4 Things Mount & Blade Bannerlord Can Improve

After spending a good amount of time in Calradic Empire, I would say that this game really brings me some good experiences, for the most part. This game does have some problems, they are not big, but still significant enough to be noticed. For the record, this game is still in early access, many aspects of the game are still being worked on. Developers will also polish the game over time, but for now, let's talk about things that Mount & Blade Bannerlord can see some improvements.

1. Smithing System

This is probably one of the most noticeable, most dreadful experience in Mount & Blade Bannerlord.

The new smithing system is supposed to give users the freedom of crafting weapons the way they like, it's a nice new feature we are supposed to enjoy, but there are two major issues.

Forge Two-Handed Sword

The first one is smithing stamina. Doing any smithing action (refine, smelting and forge) requires a certain amount of stamina, players can't continue smithing if they don't have enough stamina, and you can only recover stamina by waiting.

Yes, the game wants to you do absolutely nothing, so you can start smithing again. You can't even recover while moving on the map, you literally have to wait.

The second issue is cost and levelling. Smithing requires a huge amount of materials, that can't be bought. Most materials are acquired through smelting, which cost stamina - the same amount of stamina as crafting a weapon.

That made the already shallow stamina pool drains even faster, it feels like you are trying to supply electricity to the whole North America with a AA battery, you will be out before you even realize it.

Pricing is also a huge issue, buying raw materials cost, players need to be decent at their own economy before they can start attempting with levelling up their smithing.

This is not all, what made this thing worse is levelling speed. Like all other skills in the game, smithing has its own level (although smithing level is not super important), and its levelling speed also happens to be similar to levelling other skills, very slow.

It's already costly to buy required materials, not only that, it burns through so many materials to level up smithing skill, not only that, you have to constantly wait until stamina is recovered. Other players have noticed the same problems, there are already 2 mods that remove the smithing stamina, even with the mod on, it stills takes a ton of time to get my smithing to a decent level.

2. Levelling up

As we stated above in smithing, levelling up, in general, is very slow.

I'm not sure if it's intended, but if you are not putting enough focus point into one specific skill, then you gotta wait.

I'm about 15 hours in one of my characters, and I still can't ride horses with 60 ridings. (the actual time will vary, depending on how you build your character, but I was horse fighting if I have a chance)

3. Troop Tree

If we compare Mount & Blade Bannerlord to its predecessor, Warband, the troop tree has improved quite a bit.

Not only we get more troops, but we also get two troop trees for each faction, one being the regular troop tree from normal recruits, and a less common troop tree that has stronger soldiers.

While we are getting a nice improvement from Warband, I feel like there is still room left for improvement.

The game offers players a lot of freedom when it comes to building our own army, we can choose troops from different backgrounds and decide if we want more archers or cavalries, but there isn't much diversity here.

Early on the game, we can recruit captured bandits, looters, or other rouge troops, but there are no unique troop trees for them. They all ended upgrading into something we can get from upgrading a recruit.

I think giving rogue troops their own troop trees will give more diversity to players' army, this and the new "Rogue" perk can also complement each other. Not everyone's dream is to become the new emperor of Calradia, a bandit king/queen doesn't sound half bad.u

4. Weapon

Weapons are the essence of battles, selecting a good weapon can drastically make you stronger, sometimes, maybe too strong.

In case you haven't heard of it, there are some serious game-breaking two-handed polearms.

"Fine Steel Menavlion" is a good example, with its whooping 181 swing damage, it can absolutely one shot every enemy that dares to come across you. Even after the nerf from patch 1.06 that removed its crouch lancing ability, it is still too good to be a 1000 Denars weapon.

Fine Steel Menavlion

On the other hand, spears are generally underwhelming. It's not only as expensive as other weapons, it's also more difficult to use.

In order to have decent damage, it's better to be used on horseback, but with couch lance and two-handed polearm dominating horseback polearm battle, spears can hardly find its own place.

Do you agree with my points? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.