A developer has created a very smart mod that turns Crusader Kings 3 and Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord as a single game, allowing players to strategize in the former and battle inside the latter.
For as much as Crusader Kings 3 does an impressive job at simulating the complex political and social structures of medieval rule, one particular element that it lacks is a battle simulator that allows players to jump into the action and see their forces battle it out in real-time.
Now, however, a developer has created [Crusader Blade, a new mod that remedies that exact problem. Taking your armies from Crusader Kings 3, the Crusader Blade mod then uses the battle engine from Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord to allow you to fight against your enemies at ground level before sending the data back to Crusader Kings 3 to update your campaign.
The mod even accounts for scaling issues and factors in the size and scope of battles that each game can run. As it doesn’t have to render conflict in real-time, battles in Crusader Kings 3 can sometimes be fought between tens of thousands of troops on the battlefield at once - a factor that Mount & Blade 2 can’t quite manage.
Thankfully, the mod takes this into account. Taking a proportional approach to unit representation as it brings data from Crusader Kings 3 to Mount & Blade 2, the mod looks at both the size and composition of the armies set to go into battle and maintains this as it scales the forces down to a size that Mount and Blade can render on screen. Then when the battle is over, the mod applies a similar logic to sending that data back to Crusader Kings 3 - scaling up your losses so that they make sense in your campaign going forward.
I just had to get my hands on that little gem and you can, too, by downloading the mod here:
Needless to say, you must own both Crusader Kings 3 and Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord.
M&B Bannerlord is still in EA but already well worth the money. Truly a worthy successor to M&B Warband! And you don’t have to be afraid to wreck kings in Bannerlord… hell, you can execute them once you win a battle!
omg… I don’t know how many hundreds and hundreds of hours I spent just wrecking Calradia as a warlord and slaying hundreds upon hundreds of warriors… I could feel the berserker waking in me, lol.
M&B Viking Conquest is very very good too.
I didn’t have that problem… but then again, I hardly ever played vanilla, I always had a few mods running so maybe I never captured a king while playing the vanilla… it’s been years since I played Warband/Viking Conquest so my memory is hazy.
Maybe it was a bug in your copy of the game? Or did other players mention it too?
Oh my… A M&B MMO! I’d kill for that!
You must know the Freelencer mod, right? That goes in that style of play except it’s still NPC’s.
You know that Bannerlord has multiplayer, yea? It’s really difficult but it’s awesome.
I didn’t have that problem… but then again, I hardly ever played vanilla, I always had a few mods running so maybe I never captured a king while playing the vanilla… it’s been years since I played Warband/Viking Conquest so my memory is hazy.
