Are the following things fixed yet?

[El-Diablito]

1. Do armies still stand around staring at each other due to formations?
2. Can I still conquer anything just by demmanding a surrender?
3. Are my lords RANDOMLY going to f'king switch sides still to bring back some other faction? Lords don't grow on frickin trees you know.

[Tchan]

1. Do armies still stand around staring at each other due to formations?
2. Can I still conquer anything just by demmanding a surrender?
3. Are my lords RANDOMLY going to f'king switch sides still to bring back some other faction? Lords don't grow on frickin trees you know.

Hey as far as one goes i don't get that prob.. At least if the enemy is standing there ground then i advance my army, at a certain distance the enemy springs into action. But never had a prob with them not engaging.

[TheSlightFeelingOfRegret]

 Number 1 is fixed, I don't know about the others.

[El-Diablito]

1. Do armies still stand around staring at each other due to formations?
2. Can I still conquer anything just by demmanding a surrender?
3. Are my lords RANDOMLY going to f'king switch sides still to bring back some other faction? Lords don't grow on frickin trees you know.

Hey as far as one goes i don't get that prob.. At least if the enemy is standing there ground then i advance my army, at a certain distance the enemy springs into action. But never had a prob with them not engaging.

In short, if you're joining an NPC lead army against an enemy, your army will be the only one moving, so you'll have to engage the enemy on your own.

Urgh >.< can't you guys release some files to overwrite the ones in the mod, that give us brytenwald *without* any of these formations? They bring nothing to the game at all, in fact, your army is *less* effect in a shield wall, as it's not an actual shield wall, just a close formation brining fewer of your men to the fight at any given time and BEGGING to be flanked.

[graycloak]

#1 Nope, have not had this happen even a single time in the present game version. Even when joining battles the NPC forces have engaged, not intelligently mind you, but they have engaged.

#2 Towns and Castles that are hopelessly weak compared to your army *will* surrender. I don't really see this as a problem, since when I show up with 200 Huscarls and the defending lord has less than 50 low-mid tier troops the battle is going to be a slaughter anyways. I have never had a town or castle which had a chance of actually holding me off that surrendered.

#3 I have seen very few defections and then generally only after the Kingdom in question has been totally defeated.

[Gerard Mulder]

#2 a town with 650 defenders will defect to 200 top tier troops. IFF there is no lord present. With lord present there is a fight more often but not always. If the odds are bad the castle/town surrenders and expells the lord and his army so you can fight them...

[ppga]

#2 a town with 650 defenders will defect to 200 top tier troops. IFF there is no lord present. With lord present there is a fight more often but not always. If the odds are bad the castle/town surrenders and expells the lord and his army so you can fight them...

Yeah, this is a problem, I think.  I don't know that a castle should really surrender much at all if there's more than 50 guys in it.   A castle garrison of 200+ really shouldn't surrender, period.  I had about 200 guys, as Gerard noted, and I couldn't find a castle/town that would fight, unless the lord(s) in it had lots of troops.  That's just weird, if you ask me.  Just waltzing around, taking every castle by intimidation didn't even work every time for the Mongols.  Hey, that's a nice castle you got there, can I have it?  Sure, come on in, let me open the gate for you.  I would be quite surprised to learn that this was all that commonplace.

I have a house rule that I won't ask for surrender unless the castle was just taken and couldn't be expected to have any troops in it.  Auto-surrendering of castles is also bad, strategically, because even if that garrison is going to lose (and how often does the AI win anyways, once you're up and running?), it can still inflict substantial casualties, even of top-tier troops, meaning you can't just blitz Brytenwalda.  Even if you only lose a few dozen guys at a time, the top-tier guys are harder to replace (and should be even harder to replace, IMHO), so each castle gets harder, and the casualties go up, you will likely run out of steam, and out of the guys needed to not only take castles but to defend them from the counter-attack.

[graycloak]

I have a house rule that I won't ask for surrender unless the castle was just taken and couldn't be expected to have any troops in it.  Auto-surrendering of castles is also bad, strategically, because even if that garrison is going to lose (and how often does the AI win anyways, once you're up and running?), it can still inflict substantial casualties, even of top-tier troops, meaning you can't just blitz Brytenwalda.  Even if you only lose a few dozen guys at a time, the top-tier guys are harder to replace (and should be even harder to replace, IMHO),

I'd agree with the house rule, but disagree that replacing top tier troops is hard at all once you get rolling. If you get 8-10 companions to 10th+ level and give them training 3+ each, you can turn recruits into chain armored infantry in a couple of days easily. I could fairly routinely dump 50 or so huscarl level troops on allied lords without it hurting my campaigning noticeably. I think the problem is as much that it is too easy and cheap to promote troops as it is the surrenders. I find the fights rather boring once I can field 100+ huscarls anyways as no one can really beat you. 

[aurgelmir]

Yeah, this is a problem, I think.  I don't know that a castle should really surrender much at all if there's more than 50 guys in it.   A castle garrison of 200+ really shouldn't surrender, period.  I had about 200 guys, as Gerard noted, and I couldn't find a castle/town that would fight, unless the lord(s) in it had lots of troops.  That's just weird, if you ask me.  Just waltzing around, taking every castle by intimidation didn't even work every time for the Mongols.  Hey, that's a nice castle you got there, can I have it?  Sure, come on in, let me open the gate for you.  I would be quite surprised to learn that this was all that commonplace.

Problem with castles I think is that unless you take advantage of the ask for surrender exploit you realistically only have two options, assult or let them be, because if you decide to siege (which might take an ingame month) then you will run out of food and then your army will wither away in short order. It is not unhistorical to have castle garrisons, even large ones, surrender to an attacker. What is a bit unrealistic is that they will do so right away, rather than after a couple of weeks/months of siege.

Castles are made to be easy to defend, but no lord could realistically expect that their men would meet certain death as long as they could pull some enemies down with them, forts and castles were used to bog down an attacker, to deprive him of the initiative. In M&B a castle is just a meat grinder that has to be passed on the way to victory. In that light I don't think it is totally wrong to use this exploit in certain circumstances. A medieval lord would likely not have to assult every castle to win a war so why should you? (I sill use this exploit very conservatively though)

Ofc I would be happier if besieging castles became a realistic possibility without having to buy up every grainsack in the realm beforehand and gearing your character towards having the biggest inventory possible. Perhaps it would be possible to remove food consumtion during a siege? Instead just paying a daily fee (like you do when paying for accomodation in a city) as long as the siege go on to abstract the running costs of maintaining supply. that woud give new strategic depth.

[ppga]

Problem with castles I think is that unless you take advantage of the ask for surrender exploit you realistically only have two options, assult or let them be, because if you decide to siege (which might take an ingame month) then you will run out of food and then your army will wither away in short order. It is not unhistorical to have castle garrisons, even large ones, surrender to an attacker. What is a bit unrealistic is that they will do so right away, rather than after a couple of weeks/months of siege.

Castles are made to be easy to defend, but no lord could realistically expect that their men would meet certain death as long as they could pull some enemies down with them, forts and castles were used to bog down an attacker, to deprive him of the initiative. In M&B a castle is just a meat grinder that has to be passed on the way to victory. In that light I don't think it is totally wrong to use this exploit in certain circumstances. A medieval lord would likely not have to assult every castle to win a war so why should you? (I sill use this exploit very conservatively though)

Ofc I would be happier if besieging castles became a realistic possibility without having to buy up every grainsack in the realm beforehand and gearing your character towards having the biggest inventory possible. Perhaps it would be possible to remove food consumtion during a siege? Instead just paying a daily fee (like you do when paying for accomodation in a city) as long as the siege go on to abstract the running costs of maintaining supply. that woud give new strategic depth.

As I see it, the big problem of waiting for a month (although in Brytenwalda it usually seems to be much less than that), other than the food, is the fact that you have to sit there and not do anything else during that time.  Which stinks from a fun game play perspective, and also the whole campaign doesn't stop if you have to besiege a castle somewhere, although it obviously does make sense at a final objective like a heavily guarded city.  Quite frankly I find the 2+ days (depending on engineering) it takes for siege tower assaults way too long in terms of how fast things can move in Warband, and would just as soon be able to assign some men to build them while I could gallivant about for a couple of days. 

I wonder if one way possible way of addressing this might not be to make a detachable siege army, where you would go up to a castle, besiege it, go to a troop manager screen where instead of assigning troops to a garrison you're assigning them to a besieging force.  This force could sit there until the castle surrenders, then become it's garrison, and maybe you could tell them to auto-hire rescued prisoners into the garrison as well.  You wouldn't have to worry about food and be all tied up for a week or two, but you would have to worry that you left behind a large enough force to deal with any enemy lords that came to relieve the siege, and to avoid the defenders sallying forth.  They'd also be at full pay as they aren't in the garrison, or maybe even receive a 25% increase in pay for siege duty, so that you couldn't just have tons of elite unit siege armies all over the place.

That seems like a strategic element I think would add depth to the game, if it were doable.

[aurgelmir]

That would be pretty awsome.