I’ll probably never know, but I’m eternally grateful for their great work! I doubt they even play games themselves, as M&B is so free of the usual rpg influences that only a non-gamer could design this imo. The result is a dash of strategy mixed with fps-like combat where every swordstroke or parry is controlled by you, your actual skill with the interface and your ability to command your troops is by far the most important factors regarding the battle outcome.

Every faction in M&B specialize in different troops, some have great archers, crossbowmen, pikemen or mounted troops, and learning the strengths and weaknesses of your faction aswell as how to best use them is a must. It also makes the replay value great, playing for another faction makes you learn and master different strategies in the field.

While the AI is weak by default, making life easier in the early stages of the game, boosting the AI will make your army more useful. Your foes will be harder too ofcourse, but I find that commanding the army is even more fun than slaughtering the foes myself in the long run :)

If you like M&B, you should buy it. Its a small price to pay compared to all the work that has gone into making this, they truly deserve the support. It might even show the industry that there is better ways to go than staying with the same old tried and true recipe :)

I should probably try this game out again, but I’m too much of a graphics whore.

I really hope they don’t give you a choice of weapons in the arena, I’m weak, I’d just pick lance every time to guarantee victory. I like that arena forces you to learn weapons you wouldn’t normally use (just had a good tournament where in the final I got bow vs 2h sword, just scraped through with 10% health left).

I agree about the overland map though, I probably spend half my time as a prisoner. :) Maybe they could give the player a slight speed boost over other forces (with the option to turn it off for the hardcore crowd).

Seconded. The overland map and tracking system was a great idea, but the dozens of enormous rampaging armies render it pretty broken now (I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve used the teleport cheat just because it’s literally impossible to escape a superior force without losing absolutely everything), a lot of the missions and interactions are a chore and the arenas seem to get worse with every version. Why they STILL won’t let you choose your weapons and team is beyond me – and now they’ve taken out the pitched battles on demand, and just to take the fun out of their replacement, you get to spawn in right on top of three enemies half the time, too.

It’s still loads of fun (and totally worth buying for those of you mad enough to have neglected to do so) simply because the fighting is so damned satisfying, but they really need to stop adding new features before they’ve fixed the long-standing problems.

- Sieges are implemented terribly (you basically have to grind the numerically far superior garrison down in endless attacks, doing most, if not all the killing work yourself),
- there is no interaction with the Lords besides the basic delivery and kill quests (the new war campaigns are just annoying),
- the whole world map system with army speed and conversion choices is one dimensional, and very basic, the general interaction with the world is very primitive.

I love the combat aspects of M&B, but there are many, many annoying things that would need (much) work to make a proper “game”.
It has a very nice list of features, but those features are implemented only in the most basic way, often actually reducing the fun of the game.