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[[File:Mount_and_Blade_logo_smaller.jpg|frame]]
'''''Mount & Blade''''' is an indie [[Strategy Game]] with tactical action [[Gameplay Roulette|and]] [[RPG Elements]], developed by TaleWorlds Entertainment and published by [[Paradox Interactive]]. It is a [[Wide Open Sandbox|sandbox-style]] game, set in the [[Medieval European Fantasy|medieval-ish land]] of Calradia, where you begin with [[With This Herring|a lame horse, a rusty sword, a bent crossbow, and some tattered rags]], and are then expected to impress a king of your choice and conquer the world for him (or whatever else you feel like, really). You can hire [[Hired Guns|mercenaries]], train them, trade between cities, fight bandits, and even become a vassal to a lord and be granted a village, castle, or town.
The combat uses a physics engine that determines the speed of a swing, relative to the target, and gives a percentage bonus (or penalty) to the damage of the attack based on its relative speed.
An [[Updated Rerelease]] called ''Warband'' came out in
A proper sequel, entitled ''Bannerlord'' finally released, in Early Access, on March 30th 2020. This release date is ''Warband'''s 10th anniversary, something the developer assures is coincidence. It was expected to remain in Early Access for a year before final release but this time was extended amid worldwide lockdowns interfering with development.
{{tropelist}}
* [[24-Hour Armor]]: No matter how high its encumbrance is.
** Averted with NPC lords, who switch to civvies when resting in a castle or town.
* [[Acceptable Breaks From Reality]]: It might not be very historically correct to have Vikings fighting Mongolian horse archers, but boy is it fun.
* [[The All-Seeing AI]]: Computer-controlled ranged troops see perfectly through fog, shooting at you long before you get close enough to see them. Fortunately the same applies to your hirelings.
** Lost track of where the enemies are in battle? Just follow the AI! They know exactly where those last remaining horse archers are. They also know exactly when the final enemy is slain, even if it took place a distance away.
*** Or you can just [[Mundane Solution|open the minimap]] and see where everyone is.
* [[The Alleged Steed]]: The one you start with, usually.
* [[Anachronism Stew]]: As far as all the medieval weapons and armour go, [[Shown Their Work|they are portrayed very accurately, including their proper names]]. The only [[Acceptable Breaks From Reality|exception to this rule]] would be that [[Weapons Kitchen Sink|they come from]] [[Dark Age Europe|slightly]] [[The Low Middle Ages|different]] [[The High Middle Ages|time]] [[The Late Middle Ages|periods]] of [[The Middle Ages]]).
** With the usual exception of the bastard sword, which is a misnomer historians applied to hand-and-a-half longswords. Correctly, all western swords with a two-handed hilt are longswords, with the one-handed base form being considered an arming sword or a short sword.
* [[Annoying Arrows]]: Played straight except for headshots, usually. Though there's still sometimes the amusing sight of one of the tougher units charging on with an arrow sticking out of his eye.
** Rarer when full damage is enabled; two arrows are usually lethal unless their target is wearing plate armor.
* [[Arbitrary Headcount Limit]]: Averted, the limit is based on skills, renown and
* [[Armor Is Useless]]: Averted, though with cheaper armor at lower levels you might think this is the case.
* [[Army of Thieves and Whores]] : The various bandits (particularly the Looters and Mountain Bandits), the deserters... and theoretically ''[[Video Game Cruelty Potential|even you and your own party]]'' - [[Rape, Pillage and Burn|if you decide to play]] [[Evil Is Cool|as a bunch of bad guys]].
* [[Artificial Stupidity]]:
** The campaign AI is even worse. In theory, the majority of the faction should gather around the marshal and push for objects while a few others run supplies and raid random villages as a distraction or seek to pick off enemy lords doing that. In ''practice'', lords break off from the marshal quickly, and drop everything to go feast.
* [[Ascended Extra]]: The Khergits were a type of bandit until an update turned them into a proper faction.
* [[The Atoner]]: Firentis.
* [[Authority Equals Asskicking]]: A common occurence with the faction lords, who after all lead armies as part of their job description. Specific levels of asskickery vary between individuals, but most can outfight their own elite troops. If you see someone with distinctive armor riding around the battlefield scything down your troops ''with an actual scythe'', it's probably a lord.
* [[Automaton Horses]]: Horses are basically treated like any other equippable item, never tire, never panic, and are perfectly willing to run headlong into obstacles like walls or trees at full speed unless steered clear by the player. They can be injured in battle, though, and have a chance of becoming lame or dying when they run out of [[Hit Points]]. They also have their own AI while not being ridden and will bolt off if hit.
** Diplomacy, a mini mod included in most mods by default, does however make horses slower as they lose HP.
* [[An Axe to Grind]]: Axes have a bonus against shields and throwing axes are one of the signature weapons of Nord Huscarls.
* [[Badass Army]]: Any force composed of top-level units. They will make ''hay'' out of a lord's army.
* [[Being Evil Sucks]]: Partially averted, partially played straight. It's easy and profitable to do "dishonorable" missions, such as assassinations, kidnappings, and starting wars, with little consequences aside from ticking off the victims. However, dishonorable acts such as pillaging villages or kicking around the local peasantry will draw the ire of the local Lord, who can usually (At least early-on in the game) kick your tail pretty soundly.
** In Warband, you also have to take into account the opinion of your companions: many come from the peasantry and aren't too fond of watching their kind get murdered and looted, especially as they are supposed to take part in the pillaging.
* [[Being Good Sucks]]: The benefits of having a high honor are dubious at best. You have to turn down often needed rewards for quests, release valuable prisoners, skip lucrative quests, refrain from beating down on the peasantry, and make enemies of the "dishonorable" nobles across the realm. All to make friends with some "honorable" ones. And prior to Warband, it didn't even properly do that.
** Honour does have one benefit, namely becoming marshal. If your honour is high enough, a lot of lords will like you enough to vote for you to become marshal without you having had to bother doing a million quests for them, saving you time that can be used to make the money you're missing out on from dishonourable acts by battling, which also trains your men and keeps morale high. The dishonourable lords never go below -3 relation with you no matter how high your honour is either, you need to do other things to make anyone hate you more than that.
* [[Black Cloak]]: Whenever you sneak into an enemy controlled city, you wear one of these, along with a staff and throwing knives.
* [[Blade of Fearsome Size]]: Obviously, the two-handed swords, but a few weapons used to be ''way'' oversized.
** Straddling the line between this and [[Blade on a Stick]], the [[Sinister Scythe|Shortened Military Scythe]] is a scytherblade facing upawards
* [[Blade on a Stick]]: Spears are best used only against cavalry, and most other polearms are best used only by cavalry.
* [[Boom! Headshot!]]: Doable with every ranged weapon in the game for double damage.
* [[Bow and Sword
* [[Cast of Snowflakes]]: The face generator allows an impressive array of variations, and the game makes good use of it. In addition, soldiers of the same type will have slightly different equipment, differentiating them further.
* [[Chainmail Bikini]]: Averted, armor looks similar on women as it does to men. However, in training fields and arena melees, men wear knee-length trousers and women wear bikinis.
* [[Choice of Two Weapons|Choice Of Four Weapons]]: You have four weapon/shield slots to do everything you need done. Ammo costs one of these slots.
* [[Contemptible Cover]]: The reception to the cover's use of [[Captain Ersatz|not-Aragorn]] (dubbed "Frodogorn" by the fanbase) and the general blandness of it was ... less than enthusiastic.
** [[Uncanny Valley]]: [http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php?topic=41538.0 Frodogorn is not an actor, but rather a render], [[Off-Model|which becomes very obvious when you look at his face in high-res.]]
* [[Crippling Overspecialisation]]: Khergits have no foot troops, rendering them very weak in sieges. Deserters are made up of a single unit type and lack the random equipment of bandits (which makes some bandits cavalry and/or archers), meaning they often have all infantry forces that can be easily kited.
* [[Critical Existence Failure]]: Characters become bloodier as they take damage, but their performance is unaffected.
* [[Dangerous Deserter]]: In spades. From a technical point of view, they are very similar to regular groups of bandits, but are often far more numerous and better equipped. They can be a [[Demonic Spiders]] style threat early in the game, but become less intimidating after the player levels up considerably and creates his party. Still, large groups of advanced troops (40 nords warriors in full mail armor for instance) remain a threat for a pretty long time.
* [[Deliberate Values Dissonance]]: Calradia is a sexist land (though it is only briefly touched on before Warband) where even the lords that have been established through dialogue as being just and honorable have no qualms with raiding caravans, burning and plundering villages and attacking helpless traveling farmers, provided they belong to an enemy faction.
** The Steppe Bandits more so than the actual Khergit lords themselves, as they're always hostile.
* [[Department of Redundancy Department]]: You can find a Ragged Ragged Outfit.
** Occasionally one may come across a "Strong Strong Bow"
* [[Disc One Nuke]]: A character with the "Lady in Waiting" background starts with one of the best horses (and the 2nd fastest, losing by only one point of speed) at the cost of a hit to other starting equipment (that is very poor for everyone and will be replaced after your first battle anyways). The [[Easter Egg]] "[[Wutai|Strange]]" equipment in Rivacheg and Tihr (and Jelkala, but it is technically inaccessible without edit mode) is pretty handy if you find it early.
* [[Disney Death]]: Neither the player character, the [[NPC|NPCs]], nor any of the lords can be killed in battle - they're only knocked unconscious and taken prisoner, and either are ransomed or escape. Your [[Redshirt Army|hirelings]] can be killed, but even then you can learn a surgery skill granting a chance that a soldier who would've been killed will be merely knocked unconscious instead.
* [[Disposable Bandits]]: Bandit parties in are generally the weakest non-civilian party on the world map and, unlike civilians, nothing negative happens if you kill them. After the early game groups of "deserters" start spawning, which are functionally identical except for being stronger fighters.
* [[Drill Sergeant Nasty]]: Lezalit. Ymira points it out if you have both of them in your army.
* [[Dronejam]]: Your own soldiers can and will get in your way in a fight: sieges and the start of battle are the most blatant.
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** They can be brought back by changing a single value in the module.ini file<ref>display_wp_firearms, if you were wondering</ref>.
* [[Dungeon Town]]: Occasionally coming to a town you will find that there's a group of bandits in it, causing you to have to liberate the town.
* [[Early Installment Weirdness]]: The very early version had a more fantasy bent, with undead and invading black knights. This data can still be found in the game files.
* [[Easter Egg]]: There's samurai equipment hidden around in hard to spot chests.
* [[Easy Logistics]]: Averted like hell. Troops will become unhappy and eventually desert if they don't have anything to eat. Overworld map speed is brought down by excess weight from loot. The latter can be addressed by keeping extra horses in your inventory that are used as load animals, but having ''too many'' horses will negate this effect, allegedly because larger amounts of horses are harder to control.
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* [[Endless Game]]: There is no set victory condition. Unless you select the retirement option ([[Game Breaking Bug|or your save is corrupted]]), there isn't even a way for the game to end as losing a battle won't kill you, though there still are situations where [[Continuing Is Painful|it's better just to reload or start a new game]]. It's not until ''With Fire and Sword'' that the player character can actually die.
* [[Enemy Exchange Program]]: Villages that changed ownership still produce troops of the faction they originally belonged to, even when that faction no longer exists. When a faction is defeated and its lords disperse, they also retain and are able to recruit troops of their original faction even in service of their new masters.
* [[An Entrepreneur Is You]]: Trading goods is one way to make money, and ''Warband'' allows investing in personal enterprises. Bannerlord significantly upgrades this as part of
* [[Evil Uncle]]: King Harlaus of Swadia and King Yaroglek of Vaegir, according to their claimants' stories.
* [[The Exile]]: Endicting a lord from your faction of treason is the only reliable way to put said lord out of play permanently. Other kings can also order exiles for their own lords, but these just join a different faction (hopefully yours) instead.
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** You may also want to avoid the 'lend companion' requests that lords sometimes make if you have a rebellion in progress. These requests can include the claimant, and if the rebellion then ends while the claimant is away, the whole structure of the faction breaks down.
*** Also in the claimant quests is that if someone other than the rebels finishes off the original faction, the ending is bugged.
* [[Game Favored Gender]]: Goes both ways in different games. In the original, starting as female will give you better skill-point options. In Warband, female characters need far higher reputations to become lords (something companions comment on) and don't recieve a fief with it.
* [[Game Mod]]: Many, from historical (Mongolia, ancient Greece, [[The Wild West]], 1200s Europe, WWII China, the [[Red October|Russian Civil War]]) to fantasy (''[[The Lord of the Rings]]'', ''[[A Song of Ice and Fire]]''), [[Violent Glaswegian|to the gang-filled streets of Glasgow]] or even some original new scenarios [[Fan Wank|expanding the Calradian setting]] of the vanilla version (from [[The Low Middle Ages]] to the far future of [[Next Sunday A.D.]]).
** ''With Fire and Sword'' is a non-free mod, which changes the setting to the Khmelnitsky War as described in Polish historical epic ''[[Sienkiewicz Trilogy|Ogniem i Mieczem]]'' (the wars with Cossacks, Tatars and Sweden in the second half of 17th century), with storyline based on the novel ''Black Mace'' by Alex Trubnikov.
** ''Viking Conquest'', another non-free mod, moves the setting to Britain and Scandinavia during the Dark Ages and Viking invasions, complete with a "story" mode.
** ''[[Nova Aetas]]'' is a [[Fan Sequel]] mod set in the vanilla Calradia setting, albeit around the time of its Renaissance. It also extends the map significantly, to the point of having New World and [[Mayincatec]] analogues.
* [[Geo Effects]]: Montainous battlefields allow for lots of this. Cavalry units cannot charge up a slope, and ranged units, obviously, cannot shoot through hills. A sound tactic against mostly cavalry armies is to station your troops on the peak of a slope, or behind a river.
* [[Gratuitous German]]: Not the original game, but the sheer amount of [[Game Mod|Game Mods]] that attempt to add Germany-based factions or units into the game and fail at properly utilizing German spelling and grammar is astounding.
* [[Gray and Grey Morality]]: No single character in the game is entirely good, at least not by modern moral standards.
** This even extends to all your companions. [[Knight in Shining Armor]] and scholar characters are honorable, but very prejudiced against commoners and foreigners, while commoner characters tend to have rather loose morals when it comes to things like contracts or personal property, and professional soldiers are all [[Blood Knight|Blood Knights]].
* [[Grid Inventory]]: And everything takes up one slot regardless of its size or weight, though weight does influence your party's overworld speed.
* [[Guns Are Useless]]: Averted in ''With Fire And Sword'', where guns are extremely powerful: the gun you start the game with will kill most bandit-type enemies in one shot, and getting hit by a gun with your starting armor can easily kill you. The drawback is that they take a very long time to load, even with simple pistol weapons, and if you're on foot, that's a ''very bad thing'' (on a horse, you can at least continue to dodge effectively).
* [[Hard Head]]: NPCs and redshirts saved by the surgery skill are knocked unconscious and make a full recovery withing a few hours (days at most) with no lasting effects, even if they got a spear to the gut or an arrow through the eye.
* [[Helmets Are Hardly Heroic]]: Sword Sisters have what seems to be a 50/50 chance of going into battle without a helmet (the better off to show their flowing hair, presumably). Along with various recruited bandits and Khergit Lancers, they are the only unit type to do so. This makes them predictably vulnerable to [[One-Hit Kill|arrows to the head.]]
* [[Hit Points]]: Everyone has em, though sometimes in a very odd way. My horse seems to have a spear through its head, why is it still running around?
** Your horse probably has great defence stats and can probably have a lot more spears sticking out before it dies.
** Shields also have hitpoints, after they are exhausted they will break (they are fixed after the battle, but move down a notch on the quality scale).
* [[Hitbox Dissonance]]: Shields are immaterial unless the block key is held down, lots of minor discrepancies as well.
** Sort of fixed in Warband, non-blocking shields will still block arrows, but not the ones that are instant death headshots, the ones that make you buy the shield in the first place.
** Presumably because if the shield where protecting your head, how would you see?
* [[Honor Before Reason]]: The Rhodoks claimant Lord Kastor of Veluca himself admits that King Graveth is a hero for saving the council from a raiding party, but claims he shouldn't be king because he violated the law against bringing weapons to the council meeting.
** Of course, he might well have organized said raid himself... It also doesn't help Graveth that he approached the defenseless council armed, told them of the war party, and then [[Blackmail|told them he wouldn't save them unless they made him king immediately.]] At least, according to Kastor...
* [[Horny Vikings]]: Averted
* [[Horse Archer]]: Most Khergit troops. Building a player character into one is difficult but rewarding.
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** The Siege maps in Multiplayer take this to extremes with Rhodock Warhammers/Swadian Greatswords instantly killing attackers as they swarm up ladders, or rushing through a fallen sally port only for 2-3 defenders waiting patiently to slay them.
* [[Impoverished Patrician]]: One background choice. It grants you with a banner and slight fame boost (which affects max army size).
* [[In
* [[Inevitable Tournament]]: Sort of. The fighting tournaments in the large cities aren't mandatory, but placing bets on yourself and then winning goes a long way towards paying your [[Redshirt Army]]'s salary.
* [[Invisible Wall]]: All over the place and ''still'' characters can occasionally clip through scenery into places they're not supposed to be.
** Most ridiculously in some of the cities, where there are [[Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence|Insurmountable Waist High]] ''Broomsticks''.
* [[Invulnerable Civilians]]: Except if you defend yourself when they revolt.
* [[It's Always Spring]]: Even though the game does have an internal calendar that tracks the days and months going by, seasons never change and for non-player characters the only change for age is an increase to the number on their statistics page. Will be avoided in ''Bannerlord''.
* [[Karma Houdini]]: Roughly every rival lord battling with you. They will come over and fight you with clearly inferior units to your own, just in advantage on numbers, to have their troops slaughtered en masse, but they almost always avoid capture. The player, on the contrary, is always captured if he's defeated.
* [[Keep the Reward]]: An option in quite a few quests. Though it only gets you honor, which is a mixed bag (Lords have a higher default disposition if your character has a similar honor score). <ref>i.e., high honor is ''bad'' when talking to someone with low honor</ref>
* [[Knight in Shining Armor]]: YOU, if you want. Though you'll find that [[Awesome but Impractical|shiny armor is quite expensive and makes you move at a snail's pace if you get de-horsed]]
* [[Lady Macbeth]]: A female PC can become this to a noble as a way of gaining power.
* [[The Lancer]]: Bunduk and several of the recruitable hero characters. Literally, since they can become lancers in the classical sense of the word, on horseback of course.
* [[Land of the Shattered Empire]]: The Calradic Empire has been gone for a few hundred years, leaving behind several factions who all claim to have a historical right to the rest of the former empire (and thus reason to wage on/off war with their neighbors). Naturally it's up to the player to do something about this. The prequel, ''Bannerlord'', is set just as the empire has split from a [[Succession Crisis]] and its former tributaries have broken off.
* [[Lazy Backup]]: Combine the fact that [[We Cannot Go on Without You|your side automatically loses]] if your character is knocked out with the fact that sieges are done in stages and losing at any stage ends the siege unsuccessfully, and you can get into some seriously weird situations where your guys retreat, dragging your unconscious body out of the castle, through the town, up the walls, and down the siege tower ramp, just because you got knocked out by literally the last defender in the last room of the castle. And then they dismantle the tower, so you have to build a new one.
* [[Leaked Experience]]: Normal exp is granted for killing things yourself, and then battle exp is granted for being on the winning side. Battle exp is shared among all members of the army, even if they didn't actually appear on the battlefield. A viable strategy for leveling up troops that are yet too weak to survive actual combat.
* [[Leeroy Jenkins]]: Your army's default battle behavior is full-on charge. Depending on the circumstances, this may not be the wisest strategy.
* [[Left
** [[Wild Mass Guess|Perhaps on this world the magnetic poles are perpendicular to the geographic poles]].
* [[Leitmotif]]: Every musical cue for the Khergits makes use of a single melody. The same for the Nords as well. The Swadian and Rhodok themes have more variation and subtlety and the Vaegirs seem to lack a motif altogether.
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** A horse archer PC doesn't really start to work too well until the mid 20s or so, but at that point it can solo entire armies.
* [[Mook Chivalry]]: Entirely averted. Once de-horsed, infantry will frequently swarm you from all sides, sometimes so thickly you can't move. The only defense is to backpedal and hope your shield up until [[The Cavalry]] arrive to spread them out a bit.
* [[Multi Melee Master]]: Each weapon proficiency category covers several different types of weapons.
* [[Multiple Choice Past]]: How you choose your stats.
* [[Mutually Exclusive Party Members]]: Each NPC companion has two others that they don't get along with, and will eventually make this known to you. If multiple members of the party are antagonistic and/or morale is low, some may eventually leave (take your stuff back before they do).
* [[My Rules Are Not Your Rules]]: Every time you lose a battle, you get taken prisoner and dragged around for a while; however, whenever an NPC Lord loses, he gets away 80% of the time, and then he's nowhere to be seen.
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*** Lords get troops based on their fiefs. More fiefs means more troops. Kings, on the other hand, get troops based on the fact that they're kings. So ''if'' you manage to defeat a King's sizable personal force (200+ troops), then ''when'' they escape, they'll disappear for a few days and show up with their entire force replenished. Particularly devastating if you're trying to take the king's last city, and they keep respawning to smash into your forces.
* [[Names to Run Away From Really Fast]]: ''You'', if your army is sufficiently strong enough. Lords and even ''Kings'' will turn and run if they see you getting close (with their status listed as "Running Away from YOURNAME").
* [[Nerf]]:
** Also - couched lance damage - a form of attack that in the original M&B would allow a starting player with a half-way decent polearm to solo entire armor-clad armies
* [[No Arc in Archery]]: Averted. Arrows, bolts, and thrown weapons need to be properly aimed taking into account distance, relative speed and altitude, and weapon arcing (but, oddly enough, not target density). The game's log rates the shot's difficulty if you hit, based on these elements, which impacts the rate you gain experience for ranged weapons.
* [[No Stat Atrophy]]: Averted, characters over a certain age start to lose stats when knocked out. The fan backlash and the speed with which a tweak was found that disables this feature demonstrate just why this trope is an [[Acceptable Breaks From Reality|acceptable break from reality]].
* [[Nominal Importance]]: Named NPCs are either kings/king claimants or "hero" characters like you: they are knocked out in battle instead of suffering perma-death like nameless NPCs and can be leveled up and equipped much the same way you are.
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** The mountainous region at the borders of the Vaegir and Swadian kingdoms also hosts ''entire droves'' of bandit bands. These Mountain Bandits are a little hardier though, and also one of the few highwaymen types that use light cavalry units in addition to infantry.
*** Sea Raiders, in Warband, are a large source of good equipment, money AND experience. To elaborate; each Sea Raider is worth about 130 experience points (quite a lot for M&B), they all have good equipment like mail armor, axes, bows, decent shields and helmets allowing the player can farm them for large amount of cash (or keep better items for himself). The downside is that Sea Raiders carry said decent armor and very damaging throwing weapons and some of them even long bows. Careful players can ride around them, dodging projectiles, until they all exhaust their ammo. And the best part: you can do this all by yourself, meaning only you get all the experience and more items can be found after the battle
* [[Plot Armor]]: Any named character can only be captured, not killed. Only Kings (finish a rebellion quest or destroy their faction) and Claimants (Fail a rebellion quest or by
* [[Power Equals Rarity]]: Loot will rarely contain items with the highest quality modifiers. Lordly armor and Champion horses are so expensive that even kings apparently can't afford to make much use of them.
* [[Pretext for War]]: One mission type is having noble to ask you to find reason to start a war.
* [[Proud Warrior Race Guy]]: Several, notably Baheshtur and Matheld.
* [[Purely Aesthetic Gender]]: Averted though the difference is negligible in the long run. Gender will affect a player's initial stats. However, the female NPCs are oppressed, and the female player character is not beyond some sass from lords early game, somewhat higher requirements for vassalage and no fief upon becoming a vassal, the last of which is actually a blessing in disguise (in gameplay anyways, escaping such is an option for motivations in the background questions at the start of the game).
** Also there is a huge difference in captured female and male peasants. Male farmers will train up to become mercenaries like the ones commonly hired in taverns who are useful but expensive, while female peasants will become Sword Sisters, a rare but cheap and somewhat fairly powerful mounted unit.
** Warband has a different method of courtship for each gender (males must woo a lady and convince her guardian to let the marriage take place), while females have to court roaming lords.
* [[Purposefully Overpowered]]: Cavalry dominates most battles without conditions working against them (hills, sieges).
** Warband's multiplayer sieges remove the siege from being a negative condition; circle round the whole castle and get all the ladders up on the wall or charge through the sally port and butcher anyone in the courtyard.
** Nord Huscarls take a long time to train, but are by far the best infantry in the game, able to fight greater numbers and win with few if any losses.
* [[Quicksand Box]]: The period between early in the game (when you take on many modest-paying side-quests to amass wealth and gain favor of lords and factions) and late in the game (when you have an army large enough to take over the world or follow a claimant quest) when you basically have very little to do but fight bandits, [[Level Grinding|level-grind]], and expand your army up to 10, then to 20, then to 30, to 40, to 50... fight bandits, take all their stuff, sell it at the nearest castle town, repeat, until you have an army of 100 and can start to really do some interesting stuff.
* [[Ragtag Bunch of Misfits]]: The player can recruit troops from all the factions as well as mercenaries to create one big motley crew - and as he can recruit from his own prisoners and those he rescues from the enemy pretty much any unit can end up in the player's service, including bandits and raiders. The companions recruitable include everything from impoverished nobles to petty bandits, including a daughter fleeing from an arranged marriage with no fighting skills whatsoever.
* [[Rain of Arrows]]: Basically what happens if you get enough archers (or crossbowmen), and one of the best tactics you can use if the map permits.
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* [[Rain of Blood]]: Get a guy in close combat for long enough and they will look like they took a dip in a crimson sea.
* [[Ranged Emergency Weapon]]: Throwing knives require no skill in throwing to use and take up only one of your four weapon slots (opposed to the two taken up by a bow or crossbow and its ammo) but do poor damage. Their primary use is to give a sword/shield/lance user some range. Many infantry units have a chance at having proper throwing weapons at creation.
* [[Rape, Pillage and Burn]]: This can be done to villages, and the AI will do it to them frequently.
* [[Recruiting the Criminal]]: You can get bandits and such into your party if you take them prisoner and then recruit them after dragging them around for a while to crush their morale. This causes a slight moral hit to your party. Alternatively such criminals can join your party if you conquer the castle they are held in. These criminals are perfectly loyal, and are an effective stop-gap to ensure a newly conquered hold has ''some'' garrison while grab more troops to station in it.
* [[Recurring Traveller]]: Tavern regulars.
* [[Redshirt Army]]: Your soldiers, as well as the soldiers of every other lord.
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*** You'll still want to aim for them first when you can, they are almost unilaterally the best equipped enemies and so can deliver the most beatdown on your own troops. Mostly. They also have the highest skills, most especially Tactics, which can result in you being badly outmatched if you lack a good tactician of your own.
** In the Warband standalone expansion, while the kings and lord can still do stuff, they'll mostly participate in feasts... unless they are your enemy - then they'll take their armies and go kick your ass.
* [[Ryu and Ken]]: Swadia and Vaegir share a troop tree layout and wider range of units. Swadia has crossbowmen while the Vaegirs get bowmen, Swadia's cavalry and infantry is better armored but less damaging. The Sarranids added in ''Warband'' are somewhere in between but more frequently carry ranged weapons.
* [[Save Scumming]]: Averted, you automatically fail most tasks that have a random component to them for a short amount of time after reloading a save. The game actually takes it farther than that: you will fail even if it's otherwise impossible to do so!<ref>For example, if you use the third-party tool TweakMB to give yourself a 100% chance of success, or make it so you always recruit at least one person from villages, you will still fail/find no recruits, respectively</ref> You ''will'' discover this fact at the [[Finagle's Law|worst possible moment]].
* [[Set Swords to Stun]]: Practice weapons knock opponents out instead of killing them. Mounted sword users can deal non-lethal damage with a pommel strike.
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* [[Spiritual Successor]]: To [[Sid Meier's Pirates!]].
* [[Spy Speak]]: One quest type involves identifying a friendly spy in this manner.
* [[Stats Grinding]]: With weapon proficiency only (you get "free" points on each level up as well). Thankfully it increases rather fast with a decent weapons master skill, and one of the main purposes of arenas is to get this skill up to basic competency. One quirk is that mounted archers build proficiency stupidly quick, as the the increases are based on the supposed difficulty of a shot (How far the target is, how fast you are moveing, bonus for head shots), but fails to account for how easy it is to
* [[Sticks to the Back]]: Most of the larger weapons.
* [[Storming the Castle]]: The most common method of expanding your territory.
** Combined with [[All Your Base Are Belong to Us]] is what makes multiplayer Siege games so awesome.
* [[Strategy RPG]]
* [[Suicidal Overconfidence]]: The combat AI will charge into any enemy. Even if COMPLETELY outmatched (IE: Peasants vs Knights) Averted on the overmap, though.
** Some of the more hilarious parts of this are watching peasants gleefully charge fully-armored swordsmen one-after-another, with the swordsman 1-hit-killing each one. Or heavily-armored footmen trying in vain to chase down horse archers...
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** Apparently even those were too restrictive to some players, as relatively few quests in the expansion have ''any'' limit.
** The record being the wedding "mission", with a time limit of 360 days. Since a wedding require total peace, a feast, and the presence of both the brothered, her father, and you, all this time actually come in handy.
* [[There Are No Tents]]: Averted. You have the option of setting up camp anywhere and anytime on the world map. While camping, you can still engage in some minor actions, like trying to persuade captured bandits to join your party, or reading books. The only downside is, that unlike cities, villages and castles, your camp won't protect you from wandering hordes of bandits (if they're passing by and bump into you).
* [[Thriving Ghost Town]]: Very obvious when you choose to explore a town, castle, or village. Some of the villages look barely enough to house twenty people whereas you can be recruiting a half dozen volunteers from them every day.
* [[Token Evil Teammate]]: It's useful to have some around so you can order them to raid enemy villages without dropping your own reputation.
* [[Too Dumb to Live]]: The AI will always provide you with endless hilarities by following this trope.
** Both sides during a multiplayer siege battle will treat a defender who repeatedly opens the sally port door this and will promptly ban the offender for their stupidity/poor sportsmanship. On certain servers such shenanigans might be [[Unfriendly Fire|rewarded with friendly arrows to the back]].
* [[Took a Level
* [[Training the Peaceful Villagers]]: A possible quest for each village.
* [[Trying to Catch Me Fighting Dirty]]: The arena is home to some of the dirtiest fighting imaginable. Everything from hitting someone over the head as they spar with someone else to two AI teaming up for a few minutes to go after the player or some other poor unfortunate can be expected. And you will be engaging in it aplenty too.
* [[Values Dissonance]]: Deliberately invoked. You're told up front that, as the game is heavily based on the Middle Ages, the most powerful people in Calradia tend to be of noble birth and male. Indeed, in the early stages of the games, most NPC's will treat a female character like a joke. Of course, there's really no penalty for playing as a girl, and in fact there are several achievements that require you to accomplish certain impressive feats with a female character.
* [[Velvet Revolution]]: High persuade and relations with a kingdom's lords will allow you to convert most lords to your side during a rebellion, leaving you only the capital and current ruler to attack.
* [[Vendor Trash]]: A byproduct of the looting system. Firstly, you can only get things that your opponents wield (Looters will not magically yield plate armor, for example). Secondly, the quality and quantity of loot is determined by your Looting skill (which serves no other purpose). Thirdly, the more troops and companions you have the less loot you get. The net result is that post-battle looting tends to yield dangerously subpar equipment only fit for selling off. You have a much better chance of finding high quality items by using that money to [[Boring but Practical|go shopping]].
* [[Video Game Cruelty Potential]]: Want to level up your allies, but have a battle they aren't going to win on their own? Dismount enemy cavalry and knock down infantry by trampling them to make them easy pickings for your men.
** Or massacre helpless villagers, loot their homes and steal their cattle.
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* [[We Cannot Go on Without You]]: The battle ends as soon as you are knocked out, no matter how close you are to victory. This doesn't mean you lose, but your men will retreat and lose morale. While you can send your men in to fight without you, this is something you should NEVER do as they are much less effective when unled (an army that can inflict a 10-1 casualty rate on the enemy in a proper battle can easily suffer a 2-1 casualty rate if you use autoresolve for the same battle).
* [[Wide Open Sandbox]]
* [[The Wiki Rule]]: The [http://mountandblade.wikia.com/ Mount and Blade Wiki] probably isn't actually your premier source for ''M&B'' information. The ''M&B'' page is one of the most popular sections of StrategyWiki though, despite being fairly incomplete.
* [[Wimp Fight]]: If two AI in the arena spawn with bows next to each other, they will proceed to punch eachother for minimal damage until one is KO or (more likely) someone kicks both their asses.
* [[Wizard Needs Food Badly]]: A lack of food causes morale penalties and eventually desertion.
* [[You All Meet in An Inn]]: Companions are acquired in taverns.
* [[You Will Be Spared]]: If you let lords go free, they may give you the quick and painless variety.
=== In addition to the above, ''Warband'' also features: ===
* [[Adipose Rex]]: AI quirks cause King Harlaus to feast far more often than his counterparts, even when it is strategic suicide. This has spawned a [[Fan Nickname]] deeming him "King Harlaus the Fat".
* [[American Kirby Is Hardcore]]: An inverted example. The American and European boxarts depict roughly the same scene, but the American boxart has a bunch of bright light added and has a clear sky, with expressions indicating it is set during preparation for battle and is drawn slightly more "realistically". The European art is much darker and stylized, set during battle and has an overcast sky. Rating differences are likely behind this (The ESRB rating is Teen, while the PEGI rating is 16+).
* [[Artificial Difficulty]]: Whereas the original M&B was fairly sensible in this respect, WB has situations where you're arbitrarily denied reinforcements or the use of some of your weapons.
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* [[Game Favored Gender]]: While the starting stats still favor females, the politics system favors males and up front tells you at character creation that non-noble non-males are the equivalent of a [[Self-Imposed Challenge]].
* [[Hitbox Dissonance]]: The shield bug is gone, but is replaced with a forcefield that blocks projectiles as if the shield was up even when it's not.
* [[Left
* [[Mook Maker]]: Bandit parties are now spawned by bandit hideouts, which can be assaulted to temporarily clear an area of banditry.
** Leaving hideouts alone is a singularly terrible idea: bandits spawn from the hideout based on ''your'' party size, and at regular intervals, so that if you leave the area alone for too long, you'll have a dozen groups of 40+ bandits that, when they see you, will gang up on you, resulting in 400+ bandits attacking you!
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* [[Shout-Out]]: Several achievement names reference [[Monty Python and the Holy Grail]].
** If you happen to get into a bar brawl, drawing a bow in the tavern will result in the tavern keeper shouting [[Star Wars|"No shooting, no shooting!"]]
* [[Suicidal Overconfidence]]: Enemies can now actually flee the battle on the tactical level, but they'll still
* [[Updated Rerelease]]: Despite being initially marketed as a stand-alone expansion (and
----
=== In addition to the above, ''With Fire And Sword'' provides examples of the following tropes: ===
* [[Call That a Formation]]: Units can be arranged to 1-4 deep lines. Suprisingly, Units tend to remain and/or reform the formation unless told to charge.
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* [[Shout-Out]]: [[The Three Musketeers (novel)|The Three Musketeers]] are mentioned by an NPC. Also, one of the books you can buy (the one handling the power of the state) [[Truth in Television|was written by a certain Armand-Jean du Plessis, duc de Richelieu]].
* [[Tsarist Russia]]: Recently reformed with Romavos in power now.
----
=== ''Bannerlord'' adds the following tropes: ===
* [[Annoying Arrows]]: Imperial Archer has a very weak bow. It gets away with this by being the only tier 2 archer option, thus making Imperials able to field large forces of archers.
* [[Anyone Can Die]]: Except for the player character on easy-mode, the immortality of named characters is gone. The exception is characters under 16, who can't appear in fights and, if modded to fight, are immortal without further mods.
* [[Chaos Architecture]]: Unlike vanilla to ''Warband'' the overall shape of the continent is still recognizable, but it still has changed far more than it should have over a mere 200 years.
* [[Child Soldiers]]/[[A Child Shall Lead Them]]: Possible with the succession system, though game mechanics render a faction having a minor as a leader almost as bad as having ''no'' leader. Child soldiers were briefly universal due to a bug in development, but it was fixed before the early access release.
* [[Doomed by Canon]]: Being set 200 years before ''Warband'', a game where the Empire is described as long fallen, requires the player either fails to reunite the Empire, fail to keep it together or creates an alternate continuity.
* [[Fragile Speedster]]: Aserai are lightly armored, but (in theory) faster.
* [[Loads and Loads of Characters]]: In addition to what ''Warband'' has, there's now more factions, minor factions, the player's clan, and important people (recruiters) in settlements. Rebellions and child birth can lead to an effectively infinite number of characters.
* [[Infant Immortality]]: Added relatively early in early access. Removable with mods.
* [[Item Crafting]]: Characters can make weapons with the crafting skill.
* [[In-Universe Game Clock]]: Bannerlord changes the time flow so years pass much quicker, making the game year consist of only four months, each one a season long.
* [[Magikarp Power]]: Aserai units have the weakest tier 1/2/3 units, but better tier 4/5 ones. In particular, archers are actually very good and some of the best in the game, but are fourth tier units and have to be promoted from units with no bows.
** With the right perks you can upgrade bandits (the weakest units) into noble troops (the strongest units).
* [[Medieval Stasis]]: Averted. With even a cursory knowledge of medieval material history it's obvious that weapons and armor are indeed significantly more primitive than that seen in the original (no plate).
* [[Mighty Glacier]]: Empire units have higher than average armor, but lower than average damage and speed.
* [[Obvious Beta]]: Like the original game, ''Bannerlord'' released as early access and had some fairly blatant missing content. Most infamous being AI for handling siege towers having been broken until January 2022, nearly two years after release, and a handful of perks still being non-functional as of that same patch.
* [[Purely Aesthetic Gender]]: In contrast to the original, there is no mechanical difference between the sexes outside of marriage and childbirth. Unused code suggests this is another symptom of the game being unfinished.
* [[President Action]]: Senator Lucon will lead the armies of the Northern Empire like any other faction head. Whoever winds up ruling the Northern Empire after him will likely at least ''try'' to be such.
* [[She Is the King]]: Ira, Emperor of the Southern Empire. Would be [[A Child Shall Lead Them]] if not for the fact that the power is held by her mom as regent while she's a minor (at least at the start of the game). A player character ruler's title defaults to "king".
* [[Succession Crisis]]: The Empire is split into three factions. The Southern Empire is ruled by the Emperor's daughter with his widow as regent. The Western Empire that wants military control, with only veterans getting a vote. The Northern Empire is controlled by the Senate, who wants the Senate to choose the new Emperor.
* [[Uriah Gambit]]: Minor clans hired as mercenaries are paid by the influence they would earn if they were actual faction members. Thus it's viable let them be defeated to slow down and weaken enemies (or scare off enemies with their numbers) since that requires no payment.
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