Dark Ages in the British Isles were a fascinating, dismal time of constant wars, in which people fought for survival. A dark age with a deep blend of cultures. The 6th and 7th centuries were a time when invaders (Saxons, Angles and Jutes) tried hard to forge their destiny in a new world with the steel of their swords, shields and spears. The ancient peoples tried to resist, while they saw their kingdoms defeated and conquered by the “barbarians”, and sorrowfully saw how their beloved world slowly disappeared off the face of the earth. But other people must not be left unmentioned, like the Picts, who have always inspired great interest. Or to the west, another island as complex as Britain: Ireland in which many people were fighting for a piece of land, their clans, livestock and supremacy. In short, it is a world we know little about, yet a magnet for history lovers: a time of war and great deeds, where few kings (almost none) died in their beds.
The models and textures in this mod are very nice and the scripting is quite good, it runs well and the map has very diverse and well researched factions
Unfortunately the gameplay is utter rubbish. I've heard it called the "realism mod".
Realism my arse.
Brytenwalda confuses realism with making the game impossibly hard. It basically ***** the player over with cheap tricks and gives them to recourse.
Raider mobs annihilate anything sent against them, unless you have a better than a 10 to 1 advantage raiders will annihilate you until you get high enough in level to pick them off yourself. Also, there are basically no weak mobs to help the player to level their troops, it is this and the fact that levelling troops takes a month of Sundays that ruins this mod.
The only way I could get good troops was to wait until I found a band of raiders with a lot of prisoners but low fighting strength. I would hide my soldiers and ride in to pick the raiders off 1 by 1. This is bad handling of the Warband campaign system and being forced to play like this makes the game tedious.
Raider mobs also spawn with absurd stats and basically all of them have chainmail! This is meant to be Dark Ages Britain FFS, if you had chainmail in this age you were probably royalty, nobility or so incredibly good at fighting that you killed some nobleman and got away with it (and his armour). So why the **** are these Dena and Frankish raiders who are running around Britain in an King's Ransom worth of chainmail mindlessly attacking me and my useless idiot army? The Vassals even worse, they get incredibly generous helpings of ridiculously over-powered units and the get reinforced at a rate that makes it impossible to compete with them.
I gave this mod a 3 because even though it's well made, it's not worth playing. It's not worth playing because there's no viable way to win without making the game a tedious grind. You should be able to win games with skill and persistence, not mindless repetition. I'd happily give it a 10 if the author fixed the ridiculously powerful raider mobs, balanced the vassal armies to better represent their historical counterparts and got rid of the stupidly slow troop leveling system