Today, I'll be talking about one of my favourite mods for Mount & Blade: Warband, and some things I like and dislike about it.
I started a new save in the Star Wars Conquest mod recently. I'm not sure what brought me to do it exactly- I was bored, but not in the mood for either Isaac or TF2 (the main two games I use to kill time), and eventually I found myself playing it. Starting saves can often be a bit of a hassle (a problem I get in lots of games, like Minecraft and Terraria- the first few hours of every save go fairly similarly, and it can get repetitive). This mod isn't too bad for that though- the weapons are very different from the base game, so it's possible to take on lots of enemies if you have good aim. It's also very easy to make money as a merchant, probably more so than in vanilla Warband.
From what I can tell, inflation is a real thing in this mod. In Warband, it can be hard to amass more than a couple hundred denars early on, and even if you're very clever with buying and selling goods, it's not overly easy to make more than a few thousand denars. In the Star Wars Conquest mod, though, it's entirely possible to make over ten thousand credits in a relatively short time, even without leveling up trade or inventory management. Why do I call this inflation? Well, in the base game, there aren't many things that cost over ten thousand denars- some industrial buildings in a city, or improvements in a place you own, but not much else. In the mod, on the other hand, you can purchase ships that cost upwards of fifty thousand credits, and even some weapons and armour are tens of thousands.
In the version of the mod I have, there are some rather overpowered items available, and while they do make the game much less tedious to progress in, they almost feel a bit unfair. For instance, the player can buy a battle droid body, which gives really high armour for body, head and feet, and wear it with invisible parts to make it look good, which give almost no stats. There's no requirement to do this though- one can wear the battle droid body alongside a normal helmet, gloves and boots, and although this is a very expensive outfit (probably around 15k credits for all stats maxed), it's way better than any other options. There's also a weapon called the concussion rifle (which, to be fair, is a work in progress) which does AoE damage- essentially, you can lead an army of 20 people into a city with 100, and singlehandedly kill them all with an explosive rifle. It's technically illegal (not that this has any effect on gameplay (yet?)), and it's not exactly cheap, but it's very strong.
Why do I like this mod so much? Well, like I said, it's easy to get started in- you don't have to grind sea raiders for equipment, it's all relatively affordable. More importantly though, it does a good job of capturing the Star Wars feel- there's a wide variety of races to choose from, lots of cool equipment and ships, and a lot of recognisable locations (including Tatooine, Dagobah, Hoth, Mustafar, and many more). The guns are quite fun to use, since they're so different from other weapons in other Warband mods (with slow bullets and non-parabolic trajectories), and of course, you can use lightsabers and the force, should you choose to. It really doesn't force you to be force-sensitive though, which is interesting- you can get by just fine with a gun and vibro axe.
Overall, I like how much of a total overhaul this mod is, without changing the things that make Warband great. It does greatly reduce the number of factions, which could be seen as a bad thing, but it's appropriate for the setting. I personally believe it has enough new features to more than make up for this.
Anyways, that's gonna be it for today- hopefully you enjoyed this post!
