Lol true!

Wait a minute, i know the refrence

@@cheungkwokhei Thats Jack Sparrow reference

Mounted crossbow woman is very good with horse archers cuz close range fast crossbow destroy cavalry charge with better pierce.

For real, in Warband they at least had a chance to spawn on the field with a decent helmet, so they couldn't be instantly one shot.

No way. They were bad especially when you take in considiration of their pay with regard to other proffesional mercenaries.

@@copperbeard7196 There were definitely better mercenaries in Warband, but rolling with just Sword sisters was still somewhat doable, given their versatility. In Bannerlord though, they're not worth running at all, period.

@@copperbeard7196 they had the best body armor in the game. Plate armor.

Depends, if you had a reduction to dmg on units they were really good, but without it, lack of helmet was really punishing for them.

Lol that's a good point, I didn't think of it that way!

@@Strat-Guides even more insult to injury - both gallant and veteran sisters have higher crossbow skill than onehanded/twohanded. You might as well name them crossbow sisters at that point.

Remember sword sister from warband? they can win 1vs1 against butter king

@@oleksandr4371 pepperidge farm remembers 😂👴🏻

@@oleksandr4371 in the original game (pre-Warband) they were a notch below top tier despite being top tier. every faction had 1 top tier unit and the sword sisters no matter how you upgraded them would be just shy of that high end unit making them a good all round upgrade line, but less than one that mixed different cultures. of course they lacked bows which hurt them as crossbows were not a replacement for bows. that being said bows were also not a replacement for crossbows and no one had both.

In the og Warband they were, unsure why they didn't do that for bannerlord

The old name for linebreakers was Berserkers

@@arkos4366 cuz u must know that they are like netflix

sword sisters not wearing a helmet is a tradition from Warband they were pretty shitty and expensive unit too, but it adds flavour

Yeah I think they did the same thing with the Falxman - madmen with no armor and a ton of combat skills!

No problem! Sometimes I don't even do an intro and just start lol but it's probably a good idea to know what's covered in the video first :)

100% agree great channel, other youtubers are basically padding for content to hit the minute count for adverts... It's annoying, I end up watching some youtubers on 2x play speed to get past their slow talking :|

Decent body armour would help.

Yeah that's a good point - if they were cheaper than regular units it would make a lot more sense. The Kmart special units lol

@@Strat-Guides People are discovering why a gender pay gap exists inside of a fictional universe.

@@anarki777 XD

@@anarki777 got daaaaaaaaaaaaamn lmao

Lack of helmets yet in warband and fast and weak horses let them die like flies. They were only viable among khergit lancers

lol they got headshot a lot even the lowest tier could kill them easy, but they are even worse in bannerlord than warband

I loved making sword sisters armies in first game. They were super fast, had shield and were ranged unit with crossbow.

I use the "My Little Warband" mod to edit them and give them kettle hats, makes them considerably more viable when an overhead bonk by a looter can't one tap them

@@Resegy khergit lancers where no joke with their lances or those swinging pole arms sure not as hard hitting as most of the other top tier heavy horse but not pushovers.

It's good to see, wasn't consistently the case across pre-release...

I mean, common sense would say that would be the case, but ultimately common sense doesn't commonly apply. ItalianSpartacus looked over the stats, and some units have the stats and seem to have the gear to be good value for money, but their battle performance leaves something to be desired, as was the case of the macemen, if I recall correctly

When did you start playing the game?

before spear brace the pikemen were beyond useless, now they at least have risen to mostly useless.

Lol it's TW so you never know!

That would be an interesting test - mercenary horse archers vs Bucelarii

@@Strat-Guides where test?

Thank you!

Haha it did kind of look like him right?? I did random face generation a couple times and he popped up, only needed 10 minutes of work to get him looking a bit closer :)

Hahaha that would be amazing!

At least they're dying with style

That's certainly a good challenge lol good luck if you do try it!

they have mods that add an all female line up, some make them weak, others strong. i use Valkyrie since it puts them roughly on par, though that is due to a lack of cavalry. they have Battanian level noble archers and their grunts are basically Sturgians without the cav. the lack of cav hurts them but they only have troops that work well so it balances out.

Wonder if they will be decent if you get all the troop hp perks. So medicine and all the three melee weapon perks that gives health.

@@jellydamgood all troops are OP with enough party leader/captain perks, so not really the point. You can literally run an entire campaign with looters only and wreck face

@@Paulunatr I'm more curious if the extra hp will make them viable for long term campaigning lol. Instead of needing to replenish forces after every two big battles. After all, with the gear they are wearing, all that extra health probably means tanking maybe two more hits each. It's not exactly easy to replenish these sword sisters, since their recruitment is rng and from taverns. At least looters are everywhere in the empire areas, and can be easily recruited with the roguery perk. So even if they die en masse while sieging or facing tons of cav, its no biggie.

Thanks for the support!

Because the stewardship capstone would reduce wages by 50%, mercenary connections reduces mercs by 25%, and then the steward perk I can’t remember is another 25%

And between the crossbows, mace men, caravan guards etc I think you could get a decent and super fun / thematic army.

go check out some of Strat's older videos, there was once a way to get the mercs to pay you! they have tweaked it so that doesn't happen anymore if you stack all the modifiers together, but i think you can get them to being free of upkeep.

I'm not sure if you watched the whole video or not, but I ran the macemen vs sea raiders (infantry only), sword sisters and hired crossbows vs foot archers only and I ran the pikemen vs cavalry only. I agree with you that some of the tests weren't necessary, but I was curious to see how each of them performed. For example, the sword sisters did much worse than hired crossbow man even against horse archers. I can cut the useless ones in the future if people don't find them interesting (like pike vs horse archer lol)

Interesting, I wasn't aware of this bug! Thanks for the heads up, I'll look into it.

Thanks!! I've got some videos planned that I think everyone will love (probably have them ready by next month).

That's a good idea! I'll try to test that out if I have time this week.

Lol when I was making a character for this video, I hit the random face thing a few times and it popped out a guy that was kinda close to him, so I touched him up and sent him out :D I had an ex that religiously watched friends so I've seen my fair share of the show!

With the right perks, fielding a mercenary army can be quite cost effective.

One thing I noticed about Bannerlord is any unit can perform well if given the right opportunity, but the point I try to make with videos like these is: Would you rather have one unit over another if they cost the same? Or in this case, if they cost more? So a T5 archer will outperform any of these sword sisters and will cost less to hire and less wages. It would be a different story if these mercs performed better, then it's a matter of how much are we willing to pay for a better unit. But as of right now, I can't really see a use case for some of these units :(

Just imagine the helmet hair though... it would be unbearable lol

Imperial caravan guards are crossbowmen mounted with a spear so a crossbow wiepding outrider

Lol true!

These were all ran at Bannerlord difficulty so normal damage for everyone. Good question - so autoresolve would make these units perform much better! There is some amount of RNG with autoresolve, but the results more closely follow the balance of power.

LOL well I'm glad my testing has some validity in an actual campaign

That's a good question... I think the best would be custom equipped companions :) Outside of that there are really only 2 options that I can think of, low tier Khuzait (I think level 2?) and mid tier Aserai (level 3?). You bring up a good point, they would get a lot of prisoners. I didn't think of that. I guess you need to weigh how important getting prisoners are for sub-par performance and higher wages?

So I have not used CEK yet, but I could add the caravan units to the list of topics to cover. I'm not sure if I can get to it this month but it's on the list now :)

They brace on their own. Be aware, they won't brace unless enemy cavalry are a certain distance away from them, so at the start of battle they will just stand there. As the cav get closer they will assume the brace position. They can brace in any formation, although I've found line to be the best and 2 ranks deep is the perfect depth because 3 ranks the rear soldier will no brace and 1 rank is too thin. You need to use filters to separate them. It's a real pain :(

@@Strat-Guides Oof, that kind kills the appeal of specialized infantry like pikeman then, yeah? Maybe there will be a mod to separate out specific infantry type during pre battle formations if there isn't one already, I like the look of a 2 deep pike line since Vlandia insists I meet their knights in person rather than via teams chat.

@@hybridce99 the first game had that stuff modded in well before native did it later on (this was for skirmishers). the filters were supposed to be a way of dynamically making different groups so that you didn't have to mod stuff in, but this really isn't working that well (just look at bows mixed with crossbows). it is just another reason why people say that Bannerlord is behind the curve even from the original game in development terms. it also is a good example of why you want your game to be as moddable as possible and why you want a good community when building your game.

you can assign them to another group in your army/inventory screen, from infantry to something you don't use. like heavy infantry

I just hear Bill Burr

Rhagaea wants to know your location

I love this community xD

Lol am I going to be cancelled now?! ;)

@@Strat-Guides you gonna be arrested for no reason :D , and Greta will text you

Without crowns or helmets, God save the queens

@@Resegy you were supposed to say ' IF SHE BREATHES , SHE IS A THOOOTTT

😂

And those mounted ones are SO bad lol they had beginner's crossbows so it's no wonder.

I actually had a large amount of those in my current army and thought they were decent. I'm just gonna drop them in a castle now lol

I was thinking the same - I was most excited to see their performance but now I know I haven't been missing much by ignoring them lol

@@Strat-Guides try them against top tier units with heavy armor. blunt damage used to ignore all armor, now it ignores 85% of it. they are probably trash against low tier units because they don't do much damage per hit since maces are balanced against armor, but against high armor they probably out perform equivalent units without blunt damage. this is also what most mods dealing with arenas get wrong. they think since you keep your armor that it gives you an edge, but the arena stuff is all blunt so most of the armor is ignored, and when the mods were made it ignored all the armor. some mods that messed with damage stuff didn't have special arena damage to ensure that there was still a damage type that ignored armor, so those mods made armor in the arenas advantageous which is where i think those mods shine. in the first game it was 1 mod at a time so the mod itself had to fix it for how they did stuff, but now people just stack mods without understanding the nuances of the changes and mod makers don't worry about some aspects since another mod can just fix them. the places to coordinate mod info has also scattered to the winds, so you can't just hop onto the forums and ask about the mod and get some answers (hence why you can't spend that focus point in the Banner King playthrough and no one has been able to tell you why, i actually tried looking ti up myself and found they had no forums for such issues to be talked about, just a Discord channel).

I agree, I much prefer the newer system. They just need to tweak a couple things and they will be viable. I was really impressed with the hired crossbows, they completely wrecked the enemy!

Yeah! The music will never be topped IMO

I think I used KCD, it was late when I finished editing this one lol Yeah someday I'll do a KCD Let's Play on the second channel :)

A couple of them were decent, but for sure stay away from the sword sisters and macemen lol

Best game soundtrack ever :)

I know that Banner Kings has a function like that. I wanted more Sturgian troops but when I went to the empire village that was Sturgian culture, they had half and half.

Imagine getting the same performance from tier 3 units compared to tier 5 that cost even more than regular units haha

The one in using still works. If you follow the link in the description from the small mod video, it will take you to the page I downloaded it from. Hopefully that helps!

With all of the right perks, you can make even some of the terrible units make sense. If I recall you can get 50% wage reduction (25 from steward and 25 from trade).

@@Strat-Guides yes, if you take every wage reduction perk and max out steward for the 250 perk (you have to go over 250, don't remember the exact number) you can get 100% wage reduction for mercs. You also have to be in an army but you can do that by just having a companion part join you. Very gimmicky but can be fun, especially if you are just focused on being a mercenary so only have to worry about primarily your party's wages.

It's certainly not a good way to use your troops, but it's interesting to see how they hold up compared to each other. For example, the sword sisters did much worse than the hired crossbows, so there is still useful info to be had.

I'm sure they would do better, but would they do enough to make up the difference in cost? I think probably not, but would need to test it out :)

Lol that would be a legit challenge. And maybe we can allow the Battanian cavalry to neuter ourselves even more :P

They actually do it on their own! Just be aware they don't actually brace unless an enemy cavalry is charging them from a specific distance (I think it's usually around 50 - 75m). I find that line formation to be quite effective and making sure they are 2 ranks deep since both rows will brace.

I'm a huge fan of a small frontline shield wall (maybe 20 - 30%) and the rest Fian champions. The only job of the front line is to not die, so they distract everyone else and allow the archers to clean up. It's a bit OP and get's boring, but it's one of the best tactics you can use. Keep the infantry in shield wall or square (I prefer square).