The Ultimate Guide to Bannerlord: Riding and Athletics XP

 Do you know how much XP you get for traveling across the map? Ever wondered why your athletics skill increases so slowly? Want to learn this one weird trick that doctors hate to gain 186 riding in a single battle? Hello Everyone and welcome back to another Strat Gaming video guide. In today’s video we are going to be looking at how XP and leveling work for athletics and riding. By the end of the video, you will have a firm grasp of how XP is earned on foot or horseback as well as how to quickly and efficiently level both. And if you stick around until the end of the video, I’ll show you my top 3 ways to get a great start in the early game.

   I’ve broken this video up into several chapters so if you’re following along you’ll be able to easily navigate through relevant segments. Check down in the description below for the time stamps. With all that being said, I hope you enjoy this guide and let’s get started!

First let’s look at how you gain XP with riding and Athletics. There are 2 ways – moving on the campaign map and doing damage of any kind to an enemy. When you move on the campaign map, you gain XP based on how much distance you travel. The type of XP you gain depends if you are mounted or not – no mount provided athletics XP and riding a mount provides riding XP. Let’s look at a few examples:

1. Traveling from the Vlandian town of Ostican in the North West to the Aserai town of Husn Fulq in the south east gave 80XP for athletics and 61.3XP for riding.
2. Traveling from Ositcan to the Vlandian town of Sargot gave around 21XP for athletics and 17XP for riding.
3. Traveling for 1 full day on the map gave about 12XP for athletics and 8XP for riding.

We can easily conclude 2 things here: you gain more XP on foot than you do mounted on the campaign map and that XP gain from campaign map travel is so small, it’s insignificant.

The real way to earn riding and athletics is through combat. Much like the previous two guides, you gain XP for these skills by doing damage to an enemy. I compiled the data from roughly 200 test runs and condensed it down into a brief summary:

1. Melee damage on foot – For each hit you get 1-7XP. For each kill you get 30-60XP.
2. Melee damage on horseback – For each hit you get 1-5XP. For each kill, you get 11-22XP.
3. Range damage on foot – For each hit you get 3-12XP. For each kill, you get 24-66XP.
4. Range damage on horseback – For each hit you get 3-1188XP. For each kill, you get 12-3444XP.
5. Siege weapon & boulder damage on foot – Boulder kills give 40-60XP per kill. Ballista kills give 40-103XP. Catapult kills give about 100XP per kill.
6. Miscellaneous info: Weak correlation between damage done and XP gain. Strong correlation between distance to target and XP gain. XP gain bugged for riding, looks like a misplaced decimal point.

When it comes to leveling riding and athletics, the most efficient methods are the exact same that can be seen in my previous two guides. If you have not already watched those, click the link here or check the description below for that. I don’t want to recycle content just to make the video longer, it wouldn’t be fair to you and it would waste your time. So instead, we will drop our character to level 1 for every skill and use a few of the different efficient farming methods so we can see exactly what the level gain looks like.

Let’s do a quick recap of how to farm looters more efficiently: grab any horse, bow and 3x arrows. Find a large looter group or get several smaller ones to chase you. Ride out to 150M, stop, begin shooting, retreat when they get into stone-throwing range, repeat until they are dead.

Cool tip: if you have several small groups following you and they retreat from morale loss, you will have to chase down several small groups and fight many battles instead of one large one. To avoid this, be sure to Tab ⇒ retreat when the final looter group starts to run away. If you do this quick enough, you can reset the battle and continue your farming. This strategy also works for siege defense where the attackers begin to retreat but you want to wipe them completely without having to chase them. If you hear the “end of battle music” then it’s already too late, so be sure to hit that retreat button FAST!

We were able to kill 55 looters for a total of 97 Bow levels and 186 Riding levels. Don’t be surprised if this get’s patched soon!

  The great thing about offensive sieges is that you get to dictate the pace of the battle. Since our goal here is to gain XP for our main character, we can put everyone into a single group and have them sit at the back of the map in a shield wall. Catapults can’t reach them and bows practically do no damage at these distances. We can take our time, stay behind cover and get as many kills as we like. We take 3x bodkin arrows and our engineer has the level 75 perk Military Planner that gives 50% more ranged ammunition in sieges for a total of 144 shots. We ended up with 192 kills and lost less than 20 troops. From level 1, we ended up gaining 138 Bow levels and 77 Athletic levels. Did I also mention we got a free castle out of it?

  Using a Ballista or Catapult during a siege defense is probably the best way to level up your athletics in the game. We covered both of these in the previous guide, so we will skip right to the end to see what a level 1 character would actually get in terms of leveling:

Ballista – For the Ballista, we ended up with 77 kills resulting in 110 Bow and 60 Athletics levels.

Catapult – For the Catapult, we ended up with 198 kill resulting in 170 Throwing and 95 Athletics levels.

While siege defenses are the best way to level up most skills in Bannerlord, they can be difficult to actual fight in since the AI cancels their sieges frequently. I will be releasing a guide that shows you the best ways to get into siege defense battles so stay tuned!

We are nearing the end of the video and as promised, I will be sharing with you my top 3 methods to a great start in Bannerlord. All 3 methods will be done solo – don’t take any troops or recruit any prisoners because we want to keep our expenses at 0 as well as our movement speed at max. To demonstrate each method, we will ask our friend Chad to help us out.

Start 1: Solo Looter Farming

The first method is solo farming looters from horseback. Check the timestamps in this video as well as the Range XP guide to see how this is done efficiently. There are 4 reasons I like to farm looters in the early game from horseback:

1. Level bow and riding to near max level within a month or less.
2. Earn decent money and loot.
3. Earn renown to get to Clan Tier 1.
4. It’s safe, very low risk of being captured.

Start 2: Solo Smithing

The second method is the solo smith. To do this, you will need have access to towns with lot’s of hardwood. I prefer the Battanian lands as they have hardwood in abundance. Our first stop is Dunglanys. Buy up all the hardwood you can, and begin to convert it to charcoal. Do this until you reach level 25 and make sure to take the efficient charcoal perk. When you run out of hardwood, sell all of the charcoal you made and continue to buy the rest of the town’s hardwood stock. When the town is depleted, move onto the next town and repeat. Once we reach level 50 or so, we can start buying cheap weapons and smelting them down and craft new weapons to sell back. Within a few weeks, you should easily hit level 100 smithing, have tens of thousands of denars, some nice custom weapons to use and unlocked lots of parts. The best part of all, you didn’t risk death or capture doing it!

Start 3: Solo Tournament Champion

The final method is the solo tournament champion. We start off by going to the nearest town. Wait until daytime, go to the arena and speak to the tournament master and ask which nearby towns have tournaments running in them. Proceed there and dominate the tournament. You will get minimal XP from these fights as XP gain from tournament is reduced by 75%, but you will get around of 1k denars from betting per win, the value of the prize you won – which can be anywhere from 500 -1500 denars and 3 renown per win. With no risk of being captured or loss of HP, this can be a great way to reach clan tier 1 and set yourself up for a great game!

  I want to thank you all for watching another Strat Gaming video guide. If you liked this video, thrust and stab the like and subscribe buttons down below. The likes really help out the video with the YouTube algorithm. Let me know in the comment section below what kind of guide you would like to see. Next week we will have the full smithing guide and the continuation of the Robin Hood Let’s Play series, so feel free to check those out if you’re interested. Thanks again for watching and catch you on the next one!