Mount & Blade II: Best engine_config.txt for 1000 Man Battles

The key to stable 1000-man battles is reducing the “Agent Overhead.” Every soldier in Bannerlord is an “Agent” with high-poly armor and individual skeletal animations. By modifying the engine_config.txt, we can force the engine to use more efficient animation sampling and reduce the simulation frequency for distant troops.

File Path

The engine_config.txt is located in your Documents folder, not the game’s installation directory.

%USERPROFILE%\Documents\Mount and Blade II Bannerlord\Configs\engine_config.txt

Technical Note: If you don’t see this file, launch the game once and change any graphic setting to force the engine to generate the config. After editing, setting it to Read-only is recommended if you want to prevent the game from reverting your manual physics tweaks.

Optimized 1000-Man Battle Configuration

Locate these keys in your engine_config.txt. These settings focus on offloading CPU-heavy tasks and simplifying skeletal updates.

Parameter	Recommended Value	Technical Purpose
animation_sampling_quality	0	Reduces the frequency of bone updates for distant soldiers (0 = Low/Fast).
number_of_corpses	0 to 50	Prevents the CPU from tracking physics for too many dead entities.
max_number_of_ragdolls	3	Caps physics-simulated falls; essential for CPU breathing room.
sound_channels	64	Reduces the number of concurrent audio threads processed by the CPU.
stencil_shadows_enabled	0	Disables a costly legacy shadow method that spikes during large formations.
cloth_simulation	0	Disables cape/flag physics which are devastating to FPS in 1000-man clusters.

# Optimized for 1000 Man Battles
animation_sampling_quality = 0
number_of_corpses = 50
max_number_of_ragdolls = 3
sound_channels = 64
stencil_shadows_enabled = 0
cloth_simulation = 0
shadow_type = 1
shadow_quality = 0

HowTo: Engineering the Ultimate Field Command

Follow these steps on GameEngineer.net to maintain 60 FPS during a 1000-man charge:

1. Audio Quality (The Secret Fix): In the in-game options, set Sound Channels to Low (64). Bannerlord processes audio on the CPU; in a 1000-man battle, the engine tries to calculate 1000 clashing swords, which can freeze your game more than the graphics do.
2. Shadows – Static Only: Set Shadow Type to Static Only. Calculating dynamic shadows for 1000 moving horses and men is the #1 GPU killer.
3. Battle Size Setting: Ensure your in-game Battle Size is set to 1000. Note that if you have high cavalry counts, the game engine counts a horse and a rider as separate entities for certain logic checks, which is why 1000 is the stable limit.
4. DLSS / FSR 2.0: Always enable DLSS (Quality) or FSR if available. While the bottleneck is the CPU, reducing the GPU load allows your system to maintain better thermal overhead for the CPU’s turbo clocks.
5. Corpse Cleanup: Set Corpse Character Detail to Low. Once a soldier is dead, their high-poly armor shouldn’t be eating your VRAM.

Technical Explanation: Skeletal Animation & Draw Calls

The TaleWorlds Engine uses a custom multithreading system to handle AI. However, Skeletal Animations (how the armor moves with the body) are incredibly expensive. By setting animation_sampling_quality = 0, the engine skips frames for the animations of troops that are further than $50m$ from the camera.

Furthermore, max_number_of_ragdolls controls how many “active” physics objects are in the scene. When 100 men die simultaneously from an arrow volley, the CPU has to calculate 100 falling bodies hitting the terrain. Capping this to 3 or 5 forces the engine to use pre-baked “death animations” for the rest, which is a pure mathematical calculation rather than a real-time physics simulation, saving your CPU from a catastrophic frame-time spike.