Mount & Blade II Gets Update 1.2 and Beta 1.3; Read the Massive Patch Notes

Taleworlds continues to work hard on improving its early access game Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord. While they have left behind the initial one-patch-a-day beathtaking pace, they’re still proceeding quite quickly.

They just released update 1.2 which has been in beta for roughly a week, alongside beta update 1.3 for those who are a bit more adventurous and are willing to trade some stability for performance.

As usual, the beta update is opt-in, so you need to manually select it  (right-click on the game on your Steam client, select “properties” and then opt “into e1.3.0 beta” in the betas tab).

Whether you want to try the beta or stay on the safe side, both updates bring sizable performance improvements compared to the previous versions.

Below you can read the full patch notes.

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord is currently available in Early Access for PC. If you want to see more, you can enjoy the latest trailer.

Multiplayer Crashes

• Fixed several bugs that caused the player state to be incorrect. Those are some of the issues that prevented players from logging in.
• Fixed a crash on clients that happened while joining a crowded server (Siege).
• Secured a code on the dedicated servers to possibly prevent a crash when a weapon is dropped from an agent (Siege).
• Fixed a rare server crash.

Multiplayer Design & Balance

• Troop Balance
  • Battania
    • Clan Warrior Troop Count Increased 20 > 21
    • Savage Troop Count Increased 17 > 18
    • Wildling Troop Count Increased 16 > 17
    • Mounted Warrior Armor Increased 8 > 16
    • Mounted Warrior Troop Count Increased 9 > 16
    • Oathsworn Armor Increased 40 > 43
  • Empire
    • Courser Price Increased 130 > 140
    • Palatine Guard Menavlion Perk equips correct Menavlion now.
    • Recruit Speed Increased 78 > 80
  • Vlandia
    • Sergeant Armor Decreased 41 > 37
    • Knight Price Increased 180 > 190
  • Sturgia
    • Brigand Speed Increased 75 > 79
    • Varyag Price Increased 140 > 150
    • Berserker Armor Decreased 15 > 6
    • Berserker Troop Count Decreased 18 > 17
    • Raider Troop Count Increased 7 > 9
    • Druzhinnik Price Increased 170 > 180
  • Aserai
    • Skirmisher Speed Increased 78 > 80
• Weapon Balance
  • Menavlion Length Decreased 200 > 179
  • Menavlion Damage Decreased 147 > 129
  • Heavy Menavlion Damage Decreased 177 > 166
  • Long Menavlion Damage Decreased 149 > 137

• AI is more likely to block when equipped with a shield. Common troops now generally have higher weapon skills.
• Fixed a crash that occurred when the player was a faction ruler and ended a contract with a mercenary or minor faction and refused to settle their debt.
• Pregnancy chance has been lowered.
• An AI bug that reduced performance is fixed.
• Agents no longer block ally attacks in the shield wall formation.
• Multiplayer client crash fixed.
• Fixed a bug that caused extra guards to spawn when entering a lord’s hall more than once.
• Better warning before crashing for systems with low memory available
• Lower chance of crashing the game while trying to load a save file with a mismatched version.
• Fixed the crash that occurred after the player sends the Family Feud Issue Quest’s companion to another Issue’s alternative solution.
• Caravans start selling prisoners they captured.
• AI combat effectiveness has been increased.
• Towns were going bankrupt in one week. This problem was fixed.

Crashes

• A crash that was caused by accessing the rider of a mount while the mount was changed was fixed.
• Fixed a crash occurred when executing prisoner heroes.

Performance

• VRAM usage was reduced by solving some memory leaks in the UI.
• Fixed some of the spikes in missions.
• Minor GPU memory usage reduction for the world map.

Save & Load

• Skill Level is preserved when loading old version savegames.

Localisation

• Added traditional Chinese.
• Some grammar mistakes are corrected and some typos fixed.
• Improvements, additions and corrections for Turkish and Simplified Chinese translations.

Art

• Fleeing points for AI were added to battle terrains.
• Fixed misplaced textures and added better-looking elements to the shop stands.
• Fixed some visual issues in one of the Aserai villages.
• Fixed Vlandian Vanguard shield banner issue
• Fixed certain visual glitches that appear when rendering blood on flora.
• Added three new items for crafting – one scabbard for swords and two blades for spears.
• Fixed some problems on crafting items.

UI

• Fixed a bug where map notifications were sometimes lost without being shown to the player.

Battles and Sieges

• When looting enemies, it is now possible for the system to provide an item with a modifier if the default value of the item is too low or too high.
• Missiles can now pass through between siege ladders’ steps.
• Fixed that corpses and thrown boulders were not being erased after the entity below them was destroyed.

Combat AI

• A critical bug that caused AI in sieges to act unexpectedly and possibly cause crashes, if the player was aiding a side (being a separate ally team during the siege mission), was fixed.
• A critical bug that caused AI pathfinding to almost always reset its path when moving from static to dynamic navmeshes and vice versa, which caused performance issues and agents not being able to climb siege towers correctly, was fixed.
• Incorrect ordering of mission behaviours caused a team’s general to be unset at the “choosing formation to lead” stage of army sieges. This was fixed.
• AI that should’ve attacked the inner gate after breaking the outer gate with the ram in a siege tried to run into the castle over ladders because they chose the reverse side of the gate to stand and wait for reinforcing those that attacked the gate due to a bug. This was fixed.
• Fixed a bug that occurred especially when armies were far away from each other and caused agents to run towards the enemy when given the order to retreat.
• Removed unnecessary pathfinding calls by the AI that caused performance issues especially in sieges without impact on the decisions they were trying to make.

Character Development System

• Changed Skill XP increase formula to 10 + skill level.
• Fixed an issue in character creation where switching to female from male and back would reset all beard and other male-only properties.

Clan and Party

• Companions now come with cheap items with modifiers, so they are easier to recruit.

Economy and Trade

• Higher tier armours are now produced in towns and can sometimes be found in the marketplace.

Crafting

• Fixed a bug where crafted items could have different stats then shown during creation.
• Fixed a bug where crafted items lost changes to stats when loaded from a savegame.

Settlement Actions (Town, Village, Castle and Hideout)

• Boosting construction now adds 50 construction rather than x2 construction speed
• Fixed an issue with asking companions to look for themselves or asking villagers to look for our companions near us.
• Fixed a bug that made the settlement project’s completion time negative.

Quests & Issues

• Family Feud quest related fixes/improvements
  • Bugs
    • Fixed a bug that causes quest dialogues to disappear after Save&Load.
    • Fixed a bug that causes a quest NPC to not spawn in the target village.
  • Improvements
    • Added/Changed some dialogue texts.
    • Added/Changed some log entries.
    • If the player dismisses the quest NPC from their party, the quest will fail.
• The Spy Among Us (The Spy Party) quest related fixes/improvements
  • General
    • Quest title is changed to “The Spy Among Us”
    • From now on, players can activate the quest even if the quest giver is inside an army.
  • Fixes
    • Fixed a bug that changes face keys of spy candidates.
    • Fixed a bug that causes the UI health bar to show wrong values for the player when duelling with the spy.
    • Fixed a bug that causes spy candidates to disappear when saving & loading the game inside the involved settlement.
  • Improvements
    • The spy will scale up according to the player’s skills.
    • Added better battle equipment for the spy.
    • Added/Changed some dialogue texts.
    • The randomization parameter for townspeople to give player clues was adjusted to prevent problematic situations.
    • Added visual trackers for the spy candidates (Default: “Alt” key).
    • Issue duration was changed from 35 days to 5 days.
• Lord Needs A Tutor quest related fixes/improvements
  • Fixes
    • Fixed a bug that caused the quest NPC to disappear after the player was taken as a prisoner.
    • Fixed a bug that causes the quest giver and the quest NPC to be the same person.
  • Improvements
    • Added/Changed some log entries.
    • If the player and the quest NPC are somehow separated, the player will be able to track and find the quest NPC via the quest log and can thus continue progressing the quest.
• Lord Wants Rival Captured quest related fixes/improvements
  • Fixes
    • Fixed a bug that causes the quest to get stuck if the quest giver has no fiefs.
    • Fixed a bug that causes duplicate/empty log entries.
  • Improvements
    • Added a dialogue option that allows the player to deliver the target NPC to the quest giver.
• Minor fixes for Headman Needs Grain issue.
• Further issue quest dialogue improvements.
• Persuasion parameters fixed in Army of Poachers, Family Feud and other quests.

Other

• Overhauled equipment of minor factions to better fit their characteristics.
• When we entered a town scene for the second time, guards were missing. This was fixed.
• Fixed the colour of the player’s companion portrait when entering a hostile settlement
• Made the player’s brother a bit younger.
• Fixed a bug that caused prisoners to become governors.

Audio

• Added notification shouts to certain events (like the distant shout when someone captures a flag).

Server & Network

• Fixed issues related to requesting to join a custom game that is ending.
• Fixed issues caused by multiple party members requesting to join a game at the same time.
• Fixed some rare cases of disconnections from the Lobby.

Performance

• Major CPU performance improvements on both field and siege battles.
• Minor performance improvements on multi-core usage.

Art

• Fixed beards protruding from helmets.

Audio

• Minor improvement on sounds playing delayed on slower HDDs.
• Audio performance improvements for older CPUs.
• Removed clicks and pops from boulder impact sounds.
• Some volume changes for ambient sounds.

Known Issues
https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php?threads/known-issues-updated.401168/

Versions
Native: e1.3.0
SandboxCore: e1.3.0
Sandbox: e1.3.0
Storymode: e1.3.0
CustomBattle: e1.3.0

Crashes

• Fixed a rare crash that occurred when two player-related events on the campaign map started at the same time.
• Fixed a game freeze that happened when a party is persuaded in the middle of siege preparation.
• Fixed an issue where maxing out attributes and focus points crashed the game.

Performance

• Significantly reduced scene loading times.
• Performance improvements for battles.

Localisation

• Improvements, additions and corrections for some texts.
• Turkish localisation updates.

Art

• 3 new menu backgrounds added.
• Added AI flee points in villages.
• Updated some prop LODs.
• Fixed some mesh physics problems.
• Fixed some issues in the Empire tavern scene.
• Fixed LOD issues in the forest hideout scene.
• Fixed clipping issues on various clothes.

Animations

• Glaive attack animations added for camel riders on the campaign map.
• Animation overhaul of initial character creation stages.

Campaign Map

• World Map GPU memory usage reduced.

UI

• Fixed an exploit in inventory that let the player take the equipment of heroes that joined the party for a quest.
• Fixed an error while closing the game with ALT-F4.
• Minor fixes and tweaks in scene notification popup, character developer.
• Fixed a bug that caused the game to freeze while changing compared item stats with ALT when there is no available item to compare in the inventory.
• Fixed placement of perks, full learning rate and current skill vertical indicators in character developer.
• Fixed speed mount icon being shown for non-mountable animals.
• Minor performance improvement for SP kill-feed and SP scoreboard.
• Fixed main party health tooltip formatting in the map info bar.
• Made the character developer screen more widescreen friendly.
• Added Destroyed and Not Destroyed filter options to the clan list page in the encyclopedia.
• Added Alive/Dead status filter options to encyclopedia hero list page.
• Destroyed clans’ banners now show up less saturated in encyclopedia pages.
• Loaded modules panel in Saved Games is now scrollable.

Battles and Sieges

• Increased effect of number advantage in simulation battles.
• Siege assault battles now last longer in simulation.
• Increased effect of wall quality in siege assault simulations.
• Battle missions check the maturity of agents during spawning and increase age if required.
• Fixed a problem that caused AI to fall from walls at the siege tower attachment position.
• During sally outs, garrisons now consider all enemy power outside of the settlement, not just parties which are in the same faction with the siege camp leader.

Combat AI

• Fixed a bug that occurred when either side was too weak in a siege. In cases like this, the more powerful side would sometimes try to charge without any path over the walls causing them to walk into walls.
• Fixed a rare problem with archers checking if they can see an enemy using colliders, which could cause them to face the wrong direction.

Character Development System

• Increased effect of trade skill on trade penalty to 0.4% per skill point.
• Decreased the bonus of Artisan Community and Great Investor perks.
• Implemented and fixed cultural feats in character creation.
• Increased adolescence options for the Battanian culture from 4 to 6 in character creation.
• Fixed a bug where talking with the tutorial headman gave a large amount of charm experience.
• Tweaked age progression. Characters should be looking more like their age.

Clan and Party

• Increased chance of pregnancy if the number of children is 1 or 2.
• Hero Wages are no longer 0.
• Lord parties have more experienced troops and fewer recruits. They also use their party size limit as much as possible.
• Parties do not recruit prisoners of defeated parties if they are at their party size limit. This was causing some AI parties to lose their better troops because of desertion.
• Garrison sizes are increased a bit due to the better economical management of clan leaders.
• The escape chance of prisoners is reduced by 25% when they are in mobile parties. It is reduced by 50% if they are at the player’s settlement.
• The clan leaders’ financial situation has an effect on raiding probability now, so poor clans want to raid more.
• “Donate troops” and “Inspect troops” options were disabled for caravan, villager and militia parties.

Armies

• Armies with little food now return to settlements more frequently rather than continuing their hostile plans and losing troops due to starvation.
• Parties and armies with a high wounded ratio now prefer resting in settlements more frequently to heal their troops.
• Sometimes army member parties were attacking parties more powerful than them assuming their army would help, however, they were not attached to the army leader yet and assistance from the army did not occur. This bug was fixed.
• While heading to a settlement, NPC parties sometimes also visit other settlements they are passing nearby on their way. This results in better recruitment.
• If caravans have lots of wounded troops they also wait longer in towns to recover.
• When an army visits a fortification, the player – as an army follower – can open the settlement menu with the enter settlement option.

Economy and Trade

• Players can now sell goods to caravans at a reduced price.
• Caravans are now created with sumpter horses.
• Player trade with owned caravans was disabled due to balance concerns.
• The player now has a secondary option while creating a caravan – setting it up with a higher number of better troops. However, caravan forming costs are 1.5x in this scenario.

Crafting

• The weapon becoming invisible when showing the holster is activated on crafting is fixed.

Settlement Actions (Town, Village, Castle and Hideout)

• Spawn probability of mercenary troops at taverns was increased from 33% to 50%.

Quests & Issues

• Fixed minor problems with Headman Needs to Deliver a Herd Quest.
• Fixed minor problems and made some design changes on Notable Wants Daughter Found Quest.
• Gang Leader Needs Weapon quest bug fixes and improvements
  • Fixes
    • Fixed a crash that occurred when the player completed the quest successfully.
    • Fixed a crash that occurred when the player decided to leave the settlement when caught by quest guards.
    • Fixed a bug that caused the quest log progress to reset after Save & Load.
    • Fixed a notification bug when quest guards took the player’s weapons.
  • Improvements
    • Reward gold formula is changed.
    • Alternative (companion) solution duration formula is changed.
    • Required trade/roguery skill for companion formula is changed.
    • Requested weapon amount formula is changed.
    • Stealing weapon chance for quest guards formula is changed.
    • From now on, quest guards will stop the player more often.
    • Quest giver will no longer request crossbows.
• Fixed a problem that caused the conversation to become stuck when the player clicks the dialogue option “About the task you gave me” to the “Captured by Bounty Hunters” quest giver after saving and loading.
• Fixed the “Investigate ‘Neretzes’ Folly” quest progression regression bug that happened when a noble died that the player had talked to before.

Conversations & Encounters

• If the player is mounted, they will spawn a bit further from a conversation character when using the “Talk” button in the settlement menu.
• Disabled spawning with a horse in map conversation missions (encounters) to prevent seeing horse ears and horse harness.
• Fixed a bug that caused some conversation agents to stay focused on the player even after the conversation ends.
• Fix the waiting for nightfall bar resetting problem in hideouts when the player opens up a menu.

Other

• Shield hitpoint values had been rebalanced based on their tier and material used.
• Peasants can no longer be upgraded into Watchmen directly.
• Stats of some faction army troops have been fixed and rebalanced in order to maintain faction balance.
• Tournaments will now have exclusive, weaker and easier to break shields.
• Our storyline brother now wears cheaper armour so players are less likely to strip him for his gear.
• All Sturgian faction troops now use round shields. They also use shields that are more fitting to their level and abilities.
• Fixed a bug that caused players who continued the game from old save files to be unable to starve.

Game Modes

• The reason for losing sometimes not showing up in Captain mode is fixed.
• Troop face randomisation in Captain mode spawn is fixed.

Other – Miscellaneous

• Added a cooldown for players who have left the game more than the allowed times in a given time frame. Currently, players who left matchmaker games 2 times in the last 3 hours will be blocked from matchmaking for 15 minutes. Note: these values anytime without requiring a patch if necessary or if we encounter issues.

Server & Network

• Factions for matchmaker games are now evenly distributed.
• Fixed a crash while entering a multiplayer team deathmatch.
• Official custom games now require anti-cheat.

UI

• Added server status visual system in HUD.
• Minor tweaks and improvements to the Matchmaking tab.
• Troop type icons on top (near player avatars) is now 35% bigger while in the class selection screen.
• Fixed character customisation clothing option not working.

Crashes

• Pressing ESC key on the loading screen causing an infinite loop is fixed.

Art

• Lighting adjustments.
• Fixed parallax problems on some of the stone meshes.

Animations

• New hand shield active defend animations.
• Defend hand shield direction angles are polished.
• Removed blend durations for some of the rider fall animations.
• New idle animations added for camels.
• Riders falling from horses can only block when close to standing.

Audio

• Fixed an issue with sound devices being disabled in config files.

UI

• Added crosshair outlines to improve crosshair visibility.
• Added a new “Vertical Aim Correction” option to gameplay options.
• Added a new “ForceVSync in menus” option to video options.

Combat AI

• Cavalry had a hard time adjusting their rotation in melee and especially when two AI agents fought each other they could loop around each other, major improvements have been made regarding this issue.

Performance

• Many HDD spike issues were fixed.
• Reduced memory allocations during battles and optimised some of the formation AI. These should reduce spikes occurring during battles.
• Ragdolls and dropped items performance improvements.
• Multi-Core performance improvements.
• Performance improvements for trail effects.

Other

• Boulders can now knock agents down.
• Fixed scale change of thrown boulders’ after they stop.
• Horses can no longer climb on ladders.
• Corpses now receive additional blood along with their surroundings.