So, I played quite a while in Mount and Blade, the first one, and I got to a point where I had helped Lady Suno successfully rebel against the Kingdom of Swadia. I was doing pretty well, but I was annoyed by the Kingdom's insistence on going to war with ALL the other kingdoms. I worked toward a point where I had the biggest army I could lead, filled up my inventory with stuff to sell, and renounced my vows.

As you probably know, kingdoms have negative disposition toward you when they're at war, but this goes away once your liege achieves peace with them. When I was independent before the rebellion I was pretty much the friend of everybody, and I wanted to get back to free trading to help get a fat purse before trying to help another rebellion, or whatever. But what I didn't know was that the game RETAINS the negative dispositions when you quit a faction, even after that faction is at peace. You would think that the other factions would be happy to know I might be up for hire, but no.

So, upon quitting the Swadian faction I'm still barred from all but two cities on the map, the ones the Swadians still control. I flail around for a little while, being chased by armies, and notice that because my faction disposition doesn't change when the Swadians are at peace, and a given Kingdom, when I wanted to purchase peace with them, was asking something like 42000 denars for the privilege, I decided the best thing to do would be to get my vassalage back, so that my faction dispositions would even out.

Nope.

What happened was, when I said my oaths and became a vassal again, all my other faction relations stayed the same (in the deep negatives, despite my not having done anything personal against at least one of them during the brief war with them), and my relation value with SWADIA, the Kingdom I'd just renewed my relationship with, went into the deep negatives as though I went to war with them!!

Lady Suno, who had just accepted me back into the faction when I met her in the field, threatened to attack me unless I lost points in our personal relationship and begged not to be attacked :PP

So... for anybody like me who has chosen not to have save slots and just take consequences as they come, quitting a vassalage while still at war will make the game much more difficult than it needs to be, and returning to that same faction may be bugged. In addition to that effect, I wound up failing quests and getting quests back all at once for some reason, so I think some variables got mixed in with others and it created some sort of catastrophic adding problem internally. One possibility as to why things are screwed up I'll detail at the end of this (admittedly long) post.

I can imagine some people might come up with excuses as to why factions stay bad, which is fine, but the way I interpreted it was that there were really two dispositions, your liege's war with the faction, and your personal relationship to them. Like, if your liege was a jerk but you weren't, the individuals in a faction wouldn't necessarily take it personally that you were doing your duty for your liege. It seemed to be that way in personal interactions, but I guess it's just one value.

A solution I would like, not sure if it would be easy to mod or whatever, would be that when you quit a faction you are given the faction adjustment as though you were at peace with those factions. You still retain all the negative consequences of all the things you did personally (like sieges and keeping prisoners too long), maybe stored in a separate value that is applied to the faction relationship when you quit.

As far as the other thing, getting negative faction in a faction you just rejoined, seems like a plain old bug to me.


On to a possible reason that some quests and things were bugged, that may have contributed to the strange loss in faction: I had loaned out my top medical character at one point to a character in a faction we were currently at war with. This is supposed to tick time ahead a bit and then you immediately get her or him back. But for me it didn't happen properly because the character, who was sitting in his castle, chased after somebody who got nearby and it broke the sequence. I got Ymira back, but then the quest still said I had to get her back from the character. Eventually I met up with him, he gave me the 10 denars and 10 experience you're supposed to get, but then later the SAME quest came up again, telling me to go back to him to claim the reward. It seems like the database may have been corrupted because of this unexpected event. That may be why there were other problems down the line, or... maybe it's completely unrelated.

Anyway, done. Hope this at least helps somebody avoid disappointment in the long-term game. I hope Warband doesn't have this problem, I feel like moving on to that now.

Sort of. The same thing happens in Warband, quitting a faction still doesn't erase the other factions badwill towards you.
Joining or rejoining on the other hand does reset the other factions as it should. Even letting yourself be hired as a mercenary sets the faction relations as they should be.

So it's better but not as good as it should be. Hoping more from Bannerlord, whenever that comes out.

Uhm, no? I've just checked with my copy of Warband (Steam version, but it shouldn't differ from Gog). Joining the Sarranids, who were at war with the Swadians, put me at -40 with KoS, +12 with the Sultanate, and 0 with the other factions. Resigning from the vassallage resetted my standings with everyone, just as it's reasonable to expect.

Sounds like a bug to me, maybe related to the rebellion or the failed quest, but either way it's not supposed to happen. There are no excuses, it just shouldn't happen at all. That said, faction relations, personal relations with lords and reputation with villages and towns are different things.

Faction relations affects your general standing with a specific faction, i.e. friend, neutral, or enemy. Negative relations effectively puts you at war with them. You won't be able to enter their towns and castles peacefully (but it allows you to the siege them), and you won't be able to recruit from their villages anymore (unless your rep is high enough). The lords of that faction will consider you an enemy regardless of their personal opinion of you, and will either flee or attack you (but if they like you enough you can ask them not to fight, at the price of a few rep points).

Rep with Lords affects how supportive they are. Friendly lords of your faction are more likely to help you in battle, follow your orders, and put in a good word with your liege when it's time to assign new fiefs or elect a marshal. Resentful lords won't assist you in anything and may even put a bounty on your head, but will never attack you militarily just because they don't like you, be they of your faction or not.
High rep also helps when you're trying to convince Lords of other factions to defect, or to let you go without a fight if your factions are at war.

Rep with towns and villages affects tax revenue, price of goods, and volunteers. Basically, if they hate you people will refuse to pay taxes and join your party. If they love you, your weekly income will benefit, and more volunteers (sometimes even trained troops) will be available for recruitment (even if you're at war with their faction).

If they couldn't be arsed to fix simple stuff like this after YEARS of it being right in front of them then they'll not do anything different for Bannerlord. It'll be a graphical upgrade and another cart load of bugs.

A load of game mechanics stuff and bug-like features were fixed in WB -> Warband.
It's still a mess but a better mess at that.

I'd do expect Bannerlord to be full of bugs when it comes out, but also expect a big bunch of gameplay improvements and even overhauls. Plus a graphics update, which the game needs.