There are not so many skills in Bannerlord, but Leadership is arguably the best out of all of them, as it influences how your party works and feels.
Sure, Stewardship and Medicine also have huge impacts on the lives and capacity of your army, but Leadership can do things that can’t even be compared to the others.
Recommended Read: How to Get Vassals in Bannerlord
Leadership not only makes a good leader of men and rulers but also increases passive stats that can usually be very annoying to sustain.
Here is how you can increase the Leadership of your character in Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord and how you can do this fast.
Table of contents
How Leadership Works in Bannerlord
Base Leadership in Bannerlord can influence, if increased, two main factors:
- Morale of troops under command
- Garrison size
Morale
Base morale for your party in Bannerlord is 50, and this can be affected positively or negatively by many factors, such as food supply, battle results, and Leadership.
Leadership can increase the base morale of your party by 0.1 per level. This means that at level 100 Leadership, the morale of your army will be 60 (without the influence of other factors).
If you are wondering why we are talking so much about morale, it is because this stat can end your battles in seconds if you don’t keep it up.
Morale will influence the chance for your troops to start retreating if something bad happens. If you are someone that likes to charge into the enemy rank, you might occasionally die, which can result in instant retreat if morale is low.
Garrison
Garrisons are important for defending settlements. However, militias also are a big part when it comes to this, and you can usually reinforce a besieged fief.
With the help of the Leadership skill, you can make a fief so strong that you won’t even need to reinforce it if attacked.
You will gain a 0.2 increase in the garrison size per Leadership level. So, at level 100 Leadership, you will have increased garrison size by 20.
Level Up Leadership Fast in Bannerlord
There are five ways to increase Leadership in Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord:
- Recruit Prisoners
- Recruit Troops
- Have Morale Over 75
- Lead an Army
- Have Troops Gain Experience
All of these methods have their ups and downs, but the best one would probably be having your troops get experience for themselves.
Let’s go through them one by one first:
Recruit Prisoners
Every time you recruit a prisoner into your party, you will gain Leadership experience for it. Here is how much experience you will get based on their Tier:
- Tier 1 Prisoner -> 2 XP
- Tier 2 Prisoner -> 4 XP
- Tier 3 Prisoner -> 6 XP
- Tier 4 Prisoner -> 8 XP
- Tier 5 Prisoner -> 10 XP
- Tier 6 Prisoner -> 12 XP
For obvious reasons, this would not be the most efficient way of increasing Leadership in the game, but it would be a good passive way to do it.
Recruiting prisoners takes a lot of time, and it also comes with debuffs to morale, which will cause you a lot of problems in the long run.
Recruit Troops
For every troop you recruit, you will also get a little Leadership experience. However, the number is so low that it isn’t worth talking too much about.
This just means that you and your companions can slowly level up your Leadership by just playing the gaming and recruiting troops, which is good news.
Have Morale Over 75
By constantly having over 75 morale for your party, you will passively gain Leadership experience. The amount you will get will be based on the number of troops with you.
To get a daily amount of 1 XP, you need at least 10 troops. However, having 100 troops will only get you 8 XP per day.
This is not a lot, and having such a high amount of morale with over 100 troops is going to be hard. This method is not good for someone that wants to level up Leadership fast.
Lead an Army
If you lead an army of parties, you will gain amazing amounts of Leadership experience. You will gain around 1 XP per troop per hour.
Since most armies are around 1000 troops, you can gain crazy amounts of Leadership XP in just an hour!
This method works really well because it does not matter if the troops are yours or not. And even if they are yours, you can still cheese this method to get a lot of experience in the early game.
To increase Leadership fast in the early game, you first have to become a vassal. Once you’ve done that, make a companion a party leader and give them all your troops.
Create an army and only call your companion to it. Take all the troops from the companion and now wait. In a few hours, you will gain tons of Leadership XP, and all of this cost 0 influence!
In the late game, you can just use your influence to get as many parties as you can into your army and just run around for a few hours. You will increase Leadership like no tomorrow.
Have Troops Gain Experience
A more active way to get Leadership levels is to have your troops kill other troops. Sounds easy enough, right?
To make this efficient, you can use the lowest-tier troops since they gain the most experience in fights. By letting them kill higher-tier troops, they will also gain more experience.
So, to level up Leadership fast in Bannerlord, all you need to do is recruit as many troops as you can get and send them to fight other armies. You can get around 10 XP per troop killed by just participating in fights.
Another bonus information: If you auto-resolve battles, you will still get some XP. However, it will be lower than normal.
That’s everything you need to know about how to increase Leadership in Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord!
Have any input or suggestions for this guide? Let us know in the comment section below.
