Lategame: A desolate and depressing Mount&Blade experience on day 1000+(with screenshots)

We all know Mount&Blade as an immersive medieval sandbox game, but for how long you played it on one save?
When you start a new game, there is a lot of lords devoted to their kings, they have fiefs and great armies. The game feels alive and overall great, even realistic. But there is also another side of it. Come with me and experience the endgame.
Fast forward 1400 days.

• 4 Kingdoms are wiped out, almost all map is conquered by only one faction.
• Every fief in AI factions belong to the king himself and nothing is left for vassals.
• Vassals are indicted for treason every day
• More than 75% of NPCs has left the realm
• Bandits and deserters roam in huge parties. Many Lords have less armies than Steppe and Desert bandits.
• Kings have armies of 600+ soldiers, and a lot of them are elite units like sharpshooters and sergeants.
• You start to encounter a lot more, somewhat creepy, bugs:

1. If the lord leaves the Calradia and you speak to him before leaving the location, he offers you to surrender or die
2. You can speak with some ladies about ransom. This function is not finished, they actually must be out of Calradia as well as their family.
3. Some lords roam as Outlaws when it's said that they left the realm. They do what they want until somebody defeats them. If you capture them, they will rot in your dungeon forever, they will not try to escape and nobody will pay for them
4. Some lords can start to act like they belong to your very own faction, without your appreciation. They will have a bright red colour and your kingdom's name under their names, yet they will not be shown in Factions tab as your vassals.

• You will always have a lot of lords willing to serve you in your castle. They will come back a lot even if you rejected their services already and they hate you. They will come back to kings who mistreated them and get kicked out of the kingdom the first day.
• You will probably get tired of the music at this moment, you will be playing in almost complete silence.
• Your luck will reach 0 by day 1500. This means that every wound will be severe and cause strength/intelligence loss. Your character is not young any more, you can't just recklessly participate in every battle and you better stay out of fighting.
• Culture is literally lost. Lords have switched sides too many times, you can't count that faction you are going to fight will have faction units. You will encounter Khergits fighting for Rhodoks, Nords fighting for Sarranids and other units out of place.
• The kings are literally mad. They capture castles and cities far away from their own lands.
• Many castles are not captured for long time, and units in them level up. Imagine having to capture a castle with 200+ sergeants and sharpshooters. Kings can have up to 400 elite tier troops in their party.
• Bandits can ambush you up to 7 people at one time. A sign of corruption if this happens in your own city with a lord of guards.
• Bandits invade villages 50+ people. This is not a lair or a small village, it's almost a city of bandits.
• Your lords love you, you are known as honorable person and a good ruler, and only your "Statistics" tab knows that you have killed more than 2000 people and sold more than 1000 to slavery.
• Weather can act really strange. How do you like two weeks of fogs and rain?
• Your marshall starts constantly gathering the army even when you are not in war with anyone.
  

Strange gamedesign choices, glitches, unfinished mechanics and a little randomness like 666 soldiers of Hakim and 2 weeks of fog is nothing when you look at it alone, but it stacks on top of each other. The thing that you get in total is Calradia as a desolate, decomposing place in stagnation. The remaining lords and kings are just wandering without a reason. I don't remember when was the last time somebody except Hakim or Graveth had a fief and their lords have abandoned them. When I boot this game, I expect medieval chivalry type of experience, but as you can understand, it's impossible to do it now. Now it's depressing to play it and the Hakim with Graveth don't even declare wars or try to capture anything anymore, they are just roaming somewhere in the world. Now Mount&Blade soundtrack doesn't come well with my game. It is better played with dark ambient or Fallout 1 soundtrack rather than medieval motives.
The game is really immersive at the start, it feels almost realistic, you don't even question yourself about it, that's how immersive it is. But when you play for a long time, you are starting to feel like the Calradia is dying, rotting, decaying, begging you to stop its misery and conquer it. I think that this is an interesting experience - if you want to try it, let me know in comments and I will share savegames with you guys. I hope someone sees it and appreciates the amount of dedication I put into my character and this post. I even made a picture for it.

https://i.redd.it/afajkszdqwb31.png

Submitted July 22, 2019 at 03:46PM by Antarct1c https://ift.tt/2M7w44A