1. #1
    M_Gunz's Avatar Banned
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    For the last week I've been on vacation in a place called Calradia. If you don't know where that is, don't bother with a world map.

    Calradia is the world map of Mount&Blade. There is a free download of the newest M&B, Warband 1.131, that lets you play to level 7. 600 MB download, the whole game. Without serial key you can play limited but just the training grounds of the tutorial are worth the download and yes you really-really-really should spend time there learning how to move, shoot, fight and ride then hit things from horseback. Control is intuitive but still needs learning and practice.

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    Yes, horse mounted and on foot medieval combat done very well. Fast, hard and ramming done right pays off well.

    It's a vanilla medieval RPG. The offline game is what they call a sandbox being there is no main story line. You set your own goals which can include taking the whole map over. People do that. The game world is complex yet you deal with what you want. There are other Heroes (AI) you can get to join your party. Your party can number in the 100's but 20 can run around pretty safely if you don't pick the wrong fights. You can do all kinds of things, take over or be given fiefs as in village, town, castle, kingdom. You can prop up a 'pretender' and work that way too. Or just run around killing bandits of different kinds while building up a rep. You can hold feasts, get hitched, be a big wheel and that's just offline.

    Yup, there's multiplayer. Good luck there. I'm too old to twitch that fast. Online games have goals AFAICT and don't run forever. Want to wake up from sleep and find your place has been over run hours ago? OTOH the Heroes you deal with online are real people.

    There's MODS. I haven't touched those, just got my activation key yesterday as it is. Many mods. Want magic? There is at least one well developed mod with 17+ kinds of magic. Mods are supported.

    Need cheat codes even if it's just to get started? You will learn more quicker. Yes, they have them. It is your game, play how you want.

    There is community. Here is the main site. Publisher Paradox has another.
    There is a good Wiki here. It went down for a day and when it came back up I 'save as' the pages since nowhere else did I find so good!

    One thing though. I ran into trouble after a while with BSOD crashes. The fix for me was to change the config. I switched pixel shaders off (might switch em back on) and changed from DX9 to DX7 and only once in hours do I get the game quitting back to desktop, not the BSOD. In a future patch I might try DX9 again, it does look better.

    Also I am finding that not terribly big battles bring my Sempron 2600 with 2G RAM down to low framerates and pauses. There's a battle size slider I have set at 60 which is too high for my PC and I can cut the number of ragdolls used (they are used to make the dead fall more realistically) in config to remedy that. I won't see the best on my PC but I still have a playable game.
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  2. #2
    stalkervision's Avatar Banned
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    Looks like a lot of fun Buddy.
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  3. #3
    Finally a fantasy-RPG where the equipment looks like it would actually be usable!
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  4. #4
    stalkervision's Avatar Banned
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    Do they have those wooden handled things with the long chain and iron spiked ball attached to it Gunz?
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  5. #5
    AndyJWest's Avatar Senior Member
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    Originally posted by stalkervision:
    Do they have those wooden handled things with the long chain and iron spiked ball attached to it Gunz?
    One of these you mean?

    A modern reconstruction of a single-handed kettenmorgenstern type flail. Not the sort of thing you'd want to get a tap on the noddle from...
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flail_%28weapon%29
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  6. #6
    stalkervision's Avatar Banned
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    Originally posted by AndyJWest:
    <BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by stalkervision:
    Do they have those wooden handled things with the long chain and iron spiked ball attached to it Gunz?
    One of these you mean?

    A modern reconstruction of a single-handed kettenmorgenstern type flail. Not the sort of thing you'd want to get a tap on the noddle from...
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flail_%28weapon%29 </div></BLOCKQUOTE>


    Thanks andy that's the beast.
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  7. #7
    I got the original Mount & Blade several months ago for $6 on Amazon. I played it for a bit but got bored of it. It's fun to ride around on a horse bashing foot soldiers' heads in with maces and axes but that is pretty much all you do in the game. The rest of the game, like doing missions and talking to kings and stuff, feels riduculously bare bones, like you're talking to a bunch of robots who are all the same and tell you the same boring things. Hopefully Warband is better but the reviews of it I've read seem to say it has the same issues.
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  8. #8
    M_Gunz's Avatar Banned
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    First, no morning starts or flails. Not sure why. Maybe it's about a weapon with rotating parts and they haven't been able to get that right. Spiked maces, yes. You can even swing a kind of cut-down pike from horseback as you ride by your victim which is nice for the reach it gives when his sword is a good 2 feet shorter. Just watch out for the ones with the pole arms, they're best handled by circling them and peppering with arrows, javelins, darts, hatchets, throwing knives or even stones. In a good sized fight there are all kinds of things flying around and some are big enough that one hit can really ruin your day.

    How's this... you can pick stuff up off the ground, like a thrown axe, and use it. You might be able to strip a sword and shield off a dead/unconscious guy or even pull arrows out to fire with your own bow.

    Held weapons are most effective at the end of their reach.

    Yes Ba5tard5word the missions and quests are pretty much canned. The wiki enumerates the official ones. Compare to most out of the box combat flight sims and they're downright inventive. The vanilla game is a working engine with what they had time to decorate it with. Get a mod perhaps? Even the original M&B has mods. Warband has some new pieces like the bandit hideouts, the arenas and all in all over 70 real improvements over the original. All the new parts are usable in mods. It would be nice if the people would talk like in Oblivion but Oblivion has other limits that Warband does not.
    With all the other complexities I don't need to hang up over the dialogs. I'm putting a mixed-capabilities group together and getting helpful suggestions from Companions while I do it. There is enough to do that I'm not bored and won't be for a long time. But then I don't know the older game.

    I have now a large group of Companions and sometimes they do their verbal sniping via dialogs. It's canned but it's something. It would be nice to hear Nizar actually taunt the enemy in rhyme during the fight... maybe in a sequel game it will. Baldur's Gate had things like that, the dialog was audio and sometimes surprising on the first and second play throughs. That was all canned but it worked.

    There are tactical elements to fighting from horseback in M&B that have a feel in common with combat flight sims. You have to try it to really know and you can get that far in the free demo. If you have a 'Heavy' horse then you can run foot soldiers down with it and you can make the horse jump on the way in. Just don't do it to guys with pointy things pointing at you or you will be going over your dead horse's neck on touchdown. My thing is riding around the enemies and filling them with arrows as they try to approach. Even if the hit doesn't kill, the target pauses. I work them around so that my other troops hit them from the flank and generally don't take many, sometimes zero losses. It's those mounted bandits that give me trouble. But I started in Jelkala and recruited Kergits so now I have my own cavalry which is nice because the bandits there are mounted too.

    There are also frustrations like when your own cavalry gets in your way and makes your horse stop. M&B horses don't have sense enough to avoid trees and boulders or each other. They are more like 4 legged motorcycles with inertial dampers. I've got to put in a wish on the wish list to have smarter horses. It's just 'not real'!

    There are some play-throughs on Youtube that even with only a week at the demo I know those guys made a lot of stupid choices. Sure you get to see the game. You get to see the game played poorly in the three of those I sampled.
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  9. #9
    M_Gunz's Avatar Banned
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    At the Taleworlds forum I found links to -good- training video. I will post the first now on use of infantry hand weapons. The complexity possible to use (or have used on you) really shows here with how-to-use in detailed word and examples. How many have ever heard of a "chambered attack"?

    Note that some players have been at this online for many months and work together in training as well as duels. You won't find action this insane in 1 on 1 air battles.

    Oh there is a combat speed slider in M&B and offline (perhaps online but I don't think so!) you can toggle slow-motion cheat if you have trouble seeing what is happening.

    What is Spam in M&B? Step into the strike and you won't get hit as bad or maybe not at all. Spam has risks. Online it's all subject to lag too.

    I will add more to this post as I find them.

    Infantry hand weapons tutorial.

    Chamber block demo -- this individual is known as Reapy (not long)

    Chamber blocking LANCES FROM HORSEBACK WHILE ON FOOT (short)

    The incredible LOLspin! (short)

    Kind of an ongoing critique of what was done wrong while it's being done. (long)

    Much commonality in positioning the weapon by holding swing (left mouse button) or block (right mb) before letting go or switching buttons. Sometimes I try for say right side swing and get overhead but that's my fault.

    Still looking for good mounted combat training videos.
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  10. #10
    Cheers for this, Mr Gunz - I'm strangely drawn to this game and your write-ups have increased my desire.
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