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Marquis de Montalban said:

Other than what I have quoted, a lot of what you mention was incorporated into the warband community-based competitive mode. Now before I'm preempted, there's a ton of reasons why it never became mainstream, ranging from lack of TW support, to the immense skill gap and lack of accessibility (literally thousands of hours of dying to better players), to the general toxicity/hazing of the warband veterans to new comers.

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What do you mean by 'competitive mode'? We had server side stat adjustments (which were extremely mild) quite late into the games life. We also had a matchmaking system (which quite a lot of us didn't like) which was even later into the games life. Otherwise there is very little on the surface different in how competitive is played from normal aside from round time and player number rules (which varied by tournament). I don't really see how competitive play had much involvement with what you quoted.

jon01 said:

The result of it feeling like your game suddenly stopped working was horrible, similar to Bannerlord's combat in general. I'm not sure if it was RNG-based (it felt like it), but even if it was a consistent mechanic, it was still an incredibly unfun feature to have to deal with, whenever it happened.

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Stunning was an area that I thought should have been kept as it was a good mechanic but I thought could have done with additional animations/sounds to let the player know whats happening. Just a different animation showing the weapon/shield getting knocked away and a grunt would have done it. Unfortunately they have just messed things up unknowingly as they did with much of the rest of the game.

It wasn't RNG based either, it depends on relative weapon weights and requires a held attack. Hold attacks do increasing stun and damage up to a maximum at around 0.6 seconds and then fall off to a higher than initial level. If you learned the right timing for the war spear overhead stun for instance, you could stun block every shield in the game.

Gibby Jr said:

i seriously hope that TW realise that the combat is fundamentally flawed. it is not simply a matter of parameter changes like AVRC mentioned, or small patches, new maps, new modes, skins, whatever else. these things will not make the game fun if the core elements of the combat remain flawed. i hate to say anything like "we told you so", because that kind of attitude is really quite childish and annoying, but it can't go without mentioning that since the very start of the alpha the core flaws were pointed out repeatedly by the testers. i and many others argued against many of the systems still in the game to this day, but the criticism was written off as coming from a small "veteran" core that just needed to get used to the much more "accessible" gameplay and features of Bannerlord. i don't think TW realised that those "veteran" forum users were actually a fairly good representation of what the majority of MP warband players thought of Bannerlord MP. none of the people i play with everyday use the forums, but i know their opinions on bannerlord are very similar to mine. some of the people i know from warband haven't even bought bannerlord because they don't think it's worth the money. frankly, if i had not received the game for free i would feel cheated out of my money given the product that was put out. i am grateful to TW for the copy of the game, but i struggle to have any faith or hope in the company that has repeatedly denied the community what they want and has repeatedly labelled their views as nothing more than a rose-tinted view of warband and a desire for warband 2.0, rather than as fair criticism of bannerlord. maybe eventually the game will be worth playing, but even with parameter changes, balance changes, class changes, gamemode changes and matchmaking improvements, the fundamental unpredictable elements will remain in the code and will continue to frustrate the enjoyment of many players. without a complete rethink and rework of the combat i do not see it succeeding in the long-term through small patches.

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I agree, there's really no coming back from the position they are in through parameter tweaks. The current game seems to have been designed by someone who is totally blind, they have no experience or understanding of what made warband good. As such there is no way forward for them either on the current route, it's just going to move from one terrible state to another.

The only realistic path to getting back some good mechanics is to actually go back and clone warbands, at least as a starting point. But that involves pulling out a lot of the nonsense stuff they have added and I really doubt they will do that. It's too much of an embarrassing backtrack. It's telling that despite them apparently doing 'market research' regarding players not understanding the equipment screen, they never actually interviewed members of the competitive or casual scenes to find out what we actually wanted. I played competitive but I also enjoyed a lot of hours on the various siege servers over the years, those servers offered a lot of extra equipment and content over the base game, increasing variety. Instead Taleworlds went with this limited and dull class system when everyone else in the industry was copying them. For instance Mordhau made a really good equipment system, which is really just a 3 slot version of warbands system with some extra tweaks on top. They solved the noob experience using the simple and obvious route of having pre-made builds for players to jump in with.

I was already worried before beta started because I had already figured they were in development hell. When the first beta games started (people were ludicrously hype for it I should add) my worry increased because they were only interested in asking us about high level map balance. It seemed insane to me that you would worry about map balance when your combat mechanics were in such a dire state. Surely you would build the combat up piece by piece, ensuring duelling feels good before moving out to interactions between the class types before even touching map balance. The latter relies on the mechanics of the former.

I gave them a good couple of months to see if there would be a trajectory of improvement but gave up since it was obvious there wasn't. I am pretty sure this game is just going to go down as a bad sequel which is tragic considering the amount of time we have been waiting for it.

It does affect speed, however noticeable changes in speed usually would be on the order of 50 points of change in weapon skill, the differences between equivalent classes is usually less than this.

There are some exceptions though, try using throwing weapons as swadian cavalry or try moving around on foot as vaegir cavalry. The stats on those are very noticeable.

I wrote the code for the ludus server, I didn't touch the faction proficiency. I doubt many other servers would have changed them. Different factions do have different skills in speed, damage output etc... A lot of this is hard to pick up on from a players individual perspective however due to the number of variables involved in combat. Some are more noticeable, like nord scout riding skill for instance.

Also some attributes are balanced out in different ways, for instance swadians have high 1H skill and power strike yet only have access to low damage swords by default. It's why that faction snowballs so hard as soon as they can pick up another factions stronger weapons.

Apologies for the lack of updates on this, I don't tend to have a lot of free development time so while I am not currently working on anything Warband related I tend to let things lapse.

I have created a small update (v0.1.1) to this application which will hopefully fix some of the small issues encountered so far, please let me know if these aren't working correctly or of any other bugs. The download link can be found in the first post.

The last thing you want is a beta entirely populated by people with 10000 hours. You need a spectrum of all experiences otherwise you will miss a lot of issues that new players may be coming up against when opening the game for the first time. There are still many mechanics and features in warband that people can only really learn by word of mouth and otherwise appear as random or buggy behaviour to a new player.

If a team spawns in control of the current flag, it does give them time to setup, however it also gives more time for the attackers to work down the defences. Additionally it also lets the defenders mount earlier attacks or attempt to delay the attackers from getting through.

Teams would be able to make specifically timed plays as well since they have a known objective. With the current system there is generally little incentive to attack early.

The removal of the random selection of flags is also good from a balance perspective, the number of flag spawns are so low that the odds of a disruptive flag significantly throwing off a close game is quite high. It's also something I have certainly seen before.

Generally I think the change would let the meta-game be potentially much deeper, since you would have far more ability to plan and modify the team build for each of the three scenarios rather than having to hedge around 2 flags while also spending half the round just hovering about.

The only thing I would be concerned about would be the risk of deliberate money saving rounds when a particularly hard flag is likely to come up for a team. I am not a fan of that kind of decision.

Aeronwen said:

Yep.

Remember that amazing round where Triari was miles away from the flag, having dispatched inf and didn't have time to get there but killed the 2 on teh flag with footshots? If someone has teh skill to do that why should it be prevented?

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Because it's mechanically awful.

Infantry have pretty much no way to know if they can currently be foot-shot or not. Whether it can happen is down to tiny differences in the angle of the shield. Bear in mind that infantries primary role is as a tank unit to take and hold positions, having their only means of defence be completely unreliable against rangers even when they directly aim the shield at them undermines that.

If rangers want to kill an inf head on, they can shoot the shield to break it, or shoot through with a crossbow. In either case the infantry can predict the results far easier, they can see their shields health and they can pick a shield with knowledge of its resistance to penetration.

I dont have an issue with cav or rangers getting footshot incidentally, just infantry since it makes it very difficult for inf to actually play their roles under intense ranger pressure.

Fietta said:

Doesn't 5 shield skill allow even the smallest of shields to block arrows? Even if it doesn't the Rhodok shield is pretty massive anyways, I don't see the need for extra shield skill, they're quite OP with their 1 hit cleavers anyways. I feel like you're only giving it them just to try and buff them even though there's no reason for it because it's maybe their 'class advantage'?

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You are correct, 5 shield skill is basically good enough to provide full coverage vertically even with small shields.

However, shield skill also effects a delay during melee. When I originally buffed the shield skill of the other factions I also buffed rhodoks too since they were already considered 'slow' in melee. The extra shield skill therefore is more about maintaining melee parity than helping deal with ranged.

DarkLight said:

You need one more point on shield skill so you dont get shot through by crossbows.

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As far as I know shield skill has no effect on crossbow penetration, but I have never tested it.

Firunien said:

Because of faction inbalance we switch spawn/faction. It´s a non issue. Some balancing could always be done, but i dont see anything significant besides removing lawl for cav.

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It's not entirely true that it's a non-issue.

The worse the faction matchup, the less the difference in strength between teams matters. In matches this may give an advantage to a team which favours open maps over closed maps, if the closed map is a bad faction matchup, then the result is more likely to be a draw which then favours the open map.

A tourney a while back had rhodoks vs sarranids on ruins (sarranids on hill). No matter what we tried we never won a single round as rhodoks in any training or the match, we also never lost a single round on sarranids. It made the match revolve entirely around the closed map.

Scar said:

He was referring to this:

You could maybe take each map, cut it in three pieces with one of the flags in the center of each of those smaller maps, and then spawn groups of 8 players for each team on these smaller maps (one map would have 9 players on both sides when the server is full). You could even make it so that one team holds the flag, and the other one has to attack it, because that's generally how matches play out. The team that wins at least two of those small maps wins the round. Repeat until X round wins.

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Yes but that's pretty complicated as a modification since you're now talking about having multiple matches happening in parallel as well as all the heavy modifications needed for the maps. Cutting up the maps would also impact cavs ability to move as well as I said (for instance how do you cut up sandi?). Whereas simply changing the spawn locations based on the current flag is completely trivial and requires only tiny changes to each map (moving a couple of entry points).

@OGL, you can pick which entry point a player spawns at, for instance I always made players spawn at entry point 0 when they first enter the ludus server, so it would be easy to do.

Scar said:

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Because these maps were flat, had barely any obstacles and no archers or cavalry. As soon as all classes are kept within range of an archer, they are forced to take the fights, or they'll just die.

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Sounds a bit grim that though, I thought ogl meant simply changing the spawn points to be close to the flags when they spawn (for instance making upper spawn on verloren in the tower for attacker spawn flag) but keep the maps the same.

Cav especially need space or cover to be able to operate, since otherwise the rangers will focus you down in seconds. If the situation is that the rangers in turn have no cover then the cav will be forced to just charge them every round which doesn't sound much fun for the rangers either.

EDIT: I should point out that I think with fast raise times on instant flags, moving the spawns to be closer is a very good idea and pretty easy to implement. Just need to set 3 entry points as spawn locations for each team rather than 1.

OurGloriousLeader said:

Different spawn points closer to the flag areas is actually a great idea and neatly removes circling.

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Does this remove circling though? I don't see why it should. When the group fighting server was up that saw circling even in very small arenas.

Circling is due to a kind of game theory you play with everyone else on your team. The people who avoid engagement live longer on average and may have a slightly higher chance for gaining kills as a result.

Of course if the whole team charged as a team then everyone might get more kills, but people don't measure the team victory as much as how high in the scoreboard you are.

If you want circling to stop then you need either an objective which a team can't avoid or an incentive to create reward for players who actually choose to fight. You could also find a way to punish people who deliberately avoid engagement but carrots are better than sticks. That was the idea behind a small trickle of gold on the flag, to add an incentive to hold it (and reward since it wins rounds and is totally thankless).

The instant spawning flags did create a decent objective, but as ogl said when the timer was raised it removed the urgency so people started circling again. When the timer was low it was fine for some flags but too hard for others, the proper solution is to configure it so the raise times change based on distance to the two spawns. That way if configured right you could make it so that a team can always arrive with plenty of time to contest the flag but cannot ignore it without instantly losing every round.

Guy installs spyware on hundreds of peoples computers by deliberately deceiving them but its ok because we caught 3 people who cheat at computer games?

What...

Ends do not remotely justify the means here. This may have been acceptable if it was upfront and open source. The way this was done was entirely unacceptable.

This is the data I have decoded for the objects:

Group Number - This holds which group of objects its from, scene props, plants, entry points etc...

Type Index - The index of the type of object, this will be unique to each group

Magic Number - Don't have a clue what this does if anything, changing it has no noticeable effect and it always seems to be the same on all objects, seen some others in the code, it may be some sort of version number.

X Axis, Y Axis and Z Axis - These 3 axes must be orthogonal 3d vectors which effectively hold the objects yaw, pitch and roll for use in matrix multiplication. I am translating these to yaw pitch and roll for easier interpretation in my application

Location - 3D vector location of where the centre of the object is relative to the world

Name - A string of characters representing the objects name

Var1, Var2 - These hold the settable variable properties for objects, interestingly they're stored as 32 bit integers in the map file but have heavy restrictions on their values in the warband editor (for normal objects the range is 0-127). I haven't played around with trying to set higher values and seeing if they actually get into the game yet.

Scale - 3D vector holding the scale of the object

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I would have thought that the objects index would be used for looking up which meshes to use etc... Would be faster and avoid the risk of having identical names on objects, however names would have the advantage that they could potentially handle objects being re-ordered and their indices changing without breaking the map. If it is names I would think having 2 identically names objects or removing a used object name would have detrimental effects.

InVain said:

Wonderful, I've long been hoping for a tool like this?
Does the 'objects' tab work already? I would be very useful to be able to search, edit, remove, replace objects from outside the scene editor.

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It's a bit work in progress, at the moment it doesn't really do more than display the objects properties and give you the option of downloading them as a CSV file. I can look to adding the ability to modify the objects list, it should be possible to add the features you mention there.

Hope it proves useful, let me know if you encounter any problems. I did a bit of basic idiot proofing but I probably missed some things.