Best Campaign Mods for Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord¶

The campaign game mode in Bannerlord offers a great deal of customization even without any mods. In a game where you forge your own story for the most part, the replayability of campaigns is impressive. With that said, there are plenty of mods out there which can further enhance your experience of the campaign, and here we’ll list a few of our favourites.

Bannerlord Tweaks¶

As the game is still in continuous development, it can be expected that some features will feel unrefined or lacking in potential. If you can’t wait for the developers to focus their attention on these, Bannerlord Tweaks provides a good range of adjustments to some of the major and minor issues with the game. For example, one of the most annoying aspects of the crafting system is the stamina limit, which is incredibly low to begin with and will stop you in your tracks as you craft, making the whole process incredibly tedious. This mod raises the cap on stamina from 100 to 400, giving you more time to craft before you become exhausted. In addition, stamina gain per hour is doubled from 5 to 10. If this still isn’t enough for your preference, you can now disable the crafting stamina feature altogether, allowing you to continue crafting without the need for rest.

There are numerous other tweaks which will make the campaign slightly easier for first time players, or for casual players who don’t have as much time to grind through a campaign. For example, renown gain from battles is now doubled, and there’s an option to adjust the multiplier for influence gained. You’ll gain more renown from winning tournaments, 500 gold per tournament won, and you’ll gain experience from fighting in tournaments. The mod also offers greater customization for your clan, such as an option to increase the companion limit that you gain from each clan tier, and the amount of parties that you can field with them. Settlement buildings are now more productive, providing more food and militia troops over time. You can now loot a noble’s armor and weapons when you execute them, providing more of an incentive to do so. There are also some combat feature options, such as the ability to slice through enemies with two-handed weapons, or decapitate them when their health is low enough and you aim for the head. The list goes on, there’s a reason this mod is the most popular for Bannerlord on Nexus Mods!

Settlement Icons¶

This is a simple mod which alerts you to any points of interest in specific settlements. This is implemented discreetly by placing an exclamation mark as part of the icons above a settlement name, indicating that there are notables or other residents within the settlement who can offer you quests or other opportunities. A must have if you don’t like the idea of checking each and every settlement for new things to do!

Diplomacy¶

This mod greatly increases your capacity to engage in diplomacy within your own kingdom, and between kingdoms. The overall diplomacy interface has been improved, allowing you to send messengers, form alliances, create non-aggression pacts, grant fiefs to clans in your kingdom, claim fiefs that you led an assault on, donate money to lords, secede from a kingdom, and even force a king to abdicate from their throne. There’s so much more to this mod than meets the eye, so stop doubting its value and give it a go!

Fighting Together Relationship¶

This is a great little mod which introduces small a feature which should definitely be implemented into the main game. Essentially, the mod allows you to gain increased relations with nobles and other army leaders when you fight with them on the battlefield. The gain will be proportional to the outcome, which means if you win a battle against all the odds, you’ll gain a massive amount of increased relations with those that you won the battle with. Similarly, if you needlessly lead an ally into a battle which you’re unlikely to win, then lose, your relations with them will be significantly decreased. The relation system also applies to your enemy: you’ll automatically lose relation with anyone that you fight. Ultimately, this mod enhances immersion by allowing the player to strengthen alliances or create feuds through one of the most fundamental aspects of the game.

Kill Bandits Raise Relations¶

Another simple one which allows you to improve relations with local notables, villages, and settlements in the area when you defeat bandits nearby. This can be a great way of building your reputation in a new area, even before you encounter any of the notables in a settlement.

Detailed Character Creation¶

This mod does exactly what it sounds like: allows for a more detailed character creation experience. You’ll now be able to directly adjust features like age, weight, and muscle, all of which provide you with a much greater degree of control over the appearance of your character. There are also additional refinements to existing sliders for the finer details of facial and body features. The mod comes with an added feature which allows you to change the names of Wanderers and Nobles in a campaign. All this comes in a super lightweight package which makes the mod highly compatible with the base game and other mods.

Banner Editor¶

Ever wanted more options to customize your clan banner? This mod provides just that, simple and effective.

Cultured Start¶

A particularly useful mod for those who have already played through a campaign. This one allows greater customization for how and where you start a new campaign. There are numerous scenarios, including the option to skip the tutorial and the tedious quest Investigate Neretzes’s Folly. You’ll also be able to start a new campaign in a specific role such as merchant, exiled noble, vassal, or kingdom ruler. Each of these will provide you with a certain amount of renown, influence, and lands, which can save you a lot of time if you want to get stuck into the process of kingdom politics as soon as possible. Once you’ve chosen your role, you’ll also be able to select a specific region to spawn from. All of these options make this an essential mod for those who know the basics and want to cut out the tedium of going through them from the start.

Gay Marriage¶

If you’d rather not roleplay the quasi-medieval politics of Calradia, the Gay Marriage mod has you covered. You can now propose to marry any character, regardless of their gender. One thing to note is that some of the new dialogue introduced to make the mod as seamless as possible is restricted to English only.

Another Chance at Marriage¶

Keeping to the marriage theme, this mod essentially fixes a part of the game which should already be functioning. In vanilla, when you fail to marry, you’ll see a dialogue option for “My lady/lord, may you give me another chance to prove myself?”. This currently results in a resounding no 100% of the time. With this mod, there’s a good chance that your romantic interest will allow you to go through the dialogue checks for a successful proposal again, especially if you wait a while before returning.

Sound the Alarm¶

You’ll love this mod if you’ve ever missed important alerts during the campaign. The default alert system can make things easy to miss, which can be costly if you’ve just missed that one of your major settlements is under attack. This mod will make alerts much more noticeable, and will even pause the game by default so that there’s zero chance of you missing an important message. If you’d rather not have the game interrupted but still want the more noticeable alerts, you can turn the pause function off.

Best Combat Mods for Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord¶

The combat system in Bannerlord is at the core of what makes the game so great. The battles can be highly customizable and allow you to unleash unbridled chaos on the battlefield, while raiding a sleepy village, or besieging an imposing castle. There’s a lot to love about the combat system, but there’s no denying that it lacks depth in some areas. Thankfully, there are plenty of mods which introduce refinements to battle tactics, or add small touches to the thick of battle which make it all the more immersive. Here are some of our favourites.

Realistic Battle Mod¶

If you’re tired of seeing the combat AI behave in ways that just don’t make sense, such as horse archers charging directly into a line of troops as they fire, only to be cut down seconds later, this mod is for you. The general aim of the mod is to improve AI intelligence. This comes in the form of ensuring that specific troops behave in ways which make sense according to their skillset. For example, horse archers will now encircle an enemy force, and keep a good distance from any melee units as they fire upon them from afar. If melee units draw near, the horse archer will increase its distance and continue to encircle, rather than immediately commit to melee or wait to die with a bow in their hand. This is just one example of an improvement to troop AI intelligence, but it is also featured in a broader sense. Enemy armies will now utilize their army in much more efficient ways, deploying different kinds of troops in ways which make tactical sense. In addition to all this, there are numerous tweaks to body armor and weapon damage, which make specific weapons more or less effective against specific armor types, such as blunt damage being more effective against heavy armor. All projectiles will now also inflict damage in accordance with their kinetic energy, which according to the devs has been implemented based on real life experimental data. There’s so much more in the details of this mod. The result is longer, more epic battles which feel dynamic and ultimately make more sense.

Xorberax’s Cut Through Everyone¶

One of our biggest gripes with Bannerlord’s combat system is the inability to hit multiple enemies with one swing of your weapon. While this can sometimes occur in the base game, too often a swing will move across multiple enemies, only to inflict damage to one of them. This mod puts an end to that. You’ll now be able to slice through multiple enemies with one swing, so long as your aim is on point. There are limiting factors in terms of how many enemies you can hit, and how hard you’ll hit them for, based on the weapon type you’re using and the speed at which you swing it. A two-handed weapon will give you the best chance of swinging through multiple enemies in front of you, especially at high speed, but you can still use a shortsword in a tight spot to hit multiple enemies and give yourself a chance to create some space. Although swinging wildly on a battlefield in berserker mode is fun, one of the best things about this mod is that it allows you to charge through multiple enemies with a polearm while you’re mounted. No longer will you be left disappointed after smashing through a group of enemies with your polearm, only for one of them to be hit even as your weapon clearly went through a bunch of them!

Dismemberment Plus¶

A simple mod which works beautifully with the above Xorberax’s Cut Through Everyone mod. You can now decapitate multiple enemies at once with one swift stroke, so long as your swing is powerful enough. You can also decapitate a single enemy in the same way, of course. The same physics apply to arms and legs, so you can chop them off too if your aim is on point. This makes ending a melee all the more satisfying and dramatic. Simple as that!

Best Steam Workshop Mods for Bannerlord¶

The official release of Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord came with a number of updates to the game, many of which improved compatibility with various platforms and systems. One of the most exciting updates was the addition of Bannerlord mods to the Steam Workshop, which makes browsing, adding, and removing mods easier than ever!

We’ve featured one of our favorite mods which is currently on the Steam Workshop for Bannerlord, but there are many others that you can easily subscribe to and experiment with on there. Keep in mind that many of the mods on the Nexus portal are already on the Steam Workshop, so if you want to put all of them in one place and avoid the additional steps to install from Nexus, you can now do this through the workshop.

Improved Garrisons¶

Good Compatibility

This mod aims to provide a fairly comprehensive overhaul of the garrisons system in Bannerlord, without significantly altering the experience of the game otherwise. In other words, you can expect garrisons to function in much the same way as they did before, but this Improved Garrisons will give you more control over exactly how they’re managed. One of the best features of this mod is that it’s highly compatible with both new and old saves, so you can try it out in the middle of a campaign, and if you don’t like it you can easily unsubscribe from the Steam Workshop to remove it, without causing any compatibility issues.

UI Improvements

In terms of the main UI changes implemented with Improved Garrisons, you’ll now be able to manage the garrisons of any settlement regardless of where you are on the map, and you can easily see at a glance which settlements are under attack, at peace, or destroyed. You can easily transfer troops from one garrison to another, and you can see the basic stats for things like gold quantity, food rations, and prosperity status. There’s also an activity log for all settlement garrisons which allows you to keep an eye on things like the development of town projects!

Recruitment Overhaul

The recruitment system for Garrisons has also been improved, now giving you the ability to set an option which recruits new garrison troops from surrounding villages automatically. You can even set a cap on the number of troops that are recruited for a particular garrison. In addition, if you want to recruit different types of troops from specific regions for a particular garrison, you can now set up recruiter parties which will roam the land to do this for you! Not only that, you can also specify the type of troop that they should recruit, allowing you to establish a garrison only with troops of your choosing.

Training Overhaul

The features don’t end with recruitment for this mod. The training system has also been improved, and you can now set up templates to train specific troops in particular ways. For example, if you have a low level Battanian troop that you want to train to become an elite infantryman such as the Battanian Oathsworn, you can now specify this troop tree progression in a unique training template, rather than rely on the random assignment of regular automatic upgrades. Your troops can still be set to upgrade automatically, but if you’d rather decide only from the point where they have enough XP to level up, you can set this option too.

Guard Parties

Another new feature introduced with this mod is the addition of Guard Parties. These are a new type of group which you can establish from your garrison to patrol the lands surrounding a settlement, with specific orders to protect assigned areas or vulnerable sources of wealth such as villages or caravans. You can also order Guard Parties to follow you into battle if you need some extra reinforcements, but they are otherwise entirely self-sufficient. They are designed to be intelligent in their AI choices, so that they won’t engage an enemy force if it’s overwhelmingly powerful, since it’s likely that the outcome would be bad for them. They will also heal themselves, replenish their troops, and sell prisoners and loot.