Mount & Blade: Warband - Viking Conquest Reforged Edition

I hadn't planned to try this because I haven't really enjoyed any of the other mod/alternative settings I've tried, but the wait for Bannerlord became too much and I needed a M&B fix that wasn't more Calradia ... so I picked up GoG versions of both Warband and Viking Conquest Reforged on sale. Wow, am I glad I gave it a chance. It is of course still M&B Warband under the hood, but there are enough changes of emphasis and balance to make VC feel like a fresh game. More difficult (depending on settings, to some extent) and so perhaps not the best entry point for a new player ... but for a long-time player it is great. It forced me out of my horse archer & cavalry tactics comfort-zone and made me engage with one-handed weapons and the shield wall. The re-balancing of infantry vs cavalry, and melee vs missile, is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the game, certainly on the combat side of things. And of course there's resonance for those who like the historical period, or who enjoy shows like Vikings or the Last Kingdom, or who have immersed themselves the novels corresponding to that latter series. The campaign is minimally polished and presumably limited by what the engine can do, but it does engage emotionally and provides enough structure to make the game interesting, while still allowing you to mess around in the sandbox world to your heart's content. Now I'm off for another playthrough, but being ruthless instead of kind this time...

The effort that must have went into overhauling Warband to make this DLC look and play like it does deserves a lot of praise, and the continued support by the developers to get rid of bugs with the help of the community is something that is sadly too rare in the game industry. The sea battles are epic, the seiges are improved, polearms are useful, and lords actually use formations. All of the things I just mentioned are straight up improvements to the base game, to the point where it looks more like Bannerlord than Warband in terms of features and mechanics. However, like everything in this world except maybe Ryan Gosling, this DLC isn't perfect. While archery was overpowered in Warband, in Viking Conquest bows are just useless, and while archery during this era was mostly for hunting and not war, historical accuracy doesn't seem like a major concern considering how strong crossbows are in comparison, not to mention the fact that quivers hold 40 arrows while bags of sling ammunition hold about twenty rocks. Additionally, earning money before you get your first town requires either killing lots of vikings (which are the strongest units in the game except for expensive, high tier troops) or a lot of repetitive trading (sell wool at buy wine in Ribe, sell wine and buy wool from other villages and towns, repeat until rich), and while you can avoid this problem by starting a game as a lord or even king, I would argue that the reason I as well as many other fans of Mount & Blade like the franchise is because of the rags to riches role-playing. Money may not be such a big problem if it weren't for the fact that you need a lot of it to buy a ship, so if you're crazy like me and start in Ireland, it's difficult to leave your starting location (although you CAN pay for a ship to ferry you). Yet if you enjoy this time period as much as I do, then you will probably enjoy it as much as I do, despite these problems and the occasional crash. :)

If you start from nothing this version can be pretty brutal - you either have, or have not and get slaughtered, but once you get a little band together and have good skills you can do alright Different from warband, in that it's less technological. Not so many bows and arrows on the field or horses, meaning A.I. uses tighter infantry formations and close-range javelins and such alot more. Can work really well at some points, and be totally busted another minute. Then again, it's warband so it's pretty much an essential buy in my book. If you find a good trade route selling wares you can build up your character and thrive - actually surviving to the point you have a good band is really rewarding in this version, since it's kind of hard to do if you start from a common background. Alternatively, starting from a clan leader and stuff like that is good for roleplaying. Pros Era-specific setting Pre-bow and arrow combat Realism More Warband Cons Challenging, and at times annoying to lose at Pre-bow and arrow combat (sometimes gets boring) Challenging starting game

Arguably one of the most appealing aspects of the Mount and Blade games, for me at least, is the level of customisation that comes from what you can tweak, or what you can mod, particularly in the sandbox game. Considering that Viking Conquest was basically based on, and made by, the same team that created the amazing Brytenwalda mod, the lack of additional [sub] mods is quite surprising and limited mostly to tweaks. That said, Viking Conquest is perhaps a little more polished in overall gameplay than Brytenwalda, but I'd venture that it also loses some of the charm and certainly the customisation options that made the latter such a great conversion mod. Having played both now, I'd honestly say that for the sandbox experience, Brytenwalda wins my vote. The added bonus is that it's also available for free, making Viking Conquest a rather expensive alternative, which for the most part, doesn't add or improve too much on top of the Brytenwalda concept. Viking Conquest practically seems to have been ignored completely by the modding community. There's hundreds of mods for Brytenwalda, yet only a handful for Viking Conquest. The problem there is that the large majority of mods that work with vanilla Warband or Brytenwalda, often don't work or apply well to Viking Conquest. In particular, that means UI improvements and tweaks you might be familiar with, just won't work in Viking Conquest. As for how well Viking Conquest works, using maximum settings for things such as battle sizes, I only encountered one CTD in over 100 hours of play, which suggests that bugs or issues other reviews have complained about, have most likely been patched and fixed in the current version on offer. Overall, considering you can get pretty much the same flavour of gameplay with Brytenwalda, I'd honestly say Viking Conquest isn't worth the full price on GOG, but perhaps worth taking a punt when it's on sale like I did.

I grabbed it after being happy with warband, but this is far from a polished release. As some people said it should not be a paid DLC - unless the people behind it bring it over the finish line. the next section is in case people encounter same issues Issues I had to "debug": 1. how to start, there is no separate start.sh for VC (why?). have to use the (config) desktop app. change module from native to VC then use the regular launcher 2. no sound / music, specifically in rgl_log.txt lots of "Sound file could not be found: Modules/Viking Conquest/Sounds/horse_gallop_3.wav" so here it seems someone started to convert wav to ogg for linux but didn't finish the job > cd Mount Blade Warband/game/Modules/Viking Conquest # in sounds.txt replace ".wav" with ".ogg" - can use sed I used editer for more careful # in music.txt replace ".wav" with ".ogg" - same > cd Sounds/ > for i in $(seq 1 9); do cp "Sword_clash_0$i.ogg" "sword_clash_0$i.ogg"; done > for i in $(seq 10 22); do cp "Sword_clash_$i.ogg" "sword_clash_$i.ogg"; done after this the rgl_log.txt was clean of errors on load+exit other stuff I tried which might have helped: install ubuntu-restricted-extras change to use_winmm_audio = 0 in ~/MBfolder/rgl_config.txt version 2.054, ubuntu 18.04