Can a ship be a horse archer? This is one of the many maritime musings Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord’s devs had to grapple with when putting together the flotilla of vessels which make up its naval warfare-themed War Sails expansion.

Ahead of War Sails’ release on November 26th, I chatted to a couple of its developers. Naturally, I was keen to hear about what the process of assembling the expansion’s armada. A particular challenge as each of Calradia’s historically-inspired nations has access to unique ships.

“We always had this idea [that] if the Calradian Empire were to have a flagship – this top of the line ship – it will be a Dromon”, Taleworlds design team lead Gökçen Karaağaç. Naturally, the Roman and Byzantine-inspired legions who dominate the central regions of Bannerlord’s map have an oared galley with trigular sails which mirrors those used by the real-world Byzantine navy as their main craft.

“The Aserai will try to match whatever the Empire does,” Karaağaç says, explaining that they reflect the two sides in the Arab versus Byzantine navy wars. Meanwhile, the Vlandians a Norman-ish faction whose gear includes some later medieval tech, have a kind of “pre-galleon roundship”.

Karaağaç admits that the team didn’t tie themselves too closely to naval history. “A Ghurab or what inspired the Ghurab, the Aserai unique ship, is fundamentally quite a different ship than what Byzantian people called a Dromon,” Karaağaç says. “So, we had to skew the time frames to match things together. Once all of those were in place. Even though they are kind of anachronistic, they still fit.”

Even then, picking ships is only a small piece of the puzzle. “The details, the balance, and how we fit them all together [came later],” Karaağaç says.

While the team has been thinking about the naval pairings of their factions for years, that doesn’t mean the vision for every vessel was in port and ready to sail from the start. “The Khuzait’s unique ship, the Qalguk, and the Battanian one, the Birlinn, were the last two ships we figured out.”

The challenge for the Mongol-inspired Khuzait, is that the historical people Taleworlds is drawing from aren’t known for their shipcraft. “They usually commandeered or made use of other people for their navies or their naval expertise came much later,” Karaağaç says. “We didn’t want to give them a mediocre ship, but a ship that’s made with right intentions [with] kind of weird results. So, their unique ship, the Qalguk, derives inspiration from a much more modern ship, a xebec. But it is fashioned into this time frame, and play this horse archer role on a ship.”

The Qalguk “trades off its ability to carry a lot of troops, its durability, its really high speed or carry capacity to fulfill that horse archer role”. It may not fit the historic period Taleworlds are usually drawing from perfectly, but it does fit the character of the faction. “This doesn’t fit realistically, but once we can find a meaningful reason to have such a ship, then it fits,” Karaağaç says.

Then, the Battanian Birlinn faced a different problem – Taleworlds knew they wanted the faction’s ship to mirror the nation’s land and lake-locked geography, but didn’t have a go-to real-life ship to think about visually.

“Since they’re on top of this plateau, [the Battanian] don’t have really easy access to the sea,” Karaağaç explains. “They’ve been known to raid rivers and make use of their inner sea, but they are not known for their seafaring, so we didn’t want to give them this huge big Battanian ship. We found a paper on this river flat-bottomed ship near northern France in a bog. We said ‘that sounds and feels like a Gaelic ship that someone from Gaul would use or Celtic people might use’, so we tried to make use of as much as possible.”

Add those to the array of other unique ships Taleworlds have designed for the other nations, and you’ve got an intriguing selection of many-oared flagships for each fleet, which can then be surrounded by a mix and match of clones or other boats for battles with up to eight vessels on either side. Make sure you watch out for the Qalguk doing its best impression of a crackshot riding a colt amid the chaos.