Greetings warriors of Calradia!

For regular followers of this series of blogs, it will come as no surprise to hear that, for Bannerlord, we draw our inspiration for each faction from a number of historical cultures and peoples. Using real-world cultures in this way gives us a great starting point when it comes to creating visual assets for the game. It allows us to create weapons, clothing, armours, buildings and practically everything else in the game in a way which looks and feels authentic to players. However, the low fantasy setting of the game gives us room to inject our own flair and flavour into each item we create, which is something our artists certainly make the most of. In this week’s blog, we talk to one of these artists, Ömer Zeren, who will tell us a little bit about his workflow and what it takes to get a design from the drawing board and into the game.


Ömer Zeren

Ankara, Turkey

2013

Fine Arts - Visual Communication and Design

3D Artist

“Since I joined the team in 2013, most of my work has revolved around designing and modelling armours and costumes for the game. A design can start with something as simple as a description, such as ‘Vlandian medium leather armour’, or it could be something a little more complex, such as a reference image or a concept design created within the studio. Those are usually the starting points for any of my designs. My next step is to launch ZBrush and to start sculpting! If the final design is approved, I move on to create a low-poly version of the model. I try to be economical with the poly count of course: a full set of armour, head to toe, usually comes to around 7000-10000 polygons. For texturing, I use a number of different programs, including ZBrush Polypaint, Photoshop and at times I use Substance Painter (fabric texture creation is faster with it!). I finish by doing the skinning and import the item into the game to check for errors, etc. If everything looks good and is approved by the boss, I move on to the next one.”



“It has to be the handcrafted, huge world of Bannerlord. There are so many possibilities for adventure. You can be a furious warlord or a greedy mercenary, or you could just be minding your own business and have a bandit group or noble lord hunt you down for whatever reason and make your life hell. It's medieval to the core!”

“Tweaking the cloth parts of the armours/costumes for cloth simulation. Basically, there is a lot of trial and error! Our cloth physics system is custom written code that was created in-house and was implemented later on in production. This meant that older models had to be revisited and tweaked for better simulation results (like changing poly loops or simplifying layered meshes). Ironing out the bugs and tweaking the models takes time.”



“I am currently working on some civilian costumes for Aserai. This involves sculpting and texturing lots of fabric and jewellery! For these particular sets, I use concept art created by one of our artists. It’s refreshing after years of leather and metal sculpting! Of course, Aserai has some cool looking heavy armours too, so no worries there!"

“Sturgia. I have worked on a lot of different armours for the game, but with Sturgia there tends to be a bit more variety within the designs for this faction. This is because they are a bit of a mixture of Slavs, Vikings, Russians and Scythians.”

“It takes about 2 weeks from scratch to create a fully functional game model. This includes designing, redefining, low-poly, texturing, skinning etc.”



“My favourite part is adding details in the sculpting process. It’s fun seeing your blocky model come alive.”

“Good quality reference art is really important, and it is something we search for as much as possible. Historical accuracy is fairly important to us so we search through historical medieval books and festival photos for as many pictures as we can find. Movies can help too, but we try to avoid the Hollywood bling.”

“It depends on the task. If it is something vague like, "European leather armour wearing foot soldier", I can choose the design more freely. But if it is a book illustration of a specific troop or a concept design, I strictly follow the references.”



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Greetings warriors of Calradia!

In Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, whether you are trading goods or taking part in a military campaign, a large portion of your time will be spent traversing the campaign map. The campaign map acts as your portal to virtually every other aspect of the game: the diverse array of settlements, the huge and epic sieges, battles, trade, diplomacy, etc. In this week’s blog, we would like to show you some of the work we have been doing to improve this core feature of the game.



For Bannerlord, we are using a fantastic scene editor that our engine team created for our artists. We were, however, using a different method for the campaign map that was a relic of Warband’s system. This was practical in some aspects and had its advantages, but as time went on we realised that the limitations were too many and we decided to redo the campaign map system built on the new scene editor.

There are a lot of advantages to the new design. Apart from being able to create a map that is of a much higher quality, it is actually a huge change that opens up a ton of possibilities. By creating the map directly in our editor we are able to quickly and efficiently edit the map, with one of the key benefits being that we can now place settlements directly in the editor (rather than with coordinates in a text file!).

This leads us on to possibly the coolest change we have made with the campaign map: the city icons on the world map now visually represent the actual city scenes. This means that, given some time, seasoned players will be able to recognise a city just from its map icon alone. Likewise, players will be able to see what kind of resources a village produces and the level of a castle’s walls visually represented on the campaign map.



The new system requires a bit more work in certain areas. Making city icons that match the scenes is an additional task, and we also need a separate navigation mesh so that path-finding is fast and efficient for the many parties roaming the map. However, we think that the benefits justify the extra effort.

Finally, we would like to expand a little on what Gökçen told us in last week’s blog regarding terrain types. Designating areas of the campaign map with different terrain types allows us to do more than just match battle scenes to parts of the map, it also allows us to control AI behaviour (for example, limiting the areas where certain bandit parties can roam) and affect party modifiers (such as movement speed). We think that modders will find these terrain types to be quite useful as they can be used in a number of inventive ways.



In next week’s blog, we will be talking to 3D artist, Ömer Zeren. If you have any questions you would like to ask him, please leave a reply in the comment section and we will pick one out for him to answer.

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Greetings warriors of Calradia!

Should you enter, let’s say, a castle for the first time, you would get lost in minutes. The debris of that ruined tower would not have fallen so handily as to be climbable to the top. The path to the Lord of the castle would not be perfectly illuminated with torches which leave empty, useless halls in darkness. And, should you enter a real battle, there wouldn’t be overturned carts conveniently distributed so you can move from one cover to the next. This is because there is a big (and obvious) difference between real life and video games: life doesn’t have to be fun. A level designer’s work is to create these set pieces where you live your great adventures: places and landscapes that present just the right amount of challenge, which, at times, guides you like an invisible, subtle hand, and evens the scales so that every fighter on the battlefield has a fair chance. In this week’s blog, we talk with Gökçen “Cuce” Karaağaç, one of our level designers, who will explain more about his job and what he is doing for Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord.


Gökçen Karaağaç

İstanbul (Turkey)

2016

İstanbul Bilgi University, Visual Communication Design

Level Designer

“Most of my time is spent on working with our scene editor. I bounce around between our engine and campaign teams depending on if we are working on new features or redesigning or polishing existing features.

In addition to this, there is always constant progress with multiplayer. I make new maps or improve existing ones, join combat-related tests, gather feedback, watch people play and make improvements for the next test.”



“Sieges! They bring together so many things that are unique to Mount and Blade, and with Bannerlord they become quite the spectacle. Sieges are the climax of your efforts in the campaign. When you are attacking you see the army you painstakingly built up slowly melt away as you approach the walls to claim your prize. As a defender, you fight to hold on to the gains you made after months of fighting and diplomacy. Sieges are where you see the result of your campaign efforts most clearly.”

“Cavalry and foot interactions on multiplayer maps are what trouble me the most. When cavalry units can move at 4x the speed of foot units but are less manoeuvrable, while foot units have a perfect turn rate and can traverse tight corridors and sharp corners with ease, things tend to get a little complicated. On top of that, when you have horse archers, throwing weapons and 6 factions with different mounts, you have quite a few things to think about.

An area could be just large enough so that a heavy Vlandian knight can manoeuvre around enemy spearmen but still get punished for his mistakes, while the same area might be wide enough for the nimble Khuzait horse archer to stay completely out of reach. Likewise, swift Aserai light cavalry could just zip through one opening to another, barely exposing themselves while charging down enemy infantry. And while all of these things are all great for depth of gameplay, they could also be extremely frustrating if players can abuse them.

So, in pretty much every map, we try to add multiple elements to create fun interactions between cavalry and infantry: ditches to disrupt cavalry charges, serpentine corridors to slow them down, small fences that only cavalry can jump over, paths that are too time-consuming for infantry to use, etc.

I can’t say this issue is solved yet, but it is satisfying to work on! I often find myself tweaking a corner so that cavalry can approach from one angle but not the other, or by adding a place for a crafty spearman to hide and ambush unsuspecting horse archers.”

“Nowadays I’m working on the world map; creating settlements and adding details. It’s a process I do together with our 3D Artist, Umit. That being said, most of my time is still dedicated to my work on multiplayer maps, and with creating new castle and city scenes.

This week I worked on this Sturgian coastal city:”



“Khuzait: they offer the most of what is unique about Mount & Blade.

Aesthetically they have a great contrast to the other factions, with wide open maps, sparse landscapes, stunted horses, and eastern clothing. They play their part of invaders from a faraway land really well.

As you grow your army, you can see your horde riding towards the enemy, kicking up dust and filling the air with arrows. Soon after, the organised battle lines of your more sedentary rivals fall into chaos.

Also, a nomadic collective of tribes ploughing through a disorganised empire is just the nature of the early medieval times.”

“Yes! Modders will have access to pretty much what I’m using right now. Only, it will be more robust and have a prettier and streamlined interface.”

“We don’t have randomly generated battle scenes in Bannerlord. With our new engine and new map editing tools, we are much more efficient at making terrains with no settlements on them. We realised that we can have enough handmade maps for battle scenes. We designated areas on the world map with biomes and tagged our battle scenes according to their features.

This helps us to have consistent quality and fun gameplay with all of our battle scenes, with hand placed spawn positions, managed distances according to party size and many other small details to spice up your gameplay.”

“The process varies quite a bit depending on the type of the scene I’m making.

In our previous blog about castle design, you can see me going from ground up with a simple sketch while building a castle, deciding on various details as I make the map while trying to keep true to the vision I had in mind. It is mostly adding new buildings and walking around the map, checking the sense of scale and travel times. When the overall colour palette of the castle and terrain come together, I start to add details and scripts that turn the empty husk into a siege scene.

In comparison, multiplayer follows a completely form follows function approach. It’s theorycrafting, multiple versions of white boxes, as many tests as we can muster, people climbing places they shouldn’t, calculating travel times with various troop types, checking for possible spawn camping issues, the list goes on... At some point, you grow more confident about the layout and start to flesh it out with actual assets. We emphasise control points, differentiate one side of the map from the other, visually hide symmetry of the map, add landmarks for callouts, and many other small but significant details. We also try to make the visuals match the purpose (if a corridor lets you flank a choke point, it should be tight and dark, with small corners to create surprises). As always, the map making process ends with testing and polishing.”



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Greetings warriors of Calradia!

Animation is a complex and well-developed art with a long story, even longer than cinematography. Creating animations for a video game might look similar than doing it for a film or TV show, but it’s actually quite different – and much more complex. An animated character in a video game is not linear: it has to answer to the players’ feedback, be it because you should be able to direct its movement (if it’s the protagonist) or because it responds to your decisions (if it’s an NPC). Thus, on top of the artistic work, there is a technical side of things to make them look and feel natural, transitioning seamlessly from one animation to the next. And in a game such as Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, where combat is so important, animation plays a key role in its gameplay: it gives you the visual feedback that you need in order to fight effectively, letting you know (in a subtle way) what your opponent is about to do. This is why Olcay’s work is so important, and today he will share with us some details about what he is doing for Bannerlord.


Olcay Mancılıkçılar

Bursa (Turkey)

2013

Uludağ University - Computer Technologies and Software Development

Animator / Technical Animator

“These days, I spend my time cleaning up the motion capture data which we recorded for our town and village NPC's. I make sure that all the animations look realistic, clear and blend well together with the other animations.”



“The most important thing that differentiates Bannerlord from other similar games is that it contains a large number of features. While you can be limited by what you can do in most medieval games, Bannerlord is like a combination of other games which contains lots of sandbox content. I also like the unique combat system of Bannerlord. It's really fun to play and hard to master.”

“It's definitely the two-handed animations. Actually making the animations was not the challenging part. What made it difficult was to adjust the animations for our combat system, which has lots of complicated features working together to give the players best Mount & Blade combat experience.

Another challenge was creating a dynamic rig and animations for our new mount, the camel. Our camel skeleton supports a dynamic neck and tail which helps us to create more realistic animations.”



“Currently, I'm working on our new NPC animations. We are focused on animating different types of NPCs to create a living atmosphere in the game. This could be something as simple as seeing NPCs drinking and eating in a tavern or tending to crops in a village, but it goes a long way in making the world feel more alive.”

“Khuzait, because of their horse archers (which I like to play most!).”

“Since the animations are the visual result of the gameplay system, they are very important and have a large impact on balancing.

As you know, Mount & Blade has unique and responsive combat mechanics. Everything in our combat system depends on timing, speed and readability.

This is where the animations come into play. We make sure that every attack can be read by the player and their opponent. We do a lot of playtests and adjust each of the animations to increase the visibility of each attack.”

“Yes, they will definitely be able to use different types of skeletons! For example, our new camel mount has a brand new skeleton and animations which we easily added to our engine.

We try to make sure that modders will be able to add any type of skeletons and creatures to our engine without having any issues.”

“Yes, you will be able to add custom actions and animations!”



In next week’s blog we will be talking to Level Designer, Gökçen “Cuce” Karaağaç. If you have any questions you would like to ask him, please leave a reply in the comments and we will pick one out for him to answer.

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Greetings warriors of Calradia!

When you set on your adventures in Calradia, it would be wise to remember the old proverb: there’s safety in numbers. The world of Bannerlord is an unforgiving place and whether peacefully trading or engaging in warfare, players will rely on troops to stand and fight by their side in order to achieve their goals. In this week’s blog, we take a look at how players will go about raising their own army in Bannerlord by discussing the game’s recruitment system.

The ability to raise your own army is one of the core mechanics of the Mount & Blade series. Riding from village to village to recruit troops becomes a part of the emergent narrative for players as they build up relations with different settlements to provide access to a steady stream of recruits. In Bannerlord, this mechanic works in a somewhat similar fashion as it did in previous Mount & Blade games, however, we have worked on improving the system to make it feel more natural and engaging for players.

Players now recruit units from specific NPCs that we call notables. By making this simple change we were able to expand on this mechanic and give players more control over the recruitment process. Instead of building relations with a settlement, players will now need to build up their relations with notables in the game, which are located in both towns and villages. Increasing your relations with notables will give you access to higher tier units straight off the bat and different notables have their own favoured troop types, meaning that a particular notable might offer a greater amount of infantry, while another may offer archers. This allows players to directly target and build relations with specific notables that can provide troops which match the player’s preferred army composition. This also means that losing soldiers may not be quite as devastating as it was in previous games, as higher tier troops can be more easily replaced, provided you have access to a few friendly notables!

Another major change we have made is that AI lords now recruit troops in exactly the same way as players. And while, on the surface, this may appear to be a massive benefit to the player (as there are no more magically regenerating doom stacks!), it also means that you will be competing with fellow lords for fresh recruits.

Finally, for those of you that prefer to recruit a ragtag band of warriors from captured or rescued prisoners, then those options are still available! Likewise, mercenaries still feature in the game and can offer some extra muscle in times of need.

To bring this all together and to help you visualise the changes to the system, we would like to show you an early version of our new recruitment screen. And please note that this is very much a work in progress!



In next week’s blog, we will be talking to Animator, Olcay Mancılıkçılar. If you have any questions you would like to ask him, please leave a reply in the comments and we will pick one out for him to answer!

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Greetings warriors of Calradia!

Concept artists are the backbone of an art department. A 3D artist or an animator might be constrained by technical limitations or by the particular engine that a game is using, but a concept artist can let their imagination run wild. Combining their research, their artistic sources, and their own skill, they explore new aesthetic possibilities and lead the art of a game to new territories, effectively pushing the boundaries of what a game can offer (in visual terms) to its players. In this week's entry in our blog about Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord and the team behind it, we talk with our concept artist Ali Eser, who created (among other things) the faction banners, many castles, interiors, clothes, and armours. When you look at some impressive-looking armours from Bannerlord: it's very likely that it started with Ali thinking, "hey, this would look cool in the game!".


Ali Eser

Ankara, Turkey

2017

Anadolu University, Illustration/Animation

Concept Artist

“During the day, I'm busy drawing and designing architecture, clothing, armours and weapons for the different cultures of Calradia. Usually, I have something new to work on every week so it never gets boring!

The way I go about designing this stuff is; after I get my briefing, I spend some time researching about that specific topic, gathering as much information and historical illustrations as possible. I prefer using historical reference books that focus on a specific culture/time period. After this, I start sketching. During the sketching phase, I try to come up with lots of variations for the same design because usually, a design that's worth keeping comes after several iterations. Something of importance is to form a convincing and coherent visual language for every culture, based on their way of living, values, history and traditions. This is reflected on the immersion of the world as a whole and contributes to the suspension of disbelief that the player needs. After I feel like I've created some satisfying designs, I send them for approval and at this stage we usually go through more and more changes to improve the designs even further. After we have the final versions, they get passed on to our amazing 3D artists and made into assets for the game.”



“Definitely playing as a freelancer in singleplayer campaign. I especially love starting out in one kingdom and at one point leaving it to roleplay as a traveller.”

“I think it was designing the architecture for Khuzait. The cultures they were based on (Central Asian/Mongolian tribes) didn't leave as much architectural artefacts as the other cultures because of their nomadic way of living. So what we had to do was reference their existing aesthetic styles from their nomad homes and small buildings and come up with our own designs. Which was honestly, one of the most challenging but fun designing experiences.”



“Right now, I'm designing civilian clothes for every culture. I try to always keep in mind what are the most recognizable and iconic dressing styles that are unique to each culture and implement those. Sometimes I even push those parts in my designs to have clearly separable sets of equipment for each culture.”



“I'm in-between Empire and Aserai, both for their architecture and cities. The former feels glorious and gorgeous while the latter, mystical and enchanting. The way I plan to solve my indecision is to play as a traveller from the heartlands of the empire, who roams the Nahasa desert!”



“I can say that designing for castle keeps can get quite challenging. The buildings must always make sense in real-life terms, meaning you cannot have something in Calradia that couldn't be built in the real world. Since these keeps are huge buildings that need excessive planning to actually construct, I need to be careful about which walls can stand or not, which ceilings needs support, etc. Also, I need to keep in mind the technologies and materials available for that particular culture in the early medieval period. I also have to solve gameplay problems visually, like keeping navigation fluid and easy, and making first-impressions interesting and readable. With all of this in mind, trying to design a nice and beautiful castle can get overwhelming! The design approach we have for Bannerlord's keeps is practical, less focused on the decoration and aesthetics part of things and more focused on the functional part (meanwhile, as I mentioned, keeping things beautiful). That's why the concept designs for the castles actually look more like plans than paintings!”





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Greetings warriors of Calradia!

From the steppe empires of Central Asia to the feudal states of Europe, cavalry was an integral part of medieval armies. Whether providing logistical support or charging the enemy on the battlefield, horses proved to be invaluable assets in warfare. In this week’s blog, we will take a look at these elegant and powerful animals and discuss the improvements and changes we have made to horses in Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord.

In Bannerlord, horses are just as important as their real-world counterparts, and just like in real-life, there are different breeds which are suited to different tasks. We have a variety of different horses in the game, most of which players of our previous games will already be familiar with. They include:

• Charger
  
• Desert
  
• Hunter
  
• Mule
  
• Saddle
  
• Steppe
  
• Sumpter

Each type of horse has its own stats, which determine their charge damage, speed, manoeuvrability, hit points and carrying capacity of the horse (some of you might have noticed that we didn’t mention armour, but we will get to that!).

On the campaign map, horses greatly improve the movement speed of your party. They also vastly increase your maximum carrying load, which should be of interest to any traders or looters out there. However, you won’t be buying additional horses just for these benefits anymore: when upgrading your troops to a cavalry class, you will need to provide them with their own mount (and if you read last week’s blog you will have a good idea of how to get a steady supply of these!).

One of the changes we made to horses is that they now come with an equipment slot. Players can equip their horse with different types of saddlebags, harnesses or armour, which modifies the stats of the horse. This allows players to customise their mount to better suit their current needs depending on their current activity.

The design process for creating both the horse models and their equipment was actually quite straightforward. Our first step was to do some extensive research on different breeds of horses and the types of equipment that would have been used historically. Then we selected what we thought would be the most appropriate references for the game and used a bit of creative freedom in cases which we couldn’t find anything to represent the different cultures that each of our factions takes their inspiration from. The next step was to create some concept art to help bring our ideas to life. After creating and reworking a number of different designs, we moved on to the modelling phase. This involved creating both high and low poly versions of each model to be used in the texture baking process. Finally, we implemented them into the game, ready for testing!



Each of the horses come in a variety of colours, which we think helps to add to the overall immersion of the game, and in addition to this, we implemented a horse mark variation system which adds some additional variety to the horses by randomly assigning them with leg and facial markings, which helps to make them look and feel more natural.



In next week’s blog, we will pick up where we left off with our series of interviews with members of the TaleWorlds team by speaking with Concept Artist, Ali Eser. If you have any questions you would like to ask him then please leave a reply in the comments and we will pick one out for him to answer.

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Greetings warriors of Calradia!

The ultimate goal for most players of Bannerlord will be to carve out their own piece of Calradia through bloody conquest, however, Mount & Blade games are about more than just raising an army and leading it into battle. A big part of the game revolves around plotting your rise to power and building up a war chest that is capable of making your ambitions a reality. In this week’s blog, we will take a look at one of the ways that Bannerlord’s deep economic system enables players to raise the funds needed to equip themselves, gather an army and set forth on a military campaign: productive enterprises.

For those of you that have played previous Mount & Blade games, you will already be familiar with productive enterprises, but for those who are new to the series, allow us to give you an overview of what they are and how they work. Productive enterprises are business which players can set up in towns across Calradia. They provide a way for players to earn a steady income by taking the raw materials created in villages and producing crafted products to sell to merchants. As with real-world economics, prices fluctuate according to supply and demand, so a good knowledge of the supply chain is essential if you want to maximise your profits or prevent your business from grinding to a halt.

There are a number of different productive enterprises in Bannerlord, which are:

• Brewery (produces beer from grain)
  
• Butcher (produces meat from livestock)
  
• Linen Weaver (produces linen from flax)
  
• Mill (produces flour from grain)
  
• Olive Press (produces oil from olives)
  
• Pottery (produces pottery from clay)
  
• Smithy (produces weapons and armours from iron)
  
• Stable (produces horses from… well… horses!)
  
• Tannery (produces leather armours from hides)
  
• Weavery (produces cloth and clothes from wool)
  
• Wood Workshop (produces weapons and shields from wood)

One of the key changes that we made from Warband is that productive enterprises are now linked to physical locations in each town. Players can enter a town and walk around to find their preferred location for their business from a number of different rentable buildings. Not only does this help us to achieve our aim of improving the overall immersion of the game, but it allows us to expand on productive enterprises as a gameplay mechanic as a whole.

Having various locations for productive enterprises in each town means that players and AI lords can establish multiple businesses, which actually has a wider implication than it may seem at first glance. By allowing both players and AI lords set up multiple businesses in a single town, they can act in direct competition with each other and have a negative impact on each other's profits. This can be quite useful if you already have a reliable source of income and you want to ensure that a rival lord doesn’t gain a financial upper hand, but it can be quite a nuisance if you are struggling to make ends meet and production is halted because your business can no longer turn a profit. Likewise, crafty players can monitor what businesses their rivals own and buy up any raw materials or flood the local market with crafted goods to influence market prices, effectively putting a choke hold on rival operations.

As a side note, expanding this feature of the game was actually quite a big task. We had to create a huge number of interior scenes to match the architecture of each different region of the world map and then decorate these scenes to match each productive enterprise. To decorate the interiors, we used a system that allows us to tag objects and automatically replace the default entities placed in a scene using the properties of a new shop. In Warband, the simplest way to do this would have been to create a new scene for each shop, but we think that the current method we are using for Bannerlord is a much more elegant and practical solution (and we are sure that modders will find some inventive uses for it).



And finally: In the past few weeks, some people have asked us if we plan to attend the next E3. After careful consideration, we have decided against it, and we won’t be going to Los Angeles this year. The preparations needed to attend an event such as E3 takes a lot of time, effort and resources, and right now we think it is better to focus on the development of the game. However, that does not mean that you won’t see anything of Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord during the summer: Gamescom is on the horizon!

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Greetings warriors of Calradia!

In previous instalments of our weekly updates, we introduced you to the major powers of Calradia and talked about the historical influences that we used as a foundation for creating our own take on the early medieval period. In this week’s blog, we thought it would be nice to put a face to a name, so to speak, by sharing each of the factions’ banners with you. After all, this is Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord…

Drawing inspiration from real-world medieval cultures gave us a solid starting point when setting about designing the faction banners. We were able to research the different ornamental styles, sculptures, carvings, metalwork, heraldry and flags of each culture, which gave us some interesting ideas for the direction that we could take each design.

For some of the factions, such as Empire and Vlandia, we had a pretty clear idea in mind for what we wanted to go with from the outset. However, for some of the other factions this proved to be a little more difficult. One example of this is with both Aserai and Khuzait. Initially, we wanted to go with geometric designs for these two factions but eventually decided to move away from this in favour of large shapes and a single focal point. Our reasoning for this was that the banners are displayed in many different places in the game, from actual banners carried by troops into battle to small icons hovering over each city on the world map. We thought that geometric designs could cause too much visual noise when displayed at different sizes and instead we opted to go for designs which would work well at any scale.

Something that tied in closely with this design process was deciding the faction colours. We wanted each faction to have a distinctive colour which would make their troops recognisable in the thick of a battle, while also subtly representing the culture of that faction. In other words, we needed to select colours which are unique for gameplay reasons, but still say something about the faction. One issue we ran into while selecting the faction colours was with multiplayer. We use two different colours for each faction in multiplayer: dark as the primary (team 1) and light as the secondary (team 2). The team colours are displayed in various UI elements, items and clothing so we wanted to ensure that players could easily differentiate between the two teams at a glance and that everything is visually clear for colour blind players.

Aserai

For Aserai we decided to go with a warm colour to represent their homelands: the Nahasa desert of southern Calradia. We looked at a few different options in the orange-yellow range before deciding to go with a deep, almost golden yellow. For the design, we took inspiration from Islamic decorative arts and interiors, going through many different iterations before settling on a cup and horns design, which was heavily influenced by Mamluk blazons.

Battania

Battania lay claim to the misty hills of north-western Calradia. They are inspired by the Celtic peoples of Western Europe and we felt that an earthy, woodland type of green would be the best choice of colour to represent this faction. We went through a few different design choices for their banner, focussing on animals like boar, deer and rabbits, stylised in a Celtic art style. However, we wanted a more encapsulating image for the faction and decided to go with a design from Celtic culture which is more iconic and recognisable.

Empire

Empire presented us with quite a unique challenge. The design of this flag was pretty much set in stone from the outset: we wanted to use the double-headed eagle as it is a charge that is associated with empire, especially the Byzantine Empire (which this faction takes its inspiration from). However, because Empire is split into three individual factions that are on the brink of a civil war, we had to decide whether to go with completely different banner designs or to use the same banner across all three factions (after all, each of the three rulers claim to be the rightful heir to the throne!). In the end, we reasoned that we should take a route somewhere in between these two options by keeping the general design the same, but giving each banner its own slight variation to represent the ideals of that particular faction.

For the Northern Empire, whose leader was elected by the senate from within their own ranks, we decided to go with a deep purple. Historically, the dye used to create purple garments was extremely expensive and, as such, it is a colour that is commonly associated with emperors, kings and queens. Likewise, for the southern empire we decided to choose a shade of blue-violet. This colour represents stability and nobility, which we think is quite fitting for their leader, Empress Rhagaea, widow of the previous emperor, Arenicos. Finally, we thought that orange, a colour which relates to adventure and risk-taking, would be the best choice for the militaristic Western Empire.

Khuzait

The horse lords, hailing from the eastern steppe of Calradia, draw their inspiration from the steppe peoples of central Asia. We took the colours for the banner directly from the open plains which they roam, with the main colour being a light shade of sky blue. Our original designs for Khuzait drew inspiration from Turkic and Mongolian illustrations but we felt that these designs looked a little too peaceful and we wanted something a little more impactful and aggressive. We decided to incorporate sun and moon shapes into the design as these shapes are important to Central Asian people.

Sturgia

The Sturgians populate the cold and forbidding forests of North-Eastern Calradia. They are based on the federation of predominantly Slavic city states known as Kievan Rus, with influences taken from the many different peoples who travelled to and settled in this region. This gave us quite a bit of free reign when choosing the design for this faction. In the end, we decided to lean more towards the Viking style of art, which we felt would be more recognisable. The Viking shield is perhaps one of the most iconic shields we can think of, so using that in the centre of the design was an idea we had right from the start (the sword just naturally fit in with that!). We combined this with a design taken from some Viking jewellery (a torc) which helped to bring the whole piece together. The dark blue of the banner was chosen to represent the cold and harsh environment in which the Sturgians live, and also the seas which they travelled across from their homelands.

Vlandia

We took our inspiration for Vlandia from the feudal states of early medieval Europe, in particular the Normans. We wanted to use a powerful and aggressive colour for Vlandia, and the natural choice for that was a deep, almost bloodlike red. The lion which adorns the Vlandian flag is a symbol of strength, courage and military might, and was used quite widely in European heraldry. We tried a few different, more complex designs but decided to go with a simpler version that would better suit the early medieval period that the game is set in.

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Greetings warriors of Calradia!

In this week’s blog, we would like to wrap-up our overview of the various weapons which you will have at your disposal in Bannerlord by introducing you to the selection of ranged weapons which the game has to offer.

The ability to strike your opponent from a safe distance with little or no chance of retaliation puts you at a great advantage on the battlefield. Not only can you pick away at the enemy and thin their ranks, but you can force them into making an unfavourable move which can be used to your advantage. The brutal effectiveness of a range advantage in medieval warfare can be seen from famous battles such as Agincourt or Towton, where English longbowmen harassed their enemies and forced them into making costly mistakes which ultimately led to crushing defeats.

Naturally, some of these advantages carry over into the game, however, we had to make certain choices and design decisions to ensure that ranged classes are both fun to play and to play against (gameplay should always trump realism!). So what do we mean by this? Well, from a realism standpoint, we know that some people would like (or even expect) to see arrows and bolts bouncing off thick armour and helmets (after all, armour was designed in such a way as to protect the wearer by deflecting incoming ranged and melee attacks). However, we think that this simply isn’t fun for anyone playing as a ranged unit, and by making them less effective in this way it really narrows down the variety of unit choice in both singleplayer and multiplayer. Instead, we provide players with other counters to ranged classes in the form of shields and good footwork.



Throwing knives are perhaps the least likely weapon to be seen on a medieval battlefield (if at all!). They are light, inaccurate and ultimately they don’t have much stopping power. However, we decided to include them because they are fun and because they are great for finishing off severely weakened opponents. Knives can be toggled into melee mode, meaning you can trick your opponents by switching between ranged and melee, however you should be careful when engaging in hand-to-hand combat as they are unable to block incoming attacks.



Unlike throwing knives, throwing axes actually have some weight behind them (enough to penetrate skin, muscle and bone!). Axes like the Francisca were designed specifically for throwing and as such, some of our smaller throwing axes lack the ability to be toggled into a melee mode. Throwing axes are fast, deadly, and quite good at taking down shields. However, they can be quite inaccurate so you should be careful when throwing them near your own troops!




Javelins are perhaps the most famous throwing weapon on this list and you can expect to see a wide variety of them in the game. They are heavy and slow, but they are extremely deadly and great for destroying shields. They can be used in both ranged and melee modes, and (as with most of our throwing weapons) they can be crafted in our weapon editor. Some of the factions, such as Empire, have their own dedicated skirmisher units, and in the case of Aserai they combine the accuracy and power of these ranged weapons with the speed and mobility of their camel mounts. (Oh, and if someone wants to make a Jereed mod at some point in the future, that would be pretty awesome!)



We have a number of different types of bows which players can equip in Bannerlord. Shortbows, longbows and recurve bows are all available, each with their own slight differences. Longbows and recurve bows have a higher projectile speed but they suffer from a slower reload time, whereas shortbows have a slightly higher rate of fire but pack less of a punch. Warband veterans will also notice that our bows now have a two part animation. Your character will always attempt to nock an arrow immediately, rather than only attempting to reload when you want to fire an arrow. Some of our factions make use of mounted archers (Khuzait in particular) and we are giving careful thought and consideration into balancing them with this the rest of our units, (which, admittedly, is something we didn’t quite achieve with Warband).



Historically, crossbows required much less training to be used effectively than traditional bows. A few weeks of training were enough to turn a peasant into a competent crossbowmen, while becoming a decent archer can take years. Energy is stored directly in the limbs of the weapon taking the burden away from the crossbowman, giving them a better chance to aim at their target. In Bannerlord, crossbows are just as deadly as they were historically. They are accurate and powerful, but take a long time to load (exposing the crossbowman during this period). However, a savvy crossbow user will look for cover while reloading and only reveal themselves when they are ready to fire.



And finally we have the one ranged weapon you have all been waiting for. The go-to choice for peasants and football hooligans alike, the small and humble rock. They are about as effective as a lump of frozen butter but don’t be fooled into thinking they are totally harmless!

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