1.4

Mod Future

2024 turned out to be busier than I expected. It was not viable to push a satisfying public update due to so many things being ongoing but not done. Now, BK is highly stable, and BKCE is mostly finished. For 2025, I aim towards working at one feature at a time (not multiple), and releasing these as they come. As usual, contributors will test smaller updates, which I make weekly if possible.

In short, the mod will continue to be developed, and I plan on making updates oriented towards delivering a specific feature, which will be chosen with the help of contributors. If you'd like access to more frequent and smaller updates, as well as a say in what direction the mod takes, please consider joinning my Patreon or sending a donation via Buy me a Coffee if you wish to support the mod and become a tester.

Banner Kings

I tried here to be as accurate as possible, but sometimes its hard to gauge what is relevant to public version, and what changes were made that are only relevant to test versions. In any case, there is quite a pack of good updates, and I'll summarize them here briefly:

• Overall
  Significant performance boost. Fixed many nagging and common bugs. Gameplay is smooth and very stable (without other mods), allowing for long, crashless campaigns.

• Economy
  'Caravan trains' entirely fixed. Quite more balanced and stable. Trading is hard but rewarding. Improvements still need to be done, but money is definitely a worry before you have a fief, which is certainly how it should be.

• Diplomacy
  Full on civil wars are in! Many fixes to groups, groups are more relevant. The new Relations Target feature now makes relations much more trait-based. You no longer build up relations to 100 and have them stay there. Relations move towards a logical target based on the compatibility and context between 2 people (more close to Crusader Kings relations). Relations and Legitimacy are extremely important in keeping rebels from gathering against you.

• Religions
  Religious warfare can now be declared. Religions allow different marriage types, including polygamous marriages. Of course, this requires a mod that depends on BK that adds content. Any modder can make this to their own mod. For the best lore-accurate content, we have Banner Kings: Cultures Expanded mod.

• Rebellions
  Local rebellions (from Loyalty) now much improved. Castle fiefs can now rebel! Rebels form their own kingdoms, take cultural names and banners. No more cringe "Clan of X person" hanging around as a kingdomless, independent clan. Castles have more relevance.

• Mercenary gameplay
  Whole new contracts with binding terms that yield rewards but also consequences. No more going around and doing whatever you want, serving a new king every week. Contracts have due dates, not respecting them is very negative. Kingdoms can ditch mercs or refuse to extend their contracts. Likewise, mercs can refuse to be let go, including declare war and join an enemy of their current contractors!

Economy

• Fief economy adjustments, more starting money and less over time
• Fix caravan trains / Significant rebalances to trade power in order to prevent trade abnormalities
• Several optional economy mechanics including rotting food and town patrols
• Reduced caravans globally, for performance and trade purposes
• Faster BK custom parties
• Boosted gold supply at castles and towns
• Added MCM option to reduce prices of food and trade goods, for experimenting. Will change the economy A LOT!

Religions & Marriage

• Religious wars can now be declared
• Added polygamous and companion marriages
• Marriage doctrines for religions
• Warfare doctrines for religions allowing new religious war justifications
• Added religion leaders
• Various updates to religion faith leaders, fervor calculation, UI
• At campaign start, preachers immediatly spawn and faith leaders are automatically set when possible
• Marriage logic and UI updates
• Faith types such as Dualism, Polytheism with different modifiers

Mercenary

• Mercenaries, AI & player, now have service contracts. Entering service may yield a down payment / earnest money. Contracts last 1 year and must be fulfilled in order to yield full benefits.
  • Kingdoms can now fire mercs. Player is notified when fired
  • Merc clans have criteria to join kingdoms: relations, culture, faith
  • AI has careers, dont request privileges yet
  • AI considers due date as major factor factor to leave/fire: unlikely to do either
  • Updated logic with other factors such as reputation or enemies count (from kingdoms perspective)
  • Earnest money depends on reputation
  • Players can choose to extend contract as mercenary if kingdom is willing, or extend hired mercs as a ruler
  • Breaking contract date yields significant relation downsides and reputation (if mercs choose to leave). Onuses scale with days remaining to serve. Therefore breaking contracts both reduces your next earnest money by virtue of reputation damage, and burns your bridges on being hired again.

• Mercenaries can now create armies with their own company's parties
• Mercenary influence reward for army participation is reduced by 50% in a mercenary-led army. This intends to not let mercenaries drain their pay (influence) by making an army, but also not exploiting it.
• Mercenaries now cannot be recruited to armies other than by their leader and ruler of the contractor kingdom
• Mercenaries can now refuse to be let go if their contract is not ended. Additionally, they can chose to instantly join a current enemy of their contractor (player has UI to choose).
• AI Merc parties do not dismiss during peace
• Mercenary firing now pays remaining influence variable according to their generosity (100% to 0%)
• Merc companies gather more troops during peace
• Merc clans convert troops to their own

Rebellions

• Rebel clans change to cultural name and create a kingdom once deemed successful on their rebellion
• Castles are now be able to rebel

Diplomacy & Relations

• AI forms large rebellions with claimants!
• Added Relations Target feature
• Added Secession radical groups
• Overhauled AI granting titles. Now can and should favour granting settlements they do not legally hold and recent conquests
• Decreased likelihood of radical groups gathering
• Added settings to adjust relationship xp gains, prevent Relations Target triggering xp dumps
• Player is asked to join radical groups
• Player & AI can now dissolve trade pacts
• Adjusted who creates and joins political factions
• Radical groups should now dissolve when conditions for demand are met by other means
• Increased relation to ruler as factor for radical groups
• Added MCM setting to set base reluctance for radical groups gathering
• Improved war declaration logic
• Adjusted AI army targeting logic
• Updated kingdom diplomacies to take defensive stances against stronger enemies
• Added a negative modifier to foreign lords in successions

Fixes

• Fixed legitimacy broken factor
• Fixed parties holding in front of towns
• Fixed bandit heroes stuck
• Fixed diplomacy "defensive stance" logic preventing wars as well as other corrections
• Fixed not all divinities showing up in blessing options
• Fixed village quest prisoner costs
• Fixed a crash associated to fief owner vote
• Fixed inconsistencies in groups due to saving/loading
• Fixed troops not matching the culture era
• Fixed a crash associated to bandit heroes
• Fixed a crash associated with wars and successions
• Fixed empty kingdoms still listed as active
• Fixed prisoners may not yield ransom
• Fixed a possible case of 0 damage in simulated battles
• Fixed some abnormal morale dip cases from supplies
• Correction for title contract aspects
• Fixed rites time restraints
• Various fixes to kingdom groups, refactoring for less human errors for coding in next groups
• Fixed mercenary professional troop skills
• Fixed castle caravans spawning at random towns
• Fixed foreign lords not changing to new faction on rulership election
• Fixed a case for buildings incorrectly being destroyed on game loading

Misc

• Significant performance improvement
• Population and Innovation MCM settings
• Decision to merge armies together
• When full of food, towns will now spawn locally produced foodstuffs and livestock into the market
• Added settings to configure sizes of parties when spawning
• Adjusted AI party max wages to reflect the troop wages setting
• Option to send family to feasts or not
• Parties can restock on food while going to feasts
• Player party buys supplies on entering fiefs, parties now buy supplies from castles
• Caravans now transfer between clan successors / eliminate with clan

Banner Kings: Cultures Expanded

• Expansions to southern side of map
• Added several new local bandit types across the map
• Added whole new loading screens
• A couple new cultures & religions
• 1 culture must be unlocked by decision, not playable from start
• Added various cultural missions
• Added several new Mercenary clans, covering all cultures except Lokti. Added cut content clans
• Added tons of unique culture traits to all cultures
• Adjusted various culture details like culture of militia, rebel lords and troops, etc.
• Various troop tree additions & refactors
• Transition to EOE Flavour Pack for Wilunding cultures: Rhodok, Swadisch, Osrickin. Lords included
• Updated various relationships between faiths (tolerated, hated)
• Corrected darusosian cults

1.3

We are elated to announce both Banner Kings 1.3 and its first version of its sister mod, Banner Kings: Cultures Expanded! BKCE was a huge effort, which is still ongoing, but we firmly believe it pays off. BKCE proposes to be the best version of extended vanilla Bannerlord: an expansion in all aspects of game content (such as troops, factions), packed full with cultural flavoring and more than a dozen religions to bring life to the game world. All lore-based. Not lore-inspired, lore-based! And that's on top of a bunch of important and new things in Banner Kings itself.

Mod Future

I, Basileus, have become increasingly occupied in real life, since I both have a full time job and am in university. Running Banner Kings (which I do almost entirely myself) is quite time consuming. Future updates will now take months between each other. But I do not intend to stop working on both mods. Updates will be packed with good content as I am to continue providing value to my players.

I ask that you consider supporting the mod. The support I get makes modding so much viable time-wise. Contributors also get updates of content as I make it. While this means less stable gameplay, it means more constant improvements and features. Testing by contributors has immensely helped in improving the mod while also providing tons of fun to the testers. Please consider joinning my Patreon or sending a donation via Buy me a Coffee if you wish to support the mod and become a tester.

Features

Diplomacy

Banner Kings now hosts a complete diplomatic system. Before you ask: no, it does NOT accept conflicts from other diplomacy mods. The system will continue to be expanded with the mod, but most of its core principles are in place. It's important to note that the AI makes use of all these features and is impacted by them in the exact same way as the player. These are:

Casus Belli, War Support Overhaul

Casus belli are now a concept within the game. There are several types of them, many based on the kingdom's government system, as well as cultures. For example, Battania can go on a Great Raid, while Empire contestors can use Imperial Reconquest on one another. Casus Belli are now the core of war support. This means that kingdoms need a reason to attack one another, rather than attack each other randomly.

On top of that, War Support itself has been completely overhauled. The vanilla code has been ditched - it was long and complicated. Instead we made an entirely new logic, and solved many issues with the system. While it is not fully adjusted yet, it should be overhaul a much better experience. Issues addressed by our changes:

• Distance. No more wars between factions on opposite edges of the map;
• Multiple wars. Big NO NO. Kingdoms will not declare 3 wars at once anymore;
• Short wars. A war MUST last at least 1 year. Since the game is overall slower, they still last longer than that. No more instant wars;
• Illogical wars. A casus belli is necessary. Every war has a purpose;
• Variety of opinions. Lords have now quite varying opinions on wars. For example:
  • Broke lords do not support wars;
  • Every casus belli is associated with a set of traits. A brutal lord will support more a raiding justification than a merciful one.

In order to represent these changes and many of the new concepts, UI extensions were made to make these factors clear. As a result, you as player can finally understand why a kingdom wants to go to war or not, something I myself could not explain as a developer (due to unnecessary complexity), and players struggled to understand as they became frustrated with the broken logic of their game.

Alliances

Alliances can now be negotiated between kingdoms. In BKCE, AI kingdoms start with certain alliances. These alliances will be expanded to be marriage-bound as well. Currently the way to set an alliance is using the vanilla Diplomacy tab. Allied kingdoms help each other defensively. Alliances are also unilateral, meaning only 1 alliance can be held at a time, until marriage-bound alliances are introduced. Even though, negotiated, marriage-less alliances will still be limited to 1. Because they are defensive, this means your ally will not help you on your conquest wars.

Truces

As their name suggests, truces establish that 2 kingdoms shall not wage war against one another. While they are not allies, they are sworn to not attack each other either. A normal truce lasts 3 years, other options may be added in the future.

A truce is easier and cheaper to negotiate than an alliance, and lets you not have to worry about an potential enemy for a while.

Trade Pacts

Trade pacts establish an amicable relationship between kingdoms. While it does not impede wars like Truces, and certainly does not have the effects of an Alliance, trade pacts make 2 kingdoms less likely to attack one another. Their main purpose, however, is to stimulate trade and flow of caravans between both realms.

Trade pacts remove the entry fee for caravans at settlements, making the other realm a more interesting trade target. This does not mean you or the lords will make more money, quite the opposite. Because caravan entry fees are paid to the fief lords, this means less revenue for the involved lords. However, the increased trade flow stimulates prosperity by increasing the amount of goods necessary to satisfy population consumptions. Also, by virtue of trading with one another, other realms, potentially enemies, are not benefiting from this trade.

Therefore, trade pacts act as a soft truce and stimulus for long term prosperity. They do not increase lord revenue by generating money or any kind of gimmick.

War Fatigue, Kingdom Fatigue

Both the overall kingdom and its specific wars now have a fatigue tracker. A kingdom accumulates fatigue every day it is at war, regardless of what is happening - that is Kingdom Fatigue. In addition, for every war a kingdom is, it may accumulate War Fatigue associated with the progress of that war. For example, the more troops are lost, the more fatigue is accumulated over that war. This is correlated with the kingdom's total manpower, so the casualties need to scale with kingdom size, essentially.
Fatigue represents how that endeavour is perceived by the common opinion. If a war is being badly lost, then it is more quickly seen as a lost cause, and fatigue stimulates declaring peace rather than continuing it. Kingdom fatigue instead applies to the whole kingdom, and on top of helping support to stop current wars, it also stimulates not starting new wars.

Economy

Several changes were made to the economy, but most importantly was the addition of Castles to the overall economy.

• Castles are now visited by caravans for trading;
• The player can now trade at castles;
• Castles now have workshops and produce things;
• Castles consume things just like towns;
• Castle trading is less profitable than town trading;
• New trade items (added as productions through BKCE) such as Spices (cut content);
• Trading is harder and less exploitable due to less demand for items (deflation);
• Adjusted the prices of livestock, which have embedded costs of their hide and meat yields (deflation);
• Reduced the recruitment and wage costs of units (deflation). MCM configurable.

Game Balance

A host of new balance changes should make the game more interesting.

Relations

One of the changes brought to relationships is the implementation of "true opinions": a person's opinion now does not reflect their clan leader's opinion, and is instead completely personal. This was quite requested and now a part of the mod. In additions, new triggers for relationship changes were added and will continue to be added, such that relation is a more relevant part of the game,** and specially make it such you lose relationship more**. Vanilla design is all about gaining: you gain renown, gain influence, gain skill, gain relationship, hardly ever losing these, and even if you, its not that much.

• When losing a battle, army members lose relation with their army leader;
• When conquering a fief, notables lose/gain relation with their conqueror based on their faith and culture. If they had a ruler that matched them, it means you are an invader and therefore you lose relation. The opposite applies: conquering a fief of your culture and faith from an outsider yields positive relation.

Experience

A new skill level model as added. It can be turned off at MCM. This new model makes leveling less exponential and more gradual instead: first levels are harder than vanilla, but the later levels are easier. It always struck me as not right that you gain levels by swinging a sword once at the beginning, but later you require a mind-numbingly high about of experience to gain a single level. The new skill model remedies that. It is a known issue that the Skills UI does not reflect that and will show experience bars such as 2000xp / 40xp.

Military Balance, AI

A few significant changes were made to armies / clans as well, that should help wars being healthy quite a bit.

• AI parties will join armies on their own volition, based on their traits. This means bigger armies with less influence cost;
• Reduced the influence cost to call parties to an army, which greatly helps AI using the system;
• Cohesion loss was dramatically reduced. Since parties are slower, cohesion now mirrors that by allowing armies to last longer. MCM configurable;
• Lord parties now have much more space, specially the clan leader's party. MCM configurable;
• Reworked fief volunteers replenishment. Recruits replenish faster allowing bigger armies. Replenishment is now significantly impacted by stability, so a war-torn realm will have that reflected in its capacity to gather soldiers;
• Influence cap now has a harsher impact on influence gain, becoming more relevant.

Eras, Innovations

The innovations system was completely reworked. Rather than an almost hidden, small system (tucked away in the culture part of encyclopedia additions), Innovations now are a major factor to how cultures play out, specially thanks to their agricultural developments, which allow fiefs to host more population, the very core of the economy and military within the mod. On top of that, the system now allows troops to have technological improvement over time, reflecting the changes over the decades. For each Era, troops can take a new set of equipments.

On top of that, players may now directly interact with innovations by doing Research. Research allows you to develop an innovation faster, while you yourself develop your scholarship and another skill, based on what type of innovations you are researching. For example, researching new types of buildings progresses your engineering.
Here are the changes in sum:

• Many innovations were addded;
• Increased relevance of innovations;
• Innovations are now separated into Eras. 3 Eras exist by default;
• Troops may change equipment on each Era;
• It is now possible to research innovations and develop you skills while doing it.

BK does not alter the troops to use the system, as it is not a troops mod. The system is modable and may be used by other mods that depend on Banner Kings. Banner Kings: Cultures Expanded does exactly that, and provides troop upgrades using BK's setup.

Modding Support

A large amount of existing and new parts of the mod were changed to be modable. For developers, that is mostly made through the use of the DefaultTypeInitializer class. A good example of modding BK is BKCE: all its BK content (religions, languages, troop spawns, etc) are made using good code practices through inheritance and singletons and can be easily used by a C# developer, allowing for a plug-in modding experience such that you only need to worry about your content, and not how the game will handle it.