Ultimate Combat & Battle Guide for Bannerlord

combat and battles the biggest portions of mountain Blade 2 bannerlord in this video today I want to guide you through the combat system in the game discussing things like chambering fainting and other fun stuff then we'll close the video out going over the battlefield commands as well as some tips on how to get the most of your field engagements or out of your engagements I won't be covering sieging in this video we'll have a separate one for that and you might have gleaned a good bit of this information before diving into this video but this will act as a means of covering anything you might have missed or help you with things such as breaking a unit into two separate ones during battle creation and what have you you can quickly navigate to any part of the video that interests you the most using the chapters in both the timeline and the description and if you've not yet picked up Banner Lord you can do so using the link to my Nexus store in the description and pin comments Nexus gets steam Keys directly from the developer and it's a great way to support the channel ensuring my puppy has an endless supply of Kong toys to piss me off with as always guys if you end up enjoying the content please don't forget to like comment or subscribe help me defeat the greatest hardest battle in Banner Lord the YouTube algorithm let's get started on The Ultimate Guide to combat and battles in Banner Lord loading into a custom battle we're going to go over some options before we actually even talk about specific combat mechanics like blocking and fainting and pairing and all that action so before we jump in there you can see these little arrows that are at the top the right the left the bottom of the screen this is how the game probably looks by default for you I've turned these off because they are kind of irritating for me let's go through how these work because this is your both your block and your attack Direction and we're going to go ahead and press Escape go to options and then go to gameplay I don't know how you would access this on Console I am apologize so going into controls we can see control block Direction and attack Direction right now for me it's by look but you can change it to by a movement by look is what you're going to have by default right if you look to the right and block to the right and press block you will block to the right you can in single player use Auto in which case it will automatically block to the proper direction if you press right click or if you press block it doesn't mean that it will automatically block for you no matter what you actually have to press the block button so let's let's just show this off by going to by movement and you can see here I'm looking this way my character though is still attacking over the top and if I move left right now I'm seeing the block direction that I'm going a lot of people prefer this way I'm a big fan of the look portion with the uh with uh the camera but just do whatever one is best for you and your play style you might not have even known that this was available to you and you were suffering and struggling with the previous way so this is a lot better if you're into that also though you have some other things to go into so let's go into by look Direction by look direction for myself if you want you can go down a little bit further further further further is not a word but further into the Crosshair type and you can change this from four part by default to three part if you want a different reticle when you're say aiming things with a throwing weapon or if you're aiming things with a um bow and arrow some of this other stuff we're going to be uh changing when we talk about the Battle section so I'll hold off on it but the other one that I wanted to show is show attack Direction I by default have that off because I don't like having those arrows there I understand that if I'm looking this way I'm going to block that way kind of get a good feel for it I've just been playing the game long enough but those are some quick options I wanted to go through before going into the next sections of this video so another thing that the game doesn't really talk much about is momentum swings momentum swings are pretty crucial they can be very tricky to get off and land reliably you're going to see me miss a whole bunch in this right now but still it's a nice way to kind of continue the momentum of an attack because it creates less time in between an individual attack so if you happen to break through someone's Garden you're already getting some hits in this allows you to get more hits in before they can get their guard back up or whatever the situation is now the ability to do this is going to be dependent upon the handling of your weapon I'm using a ax in this because the handling on it is like 94 so it makes it very easy for me to actually get this off reliably but something like a spathion which maybe has a 81 handling it just makes it so that your your next left click to continue the swing has to be a little bit later in the swing and I'll show off what I mean here so if I go ahead and press left and attack and write an attack or whatever it is I'm just going to go ahead and swing my weapon right I'm just swinging it no big deal now if you time this properly and attack again you can't just Spam attacking like if I'm this is me spamming attacking it doesn't do anything right you have to time it and you have to choose a direction because then you'll carry that momentum from that swing into another one very quickly so let's see if I can get this in one go here I already failed basically any time that there go that's one I'm getting performance anxiety there we go anytime is the blade rather than stopping and then coming back to my side continues into the next attack that is a momentum there you go there's one right there it's usually like the the arm will make a very exaggerated movement as it travels over the head and to pursue into the next one there you go there and again like I said it's it's it's hard it's hard to even it's hard to talk and illustrate at this point but you will find that this is very challenging my recommendation for learning it though is just simply to grab an ax and learn it through that because they tend to be very quick on the swing and you'll get to be able to get a sense for how the timing works before moving into something with less handling and kind of struggling from there but this is very crucial to kind of mastering the arena and getting a lot of really good hits in if you are in a one-on-one scenario in a battlefield maybe even a two or three on one in a Siege or Battlefield as well so definitely try to work on your momentum attacks in addition to those momentum attacks there is the ability to faint or essentially it's like animation canceling so I left click and I swing right well if I hold down if I press left click then immediately press right click I cancel the animation animation animation and go into a block this is really helpful in multiplayer but it also can trick the AI the AI will try to guess where your swing is coming from if they see you going like this they'll block up top but you can kind of combo these things together let's see if I can do this properly it's again hard to narrate and do at the same time so if I left click right click left click and a different direction I'm basically going to faint an attack so I'm holding down left click I'm going to come this way nope tricked you aha it's different than if I just went like this that's two different speeds versus that so you have the ability to faint the attack as long as your character hasn't made that ah so it's basically you have like that first like ten percent of the movement to actually cancel it out so use this to faint on your enemy so go up and across oh right and up and if you're playing against the AI and you get to higher levels of AI they'll do this to you you'll see it you'll see them even coming in with a big right swing they're charging at you with a big right swing and then they stop and go over the top so use this to your advantage it's it's the easier one of the two techniques we just talked about to learn because it's really just it's really just bouncing your finger across the the attack and block button I'm sure this would be pretty easy to do on Console it's very easy to do on PC but definitely learn your Fates because they can help you out a bit outside of faints and something that I can't show right now we're gonna put this all together and see it all uh work in an arena is the ability to chamber someone so if you see someone going like this to you and you don't have quick enough time to block if you match their attack then you should and you release the right time your blades will hit and your chamble off chamber off of one another if it's basically like using it almost like a block so if you're using a sword with no shield and you realize okay I can't do this block quick enough I'm just going to attack the way that they're attacking then your weapons will hit and you'll chamber you'll hear like of the two weapons I don't that does not sound like two weapons hitting together but the two weapons will claim together and that's considered chambering a Parry repost whatever you want to call it even though Perry and repos are two entirely different things but uh basically you're just matching the attack of the individual in addition to chambering you have the ability to kick by just simply pressing e don't know what it is on Console or holding right click or holding block and shield bashing now when you Shield Bash you want to try and not move if you do this you are going to give the unit a chance to recover from their stagger if you press this hit with the bash then immediately attack you will hit their opening and if you get the perk that allows them to be stunned for longer than the last perk in the one-handed tree that allows them to be some for even longer you'll be able to do wonders to them after a shield bash but those are some pretty crucial things to understanding the combat mechanics in this game we're going to put everything together into an arena just to kind of show you how some of this works but let me quickly show off some other things real fast and this might be better suited in the battle section but still I'm just going to go over right now I've got a number of weapons on me to show off some stuff so if you press f there's a g it's G you will drop whatever you have and then you can hold down F to pick it up or just press F to pick it up um you can also hold down G to take a look at what is on you to determine like okay you know what I want to drop that weapon again and then just press F to pick it back up now some weapons like this weapon in general is a hand and a half it is not simply just a two-handed weapon it'll have a denotion I can show you right here this has both one-handed and two-handed that means that I have the ability to use it as one or two hands and if I'm using my shield I'm going to just press down on my uh my scroll reel and that's going to put it away for me you'll see that I'm using it now in two hands if I press X it drops to one hand make a little cool twirly animation so X just kind of switches my modes this will work for javelins too if you have a javelin you press X you'll turn into melee web mode with it you'll be able to poke people but those are just some things I wanted to kind of quickly mention because you might not have known that you could actually do a hand and a half and have it be one-handed or two-handed or imagine or you probably didn't know that you could drop a weapon and go pick up another one or you realize okay you know what I don't need this bow anymore I'm about to Siege a castle gate I'm going to drop the bow and go pick up a two-handed weapon or you know I don't even have a shield I'm gonna go pick up a shield and you have the ability to kind of quickly cater those things um by just dropping and picking up whatever you need okay we jumped into a practice fight and practice fights at Arenas aside from readers themselves are really great ways to just kind of learn and hone your skills there's no cost to it and you'll have tons of opponents which kind of chop through so I just get chopped in the face you're not you're definitely not gonna be doing 144 damage because you won't have 180 skill let's see here I was gonna do a shield bash on him let's see if we can still bash this guy remember how I said not to move and I then moved but yeah you just pretty much you bash them you wait then you clap them in the face oh you get hit in the back in the head with a javelin too you do have to worry about stuff like Spears which can create distance now you'll notice that I am not blocking properly and that's something to kind of note if you don't block the direction properly your Shield will take more damage and you won't mitigate all the damage coming your way so you want to try and block to the proper direction if you can this little momentum swing foreign coming in the face with the copper machine there huh buddy spear out of my face okay good A little sword on sword battle a quick sword on sword battle but you get the principle here it's pretty much just you you try to take advantage of it when you can and in practice fights everyone has the same armor which is nice I'm also oh well you kind of get the point of what's going on here you try to kind of keep things um you try to kind of keep your distance or use your your Shield to the best of your ability and when it comes to your Shield don't hold it up the whole time like that that just takes time away from you to there we go that's a kind of more proper Shield fight right you or bash I mean it's especially prevalent in spear on spear fights which take forever if you've done any of the story and stuff but if don't keep your up when you're running because it just slows you down you're an easy target for anyone throwing or shooting at you you drop it okay you're through they threw something then you kind of go for a block that I thought that was a chamber I was gonna try to chamber him but sometimes you need to get into it like chambering I think is the one mechanic I almost never ever use in any kind of combat it's just so I'm just not good at it there are some people who are amazing at it and I did want to bring it up as a point of of an ultimate combat guide but it's something that I can never reliably do five got 20 more opponents there's no way I'm making myself through this but do the practice fights because they don't cost you anything you make a little bit of money off of it you'll gain skills and you get exposed to a bunch of different weapons and you're not just fighting with a sword and a shield the whole time you learn more about the game you learn more about how to engage different enemies on different parts of aha block me with your little sword will you like everyone's chucking javelins at me downrange it's wet and wild so that was a point where I used that momentum attack to immediately bring me into another attack after missing my first one um and there's you can you can also do this this is kind of like an old cheesy way to fight you just keep going to the right of the person if you're really really struggling just keep going to the right and then swing like you'll almost always win doing that um the AI has gotten far better with it it used to be in the game when it first came out you could just pretty much pretty much an auto win tactic I'm almost dead here that was a chamber oh and you gotta just constantly be moving too oh I don't know why I'm in front of that Shield Bash but that hopefully gives you a good idea on how to do combat a little bit better um there's you will find that it just kind of comes down to timing uh blocking right when they make contact with you can sometimes speed up your follow through that's that's what people on the internet have called a Parry in this situation but it's not a Perry and like say the Dark Souls sense where you're gonna stun lock someone that you go into and you shove their fists in their stomach and pull out like a gleaming Heart Like You Can in Elden ring something like that it's not quite like it but it's also not something that's tried and true I I've seen times where I've blocked right when someone's made contact and it's not anything I've seen times where it has so keep those things in mind let's now move into the battle screen so here we are about to jump into a battle now of course you have the things that you would imagine you have your balance of power bar and I'm using some looters because we're going to talk about some initial stuff before we jump into maybe a cool battle on a custom battle who knows um and we have two abilities on here roll two things on here two options attack and send troops send troops will do a simulation of the battle using your leadership and tactics and any perks within those to give you legs up so take a look here we're gonna go to skills we're going to go to tactics and you'll see simulation Advantage 28 so those things are crucial in both leadership and uh tactics as well as even some of the uh the weapon skills have some things that'll say like okay in simulations uh when you're attacked in a field battle 10 more damage in simulations stuff like that so you can skew the way that this send troops button works so keep that in mind before we even press attack though we're going back to to the option screen we're going to talk about some more stuff so scrolling down here we have two big things unit prioritization and reinforcement Wade count so for unit spawn prioritization what happens is the game will spawn things for you and you can see units spawn according to their position in the party roster that's the way the game had done things from the start up until a couple patches ago but now you can cater to either be high low or homogeneous high-level units will spawn first with high level low-level units will spawn first with low level and homogeneous spawns units homogeneously based on their troop types rather than their levels this option will try to fill the ranks with each type of unit at the same ratio and ignore their tiers while doing it so the this setting above only applies to Player's starting position our composition the AI is not affected I personally like high level uh because then I'm just fighting with my best troops up front first uh some people like homogeneous because then you get a nice smattering uh units share experience so it doesn't necessarily matter if high levels go in first because the low levels will still get experience shared to them with that being said a low level unit will earn more experience if they're the ones doing the kill uh the the percentage of experiences shared and as a quick kind of side note to that don't upgrade all of your units all at once like if you have 15 Tier 1 units wait until I'm sorry don't upgrade them piecemeal upgrade them all at once if you have 15 Tier 1 units wait until all 15 are ready to upgrade and then do it because then they'll share the experience together and go up together rather than having some be a higher level to outpace the others whatever it is now for reinforcement wave count this sets the number of reinforcements waves that will be spawned in a combat Mission a higher value generally means longer Mission duration on settings lower than unlimited so you just might be resolved without all troops participating in the fight so basically what this is saying is the game's gonna should send you a certain number of waves before it resolves the battle and if you have unlimited it'll just kind of keep sending those waves at you when you do sieges you'll see these waves um you'll the enemy will attack if their morale breaks they'll flee and if you have unlimited on it'll jump in and say hey you want to do another attack and you press yes otherwise if you have say three waves four or five when it does three waves of attacks then the game will Auto resolve the remainder of the battle this kind of helps streamline some of those fights that you maybe don't want to get into that are maybe a little bit longer whatever it is it's all covered through this reinforcement wave count I have it on high level and unlimited but you can put it on whatever that works best for you um you have you have lock Target which I just don't ever use because of the flow of this game this is not like a one-on-one Witcher game where I'm fighting um a monster and something I forgot to talk about in the other um in the other portion of the video but I don't ever lock onto Target so that's why I don't have that ever triggered visuals here is going to determine the weapon visual Trail visibility so of arrows and of a weapon that weapon has a small little Trail at the tip of it um I have it at 50 but friendly troop banners is really nice here because you can have it at 100 and you see all the troop banners above your army but if I turn this down it lowers the opacity so I can actually see what the hell is going on strongly recommend that to be at something 25 or lower easily for camera that's going to be your third party and first person field of views if you want to change those but for your user interface order visual type if you are on a console you probably want to keep it on radial but if you want the old visual style that it had when the game first came out you can switch it to bar and that means and I'll show you in a second here and the order layout you can change it from default to Legacy the way it was in the earliest versions of the game so another big thing too is your report casualties so whenever your someone dies in combat you'll see in the upper right hand corner will say like uh battanian volunteer and then I'll have a little symbol and then it'll say Imperial recruit and that would be green or red red means that it was an enemy killed your unit green means uh an ally killed an enemy unit I have it set to only icons or you can just have it be disabled but when it's enabled you have the entire text vitanian volunteer kills Imperial recruit with only icons it just shows infantry kills infantry infantry kills infantry infantry kills infantry it's easier to digest it's not as intensive on your system and you just get a good idea of what's going on you can shut it off entirely if you so wish it's up to you I also have report damage shut off this is the thing that's going to show you every little bit of damage that's going on just shut it off it's just too much I really don't like it you can also shut off experience so if you don't want to see all the little bit of experience that's going on you can shut that off and then I've got report personal damage so if I throw a javelin or if I shoot someone with a bow I want to see what kind of damage it does or if I hit someone with my sword I want to see what kind of damage it does you can press this oh and it will shut that off for you so you have a bunch of ways to kind of uh cater how you interact with the actual um Battlefield in addition though there is the performance tab you go all the way to the bottom you should have gameplay battle size mine is set to Max but this is not simply 1 000 soldiers will be on the field it's split between you and the enemy so 500 versus 500 versus the that's the max with the minimum being 100 versus 100. so if you are having performance issues you would go here or if you want bigger battles you would go here so those are a lot of the options that are catered to the battlefield let's actually jump onto the battlefield to talk about some other stuff so I covered a lot of this information in my ultimate beginner's guide but I want to go into a little bit more right here just to talk about some stuff so we have our captains across the top that we can put into the captaincy of these respective units and we have a total of eight formations formations units probably the better uh not the great nomenclature here so eight formations that we can have and or create and this denotes you know what formation this is and you have to have one formation of it says right there you have at least one for more information of this type to change this formations type so you have to have a formation of whatever units are in your army but you'd press this button and you have a list of all the commanders that can fill that formation and if I look over if I hover over this individual then hold down alt which I've told is left bumper on console this gives me an information gives me information of what this Commander would influence in which formations it would influence and how so influentary influence this is all the things that he's going to give bonuses to infantry but you know he's not going to give that many things to Cavalry versus myself I'll give tons to everything or Dwayne here good Cav good horse Archer um his ranged influence here for fatimatheid and also his Banner at the very top it says right there Banner Marksman flag increases range damage so we're gonna go ahead and put this guy here I mean I deliberately already I already intended him to be there and this guy we're gonna put there and this guy we're gonna put over here because he's more of a Cav dude and you know what no this is wrong dude that guy goes there and you know what let's put all all I'll lead the horse archers but that leaves this one dude who's really really good at cavalry yeah also really good at uh infantry and I want him to control something I want him to be the captain of something so we're gonna press this button right here and this gives me an option to create another formation as infantry ranged Cav horse Archer infantry and ranged or cavalry and horse archers I never really use the mixed ones because I like to micromanage the individual units let's just go ahead and make another Cavalry unit because I know what I want here and we'll put this guy in that location oh whoops I guess he's not mounted so I'm dumb I'll put him there whatever fine what I can then make a further distinction of this uh formation of infantry versus this formation of inventory press this button and you know what I want this to give preference to troops with Throne weapons because maybe I'm playing Britannia and have a ton of wildlings and wildlings are classified as infantry so we're gonna do that well there's only three of those well you know what you know what hey instead we're gonna give an additional um preference here to pull arms then I'm going to increase this number to 50 percent so 50 of my infantry and we're going to do preference heavy armor and shields over here so fifty percent of my infantry is now going to go over to this dude this formation number five and it's gonna focus on units with throwing weapons and reunions with pole arms versus this is going to focus on units with heavy armor and units with shields I could press all these buttons If I want I could press none of these buttons If I want I can maybe just split them 50 50 like we could just do hey you know what here's 50 of my units and 50 of my units and to be totally honest sometimes you kind of have to cater it yourself there right because it wasn't exactly 50. so you've got them all set up everything's good to go and as long as you've done this once it will lock in your captains in their respective locations and you can add more formations if you want whatever you so wish but you can also set up all of your units within the bounds of these little small white flags here gray white flags so you've got the ability to select one and then drag and drop right I can make a really dense formation a really long formation by and large you'd want to do a two to three rank long formation because this enables your units to wrap around another unit if they are too too thin then they won't they'll just get killed off as they wrap if they're too dense then an opposing unit let's say like this unit was facing me would simply wrap around on the sides of this unit and be able to do damage and I'll I'll show you what that looks like in a custom battle once we jump into it furthermore we have the ability to set any kind of formations outside of their actual placement so take these archers for example I'm going to press f2 this is the radial menu remember I said you can change that right options gameplay just to kind of give you an idea radial to bar two so the bars over here on the left side of the screen a little bit harder to follow for the intents and purposes of this video but I wanted to quickly show that off so that you have an idea of what that looks like and the Legacy would change the order of where those things are in their respective buttons so two we're going to make this I want these are archers and I don't want the archers to deal with as much return fire so I'm going to put them in a loose formation and I'm going to make it a real long loose formation because it doesn't matter they're not engaging in combat they just need to shoot their arrows and we have our horses horses I can put into F2 and I'm going to put into skate information because that's the way I like to use them same thing here with my horse archers we can do the same thing but I just kind of keep them in standard line formation because they are going to do their own thing they're going to form a contambrian circle they're going to take care of it I wouldn't even worry about it remotely so let me go ahead and actually remove this I want everyone back in this first formation to show off another formation configuration that is square so a square when I ready up everyone is going to raise their Shields that can raise their Shields and they are going to put them into a defensive formation and you can use this you can expand this Square out as much as you can it's a little hard to actually get to to expand out but it can be expand out or you can use Circle if you want to say form a circle around your uh your archers but this can also be pretty deadly right you know if you get too too tight of a cert too thin of a circle people will push through too tight of a circle and you've got no room to move so you've got these for special formations you can use I don't really ever use scatter um or loose when it comes to infantry but the other one is the tried and true Shield wall so actually we're going to move into a custom battle to do this rather than in that previous battle I figured it's a little bit better and easier to take a look at so let's go ahead and move some units around get them placed roughly where I want them and we'll go into some things and this is already we'll put these back into Shield wall like we were before and we'll discuss this I'll even put myself as the general of them just to I mount it it doesn't it doesn't matter hey you know what I won't do that you don't want to put any mounted Captain with an unmounted unit because it'll cause an issue with the spacing of the unit so I'm I've moved myself from there so taking a look at this we have enemies downrange they're just infantry soldiers because this is a custom battle and I catered that and I'm going to show you how some of this can kind of work out together so you have a lot of options on what you can do here you can just simply press F6 and here all whatever delegate command on off is on Console I don't know how you would control it on Console but F6 the AI takes over and they just do everything from there but you've got a bunch of different ways for your units to actually Engage The Enemy a lot of ways that they can use AI profiles to do so so my Bowman I'm going to put them back in Mount loose formation and I'm going to make them real nice and wide so these infantry soldiers they're in Shield wall right if I press F1 then F3 to charge watch how they just they just kind of go they stay pretty well in formation they're kind of keeping lock and toe for the most part though they are running at the enemy I'm going to switch this though to now go engage that's F4 they've stopped they're all locking up to kind of keep those Shields a little bit more intact I did start them on a charge so it kind of messed up with their unit cohesion but engage slows the advance down for them and keeps them kind of a little bit more methodical you can see these guys are starting to attack and here's a really good examples I want to show off I deliberately did not make these guys as long as possible in their actual line formation watch what happens when the the enemy hits them so they've started to wrap around over here right as you can see right here they've wrapped around to the flank so it doesn't matter if there's a shield wall they're in the back they're on the flank of the of my unit and they're starting to kill their way through it doesn't matter how impervious my units are to damage with their Shields or what their max level is this pretty much enables it so that your units will take more damage if I had made this line longer or if I had seen the enemies line coming at me and adjusted it to make it longer to match theirs this wouldn't be the case I can kind of try to mitigate this by having them just go to charge but still the damage is done they're already on the flank they're already pushing through and they're collapsing on my soldiers very very well so this is just an example of how you have to really keep your line matching the enemies or at least keep it as long as as you can it and if you say hey the enemy's got a really tight small line you can take advantage of this and you can make yours longer so let's go ahead and reset this and open look at them jumping immediately into a shield wall here to take the oncoming fire but let's reset this so we're going to another engagement here but this time I've chosen the square formation so they are going to use their shields on all four sides of this formation to try to keep them in his best unit cohesion as possible while maintaining a defensive stance against the enemy you'd use square if you are overwhelmed with higher tier troops or overwhelmed and you have maybe a position you can use to your advantage say a building that you can use to kind of cut off one of the sides of attack to you or if you are dealing with aggression from Cavalry this is a really great way to just kind of densen your unit keep a lot of aggression and enable them to do a lot of damage so hopefully that yeah they'll start to kind of come around my unit's still engaged and we're fighting now on all fronts we're not just having an open portion of our line getting slaughtered also the it is kind of a little wonky because it was a weird uh lopsided engagement but everyone's Shields are up they are trying to maintain this square look at that so they're trying to keep that fight going anyone who tries to wrap around they've got pretty good coverage on them and it's left a very interesting little like pocket here of combat [Applause] so it's a great way to mitigate a larger force or at least slow down a larger Force because you actually have the ability to defend on all sides now clearly I mean I'm not using any of my supporting units this is just an infantry infantry tactic section but I wanted to show this off nonetheless now another big formation is scan information you use that to kind of break through but um my good friend Strat gaming has done a lot of really great videos and shown exactly which formations work in which situations a little bit better and he's done a lot of numbers break down and everything like that I want to go into kind of more of the high level tactics of when to use these in a situational thing rather than those actual numbers so I'm going to leave you to a link to his video in the description please go and check out stratgaming as he has a great great great great very like scientific breakdown of uh how skein works against certain formations and how the lines should be configured when you're fighting against large units and stuff like that let's move into some just discussions now about horse archers okay so we have our horse archers here and by and large I recommend that you use engage for almost every unit except for the horse archers I press F1 and I press F3 and I let them do their thing because the AI for horse archers is incredible it will always keep units to its left and they will fire over their left shoulder they will maintain the distance that they need to maximize the amount of shots on target as they can and if they get engaged they'll pull a weapon out to fight their way out of combat they will not stay in combat if they can prevent it so here we go here they'll form a natural contabrian Circle too see them just shooting into these units and this is when multiple engagements work right if you have your infantry pinning this these units down their Shield wall is not going to be as effective so you see them kind of running around oh their back is exposed shooting them with bows and arrows taking as much advantage of that as they can and and horse archers are probably one of the strongest units in the game because especially if you play with kazade they've got such great skills but they're maintaining just enough distance they don't need to deal with it they might get pulled into combat right there but that's mainly because the AI gets a little weird and sticky when it comes to hilly areas if this was like a flat plane they wouldn't do that as much that has something to do with like the the z-axis for them but they'll just kind of keep doing their thing they will prioritize archers they will not prioritize infantry right they know that there's those Shields exist so horse archers will prioritize horse archers trying to shoot them if they've got no better targets they will then go to infantry and they'll try to shoot anyone that they can get the max amount of damage on the AI is actually remarkably good at Target deciding it just kind of gets a little funky with certain navigational portions of the of the battlefield but maybe you don't want your horse archers to kind of go to town on everyone maybe you want them to actually join in on the fight and actually get a little bit dirty with some melee and this can be true if you're playing against you're playing with cazette or starters which actually have really great skills so I'm going to go ahead and press F4 and just to keep in mind you can highlight multiple units at a time by pressing Ctrl One Two Three or pressing one one two three four you know you just you choose from there if you want to select everything you'd select any number outside of the formations that you've got so if I've got four formations and one two three four I'll press eight and that highlights all of them and I'm not sure what that is on a console unfortunately but probably just a highlight all button and I can have the ability to press F4 so they will stop firing and they look at them just charge right on in then I'm going to press F4 again and they should get out of there it's just doing doing that kind of stuff like the hard E-brake on the AI gets a little wonky and they kind of don't like it very much but this also gives us some other things to take a look at when it comes to Cavalry so let's jump over to a discussion now on cab okay so let's have a conversation now about Cavalry Cavalry has a lot of different things that it can do right so you can select them I can press F5 and they'll Dismount this can be nice to have say maybe a really good unit of Calvary that's great on on horse as well as on foot like the noble line for sturgia this mounting them can be pretty advantageous in certain situations so you have those tools at your disposal but you've got your typical ways to do things right you can press engage they'll maintain formation as best they can like Escape information which is what I really recommend when you're playing with your Cavalry and they'll charge they'll hit against the enemy in whatever way that they can the other one is charge and we'll go over that in a second but what I want to talk about is follow me which is probably the way that most of us will use our Cavalry as kind of large bodyguards and follow me I don't want you to think of it simply they'll walk around you and that's cool they will mirror the way that you engage the enemy if you pull out your sword and just jump in there and jump into The Fray they will do the same thing if you use your Lance then they will do the same thing if they have if they have the capability to use a range weapon they will pull out a ranged weapon if you're using one as well so if these were horse archers and I pulled out a sword and shield they would pull out a sword and shield as well if um I pulled up my bow they'd keep their bow out so as we kind of close the gap here um the way that you'd use your Archer your your archers your uh um your Cavalry is as you would expect it to charge into the enemy and if I press engage it can get kind of funky so they sometimes just don't really do what they're supposed to do and engage was originally intended as a way to make the unit advance in kind with the rest of its unit to maintain cohesion it used to be that it would it would use a specific AI profile but now you're going to go ahead and use charge here and the way that these Cavalry soldiers will work is they will charge into the enemy and to the best of their ability they will use their Lance to cycle charge more and more and more this this is definitely not recommended right they're pushing right through there you go there you go good guys and then they'll get all the way around and they'll keep charging that's how their AI profile is supposed to work when they've got a lance like this they don't stay in prolonged combat they can but they'll fight their way out to use their pull arm to their best ability and try and maintain as much uh pressure here but the cavalry does not prioritize infantry in fact it's only in this situation that that's actually happening the Cavalry will prioritize archers or other Cavalry because that's its role is to either shut them down or destroy archers so you can see that they'll just kind of cycle charge through here because they will not typically prioritize this because it's a higher threat range for them they don't want to fight infantry because the Infantry have tall spiky pointy spear things that'll kill their horses so that gives you an idea of how you should be using your Cavalry you can put these guys um in different formations like you can put them in skate information right now if you wish um charging kind of defeats that purpose but you'd use Shield wall if you're dealing with a bunch of horse archers you can advance in Shield wall with your Cavalry and it actually is pretty effective then brake Shield wall into a skein or a line formation and have them charge in it will work wonders I promise so that's how you would navigate and operate your Cavalry let's jump over to the last unit in the the mix with your archers all right stepping over to our archers I've set them up in a position over here and really that's kind of it I don't do anything with my archers outside of that I want them to kind of take care of things on their own and depending on what bow they have in their range they'll just shoot wherever you put them the big thing here is you want to put them on a high ground you put them on a high ground with an infantry say like right here in front then they will take care of things as they approach in range and you don't have to do much I don't like charging my archers because watch what happens when they charge I don't know why that guy's getting closer there's no need he's got a bow and arrow you can use engage in which case they will try to maintain a medium to max distance away from the unit but I really find that archers are done best with just simply let me see if they can even get really they can get really wonky with that with engaging or charging so I don't I don't touch engage or charge all I do is place them on a location above so they have got plenty of vantage point over the unit over the enemy and I just let them do their business I have the Infantry hold the line below and The Archers can just shoot it's too risky to have them charge or attack if I'm trying to give them specific commands see like I didn't want my guys to get into close combat and here they are so that's how I would play with archers just simply place them on a high ground above uh the enemy's like approach and have them just um Obi-Wan Kenobi the hell out of them otherwise you're just going to deal with a unit that gets um slaughtered because of a wonky AI with having to get close like look at that again they're over there getting close for no reason and just getting attacked so I would maximize my archers by just keeping them on The High Ground all right let's bring all this together and let's have a quick little mock battle here I set the the AI up across the field here the sturgia versus uh Empire empire and we're gonna kind of bring online a lot of things that we talked about so I've set up my archers in a loose formation my infantry is down here in a shield wall will soon be a shield wall and I have some Cavalry elements over here and some horse archers over here so let's go ahead and write a deployment and what I'm going to tell you I'm gonna do right away is I'm gonna I've already set the AI profile up to attack me so I'm going to take my archers and hold this area it doesn't need to be a high high ground that they hold above my infantry but just enough that it's giving them clear line of sight my infantry I'm going to place in the field quote unquote right in front of them so let's go ahead and start that portion oh good I started as far away from that as possible you want to try and get that moving as fast as possible because you don't know what the AI is going to do so let's go ahead and move forward [Music] smoke man there we go there we go so with my my Calvary my horse archers I'm gonna let things go pretty automatic here so for four I'm gonna go ahead and press F1 and just let them do their thing for my Calvary I'm going to press F6 and let them let the AI decide how the best use the cab in the situation that they're dealing with here archers are going to get in position we already can see that their infantry is coming up on us I'm actually going to go into a line formation to get them in place faster you see that the Cavalry is now split up across two separate units which they're gonna micromanage they're going to protect my flanks with those which is actually way better I don't want to deal with that no sir my infantry's getting into line here somewhere see my archers I'm not giving them I haven't given archers a single command and they're just taking care of things or shooting stuff and that's exactly what I want it's exactly what I want so I'm going to go ahead and go into a shield wall you see some Cavalry elements coming our way my cab is going to counter charge there if that's kind of what their profile is set up to do I'm gonna have them Stop Now by doing that they kind of set themselves all wonkopotamus there but I'm gonna throw a javelin you see my Calvary did not go and charge theirs it kept itself in a good uh I'm not using them properly I'm focusing too much on this but everything for the most part my Calvary is counter charging theirs solvic charge coming in and is now going back to a secure flank there we go my archers are maintaining fire the whole entire time don't have to worry about anything oh that horse had a weird thing you see that thing it had like spaghetti coming off of it Shield walls nice and big and long I'm gonna go ahead and have my infantry engage now the weird thing here is because there's a bunch of Cav in the way they're not going to prioritize the other infantry they're going to prioritize what's in front of them but as they kind of make room they start to do it properly you see their infantry is going to come back out hey what is that so I have 159 we have 200 so just 40 short and their line looks a lot longer than mine so what I'm going to do here is stretch it out oh my God no it kind of it's kind of risky to do it that close like I'm gonna do it right here we go if you do it that close by the time they actually get information the enemy will be on them you see them coming across keeping that Shield wall up now I'm going to switch into a skein and I want them to go ahead and engage they're gonna get that ski information first and again some some things can kind of kind of uh throw them off guard like throw them out of whack but there they go [Applause] calvary's in an all-out charge over there I'm gonna push them out of this fight just kind of get them moving away so we can watch the Infantry engage and there you go temperature kind of hits in those individual pockets now I'll have the calvary do its thing I'm just gonna have them charged now because they've made contact that skein allows them to wrap around the enemy they've already engaged in the front and now they've got a nice big long line of battle here you should be hunting down the enemy hero if you can my archers are back there I kind of forgot to take advantage of them but ideally you would move them up as your engagement would move up or you'd have six them but you can see here that's kind of roughly how you go about battles in this game um there's a lot of narration going on this one too so it can kind of Sidetrack you just focus on keeping your infantry matching their infantry line as best you can put your archers in an advantageous situation that they can get constant shots on the enemy make sure your Cavalry is charging is actually kind of keeping its cycle charging going and ensure yourself that your horse archers are using proper uh keeping the proper distance sometimes with horse archers um my dog using his uh squeaky toy sometimes with horse archers you need to kind of delegate them to a commander because it just makes it a little bit more like okay I know nothing's gonna happen to him right now if you don't want to micromanage them if you're not comfortable with micromanaging and you're brand new to the game just press F6 learn it in due time you don't feel like you have to know how to be the ultimate Banner Lord Commander when you first start the game it just takes time so don't worry about it you'll get there in time just start with one unit at a time that's probably my best suggestion to you is use maybe just micromanaging your infantry formation and then worry about micromanaging your archers whatever it is but if you have any other questions please by all means go ahead and let me know in the comment section below there's plenty of stuff to go into maybe let me know the next video you want to know about with Banner Lord I've already created a ton so you can find that all linked to the play in the playlist at the end of the video but as always guys thank you so much for watching here today have a good one and take care [Music]

Channel: ItalianSpartacus

Views: 233,617

Keywords: mount and blade 2 bannerlord, Ultimate Combat & Battle Guide for Bannerlord, bannerlord combat guide, bannerlord battle guide, bannerlord combat tips, bannerlord battle tips, bannerlrod battle guide, mount and blade 2 gameplay, bannerlord console guide, beginner guide, gameplay 2022, 2022, mount and blade guide, bannerlord, mount and blade, mount and blade 2, mount and blade 2 tips, mount and blade 2 bannerlord tips, shield wall, bannerlord shield wall, bannerlord skein

Id: QV5DQxzS5IA

Length: 52min 17sec (3137 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 01 2022