Becoming a ruler in Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord isn’t just about trotting up and down on your horse yelling orders at the archery line. When you start amassing territory and settlements start being ceded to you (or you take them by force) there’s a lot of in-depth managing you can invest your time in. After all, you don’t want to be ruler of a few broken down villages, do you?

Managing your settlement

When you take over a settlement or one is handed to you, there’ll be immediate choices to make. This all takes gold, so if you don’t have a stockpile of money sitting around you may not be able to exert your will just yet on your fledgling settlement. 

When it comes to upgrading and managing your settlement you have a few different options. You can choose to build structures, upgrade structures, invest in reserves, and set a ‘Daily Default’ option.

Building structures offers benefits for your settlement and ultimately you so is something well worth your time and money. All projects and buildings can be queued up so you don’t have to check back constantly to issue orders and all projects can be upgraded to a maximum of level three. The Granary is a common building that can be upgraded which allows food to be stored, making your starving peasants' life a little easier.

Other buildings such as the lime kiln, barracks, and training fields can also be invested in, giving your settlement much more to offer your budding demesne and even giving it the opportunity to add to its own defence, should it be assailed. 

Reserves are the measure of food supplies your settlement has on hand. You’ll want to keep this at a decent level at all times, too low and your settlement will start to suffer badly. No-one likes to be hungry, even in a video game.

The Daily Default option allows you to tell your settlement what to do when not doing something else. For example, if you are worried about food reserves, setting your Daily Default to Irrigation means your citizens will busy themselves looking after the growing of food when not doing something else.

Whilst you may not have to return to check on the project queue, it is a good idea to return often to make sure your citizens are happy, their needs are met, and they’re not thinking of rebelling. After all, what use is a leader whose citizens don’t respect them?

Defending your settlement

A natural part of life in Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord is that settlements will come under attack. If you want to keep your settlement un-raided, you’ll need to garrison troops from your party into your town when you visit. By assigning your troops to your town they’ll automatically defend it should enemies try to invade. In addition, the training field and barracks projects allow your troops to train and increase the size of the local militia, meaning they’ll be on top form should anyone attack.

Hopefully now you should have an idea of what it takes to manage a successful settlement in Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord. For more information and articles, mount your horse and trot over to our game hub.