Monthly devblog April 24 news - The Old Realms mod for Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord

Monthly Devlog: April 2024

Work on Environment:

Code: Some QOL improvements

The coding team added QOL and UI additions. While our Blessing system mostly works as intended, we know it is very hard to understand how long certain blessings are actually active and how to know what these blessings actually do. For this, we extended the Map information bar with more UI Elements.

In addition, you will be able to easily understand what kind of effect and attributes certain Units have.

In general, we want to make all information and changes in our mod more accessible with measures well-known to players.

Custom resource system:

We mentioned back in January that we worked on a custom resource system that will add a new mechanic for gaining, upgrading, and maintaining troops. We try to make each faction's gameplay a bit special and make upgrades to troops more meaningful.

While a lot is still under development and playtesting we can tell the following:

Dark Energy:

Dark Energy will be a resource that will be used in Mousillon and for other Vampire Count factions. While it is easier to obtain, it is also costly to create and maintain your army of undead with dark energy.

Gaining: The player will be able to gain Dark Energy by not taking prisoners after combat and for any eliminated troop. As a Necromancer or Vampire, the player can now defile shrines which provide additional dark energy.

Undead troops like skeletons and Grave guards require Dark energy to upgrade them. All other costs are nonexistent.

Higher undead troops like wraiths or vampire units have in addition to the upgrade cost also a dark energy upkeep. Inside keeps or towns troop garrisons are only costing half the upkeep. This makes the use of special undead troops rarer, and encourages the use of lesser undead units.

Prestige System:

In the empire, we will make use of a different resource: The Imperial Prestige. Especially stronger units, like gunpowder units or knight units, will also cost quite an amount of Prestige. While Units are overall more expensive Prestige cost-wise, none of the troops actually cost any Prestige Upkeep.

Engineer shop upgrade

In addition to troop upgrades, saving your earned prestige allows you now to upgrade the engineering shop, providing more high-tiered weaponry, which is otherwise inaccessible.

Prestige Projects

In Altdorf, you will also now find a well-connected Noble who will allow you to finance or use your influence throughout the empire, to gain more Prestige, or make use of it for extremely exotic things.

New Career: The Knight of Mousillon

The Knight of Mousillon shares some commonalities with his Bretonnian Counterpart. The silver-tongued men serve the Serpent of Mousillon and can ill-fate the most noble knights. With the help of Necromancers and Vampires in his party, the Knight of Mousillon can conquer back the lands of Mousillon, and free Bretonnia of the Lie of the Lady.

One feature of the Knight of Mousillon is the ability to transform regular Bretonnian knights or troops into Mousillon knights. While peasant troops can be slowly transformed into their Mousillon variant, Bretonnian knights (it doesn’t matter if imprisoned or of your own troops) can become Knights of Mousillon.

For this our new feature of the career button becomes handy. We will make use of this button for a few career mechanics. stay tuned!