The loyalty of your companions, towns, and fellow lords in Bannerlord is as important in the game as it is in real life. For any players looking to accomplish a diplomatic playthrough, building loyalty with the game’s various factions and places is imperative. Below, we establish how to increase loyalty in Bannerlord, so you can charm your way into their good graces.
Increasing the Loyalty of Settlements in Bannerlord
Raising the loyalty of towns feeds into every aspect of the settlement’s success, from its ability to complete building projects quickly, to tax revenue, to the ability to defend itself. There aren’t any shortcuts to raising town loyalty, but there are a few ways to make sure it’s always going upward:
- Before engaging in any of the actions below, you must install a governor that won’t anger the people constantly. This means he or she should be of the same culture as the citizens (i.e. an Aserai ruler for a city in Aserai lands, even if your faction’s culture is different). Placing a different culture as governor will contribute to a daily loyalty penalty that makes all measures harder. You also want to look for diplomatic companions that come with inherent bonuses to relevant stats, like Charm, Steward, and Leadership. These attributes will come with bonus perks that make governing much easier.
- Taking care of guests for the locals is the best way to raise relations quickly. You can find quests by looking for the blue exclamation points near their portraits. You can use trustworthy companions and powerful troops to complete many missions at once, but this requires accepting the risk that they could fail and hurt relations with the influential person.
- Each settlement comes with various building projects that raise its stats, each of which indirectly raises the loyalty of the people. Improve the prosperity and security of a town, for example, and its loyalty will increase. Building the Fairgrounds will directly impact the loyalty stat, so it is recommended you build this one before any of the others.
- Each settlement has daily that contribute to a continual boost in a certain stat. For loyalty, this quest is called “Festival and Games”. It gives a +3 boost to the daily loyalty score, which is really helpful to offset the daily loyalty loss from various factors.
- Maintaining a well-equipped garrison will elevate the security of a settlement, which affects its loyalty. The same with its prosperity, which can be elevated by helping villagers and building specific upgrades just like loyalty.
- Certain policies raise the loyalty of all citizens under your command, including those in villages and keeps. Of course, you need to be king or queen first, but it is a simple matter of reading through the descriptions and picking the policies that have the highest impact on building citizen trust.
Increasing the Loyalty of Other Lords and Ladies
Increasing the loyalty of your fellow lords is a matter of increasing their ‘relation’ score, which is always visible in their Encyclopedia entry, as well as the tooltip that appears with a mouseover on any screen. Favorable relations with lords and ladies are paramount for a diplomatic playthrough. It makes every negotiation easier, including suing for peace, bartering, marriage, and getting them to defect and join your kingdom. These are the best ways to increase the loyalty of fellow lords in Bannerlord:
- Money and gifts are a sure way to make people like you more in real life, and Bannerlord is no exception. To give a gift, open the barter screen through dialogue (“I have a proposal that may benefit us both”) and offer money or valuables but ask for nothing in return. Relation with this lord will rise according to the value of the gift.
- Completing quests for lords and ladies
- War is a good time to make friends. The obvious route is to fight alongside your allies and earn their favor through heroism, which happens much faster if you come to their rescue in a fight they’re losing. A more effective way to raise relations with enemies–perhaps for future loyalties–is to defeat them and then let them go instead of capturing them. Assuming you’re fairly good at winning fights, you can continue defeating and releasing enemies throughout a campaign and walk away with a dozen new friends.
- Marrying into a family will increase your relationship with its members by at least 40 points instantly. This can only be done once unless your spouse dies and you remarry, but the move essentially earns their loyalty permanently.
- You can increase the loyalty of lords within your kingdom by using influence to raise their clan in the clan management screen. If you’re truly wealthy and generous, you can also gift one of your settlements to a landless lord and receive a large relation boost.
How to Increase Companion Loyalty in Bannerlord
Like the other lords in Bannerlord, companion loyalty can be measured by their ‘relation’ stat. Companion relation is a peculiar stat, in that there are few ways to elevate it once they’ve signed on. This means a companion recruited at -2 relation will remain at this level for twenty years of in-game time. There are two actions you can take to change this, however.
For companions with kind traits like ‘merciful’ and ‘honorable’ performing aggressively villainous actions like raiding a village, robbing a caravan, or beheading a captured lord will cause them to confront the player and question their morality. If the player accepts responsibility during the ensuing dialogue and promises not to do it again, relation with the companion will instantly go up by 15 points.
This means that -2 companion instantly becomes a +13 in terms of how they feel about the player. In perspective, it takes a relation stat of +10 for any other character to be considered the player’s friend in his or her encyclopedia entry.
After you’ve become a king or queen of your own faction later in the game, you can choose which companions you want to be loyal for life by promoting them to vassals. New to the 1.7 version, the action requires 500 influence, 20,000 denars, and a settlement to grant this companion. When they’re promoted from a companion to a lord or lady with their own lands.
Logically, their relation will instantly go up to its maximum value (100), which makes it unlikely that a companion will ever become disloyal. This is a useful tactic for late-game conquests when you want to make sure your kingdom’s flank is covered by someone you can trust.
Now that you know how to increase loyalty in Bannerlord, you can finally keep your kingdom intact without constant battles (if that’s your thing). Moreover, you can travel to the far reaches of the map without worrying about how your settlement will fare without constant supervision, roleplaying as a true banner lord!
