Should I do a ton of tweaks to gear the mod more infantry heavy?

Warning lots of text.

Most of said tweaks would involve decreasing animation times for stuff like horsebumping and getting knocked over.  If you watch a native battle the reason the knights win is they are able to keep swinging away at their opponents while the footmen get bumped at a rediculously slow speed and bounce then hold their ribs and have a good cry for a whole second.  And then another horse hits them. 

Just for jokes in that first battle when Gutts is supposed to raid the camp I decided to hold my ground instead.  You get a ton of assault riders who come charging over the hill at you and your ten soldiers.  I must have fought them twenty times.  I quickly realized that fighting cavalry unlike fighting infantry isn't actually fun.  I realize why a few mods eliminate horses altogether.  The horsebumping is enough to drive you insane.  Your character sits there like a moron unable to move.  I'm not joking when I say a horse can "walk" into you and you are stunned for a whole second.  And it is never one horse that walks into you.  Sure fighting as cavalry is fun but the reverse isn't true.

Now seeing as Gutts is more of a footslogger than a knight(although he is both) should I start tweaking animation times for the horsebumping and getting knocked over to make it take less time to recover?  Unfortunately I don't have the option of raising the speed at which you stagger like a drunken moron or I would change that so the horse would at least have to be at a trot.  In its place I can halve the time you are staggered by a horse and also make you get off the ground faster after being knocked over(by both horses and blunt weapons).  I have a feeling this would balance  ai infantry against cavalry more than it is now as well.  I'm going to increase the amount of damage it takes to stagger a character even more as well.

Alright well what I want here is a lot of opinions.  This change would be something that I would have to be careful with.  What do you guys think is this a bad idea or a good one.  Do you hate fighting cav right now from the ground?  Would this make things too easy?  So feel free to post.

I think this is a great idea because this happens to me a lot. It would definetly stop the cavalry just running over everyone all the time, and because Gutts is so huge and powerful it even makes more sense for him to have it. So i say, go for it!

THIS IS A FANTASTIC IDEA, right now im having a attack of rage against this fu&%$ horses!
I like to play gutts alone after the eclipse, so its kind to hard against cavalry 
This away, maybe i can send all then to hell 

It is indeed hard to beat cavalry on foot even with long-reach weapons and good player skills, and many people who like to have small parties (being loyal to the Manga setting) but aren't that experienced probably would found this very useful. If you were to alter things for like, every great-skeletoned soldier, it would be hard to balance, but if just for Guts and maybe for some sturdy companions (like Pippin), I guess it's alright. But only an actual in-depth testing could tell if it works out or not, so go ahead and do it in either case

Gonna go with the majority on this, I think it's a good thing to work towards.
Goddamm cavelry take too long to slaughter with all the nudging.

Cavalry have too much of an advantage in native anyway.  So if anything I believe that this will actually restore balance to the classes.  The changes would have to be for everyone but infantry ai needs help anyway.  I'll test it out and see.

Why don't you add an poll?

the poll speaks true... and I agree! I also agree that cavalry was always too powerful. everytime i was like "hey, les give them infantry troops a try, ive played with cav only lately", i was kinda disappointed and catched me having almost pure cavalry with me again. but I hope you wont make cavalry too "useless" now
A downside for infantry is, that they're kinda slow on foot and for foot-range it takes rather long time to cross half the map just to get, lets say, to 10 looters but cavalry crosses the map rather quickly. would be nice if there was something like: IF combatants are all infantrymen -> spawn point distances is halved. or something alike, i guess you get the idea.

furthermore, regarding animation-time tweaking... what do you think of raising the speed of drawing a sheathed weapon? it also often occurs in the manga that gutts is not drawing out his sheathed sword and waits until he has it ready in front to strike out but he is striking directly from the back in one go. I would totally love to have such an option!

native:
draw sword -> wait until you have fully grasped the weapon, having it in front of you safely waiting to swong it -> strike out -> hit.

my desired effect:
draw sword -> strike out -> hit.

I always wanted to have an option where you perfom a strike directly from sheathed weapon position not only in M&B
would be totally awesome if it was possible to code something like that... like when you have everything sheathed, press the "sheath weapon" button and then you will perform an overswing (in case its carried on the back) or a left-slash (in case its carried on the left hip) with your weapon instantly. I guess this is called "draw blank" or so (free, literal translation from german )

I guess I'm on the fence with this one.  About the only time I even have Calvary on my side is when a Lord joins in, as in this picture for example.


All that Calvary came from a Lord tagging along with me.  What you don't see much of, is the Infantry and Archers I have lining up in front of this shot.  I pretty much depend on my Archers to take out the enemies Calvary by dropping their horses.  I also have my Infantry group up so that the enemy Calvary doesn't have an easy time crashing through them.  If there are any Calvary, on my side, I line them up behind everyone and let them grab the stragglers.  Once there are a few enemy soldiers left, I first have everyone gather together (group hug time), wait for the "loose ends" (curious bastards) to come closer and then I release everyone to mop up .  Works great and I usually come away with very minor loses, so I guess they really don't bother me.

That is a great idea. I often get killed/ganged when I have to change weapons mid battle (range to melee).

About horses, ideally the stun time should corelate directly to the amount of damage done, but that may take too long and be too complicated using scripts (lagging larger calvary battles). My advice once you know exactly what to change (if you don't already) is to try some extremes to quickly check the impact on infantry vs horseman battles. Once you know how those affect the gameplay tweeking shouldn't be too hard  .

While Im all for it (I quit playing awhile back because I could take out 200 size armies solo with a heavy hunter), it might be an idea to add it as an option in the camp menu. If X=0 then staggertime=Y, else stagger time=Z sorta thing in the script.

Maybe give everyone a small boost to running speed too, so the cavalry advantage isnt too huge there either - not much, but a flat 10% speed boost to infantry would help I reckon.

Thats a good idea I'll raise infantry athletics a bit.  You'll notice horsemen also have no athletics and often no shields to reduce their effectiveness in sieges.(Except the slow-ass infantry cavalry of the tudor they have athletics and no riding skill).  Unfortunately coding the stagger would be really difficult.  The timing of collisions between infantry and cavalry is all hardcoded.  That is why I am going to make it a global boost to all infantry.  It will actually be a fairly unseen change but it wlll allow infantry to recover hopefully fast enough to get a swing in when cavalry are stampeding all over the place.  I'll look into making troops draw their weapon faster too.  It would help archers out as well; they don't draw their melee weapon fast enough.  A slash from sheathed would probably be a special attack.  Actually it could be like if you have dragonslayer or claymore in one of 4 equipment slots but not in you hand then superslash.)  It could be an identical attack to the regular area damage but affect 5 people instead of 2.  Of course that is if I can get the sword to appear in his hand.

EDIT: Well changed the two animations the horse bump one and the one where you fall over.  It makes a huge difference when fighting horsemen.  Before you sat there like jello unable to move or respond.  Now while you do still get knocked down you get up quickly because you know the next thing to hit you is an axe.  And when you get bumped you aren't stunned for long enough to prevent you from responding to the attack.  You still fly back from the impact but you don't quiver like jello for a second anymore.  All in all so far it just feels better.  The combat is faster in this mod and this change seems to fit well with it.

Wow I'm the only one who picked the third choice...

I meant a boost to the base speed, not give everyone more athletics

That means people with athletics would be even faster.

Base speed is hardcoded I think. But giving all the infantry more athletics has the same effect.  I could also start tweaking armor weights with the idea that the weight of an object is not so important as how awkward it is(read encumberance).  Truth be told the weight system native uses should have been encumbrance based all along.  Mail while heavy is not very encumbering because it is spread over your whole body.  Carrying a warhammer would probably slow you down more because the weight is focussed at one point and digging into your back.  So I might start retooling eveything with encumberance instead of weight.  The Dragonslayer could have reduced "weight" in that sense since Gutts seems to be so used to it that it barely slows him down.  And I made the Berserker's armor weigh nothing since it actually speeds Gutts up.

good man.

That also speeds the player up

Does this mean light leather will no longer be the best armor in the game speed-weight wise?

I'll probably make mail_shirt the best balanced for protection to speed.  The plates will likely be reduced in encumberance but only a little bit.

Berserker Pride said:

I'll probably make mail_shirt the best balanced for protection to speed.  The plates will likely be reduced in encumberance but only a little bit.

Click to expand...

Plate reduced in encumbrance?!
That makes perfect sense! (and no that is not sarcasm).

Personally, I might recommend making Cavalry less common as one way.  It'll certainly make "The Band of the Hawk" more powerful in the begining because of it.

Making all the armies have an infantry to Cav balance more similar to Midland or Panerian armies, for instance.  Would help a touch.  And probably drop it down a few notches too.  Maybe making it so Cav never makes up more than 10 percent of an army?  Or even less?

Well I like fighting cav sometimes.  There is something cool about parking all your troops together and telling them to hold against a massive Tudor charge.  But as long as you keep your men together cav are beatable.  And horse healths in this mod are very low(70-90).  So a couple good hits from anything will dehorse them.  Add in the spearbracing and I like the balance.  Of course if cav hits you while your men are split up you will get rolled as it should be.  The animation changes to horsebump have had the desired effect.  When cav hit your men they get knocked down but they get up quickly enough that they can retaliate against the second horse about to hit the line.  I really like where things sit right now.  You can win with any army but you won't be guaranteed that win.  When the two new factions of Gutts Kingdom and the Berserk Rebels come out more balancing will probably have to be done.  Gutts kindom is fun to lead because they have a lot of fast thrower cavalry but their mounts aren't strong enough to roll an army all by themself.  Their strength is of course two-handed swordsmen.  But those swordsmen will get rolled by too many cavalry or archers if they aren't managed properly.

Good news I mostly fixed the lag issue with the hand cannon and Schierke's want.  That means I was able to get some area of effect troops ingame as elites.  The really big Black Strugglers have a chance to get a weak hand cannon.  They aren't really accurate with them but they can do a lot of damage in one shot.

Your idea of rarity would be a solution but I went with making horses more of a glass cannon instead.