Vire70
Recruit
I just recently got into Warband again after an extended break, and as I normally do I have a look around for newer promising looking mods. Perisno caught my eye and since then I've been playing it off and on for the last week or so. It is a good mod, and there's some new stuff here that I've never seen before, but there's also some parts that I feel are really flawed right now. As follows.
I just formed my own Kingdom by resigning from Elvarie vassalage and taking a town from the Tolranians. That all went well, except now the Zann are aggressively swarming across the map - and in all the countryside outside of my town there are these giant hordes of Zann vanguards, with anywhere from 100-250 units each. Worse is the fact that each of these has 30-150 prisoners.
In other words, they're still huge mobs of units despite obviously being part of a ton of battles each. And the reason for that is because of the unit distribution, or rather the lack thereof. To illustrate with an example, right now in my game the nearest Zann vanguard group has 214 units. Of these, 96 are Zann Veteran Swordsman, 34 Zann Kamikaze Warriors, 29 Zann Longbowmen and 30 Zann Swifthunters. The rest of the units are mostly a spattering of other faction groups they've picked up as prisoners, like peasants. But the ones I mentioned, which add up to 189, or 88% of the party, are top tier units. Almost all of them are top tier units. And this is not unique to this one group - they are all like this.
I have seen people comment that it is this way to compensate for them having to invade and that they start with few land areas... but what happens once they succeed in taking a few towns? It just seems like they have an endless horde of overpowered crap. I wouldn't even mind the party sizes if they weren't all top tier, but it's like the mod creators didn't even try to fit in an even distribution of units for Zann. That's not even getting into these really annoying random groups of super aggressive samurai bastards, like General Yamasomething, who randomly show up with 200+ Kamikaze Zann every now and then and attack you for no real reason. That leads me to the next thing...
Mercenaries, amazons, landing parties, etc.
Two things to say about these; the first is that the party sizes for these forces could really use some variation. 60 units of amazon warriors in plate armor were everywhere when I began the game, and there's absolutely nothing you can do to these kinds of parties for the first 100 days or more I find. It would have been fine if there was some groups of 15-30 when you start, but they don't spawn with that few. It's big or nothing.
Honestly, that isn't that bad by itself - at least a bigger party is easier to avoid when you're smaller in size. What really bugs me is that none of the vassals ever seem to give one crap about these units. Even when I became a sworn vassal to the Elvarie Queen, none of my fellow lords would ever help me fight these units. Which also means these units never really die out unless they happen to fight each other, because the only person they will attack is you - not any of the vasslas who are patrolling, specifically to rid their lands of the very bandits they're now ignoring
As an example... that same General Yamawhatever decided to attack me once with his 200 spamzerger kamikaze units one time when I was right outside the castle of the Elvarie Marshal who had requested my presence for a war campaign. He was inside the castle, and Queen Arlina with 250 units was standing right next to me outside of it, waiting. General whatever shows up and attacks me, me thinking the huge force of allies right next to me would result in me having a pretty good chance of victory, only to find my measly party of 100 troops are left to die while the Queen watches - because apparently she's pals with this Samurai wankhead who attacks me on sight and says he wants to conquer the countryside. If I hadn't saved just beforehand, I would have died, been captured, lost all my troops and probably failed the quest too.
I understand that it has something to do with these smaller sub factions or bandit groups having their own independent relation modifier with particular factions, causing vassals to not necessarily attack... but I just think it's completely broken in execution. You can literally get ganked in the midst of your own war party of vassals, as a marshal who called them there, by some foreign conquerer or even a group of amazons... it is really silly and frustrating.
The next thing is that I spent quite a while playing with the freelancer mod - the thing where you can join a lords entourage as a soldier and get promotions. That was really fun, but it seems to be quite flawed too when taking into consideration how huge a lot of stats for units are. I honestly just think everything is put over the top a bit. I mean I had to get like 6 riding skill for the 3rd promotion, and 16 strength or something like that. I feel like someone could easily start their own kingdom and conquer half the map before they were high level enough to get to the final promotion - of any faction.
Having said all of that, I have really enjoyed the mod thus far and will be playing it a lot more I think. These are just the few things I've come across that I find particularly troublesome, so don't take any offense.
I just formed my own Kingdom by resigning from Elvarie vassalage and taking a town from the Tolranians. That all went well, except now the Zann are aggressively swarming across the map - and in all the countryside outside of my town there are these giant hordes of Zann vanguards, with anywhere from 100-250 units each. Worse is the fact that each of these has 30-150 prisoners.
In other words, they're still huge mobs of units despite obviously being part of a ton of battles each. And the reason for that is because of the unit distribution, or rather the lack thereof. To illustrate with an example, right now in my game the nearest Zann vanguard group has 214 units. Of these, 96 are Zann Veteran Swordsman, 34 Zann Kamikaze Warriors, 29 Zann Longbowmen and 30 Zann Swifthunters. The rest of the units are mostly a spattering of other faction groups they've picked up as prisoners, like peasants. But the ones I mentioned, which add up to 189, or 88% of the party, are top tier units. Almost all of them are top tier units. And this is not unique to this one group - they are all like this.
I have seen people comment that it is this way to compensate for them having to invade and that they start with few land areas... but what happens once they succeed in taking a few towns? It just seems like they have an endless horde of overpowered crap. I wouldn't even mind the party sizes if they weren't all top tier, but it's like the mod creators didn't even try to fit in an even distribution of units for Zann. That's not even getting into these really annoying random groups of super aggressive samurai bastards, like General Yamasomething, who randomly show up with 200+ Kamikaze Zann every now and then and attack you for no real reason. That leads me to the next thing...
Mercenaries, amazons, landing parties, etc.
Two things to say about these; the first is that the party sizes for these forces could really use some variation. 60 units of amazon warriors in plate armor were everywhere when I began the game, and there's absolutely nothing you can do to these kinds of parties for the first 100 days or more I find. It would have been fine if there was some groups of 15-30 when you start, but they don't spawn with that few. It's big or nothing.
Honestly, that isn't that bad by itself - at least a bigger party is easier to avoid when you're smaller in size. What really bugs me is that none of the vassals ever seem to give one crap about these units. Even when I became a sworn vassal to the Elvarie Queen, none of my fellow lords would ever help me fight these units. Which also means these units never really die out unless they happen to fight each other, because the only person they will attack is you - not any of the vasslas who are patrolling, specifically to rid their lands of the very bandits they're now ignoring
As an example... that same General Yamawhatever decided to attack me once with his 200 spamzerger kamikaze units one time when I was right outside the castle of the Elvarie Marshal who had requested my presence for a war campaign. He was inside the castle, and Queen Arlina with 250 units was standing right next to me outside of it, waiting. General whatever shows up and attacks me, me thinking the huge force of allies right next to me would result in me having a pretty good chance of victory, only to find my measly party of 100 troops are left to die while the Queen watches - because apparently she's pals with this Samurai wankhead who attacks me on sight and says he wants to conquer the countryside. If I hadn't saved just beforehand, I would have died, been captured, lost all my troops and probably failed the quest too.
I understand that it has something to do with these smaller sub factions or bandit groups having their own independent relation modifier with particular factions, causing vassals to not necessarily attack... but I just think it's completely broken in execution. You can literally get ganked in the midst of your own war party of vassals, as a marshal who called them there, by some foreign conquerer or even a group of amazons... it is really silly and frustrating.
The next thing is that I spent quite a while playing with the freelancer mod - the thing where you can join a lords entourage as a soldier and get promotions. That was really fun, but it seems to be quite flawed too when taking into consideration how huge a lot of stats for units are. I honestly just think everything is put over the top a bit. I mean I had to get like 6 riding skill for the 3rd promotion, and 16 strength or something like that. I feel like someone could easily start their own kingdom and conquer half the map before they were high level enough to get to the final promotion - of any faction.
Having said all of that, I have really enjoyed the mod thus far and will be playing it a lot more I think. These are just the few things I've come across that I find particularly troublesome, so don't take any offense.
