Bannerlord is notorious for its long, opaque development cycles, but in fairness to Taleworlds, you can’t fault the ambition of their paid expansions. They’ve been few and far between and basically each created a brand new game. You’ll only need to spend in-game money to get your horse armor here. And so we come to War Sails, which finally adds naval combat, piracy, and all other nautical mishaps to the game.
What you’ll probably want to know from this review is: Bannerlord can be a clumsy game at the best of times, and now you want to put ships in it? You want to have the combat AI and already chaotic fighting in an extremely enclosed space? With artillery? And collision physics? All while constantly moving up and down on a rough sea? With wind? You want these guys to be trying to board other ships wobbling about on the ocean, throwing grappling hooks and trying to traverse small rope bridges while the other side tries to cut them? Have the developers gone mad?
Well, unsurprisingly, there are problems. The AI is oddly incompetent at using the ship-mounted artillery. Ships struggle to disengage once they’ve locked onto their first target. Often corpses, occasionally the living, and even sometimes entire ships, hover ten feet above the ocean’s surface.
Bannerlord really is the Citizen Kane of Eurojank
So, yes, this is a glitchy expansion. But Bannerlord is a glitchy game, and what’s on offer here is within the parameters of tolerability in a genre we all know and love – that of Eurojank. And Bannerlord really is the Citizen Kane of Eurojank. In short, if sieges haven’t put you off the game this far, you’ll get along with War Sails just fine.
In fact, if anything, War Sails actually impressed me with its lack of jank – how well the combat worked, and how reliably ships and sailors behaved, and nothing getting stuck or locked into a necessary restart. Admittedly, that’s a consequence of going into this game expecting it to be full of bugs, but for the actual act of integrating sailing and naval combat, it’s a resounding success.
War Sails’ Odd Design Choices
However, there are some design decisions that mean it’s not quite what it could be. The world map has been modified for the introduction of ships, but not to a very good extent. Rivers are navigable up to a point, but others aren’t, or have cities on their banks with no ports. Ships are essentially linear in abilities, so historically smaller, more maneuverable craft like longships have no advantages over larger vessels. It’s not really any faster to travel by sea, either.
Most infuriating of all, there’s no additional party role like Scout or Quartermaster where a naval specialist can lend his skills to the party – it’s all on you. Shipmaster is by far the most important, and just to unlock the ability to launch four ships instead of three, you’ll need to get it up to an absurd level 225. How do we increase the shipmaster skill? Sail around on the campaign map. There is no other way.
As a result, while in many ways ships are well implemented, the navy is something that is strikingly common in a wide range of different strategy games, from Civilization to Europa Universalis to Age of Empires – the navy can be fun. But it can also be safely ignored. Min-maxers need not apply.
Modders Can Step In to Improve War Sails
Therein lies something of a problem with those huge, infrequent expansions though. Were this on a game with much more frequent releases and shorter development cycles, you might call this a fine introduction of naval combat into the game, and would be eagerly awaiting some more interesting things to do with it. With Taleworlds, that seems very unlikely. This is what we’ve got, and this is what we’ll be stuck with for a long time.
So, should it be avoided? Not so fast. While it can seem somewhat flavourless, the expansion of things to do on the ocean should probably not be left to Taleworlds. Instead, we can expect modders to step into the breach. Some of the minor grumbles mentioned in this review have already been addressed, while it’ll also work seamlessly with existing must-haves like Diplomacy. If you’re looking for a new lease of life for Bannerlord or are still a regular player, you’ll definitely want to pick it up.
