Bartering Skill

A new Bartering skill is coming to Mount&Blade 2 Bannerlord!. I have taken this info from some of Taleworlds Entertainment's blogs and put it all together! The picture below is the new Bartering screen."The right hand side presents a list of things the player can offer towards the deal, and the left hand side shows what the player can demand from the other party. This is a simple system that makes deals easy to create and view, with other players items available for barter as well.

The satisfaction-meter in the middle demonstrates the other party's willingness to accept the deal and so is the key indicator for the player, when we put together a barter offer the Satisfaction changes as we add and remove items into the offer. It is also affected by other factors such as player skills and relation to the character -and especially- the needs of the other party!. Certain goods and arrangements have different values for different NPCs. For example, setting free a character who is held prisoner may be worth quite a lot to the prisoner's family and to a lesser extent, other NPCs in the same faction, while this may be of essentially no value to characters who are completely unrelated. Capture their family and friends and i'm sure you will have lots of trade ground to stand on :D


     "The things that can be exchanged in barter depend on context as well. When bartering with enemies, you are able to negotiate peace deals, while barters between a king and his vassals could consist of granting ranks within the kingdom or awarding of fiefs." Being able to negotiate with a king for fiefs?!?! Amazing feature that will grant us lots of ways to earn more income with this new Bartering skill.

Under the hood, the game takes what might be called a rather materialistic approach: In the world of Bannerlord's barters, everything has a price (lol isn't that the truth in the real world); the game internally assigns a numerical value in the game world's currency --denars to every possible item in a barter, then uses this monetary value to evaluate whether a deal is good or not. Something to be careful of, with this kind of system, is the potential of counter-intuitive results arising: For example bribing your arch-enemy to join your faction, if you pay the right amount. In practice though, this is a non-issue. The system will typically assign such exorbitant values to decisions of this sort, that these will be extremely difficult, if not altogether impossible, for the player to attain." Basically everything can be bought, even friendship of your enemies if you have the money! But if you have a really bad relation then the price might be way over the top costing an unbelievable amount of money.

The sandbox AI can use the barter system just like the player. We have a system in place that finds parties which could be interacting and then tries to build barter offers that would be acceptable to both parties. For example, if one of your vassals has low loyalty and there is a rival king nearby who has a fief to spare, there is a chance that the king will entice your lord with the promise of the fief and your vassal will defect. Handling AI interactions in this way is a great boon for the strategical campaign as it makes the game much more interesting and unpredictable, while retaining balance and realism.