Mount & Blade: Take the money and run...

Dundush Noyan, you fool!


I had been in service to a lord of the Khergit Khanate faction, and he asked me to collect some taxes from Dashbiga. It would upset the locals, sure, but my reputation with the aristocracy would be shining. I immediately went to extort some peasants.


8000 Denars.


I got giddy at the thought of being rich   for once   in this game. After a very brief period of moral deliberation, I decided to hoof it to Veluca, belonging to the Kingdom of Rhodoks. I set up an olive oil press in the town, and began to sow the seeds of my business empire.
Roaming about the land of Cal-trade-ia, comparing prices and taking advantage of resource shortages caused by the warring factions, I was soon rolling in it. I was able to keep mercenaries as the whole of my force of twenty men. These brutes were at the top of the badassery scale, and didn't ask questions or lose morale if you attacked a village or two. The only real snag with trading in the game is that there's no way to store data within the game itself. When you spend a night comparing prices, once you hit continue that information is gone, so a pen and paper are essential.
Eventually, once I had saved up enough money by performing tasks for locals, killing bandits and generally pretending to be a good person, I had purchased shops in most of the towns on the map save for the three cities in my home, the Khergit Khanate. It also seems that these guys were the most aggressive faction. Eventually, they even attacked Veluca and captured it.


My oil press!


They say loyalty can't be bought, but I had become so attached to that income town that I immediately began a campaign of boot-licking in service to Sanjar Khan, leader of the Khergits.

"You there, with the 50 man strong force of elite mercenaries that can eliminate armies three times it size... Deliver this letter, would you?"    Sanjar Khan on employment in Mount & Blade: Warband.

 Well, as luck would have it, delivering enough letters gets you the influence to become a vassal of the realm (any more of those errands and I'd have gone postal). My gracious leader gave me this honour and bestowed upon me a fife (town) for me to control. I was given Uhhun, which just so happened to be right on the edge of the Khergit territory, and was a stone's throw from the towns of two hostile factions. I thought that this might have been more effort than it was worth.

Ignore the smoke and flames. Those villages are fine, I'm sure.

After the relentless attacks I had to thwart from the Rhodoks and the Sarranids, I wanted to get my own back. I found a once-Rhodok, Sarranid occupied  castle, and besieged it, knowing they only had a few more men than I did. I used my engineering skill to create a siege tower.


Siege towers are slow.


By the time I reached the walls, I had lost a quarter of my men and broke three shields from incoming arrows. My forces and I killed most of the defenders, only to be greeted by a new wave from the inner castle. My enemies took me prisoner, making me watch them move around the map in super-fast motion, begging to be accompanied by the Benny Hill theme. After escaping, I moved to recruit some proper Khergit troops, and stopped relying on mercenaries.
It soon came to the point that I was so loved by my village of Uhhun, that 35 recruits were joining me at a time, and sometimes I'd get some trained units joining me. Once again dealing with the bandit problem, I had a fearsome, cost effective army now.

The cavalry charges are oh-so-satisfying

From defending my fife and selling my prisoners into slavery, I was now sitting on 55000 denars. This money gets spent on troops, food, books and the ladies of the realm. The system set in place for courtship seems more akin to a bribing system, putting the game half-way between medieval simulator and a piece of social commentary.
I wasn't going to go through with it though. The last thing I want to do in an RPG focussed on large-scale combat is attend aristocratic parties to the end of landing myself a virtual, text-only woman.


Mount & Blade: Warband's single player experience is awesome, and its great value for money, particularly when there's a steam sale on. But the multi-player feels dated. On release, it looks as though it was fresh to be fighting players hand-to hand with a group of 30 or more teammates, but it's not good enough now to warrant buying the game purely for its sake, in my opinion.
Saying that, the new Mount & Blade is in the works (we're going to pretend that With Fire and Sword didn't come out), War of the Roses, which looks promising, graphically at least. It'd be fun to have a reboot of the old castle siege multiplayer mode with a modern engine.


I've thoroughly enjoyed Warband over the past few weeks. If you've got plenty of time you want to do away with, you can't go wrong with this one.