Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord – How to Get the First Lord to Join Your Kingdom

The toughest challenge a player kingdom faces, and how to deal with it.

Step 1: Survive

When you first start your kingdom, some people are going to be mad at you. Some people who are nearby and more powerful than you are. They want their castle/town back. If you do not have around 100k to pay them off, you started your kingdom too early. Go back to another guide for more tips.

What you want to do, is negotiate peace with your nearby faction, and then declare war on a faction with a neutral town or two between you as a buffer. This will make your holdings less attractive to attack, and large armies will be low on cohesion and food by the time they arrive.

Step 2: Raid

Factions take raided villages, casualties, and prisoners into account when deciding who is winning a war. You do not have to take a single holding to be winning, and you probably used up all your opportune moments getting your first one anyway.

As a single party, you can sustain yourself indefinitely in enemy territory by alternating between forcing villages to give you recruits and then raiding them for supplies. Any militia killed count as war casualties.

Choose a clan to target for raising relations with, usually the one with the most foolhardy members that can be farmed for relations. Stop raiding their villages before the progress bar finishes. This will not count as a raided village but keeps your relations with that clan high.

Once your relations are favorable with the enemy, and you are solidly winning your war, move on to step 3.

Step 3: Closing the Deal

Track down the Leader of your target clan, they are the only ones who can be negotiated with for making the entire clan desert. You’re going to have to spend some time rolling the dice on convincing them to join you, a high charm helps.

Do not despair that this step takes a while, once you have convinced a lord to defect they stay convinced. Except… oh wow he wants a lot of money, doesn’t he? The Leader of a clan holds all of their wealth, the more money a clan has, the more they will want in payment.

Now comes the art of the deal TM. Instead of settling your war price with the faction as a whole, and getting money per day- You can make a deal with an individual lord, and they will graciously eat the whole war price for their faction.

Approach them afterward, and now you can make them an offer they can’t refuse.

The Future

Now that you have your first lord, you can only negotiate peace through the diplomacy window, no more lump sums! As much of a bummer as that is, your number of parties on the map has doubled!

This is about as far as I have gotten, so here are some misc tips:

1. Leave companions in castles for overtime relations gain with their owner clan.
2. Clan leaders aren’t worth more in ransom but you’ll get more gold for beating them.
3. Its more efficient to raise relations by gifting loot than gifting money (Citation needed).