Your soldiers can finally earn their promotions in Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord's arenas

Image credit: KillDMM / Arena Training, via Nexus Mods

Apparently, there's a way to improve your soldiers that doesn't involve throwing them at enemy cavalry and hoping enough survive to earn a promotion. Who knew? KillDMM's Arena Training adds a paid training service to town arenas in Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, allowing players to prepare their troops for advancement without another round of battlefield experience. You can train the whole eligible party or select individual units, with each soldier costing 100 gold and spending four in-game hours working toward their next upgrade. It's a welcome alternative when you've got a collection of promising recruits and would rather not gamble their futures on the next skirmish.

The system doesn't hand out promotions for free, mind you. Training provides the experience needed to make a soldier upgrade-ready, but the usual promotion costs and any required horses still apply. Heroes and top-tier troops are excluded, and each arena service has a 24-hour cooldown. At publication, KillDMM supported Bannerlord 1.4.8 in single-player campaigns, with an important save precaution if you ever remove the mod: finish any training already in progress before uninstalling it. For commanders who prefer preparing an army to repeatedly replacing one, it's a sensible little addition.