I realize this may not have a solution, but how might I get rid of faction symbols in Warband, the ones that float over individual soldiers when on the battlefield? I prefer the occasional friendly-fire accident, I guess.

Thanks!

Yeah, I sometimes wonder what the game would be like if more than fire could be friendly, but I have a hard enough time getting near enough on horseback to cream some guy nearby that I'd not be a fan of cutting through my friends to get at the bad guy. Still getting used to the new feel for melee. Not the same as the old game...

After playing the original game now for a month straight I just tried out Warband last night for several hours. There's a lot of cool new stuff in the game but it's not quite all a bouquet of roses IMHO. The melee combat is very very different than the first game. The first game feels like you're in complete control of the swordplay, polearm, joust lance etc. completely free form, but in Warband it seems like the game forces a scripted swipe of the sword in a specific direction, and forces the lance to jump from the left to middle to the right. The lance control has 3 configurable options: Automatic, manual (easy) and manual (hard), I've tried all 3 and the latter one is the closest to how it works in the original game but it's still not quite right. I don't care for that at all, I can't get the level of control I had in the first game now.

If someone started with Warband and had no prior frame of reference then they probably wouldn't know the difference and would just get used to the controls in the game, but when you have probably 200-300 hours of gameplay in the first game and try Warband out I find it quite awkward.

The graphics are slightly better in Warband which is a nice improvement but sadly the game runs incredibly slow for me even on the lowest settings. My PC is a 4GHz 8-core CPU with 32GB of 1866MHz RAM and a 2GB Radeon 7850 video card. I can pretty much run any game on this machine with the graphics effects maxed out at 2560x1600 resolution including on Mount & Blade - but with Warband the game chokes into a slide show even if I disable various effects and reduce the graphics burden. Original Mount & Blade with all graphics options completely maxed out rates my system as 87% performance and it actually runs great. Warband rates my system between 25%-45% no matter what I do. Someone suggested disabling DirectX 9 and using DirectX 7, but that's unacceptable to me for a modern game on a modern computer.

I've also found various other quirks in Warband such as on the main map - in the original game you click on the map at any zoom level and your band starts walking there no matter how far away you click on the map. In Warband, if you're zoomed in, you can only click within a small radius of where you're standing or the game doesn't register that you clicked. If you click on a village or town that is a certain distance away it ignores you. Zoom the map out though for a more high in the sky view, and you can click anywhere. Why they restrict how far you can click to move when zoomed in is beyond me, it works fine in the original game.

I'm also finding that the game graphics get very messed up randomly with textures wrong, weird graphics overlaying the map or the in battle graphics at times and then sticking around. It basically looks like graphics texture corruption. I've got over 100 games installed on my computer at the moment and not experienced any such corruption with any of them so I assume it is a game bug rather than a video driver bug. Haven't done much research into it yet.

Having said all of that, Warband does look exciting to me and has a lot of cool enhancements to it, but with the bugs and changes to sword play etc. it's going to get a while of getting used to it, and it's very disappointing the game is so slow even with the graphics dumbed down significantly. Perhaps they never tested it on a computer with 2560x1600 resolution or something I dunno. Next thing I'm going to try is dropping the resolution down to 1920x1200, but that's a shame because the original Mount & Blade works top notch on my system with all graphics maxed out at native resolution. (For the record my Warband is fully updated with the latest GOG patch also.)

Haven't found anyone else experiencing these problems yet in the forums so I'll be hitting Google soon to see what I can find. Despite the problems though, I am kind of excited to get into Warband if I can sort the issues out as the improvements it includes do sound like serious progress for the game as a whole.

(I'm also still trying to wrap my head around the map changing significantly from the original game to Warband also...)

Not sure what this has to do with the specific topic I started.

On topic, I should also going to mention that it seems like turning off the banners has to be done every time I boot the game up. Probably need to check a box in the ini files somewhere...

And yes, to the prior poster, I think the combat doesn't feel as connected as the original's did. It's still frustrating to me that it doesn't feel as visceral. I don't get the texture problems you describe, but the click radius explanation makes sense for why it's so much harder to click on stuff in the zoomed out map. I've noticed the game hitching more when loading an encounter or whatever, though.

You might want to put your text into a review of the game, I think you might get more readers that way and help people compare the original to this. And/or create a new issue in the forum about the texture corruption you're experiencing.

Except it looks like I have to switch this option every time I start it up. Not sure if there's a config file that will set this for me or not.

Yep, that happens now and then. Might be a radeon thing.
Anyway, for me alt-tabbing to desktop and back is usually enough to solve it.