Character creation
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The original Mount & Blade was always both a fun, challenging and interesting game to play and I had no doubts about the second being amazing as well.
You start off with choosing your culture to start at and creating your character however you want with a variety of features able to be modified including facial features, or randomising it all like I did (though I hadn't screenshotted my characters so I quickly did one similar to my new character to show what you could do).
After that you will choose the type of family you were born into which alters your skills based on what you choose, with me wanting to get use out of the one-handed skill and polearm for my weapons.
Following your family choice will lead you into a bunch of choices towards how your life went from a young age to your current age to add more points into skills and shape how your character will start off, depending on how you want to play and what things you want to use in your quest for glory! I wanted to add some additional skills to my training so I ensured I had some into tactics and leadership, for better controlling my armies while getting a little in endurance and riding, for better movement all around.
Finally in the character creation part before you start playing, is the story background as to how things have gone and what additional skill points go where.
Early stages of the game
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After you have gone to a few small towns to recruit some units to your side, using gold from your starting amount of 1000 gold, plus some food to help your army have food to eat on your adventures for dominance, you find small armies like looters or raiders and start getting into fights as you work on experience and training your troops while growing, slowly but steadily.
Killing off the enemy, completing quests and winning in general will tend to give out some good experience, especially when you kill a lot yourself. But your troops also get experience for killing and such, allowing them to be upgraded to better trained units. You are able to level up to increase skills and what you get from them, when you put additional points into a skill, and when you use say one-handed swords, bows etc it will level the skill up as well.
As it continues
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After you have been playing longer, gaining a bigger army with more trained units and continuing to learn the game, you can attack towns to raid them. This gets you attacked by armies in which this one was a little less than mine, but it was an easy win for me. You charge on in or use tactics depending on the army size and how you feel like playing.
This being my first character I was getting used to the game again and charged in a lot, with sometimes using infantry standing in front of archers, charging when the enemy got closer.
Minimal losses to my army are always great to see while they have multiple wounded, better for taking prisoners that eventually come around to my side. There were also troops that I could take right away, I believe they were prisoners and maybe some from their side who wanted to come over right away. Not fully sure on that one.
Add in a lot of good loot which I always sort by highest value, while also taking all the horses/mules/camels which increase your carry capacity while giving horses ready to be ridden by your companions if you get the saddle for them.
Is the game worth it
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Hell yeah it is!
There is so much more than what I have spoken about in this post that you can explore and do and a variety of different ways you can play including going around to big cities to take part in tournaments, betting gold and winning quality gear in the tournament, using a variety of tactics and formations in battles, siege castles to take control, make war and more.
The quality of the game is pretty nice, has replay value which is why I am going to focus on my second character where I am already going well at the earlier stages. You get provided with a challenge based on the difficulty you set between very easy, easy and realistic, it's a different sort of game to the usual you see and you can act like a military leader in battles.
Well worth buying and smashing it out like the 13 hours I have done in 3 days, along with playing other games and doing other things.
This post was previously done on my Hive blog which can be found at https://peakd.com/hive-140217/@thegoliath/mount-and-blade-ii-bannerlord-gameplay-medieval-war-simulator
