pbnjoe: Here, seeing your post motivated me to figure out how to make it work without steam.

Replace the contents of mb_warband.sh file with something like this or put the "export" line near the beginning of it:

#!/bin/bash

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="`dirname "$0"`"

./mb_warband_linux

... and then run the game by running the .sh file instead of running mb_warband_linux directly.

It seems kinda dirty and basic but works, and I haven't had the original .sh file for a while so I'm not sure what it looks like. Also, I borrowed a little bit from chaostop's post, which I linked later.

If you're still missing libraries I can zip up all the libraries in my /game subfolder, which I believe consists entirely of Ganni1987's Mint 18 package, if not a couple extras like libXss. With both of these things together, I just made Warband run with no reliance on Steam being installed :) thanks for provoking me to do that haha.

If you have Steam and don't want to do all the stuff I just wrote, follow the directions of this post and start the game via mb_warband.sh instead of directly running mb_warband_linux.