Strategy for founding a kingdom and conquering the world in Bannerlord Early Game Planning The first step is to build up a stockpile of gold. I typically play as a mercenary until clan tier 5 and have a stack of a few million gold. 3 million is fine, 5 million is safe, but more is always better. While you're a mercenary, release every lord you defeat in battle. This will improve your relations to make it easier to recruit them in the future as well as increase your charm level. During this time, you want to level up the following skills: Riding, Scouting, Charm, Leadership, Stewardship, Medicine All of these should be above level 200 with 5 focus points by the time you're ready to found a kingdom. For attributes, focus on intelligence and social. You gain an attribute point every 4 levels. By level 28, you want to have 7 intelligence, 7 social, 3 cunning, and 3 endurance. If you take the level 225 Riding perk Mounted Patrols and the level 225 Scouting perk Keen Sight, they stack so that lords in your party have a -100% chance to escape. As long as they're in your party, they're stuck there. This means that the longer a war goes on, the less armies the enemy is able to field. This is the main interaction that lets you win the game. Kingdom Prep When you're an independent clan (before you found a kingdom) you can declare war on a faction by talking to a lord's party and choosing the dialogue that you're there to "deliver your demands." When you're ready to declare a kingdom, you first want to prepare a party of 200-300 Fian Champions. Then, find a kingdom that's losing a war (probably Battania) and wait for a town that they've lost to rebel against whoever took it. Declare war on the rebel faction and siege the town down. You can starve out the garrison to minimize losses if you want. Prep the garrison with some locally recruited units, then declare war on Battania (or the other faction that's doing poorly) by attacking one of their parties. Take the guy captive and stand outside your town waiting for them to send an army to siege it. Watch carefully and wait for their army to start losing guys. This will signify the start of the defensive battle. They lose units when siege is equipment is destroyed, so check for two instances of it in a row. You can also watch the town garrison instead by hovering over the town. Once the siege battle has started, attack the party that's laying siege and choose to break in to help the defenders. Since they're already losing a war, they're likely to bring a bunch of low tier units. A garrison + militia + your fian party should be able to handle an army 1.5x its size without you issuing a single order. If you can destroy the battering ram, your chances of victory increase significantly. Without it, your fians can kill practically infinite dudes. Defensive siege auto resolve heavily favors the defenders, so you may even just be able to auto-resolve through it instead of doing a manual battle. Assuming you win this battle, take everyone prisoner. Do NOT ransom them or deposit them into a fief's dungeon. You want the -100% escape chance from Keen Sight and Mounted Patrols keeping them captive in your party. You may need to repeat this defensive siege scenario a few times, but you should eventually get to the point that they can only field armies of a size you can handle in a field battle and then eventually only nuisance armies. When you're at this point, other factions will notice they're weak and pile on. From here, you can safely siege down any towns you want. I try to take at least 5 towns at this point to establish some passive income for myself. As long as you're an independent clan (not kingdom) during this process, no one else will declare war on you. Early-Mid Game Kingdom When Battania (or whoever) is sufficiently beaten, you can talk to your governor and declare a kingdom. Use the renown you built up to pass any laws you want (grab all of the ones that increase party size and improve fief stats, especially loyalty). Next, you can recruit the lords you've been lugging around as prisoners directly out of the party screen by picking them and choosing the talk option. If you're missing any clan leaders, you may need to hunt them down in the field to talk to them. Since they have no or few fiefs, you should be able to recruit them for the free-500k range instead of the 1 mill+ range. From here, pick the weakest neighbor and declare war on them. If anyone else declares war on you, immediately make peace and pay whatever tribute they want. Repeat the same general process where you win battles and take all of the lords captive. It should be easier now that you can form armies. Importantly, you don't want to make peace with these defeated kingdoms. Keeping any leftover lords hostage will prevent their mini-parties from running around your kingdom raiding your villages. End Game After you've recruited this next set of lords, you should be a formidable kingdom. Continue the same general concept of focusing down one kingdom at a time and taking all of their guys captive. After the 4th loop or so, you can start to allow your vassals to handle offense. Instead, you should focus on defending the fiefs that they take from enemies trying to re-cap them. You may also need to allow for multiple wars at the against strong enemies. The same general principle applies. Take everyone captive and just carry them around in your party. Once you've reached a certain size (about half of the world), you can expect to be at war with every other kingdom at the same time. Use the kingdom diplomacy menu to set war strategies to guide your vassals. You should only have one offensive war at a time with the others being defensive. Conquering the last half of the world is time consuming and tedious. Use your influence on war votes. Try to decline peace deals to defeated empires, but you can take them if your vassals are too insistent. Most importantly, you want to decline peace deals with the kingdom you're actively trying to kill (the one with the offensive war strategy). You can accept peace deals with the others to save influence, but remember that every time you do you're freeing their lords and allowing them to build strength back up. Notes Recruiting Vassals High relationship with other clans make them easier to recruit. In particular, being their friend gives you a high percent chance for a critical success (counts double) for the first dialogue option. If you have the Natural Leader Charm perk, this means you only need to get 1 additional success in the next three persuasion checks to convince them. If you bounce around kingdoms while a mercenary, you can have pretty high relations with almost every faction in the game by the time you're ready to found a kingdom Companions & Family Most party skills are absolutely essential. Risking losing them to a companion death is, in my opinion, not worth it. Scout, Surgeon, and Quartermaster roles should all be filled by the player. Engineer is less important because it's just not as impactful, so you can choose to either delegate this one or take it yourself. If you're playing the main story, your siblings and their spouses should be your party leaders for clan parties. The lack of culture variety will restrict their utility as governors. If you don't have enough family members or are playing sandbox, high stewardship companions are best. Almost every skill has useful governor perks. When you need a governor, open the encyclopedia, go to the Heroes section, and check the Wanderer and Alive filters. This will list all of the companions in your game. Filter by the culture of the towns you have or plan to have and pick up some companions of the appropriate culture. You can send them out in caravans if you want to prepare them a little, but it's not too important. Respec them by talking to the arena master at any arena and pick all of the perks that say governor. You can look for specific skills if you want, but the loyalty bonus from having a same culture governor is the most important thing. Getting any bonus at all from governor perks is secondary, with getting specific governor perks is a distant third. If you're busy, even having no governor at all is fine. Your kingdom policies should be enough to prevent rebellions Notable Skills Riding: Nomadic Traditions (75), Sweeping Wind (100), Breeder (175) Athletics: Having Going (75), Walk it Off (150) Scouting: Day Traveler (25), Pathfinder (50), Deser Born (75), Forced March (100), Tracker (125), Mounted Scouts (150), Keen Sight (225) Charm: Virile (25), Warlord (50), Firebrand (125), Effort For the People (150), Natural Leader (200), Immortal Charm (275) Leadership: Combat Tips (25), Famous Commander (100), Leader of the Masses (125), Talent Magnet (250), Ultimate Leader (275) Steward: Paid in Promises (100), Giving Hands (125) Medicine: Preventive Medicine (25), Walk it Off (50), Veterinarian (125), Minister of Health (275) Character Creation and Levelling The Battanian culture gives you a party speed bonus while moving through forest. This is a *massive* help at chasing down parties, but not required. Steward is the best skill in the game, with Medicine in the top 5 as well. Because of this, Intelligence is a very high priority skill to level. Charm and Leadership both have a lot of very useful perks. Levelling Social should be your second priority, behind Intelligence. As a general note, Ultimate Leader (275 Leadership) is more efficient than levelling Steward more. You really only need to level a single melee skill and either one or no ranged skill. Which one is personal preference, but you can do well with them even with only 2 or 3 attribute points invested. Levelling becomes very slow at higher levels. Plan your character around finishing with 26 attribute points and 45 focus points (including those given during character creation). This happens at character level 33. You'll likely end up with more than that but it will be very very late game. 20 attribute points should be earmarked for 3 Endurance, 3 Cunning, 7 Social, and 7 Intelligence. You have a minimum of 2 vigor and 2 control, so that leaves 2 points to play with. 30 focus points should be earmarked for 5 riding, 5 scouting, 5 charm, 5 steward, and 5 medicine. This leaves 15 points (3 skills) to play with. The level cap for a skill with 5 focus points and 2/3/4 attribute points is 218/232/246 Fiefs If your goal is just world domination, you don't need to fixate too hard on how your towns are doing. The main thing is just owning them. Kingdom policies should prevent rebellions regardless of what you do with them. Don't worry about castles or towns that only have two connected villages (visible in the top right corner of the town menu). These are better given to vassals. Rent is driven by prosperity, and prosperity is driven by food. You need productivity to build buildings. Productivity has a lot of inputs, but the main ones are funding (money you personally put into the town) and loyalty. Loyalty also has a lot of inputs, but the main one is security. Security comes from militia and garrison. Each garrisoned unit will eat the town's food, so smaller garrisons consume less food. Smaller garrisons means your town has more food, which means that prosperity increases faster. Smaller garrisons also mean less security though, which means less loyalty. Higher tier units eat the same amount of food and provide more security. If you want a prosperous garrison, you want a garrison of 100-200 tier 6 troops (ideally Fians). This should be sufficient to cover security needs for a town up to 8k prosperity. You can prevent the town from auto-recruiting a larger garrison by unchecking the box in the clan party menu. Building priority should be orchard > fairground > aquaduct > militia barracks with everything else being secondary Higher prosperity villages deliver more food to your town, so ideally they'll be away from the front lines so that they don't get raided. After your kingdom is established, the main threat here is actually zero fief kingdoms with micro-parties running through your back lines that are too tedious to clean up. There are four towns in the game that have four connected villages. These have the highest maximum income potential. Aserai has Sanala, Vlandia has Jaculan, and Battania has both Seonon and Marunath. You'll need to take these for yourself during the independent clan phase if you want them to have time to build up. Otherwise, just don't worry about it. Marriage and Kids Get married and start pumping out kids early. I usually have 3 kids around clan tier 3. Kids take a long time to grow up. It's very possible to finish the game before they become of age. Marriage is a great opportunity to snag high tier gear by taking it from your spouse. You can save yourself several hundred thousand denars by stealing your new spouse's armor and horse armor.