that you will improve at these activities the more that they level so right now I'm getting much better using a bow and it really shows in combat it absolutely shows athletics will have various different passive increases that you might not notice on any sort of stat sheet but it's going to control you know how your character moves speed etc so there are passive bonuses to these things the second aspect is that you have focus points now focus points increase the learning rate by a multiple so stacking up a bunch of focus points in something that you're going to use a lot of is gonna be really helpful so I'm going for bow and riding because I like to be a horse Archer on this playthrough there are other things that you can do I stacked up trade even though I haven't been using all that much so stacking up your focus points in the things that you want to prioritize is the way to increase the learning rate and then there is also all the individual / choices in there which will be you know highlighted as soon as you unlock them and then on top of that you have free attribute points which are placed into these categories so every three levels will get a free attribute point and you can place that into the category where there's multiple things that you want to be training so I put a few into social to increase trade but then also you know as a side effect increased leadership or charm which has different dialogue options helps me in certain circumstances and has various bonuses like leadership the the one perk that I wanted so I could train that faster is raise the meek now these it helps with uh you know increasing troops and giving medium XP bonuses per day now the thing about these is that you don't need them to win the game there's no builds there's no like hyper metamour effective than everything else but whatever you're doing if you're doing it a lot you can increase the efficiency and have some pretty sizeable bonuses so always remember to allocate free attribute points remember to allocate allocate focus points and then also choose the individual perks as you unlock different things in those categories it's something I didn't know a lot about I was confused by this system at first but it really is just a three-prong system focus attribute points perks and then you get passive bonuses from these categories as well as active Percona PSA's the last tip that I have which is more of an honorable mention than an actual tip since I've already done them is that you know learning all of your different command options in battle is gonna be super super effective the one that I want to highlight as the honorable mention is selecting different units like these guys my cavalry and then hitting f6 on the keyboard f6 will allow the AI squad commander to take control of them so what I normally like to do is select at least one unit one larger unit maybe cavalry or something like that and give the AI control while I then select everything else with a different key and then do charge so you can give different it's really it sounds like a stupid tip but you need to get familiar with the combat controls but the number one that I would say to get familiar with as a new player is selecting a certain set of units right let's say it's cavalry or something and then f6 to release control of that unit from yourself over to an AI squad commander and that be extremely helpful in large-scale battles that's all the tips for today that I have hopefully those were helpful and I will be trying to come back with with more stuff I'll do a combat guide I hope I might do an economy guide anything else that seems like the right thing to do there's a wealth of possible videos and educational material to do on this game but I need to become a much you know more informed authority on the game first which requires a lot more play time because it is a very complicated game with a lot of strategy and these were just tips that I had I really wish I had known early on in my gameplay session and that I uncovered and learned after about let's say 24 to 26 hours of gameplay but that's it thank you all for watching as always links down below to support you know Twitter merge patreon all sorts of stuff like that but I'll cut it there and stop rambling thank you all for watching yet again and have a nice night [Music]

Channel: Upper Echelon Gamers

Views: 289,878

Rating: 4.9095726 out of 5

Keywords: Mount and Blade 2 tips, M&B 2 tips, tips and tricks, mount and blade 2 guides, bannerlord tips and tricks, bannerlord tips, bannerlord beginners guide, mount and blade beginners guide, bannerlord guide, top tips, mount and blade trading, mount and blade 2 factions, farming influence, clan tiers, troop levelling, mount and blade 2 loot, mount and blade 2 help, bannerlord help, bannerlord quests, upper echelon gamers, upper echelon gaming

Id: 42kutzf3VyQ

Length: 23min 20sec (1400 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 03 2020