Mount&Blade/Fiefs

New to Mount&Blade 0.89x is the ability to own and manage properties (referred to as fiefs) with a more polished system than the simple castle ownership of previous versions. A fief can be either a castle or a village.

Acquisition
In order to acquire a fief, a ruler must offer it to you. There are two ways to be offered one:

Reward for allegiance
Once you reach 160 Renown, kings will start randomly asking you to pledge your allegiance, offering you a village to sweeten the deal. If your status with a king and/or his faction has dropped below 0 he will not make you an offer. If you refuse a random property offer you will displease the leader offering it (making joining his faction harder) and once his opinion of you falls too low he will not make the offer again. Joining a faction is permanent; other leaders will not offer you a property in return for changing sides.

If you ask the king yourself, certain calculations are involved to determine whether you are worthy of becoming a vassal. The game first checks to make sure you are not already a member of a faction, then checks your relation with the faction to make sure it is not below zero, and also checks that your standing with the king is no lower than -5. Your standing with the king is then multiplied by five and added to your Renown. If the combined total is over 160 and you passed all the previous checks you'll be allowed into the faction.

Regardless of the method in which you joined the faction, the king will reward you with the poorest village he currently possesses.

Handout from captured castles
Several castles are dotted around the map, controlled by various factions; once you are in a faction you are able to lay siege to the castles of your faction's enemies (see Siege tactics). When you capture a castle it will become the property of your faction; if there is a village very close to the castle it will also become your faction's property. Every time you conquer a castle your king will give it to one of his vassals, and the village (if there was one) to a different vassal; there is of course a chance that you will be the chosen recipient of one of these new assets. When it is offered to you you have the choice of accepting or refusing; if you refuse it it will got to another vassal instead. The calculations used to determine which vassal gets a property are partly based on renown and partly based on luck, so there is no easy way of determining whether you'll be offered a fief after you capture a castle.

When you are granted a castle your banner will fly above it identifying it as your property. Villages you own do not use your banner.

Taxes and produce
Regardless of how you acquire a fief, doing so allows you to collect taxes from the populace (these taxes accumulate, so you don't have to visit every week if you don't want to).

If the fief is a village you can buy food from the villagers or force them to give you goods; just as with other villages, forcing them to give you goods will lower their reputation towards you. The reputation only lowers when you actually enter the loot screen, so if you accidentally choose the wrong option you can pick "Forget it" and avoid the reputation penalty.

Reputation
Once a village belongs to you or to your faction you can no longer burn it. If you have previously burned a village that becomes your fief the townsfolk will remember and hate you, but you can still collect your taxes as usual. You will however be unable to get Recruits from this village (see Recruiting and garrisoning). You can see your reputation in the description at the top along with a word describing how much they like or hate you ("acceptive", "resentful", "hate you with a passion", etc.)

As a general rule, if you intend to conquer castles you should avoid raiding nearby villages belonging to that same faction.

Villages
Unless the villagers dislike you (see Reputation), you will get the "Recruit volunteers" option; unlike the villages your faction owned from the beginning, captured villages will offer you Recruits of whatever nation the village originally belonged to.

You cannot post a garrison at the village. If the village is attacked (see Raids) only the Farmers are there to defend it.

Castles
Faction troops of varying skill levels will gradually take up residence in your castle to defend it. You can add them to your party by choosing the "Station a garrison" option, and you can also deposit men in your party in the same way. You can also drop off or pick up prisoners. Heroes cannot be stationed in the garrison.

Men left in a castle cost the same weekly wage as they would when in your party, and their wages are automatically paid (along with those of the men in your party) at the end of each week.

Fief management
Various improvements can be made by choosing the "Manage this (castle/village)" menu option.

Castles
No castle improvements are implemented in Mount&Blade 0.892.

Villages
For your village you can pay for improvements to Housing, Irrigation, and the Mill. All structures start at Level 0. Construction costs a lot of money and will take a while (a month or more), and each level of improvement costs more money and takes longer to build. You can decrease the cost and construction time by increasing your Engineer skill. Note that the Population size will continue to display "N/A" even after building Housing because this feature is incomplete.

Raids
From time to time enemies will try to raid your villages or besiege your castles; when this occurs you can head there and drive off the attackers. If it's a village being raided the Farmers will fight alongside you.