Buying it or nah?

[Xant]

Combat in Bannerlord is so fucking awful I'm seriously thinking of refunding it. Jesus Christ, what have they done. Everything is so bad, including movement, and perhaps especially movement.

[The_Bloody_Nine]

When I got the beta I went from skeptical but still enthusiastic to disappointed and hopeless so quickly. Then only once revisited in Februar and saw no improvement at all, on the contrary. so sad

[Xant]

Hahahaha the combat is so fucking bad, it just keeps getting worse the more I play it. You just float around on ice skates, laggily hitting each other. Blocking feels like you're playing on 500 ms even in SP, I keep thinking I blocked something but nope, have to hold it for two years longer than in Warband for the parry to actually work. Meanwhile swarming is the name of the game in SP. Just horrible. Didn't have high expectations when going in, all I wanted as decent combat for SP, but it's too bad even for that.

Everything feels so fucking delayed and laggy. Worth the 10 year wait.

[Golem]

bR0 iTS OnLY EaRly ACceSs, BrO

[Xant]

Why can't these turks even one thing right, why is the practice mode full of archers and javelin throwers????

[Nickleback]

Why can't these turks even one thing right, why is the practice mode full of archers and javelin throwers????

Shshss

[bilwit]

They fucked multiplayer pretty badly, team death match is unlimited respawn with completely random spawn points regardless of what team you're on, so it's just a complete mindless clusterfuck. In all modes, literally everyone is a ranged player by virtue of every class having some sort of ranged weapon (ie. throwing). This is exacerbated by the fact that new players tend to lean toward archery since they don't have to figure out how to block and there are no real class restrictions, which means siege mode is basically call of duty with 120 players throwing shit or pew pewing arrows at the same time.

It's going to take some time (and mods) for multiplayer to not be a joke. I guess they meant for skirmish to replace competitive play in battle mode which is a mistake. It's an O.K mode but I don't see why they both can't coexist. Btw queue time for Captain or Skirmish is impossibly long and once you do get in you only get matched with parties of nerdlords who have already been playing the closed invite for months.

I think it's pretty clear with the combat style changes and game mode focus, multiplayer has been brought down to the lowest common denominator in order to make it more accessible and appeal to a wider audience.

[Xant]

Initiative is fucked, flinching is fucked, everything about the combat is fucked. I can't even enjoy the singleplayer because of how bad it is. Don't know what I expected, but it wasn't this.

[Jona]

The single worst change in combat is probably the fact that if you hit someone, your "turn" is over and they can just instantly swing right back at you despite eating an axe a split second ago. Leads to so many players just mindlessly spamming swings; if they get hit once, no big deal they'll surely just hit you right back since its so unexpected.

[Gravoth_iii]

Im having fun so far, combat is feeling clunky but i had the same issue with warband first time i tried it out. Going to give it some more time before i can really say if i like the combat enough to continue for a longer period. On a honeymoon phase still, and we are winning everything quite easily which plays up the enjoyment a big deal.

My complaints so far is that spears are near impossible to use at close range, it just doesnt do much.  Still good for support obviously, but i can really be a true spearman now.
Cav is busted, as it always is. Im not sure its even possible to balance cav really, but the horses are so strong now its insane. Not only is it really tricky to rear them with whatever length of spear, if you do youve got to switch to a 1h to keep damaging it, but even then it wont do that much. Best bet is throwing to kill the rider.
And customization options are lacking, but its early access so whatever.



Big positive is that Skirmish is a great gamemode imo, and makes for easy squad wins 

[Mlekce]

I don't like this Bonerlord.
Graphic is nice, animations of picking up weapons from ground is nice too. Combat is weird and i don't understand it.
It is almost like fighting in turns.
The most annoying part is archers that never miss me. I was in arena and every time bot draws a bow, i am gonna get hit.
Throwers on the other hand almost never hit me. Archery is so easy, and bots in combat are so hard to solo beat.
There is nothing interesting to do in bannerlord. Game feels empty to me.

[Ikarus]

nevermind

[kwhy]

SP seems alright. What do you gain by blocking correctly with a shield? Seems like you can still block even if you don't get the direction right.

the shields durability will suffer more if you keep blocking in wrong direction.

[kwhy]

The single worst change in combat is probably the fact that if you hit someone, your "turn" is over and they can just instantly swing right back at you despite eating an axe a split second ago. Leads to so many players just mindlessly spamming swings; if they get hit once, no big deal they'll surely just hit you right back since its so unexpected.

ontop of that if you just keep clicking left button it automatically start to initiate the next *fastest* swing based on the last animation or direction you were attacking.  I don't think you even have to pick a direction.  So most people are just clicking and swinging constantly mindlessly.  Thats why you'll see a lot of LEFT then RIGHT then LEFT then RIGHT attacks from noobie doobies.

Then you have the chained attacks swing where after you swing you hold the button and choose the next swing direction you get a different animation which I'm not sure if it speeds up the wait inbetween regular attacks.

Bigger difference most people will probably notices from warband to bannerlord is that your positioning is going to matter more because you can't initiate blocks sometimes as fast due to the way the animations work.

Bannerlord's foot stances (which I've yet to really test) which can speed up your attack or make your defense better based on your foot position.  I can't find the video of this anymore and the beta forums gone where people were talking about it.

Only examples I notice if you have 2H or spear you can initiate a stab on either left or right side of your character.  Also I guess if you have for example your left foot forward with 1H and do a left to right it might be faster versus if you had your right foot forward and do a left to right swing.   I've yet to really pay attention to this, but due to the fact blocking takes a little more time to move our hand to the position to block it might mean you have to pay more attention to this.

I've gotten use to it, but can't really say if I like Bannerlord's system more or less.

[Vibe]

Some more feedback from SP, avoiding MP for now:
Seems that your overall movement speed is super slow in this game, which makes it hard to outmanuevre any 1vX. Bots aren't as retarded as in Warband and try to circle you, so it's really difficult to fight 1 vs many, given how slow and clunky movement is. Siege defense AI is retarded and gets stuck on walls until the gates are open. Map AI also seems to be a bit dumb, we're losing a war that was heavily in my factions (Vlandia) favor because these idiots are sieging castles with no more than 100 people, instead of making one bigger army.
The shop gear stocks are weird, some factions have great body armor but shitty everything else, I don't know if that's intended or not but for Vlandia for example you can generally find a pretty good stock of helmets but no decent body armor.
Not a fan of how rng the crafting system is, wish there was another way.
Can't recall how it was in Warband, but feels like leveling skills takes quite a while (even with 5 points put into it for max multiplier). And yeah ranged AI is really accurate.
Raiding villages gives terrible loot.

All in all still enjoying it, but considering it took them 10 years to put this out it's honestly quite embarrassing.