Bannerlord has some great potential for combat, but it looks like there is simply too small amount of coders working on combat system. TW is possibly simly too small company.

if you use spears vs cavalry best way is to let your troops charge and give the troops shields*

Great video, I would like to see the same video done with Realistic Battle Mod if you get the time!

@@justletmeinnow100 I actually did that one first! If you check my videos, it's the one right before this one :)

they should hire the modders @@bazejs8084

So is bow, so is cavalry, not to mention horse archers can shoot through each other and get a bonus in autoresolve. A perfect organism.

@@Loromir17 The price of having to spend an entire day traveling to recruit them lol

They defeat the t4 budget disposable army falxman as well. Though falxman are amazing at destroying shields and you can mass hundreds of them quickly

The only problem I've had with the glaive is confined quarters and heavy shield infantry. Fantastic on horseback.

@@furimindusties5736 it's true for player control but someone would have to test how ineffective a glaive is during a castle wall defense vs a mace vs a two hander

Billhooks are decent. 2h sword only as a placeholder if you got no loot.

What about sieges?

@@christopherlebaron9401 nobody has made a video testing it. I don't know for sure but I'm routing for falxman t4 because they have a shield destroying special ability

The other important thing to summarise: thrust damage is utter trash Not that this is discovering anything new, just reinforcing how useless trust damage is

Can't use longbow on horseback though

Hahahahahahha leave some for your kids 😂😂😂

Good weekend to start byzantine larp playthrough

Can life get any better?

Hahaha nice! It's so fun to troll your own kids :D

That's kinda mean

really, are you really sure? A lose formation with spears (or similiar weapons) is just the most stupid thing I have seen for a while. There is nothing wrong with spears in this game. Just do not use them in a lose formation

Yeah that part of Bannerlord always confused me.

TaleWorlds just hates thrust polearms for some reason. Spears were really bad in vanilla Warband as well: the devs apparently thought that 'stops cavalry' is so OP on its own it justified making an entire weapon class garbage. Combat really didn't evolve much from Warband, swing weapons and archery still dominate in Bannerlord, it's a bit sad to see.

@@Dakkalazy spear thrusts should be the fastest possible attacks, they should also push people back

@@Dakkalazy I remember the nightmares of arena fighters getting stuck in walls and repeatedly, ineffectively, poking each other with sticks at close range. Like, hell, they would've done more damage by punching each other

@@Dakkalazy Every now and then I'll try using my spear on foot, and if you can land a hit on your enemy's face it actually does a lot of damage. The problem is that your thrust speed is so slow that your enemy will have closed the distance by the time you try and stab him.

That's an interesting thought!

Yeah that's a great point - I still like to use polearm troops in a large mass. I think for a handful of companions though, you'll get more bang for your buck with a swingable polearm or 2H weapon. I probably should have stated that in the video lol I think maybe the video comes across as a unit testing, but was meant specifically for equipping companions with high level combat skills

Thrust spears are only good en masse. Hundred or more and cavalry is done, jjust a few dozen and they amount to nothing.

@@Strat-Guides Ah I see, my bad! Thanks for responding nonetheless!

@@Strat-Guides To use only one combat skill, for melee I started crafting Very short polearms with bardiche blade. It can be used in 2 hands but when used with shield, it's moveset is only thrusts and it's short enough that it can be easily used in tight fights. It works really well in tight formation because you never get random swings from side that stop on your allies. You should test very short spears. I find shields important because enemy does use ranged weapons and you get slathered without them. As does enemy without shields against ranged troops.

​@@Strat-GuidesWhy isn't Menavlion in the video?

I recall someone mentioning that crossbows have a very flat trajectory, so they wouldn't be able to be used behind infantry or similar cover. That does seem very limiting - and then needing 3 people to work a single weapon!? That's a huge limitation

@@Strat-Guides The thing is that historically bows often directly shot at troops (could still be a curve if it was a long distance, but the archers wouldn't be behind the melee troops). And crossbows CAN shoot in a bell trajectory, Todd's Workshop (a channel from a guy who makes and sell reproductions of ancient crossbows) has a lot of interesting information on crossbows. Also the "three people" thing, I dunno if that's actually true. Medieval manuscript tend to be surprisingly detailed when it comes to the things they depict, they clearly show the various ways and tools used to reload crossbows, but I can't find even a single picture showing such a "3 man team". So if it was done, it was probably done by a very limited set of people as a way to maximise rate of fire (if you have one guy reloading, you can use two crossbows, thus doubling your rate of fire). Hell there were even mounted crossbowmen, which would never have worked if crossbows required a "3 man team" setup. Overall rate of fire never seemed to be a huge issue since crossbows were consistently used alongside bows throughout the middle ages, even after facing off against the Mongols. In fact Hungary and Poland used crossbows against the Mongols to great effect, so I have my doubts about the assertion that the Mongols made the crossbow less popular in China because it was ineffective against them (rather it's more logical to think that the invaders that thrived on horse archery simply made bows more popular as they took power, influencing the people they took over). Why did people use the crossbow even though it was slower than the bow? Well for one the crossbow is much more accurate than the bow, that alone makes it a fearsome weapon. Also, the issue of rate of fire is irrelevant if the crossbowman has adequate protection (like a stationary shield, like the Genoese crossbowmen used) or is in a scenario where he already has ample cover (like shooting from behind fortifications, good thing a lot of ancient warfare was sieges).

@@Knoloaify a big advantage of crossbows is that using them is easy to learn, making them very useful for millitia and mercenary type troops to use. In german towns citizens had to own a weapon and armor in case of a city defense, and the most popular weapons were polearms and crossbows. In terms of crossbow usage against the mongols, I have to admit that I know very little about the chinese. But I do believe that the crossbow is more useful in defensive situations and the chinese had to re-conquer all of china, as they had lost to the mongols previously. Also of course, what you already mentioned, that they were ruled by mongols and had a lot of mongol people among their ranks, so they also were influenced to use more mongol-like tactics. Crossbows are not more accurate, but still more useful for sharpshooting, as you can load and draw a crossbow from concealment, wait for a target to arrive and immediately shoot them. In China, heavy cavalry got mor popular and replaced the crossbowmen. On the topic of 3-men teams, I found this on the wiki on genovese crossbowmen: The usual team consisted of a crossbowman and two assistants, one supporting the pavise, the other responsible for spanning a second bow, thus doubling the rate of fire.

although crossbowmen did decline because of the mongol invasion, crossbows in china was one of the most effective ways of countering cavalry. 1 difference between european and chinese crossbows are that european crossbows have a small prod(bow) that has very high draw weight(150~200lb) but only pulls back a little, while chinese crossbows are somewhat similar to modern crossbows as they use a very strong bow(150~300lb) for the prod, but the string is pulled back much further than a european crossbow, making them basically bowmen that shoots slowly but is much more deadly. in the 100 years war, it is said that the french army had 1/3 of it's army as crossbows and also the genoese crossbowmen were renowned as great merceneries, indicating that crossbows were actually useful. the battle of crecy is sometimes used to show that longbows were superior to crossbows, but the crossbowmen that fought in the battle forgot to get their stationary pavis shields and were also forced to advance into the english fire by the french knights. because the knights didn't see ranged weapons as a "noble weapon", and despised the mercenery crossbowmen, they run them over and charged into the english. Also I have never really heard of a 3man setup for crossbows before. I know sometimes they did something similar for guns but never really for crossbows.

@@takuoku2546 might want to do some more reading: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossbow

There's a story? lol

Nice, good luck on your new campaign!!

Yeah it's like playing a different game pretty much!

@@Strat-Guides yeah in rbm spear is the play vanilla swords, maces, axes and glaives are the play

is this video vanilla or rbm?

@@jorgea.coronado4389how to figure out. If there is a green bar below your health, RBM

@@jorgea.coronado4389and this litterally says NO MODS

They take a long time to do, but hopefully it saves you time in the future when you need to reference stuff :D

@@Strat-Guides it's worth it absolutely. It's the extra mile that makes your channel worth the bell icon

Glad it was helpful! Haha yeah I'm a huge troll IRL and my kids get the brunt of that :P It's payback for making me watch the same episodes for 2 months straight :D

I tried one and two arrows, but it didn't look balanced and I have some OCD tendencies :P

@@Strat-Guides Fair enough lol

For your inevitable return I hope :) What have you been playing lately?

Yup. :-(

Thanks!!

I'm glad my videos are helping!

Thank you for the kind words! I've actually got some campaigns on my second channel (Strat Plays) that you might find interesting :) they are longer form videos, but I still edit it around 50% of the recordings and only show the interesting stuff

This is a good idea, though I was thinking that an optimal fix for the spear issue would be to simply make it so that the shaft and point of spears have a hit box that deploys when at the ready (the animation before releasing mouse button 1 to attack) that while not necessarily dealing damage, would act as a wall that couldn’t be phased through as it would be in vanilla. The strength of the spear wall would depend on the weight of the spears as well as the weight of the armour of the attacking troops. This would encourage the player to use deeper pike formations to counter infantry and cavalry alike, since the overlapping of spears would create a wall with fewer gaps. There still exists the issue of the spears hit box making it difficult to attack with in tight formations without being interrupted by a friendly unit getting in the way, so to fix this, I would remove the hit-box from the back of the spear and the part where the user holds it so that they may attack with it without being impeded by the guy behind him.

I like the way conquerors blade does it, pikes do more damage at the tip and closer enemy is the less it does. Add in the fact if you brace the speed the enemy is moving adds damage.

Spear have too low base damage and swing way too slow, they overrated the range way too much when balancing them.

"I don’t even think it’s unnecessarily realistic in real life. If you’re decked out in armour, and have close range weapons and a nice shield, it’s really difficult for the spear to do much, especially in a press" Well, in practical fact what we see is that this is not true. Spears have quite consistently been major favorites of all varieties of troops, including heavily armoured elites (like archaic greek hoplites), including when in no particular formation and when used in single combat. In Bannerlord spears trade damage and speed for range. In reality, spears hit like a truck and are exceptionally fast when held in two hands, while also having significant effective range. The uselessness of the weapons in Bannerlord can be primarily attributed to the lacking damage of the spears and secondarily to the lack of self-preservation of the AI. As for RBM, the AI seems pretty good to me - no idiotic football scrum like the vanilla game. The behavior there is perhaps animated by different factors, but resembles actual historical formation combat much more than the base game, as people were not in fact suicidal maniacs who would charge heedlessly into the enemy and mix about until friend could not be told from foe. We know this, because we have significant evidence as to how individual melee combat works, and significant evidence as to how long historical battles lasted and how many casualties resulted from them. If the former dynamic was applied without modification to the scenario of a large battle, with Hollywood style scrums, the latter would not last a fraction of the time that battles did and would produce egregious casualties - a duel can vary in length, but in general is extremely lethal and over very fast, often in a few seconds. Since charging a line of enemy warriors is even worse than a duel as regards lethality, being more constrained in movement and allowing for them to outnumber you, people generally did not do this. Instead they occupied the liminal spaces between individual combat and a standoff, where pressure would be exerted on the enemy but chance of serious harm was more infrequent, allowing the historically recorded combat casualties of often less than five percent. Typically an additional ten percent casualties would be inflicted upon the defeated side while they ran away and were run down and stabbed in the back.

@@melanoc3tusii205 Personally, I’ve always been extremely sceptical of applying standard models and expectations to how warfare will go, especially when it comes to warfare that largely involves melee troops, mostly because there are so many contexts that must be applied beforehand. Who is fighting? Are they a culture that glorifies death in battle and reckless bravery like the Celts or Germanics? Can they be confident that their home will be burned if they flee or are defeated? Where are they fighting? Is this a place thats important to either or side? Do they have a place to retreat to? Why are they fighting? Is this simply basically a large scale judicial duel between city states or is this between people that hate each other? How well armoured are they? Can they afford to be more risky and aggressive? What general is in command etc. And it’s not like these people had any particular hesitancy towards killing, especially the further back you get wherein plundering, sacking or even an outright massacre after a battle wasn’t uncommon. So making everything predictable and everyone is on the exact same wave length no matter the circumstances just seems equally as unrealistic to me imo. What I’d like to see is a why to make some units more aggressive then others, far more willing to wade into combat without fear. Whether it be a Doppelsoldner, religious warriors, simply brave men or possibly even actual psychopaths who knows. On spears, spears are popular because A. They’re good, range is good, in good order they’re menacing and out of order they’re still good and B. They’re cheap as all hell, the only bit of rough value is the spearhead, the shaft is replaceable as all hell so of course you’re gonna use this weapon. But once armour is applied and a shield things get very tricky. If you’re a regular spearmen going up against a 15th century knight or men at arms with a sword and shield good luck

It's hard for me to play without RBM now :(

@@Strat-Guides hell yeah. I tried vanilla after year playing with rbm - that bullshit for me

The sad part is these tests were done with high combat skill companions, so this was "best case scenario" lol they still do poorly :(

@@Strat-Guides :(

It's interesting because even at close range, they still manage to do massive damage!

its my fav weapon for personal melee use in open battle

@@Strat-Guides I have to admit i've written the glaive off for close range combat purely out of logic. It doesn't make sense a long glaive would be an OP close range weapon, but this video proves it's not only good but arguably the best.

@@TacticatGaming You forgot one thing - TW Maths :D

@@Strat-Guides I always forget TW MATHS lol! I'm about to try two handed glaive builds on my all companions playthrough though. They are going to be insane.

Thanks! It's always good to back up claims with some testing/math. Makes it really hard to refute :)

you can accomplish a lot with Khans Guard even heavily outnumbered, especially if you conserve their ammo( have them do most of their shooting when they are stationary) and don't waste and they get two stacks of arrows, also because they are fast and mounted you can recover and reposition them much safer when you get hit with the random respawning locations of reinforcements.

yeah the khans guards glaives are shorter than a lot of other swingable polearms, but in a way that does make them more versatile in some ways they are surprisingly good in sieges, as both archers and in melee, yeah no weaknesses.

Yeah that's exactly it - bows were the most effective weapon in this test (aside from impale javelins lol) and the glaive was 2nd most effective. I guess it also explains Fians with bow and 2H only because they are equally strong!

Yeah that would have been really nice! They would actually be useable I think

Rhodok sharpshooters were terrifying

The rhodok sergeants were also even stronger than the Nord huscarls too. And at half the price.

I don't remember that. Are you sure it wasn't a mod?

They just bent down to reload, same (pretty much) as Bannerlord. They never turned around

crossbows have a ton more advantages over bows, but yeah; none of them translate very well into videogames so they usually just end up being slower bows. (and then gat unhistorical buffs to compensate such as improved damage and/or range); I think a lot of the problem with Crossbos (and early firearms, for that mtter) is the media focus on "field battles" where two sides just kind of walk up to each other and start killing is giving people a skewed perspective of what war is like; just as an example; crossbowmen deployed behind any kind of wall or just pavises can far more effectivly use that cover than any archer can; at the same time crossbowmen can pick off enemies poking out of cover much more effctively (being able to hold an aimed shot indefinitely); they are also far more useful in crampe spaces, where bows (especially longbows) cannot be used effectively or can be used from tight formations (making them very good for the kind of "breaching" actions that happen in urban warfare. Bows also cannot be used effectively with all sorts of heavy armour while crossbows can be used with almost no regard to armour. the amount of real life situations in which crossbows completely outmatch warbows (irrspective of training) are not easily listed, but when you try to "stat" the weapons for a game you will just end up with the bows having better damage output.

The advantage of crossbows is simplicity. They just work. Take a peasant, give them an hour or two instruction on how to use it, how to aim it. You've got a functional crossbowman who is operating at like 90% efficiency. Take a peasant, give them a bow, teach them to use it and aim it, and in 15 years you will have a functional archer who is operating at 90% efficiency. The best way to model it would be to have all Xbows cap out at say tier 2 or tier 3. They should be a weapon of mass. Easy to field hordes of low tier crossbows that punch way above their weight. However, if you can take a stack of tier 4 archers, or tier 3 xbows, the archers are going to be better in pretty much every way. Range, rate of fire, accuracy at range etc.

In my experience, only the front row will ever attack with melee unless it's against a mounted unit (sometimes they can clip through allies and attack). It's a shame too, because a wall of spears would be really fun. Thanks for watching!

Lol reminds me of my kids smacking each other with pool noodles

@@Strat-Guides the pool noodles do more damage though

Don't work, I got you :D

Yeah lol it was pretty much the same thing! I like how they try to punch people when they ride by too

Riding Perk, Banner and Captain perk can increase the charge damage immensely

@@Strat-Guides lol I didn’t even notice. That’s just pettiness at that point. Insult to injury

Addendum: two-handed swords are particularly good in a cav vs. cav battle, because the way they are held by you (or AI), has them swinging from the shoulder at head level, which excels at slaughtering enemy cavalry during the stuckage/moshpit phase of the clash - the AI just doesn't defend at all and eats the hits on their face/shoulders pretty much all the time. Swingable polearms and long bardiche axes are way better as cav vs infantry though due to the different animation and wider hitbox.

Lol it does kind of look like that!

The only way is to use RBM sadly :(

For the no fun route, I prefer to basically make them Fian Champs but with 2H swords that can only be swung (no pierce).

Couchable Voulge all the way!

it is, baby. Holy 200 swing damage one shot anything@@Glo0ze

2H polearms are only affected by the polearm skill. It's confusing because they have the tag "Two Handed". The easiest way is to look for the polearm tag as that will override whatever else it says.

Honestly I think we can already assume shorter is better for smooshed forces.

@@notsorrystory yeah, but how much better could decide wether it is imperative that you have specialised weapons or that it is an insignificant difference.

@@dontragedia4999 fair point

lol!