Sword & Musket [Napoleonic Wars] mod for Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord

Hello dear followers,

Sword & Musket - 2.0 Alpha Release

We finally had the opportunity to publish the blog. We are happy to announce this news that many of you have been waiting for.

As the Sword & Musket team, we have done many things side by side with you, our comrades, in this project that we have been clenching for a long time! As a result of your patience and our hard work, we realized that there is a light in the darkness and we acted according to this awareness.

As a result of this move, thanks to the great efforts of all the developer members of Sword & Musket, we have revolutionized many works!

1.1.2. 'The Cavalry Update'

The work for 1.1.2, the cavalry update, started all the way back in February and culminated in a release in June, with a significant patch for it released in August.

The reason for the slow development related to Cavalry was due to a variety of personal issues many of the team members were experiencing during that time. Some people moved, had health issues, or other challenges in their personal or professional life and modding had to take a back seat. Additionally, some internal management problems cropped up during this time and contributed to the slow-down of development during this period.

1.1.3. 'The Everything Update'

Since August, there’s been a significant restructuring of the entire development team: Removing inactive members, simplifying the discord, attempting regular meetings, improving communication between departments, and a restructuring of many of the roles themselves. Taking the time to do all of this has helped us identify a lot of weak points in the workflow and let us assign or begin the search for individuals to accomplish tasks that people were previously under the impression were just being handled (the cannons for example).

This has also (hopefully) made it so that the issues which plagued the development of 1.1.2 do not affect our ability to produce content for you all in the future.

Since August, our Modding Department has conducted extensive technical reviews based on support requests we’ve received from community events. Thanks to you guys, we’ve managed to narrow down and resolve numerous bugs and other technical issues. There is of course still more work to be done and we are actively chasing down and trying to resolve some particular bugs that have been plaguing the mod for a while. We are now confident that we can resolve these soon.

Community Servers and Events

Many regiments within the Sword & Musket community have expressed their desire to host their own servers and organize their own events to better meet the needs of the community, a request that has been ongoing for a while. In determining what would create the most healthy ecosystem for the Sword and Musket community, we realized the need for, not only reliable servers, but also a complete server-hosting package that includes necessary admin tools for moderation and hosting events.

This has led us to incorporating our own admin tools in the form of Adolphus' OCEAdmin. This is an improved UI and Administrative System, forked off the chat-commands base developed by MentalRob and Horns. We've also reworked the admin-panel made by Horns for Calradic Campaign, and are using it as the base for interaction with the admin system in Sword & Musket. What this all means for you, is that server hosting with the above features is now available, allowing the community to host their own events. In addition to community events, you can also participate in events organized by us through Discord and the Sword & Musket Forum. If server hosts are interested in using their own admin tools, we've also made it easy to disable the ones we've included with Sword & Musket as well.

Sword & Musket - Discord

Sword & Musket - Forum Event / Tournements

Sword & Musket Official Servers will be available to the community in March.

Animations

Animations are of great importance to our mod as they help better portray the era of the Napoleonic Wars to players. Since the mod's release, we have made several changes to animations, and we will continue to improve them. About a year ago, we also highlighted the need to shoot while crouching in the TaleWorlds forum. While this hasn’t been added yet, we have confirmation that this will be worked on in the coming 1.3 Patch. However, TaleWorlds did change the reloading behaviour, so canceling reloads and continuing from a certain point is now possible.

A video: 04.00 more details for Animations.

With this S&M update, longer animation times have been applied to the cannons, now making them the V2 cannons we announced in our discord earlier. Currently we are working on V3 Cannons, with proper custom animations. Finally, in order to make the fully custom V4 cannons, we are looking for anyone experienced in C#. Please join our discord and send a DM to Lucon if you’re interested in helping out.

Scenes

Many maps that were in the mod previously, but weren’t working have been fixed and are now available to play. About 36 new maps have been added to the mod, with 18 more on the way. In the interest of producing as much content as possible for the 1.1.3 update, most of these maps are adaptations to Sword and Musket rather than content specifically made for it. Many of them were posted for public use or sent to us privately. What that means is, the current rate for new maps will significantly slow down. We currently have only three active level designers, so if anyone is interested in joining DM me (Sheepbitter) or Lucon in our discord, we’d love to have you.

Asturica, an OSP scene

Martello Siege

Karu Port

Na'ilu,

Aris Lowlands,

Calsa River,

Bir Saif Pass,

Canoros Forest,

A video: 4:56 more details for Scenes/Maps

Balance

Darthkiller has been hard at work, rebalancing the mod to make the game feel less clunky and more like you’re a man fighting during the Napoleonic Wars. Missile speed has been improved. Stabs and swings have been improved to feel much more similar to NW. Swords are much more hefty. And biggest of all, melee damage and other stats are now adjustable using custom code. We are no longer bound by the Bannerlord parts system, meaning we can balance the game around Sword and Musket itself, rather than use a system designed to balance around Native Singleplayer.

Modular Regiment Structure

French and Austrian modular regiments have been in production for quite some time, and it's time to introduce these units. To answer the question of what a Modular Regiment Structure is, it involves the transformation of regiments, other than the 45th Regiment's Fusilier Company, into Grenadiers or Voltigeurs companies. This process will also apply to British units and British unit production is already underway. Austrian units, being standard units, were not subjected to the same transformation process. However, due to their similar production volumes, we have considered them as modular regiments.

Updates and Added Companies

So far, we have added Fusilier and Grenadier companies to the 63rd and 84th regiments in addition to the French 45th Regiment. We have also added Fusilier and Voltigeurs companies to the 14th Regiment. Grenadier companies will be added as soon as we finish the production process. The Vistula units in France have been temporarily removed from the mod until the next revision process.

Austrian regimental and company names have been successfully added. We will present more French, British, Austrian, and Russian regiments to you in the future. And don't think we've forgotten Prussia; we just want to emphasize that the production of models is especially slow and challenging work, and we don’t want to deliver something incomplete. We appreciate your patience during this process. If you’d like to help speed this process up, we are always looking for more modelers.

Placeholders

We are very excited to be able to share new units with you all in the upcoming updates. However after releasing the Austrian faction into Sword & Musket, we have been concerned with the idea of releasing new factions without cavalry to accompany them for the purposes of community events and general faction balance. Therefore, we have devised a system of "placeholder" units, this system will allow us to temporarily add new units to the game with models that lack the rigorous attention to historical accuracy that our normal offerings have given you. This allows us to provide a temporary solution to faction balance while better, more detailed units are in production, so you can expect to see a few of these "placeholder" units in upcoming updates, giving more cavalry variety to the factions in-game.

End

That about wraps up the 1.1.3 update. We’ve released most of it as a first part already, the rest of it is coming in the next couple weeks, along with bug fixes for the first part. Thanks for watching and Subscribe for more, we’ve got a lot more updates coming on the way.