(Image credit: Taleworlds) Tournaments are a great way to make money, but only if you're good at combat But it will mean towns and castles might suddenly change hands as younger generations are born and raised to take up their parents' wars. Most times when you're defeated, you'll be taken prisoner and will have to buy your freedom or get lucky and escape. Don't worry, though: This doesn't mean that falling in combat deletes your save file or anything. With death enabled, Bannerlord becomes a lot more high stakes and more fun, since your actions have more profound consequences. It's a crucial part of Bannerlord's medieval simulation.

One final option that you should always turn on is 'Enable Death.' This makes it so all named characters, even you and those you recruit, can die. You can change these settings at any time, so once you become a bit more familiar with combat you can up the challenge as you see fit. So do yourself a favor and set everything to very easy or easy to begin with. If you set your own combat damage to realistic, for example, enemies will kill you with just one or two blows-which is way too punishing for newcomers struggling to understand Bannerlord's unique combat system. Naturally, you might think that realistic is the equivalent of normal, but it's actually more comparable to a hard difficulty setting. What's also weird is that the only settings you can choose are very easy, easy, and realistic. Instead of just setting a global difficulty, you can change different factors like how much damage your units take in combat. Don't play on realistic difficulty if you're newīannerlord's difficulty settings are a little daunting at first because they're so granular. If you're a merchant, you'll want to set up shop in kingdoms with healthy economies or that have an abundance of a certain resource, while aspiring warlords might want to join up with like minded heroes who share a similar combat style.

When you're just starting out none of this matters a great deal-and you can always pick up sticks and start over elsewhere without much pain-but it will deeply affect you later. The Khuzait, for example, are steppe nomads who favor mounted combat, making them a great faction to align yourself with if you fancy yourself a horse person. Kingdoms do have some major differences to keep in mind, like the strength of their economies and armies, the types of weapons and armor they favor, and who their ruling lords and ladies are.

Mount and blade beginners guide