o ****

so i get this mod and begin playing.
it is good all around, however this bothers me a whole lot.

I was playing under the imperial state. From villages I had about 25 recruits and 5 grunts after a minor skirmish.
Then I ran into a party of gun toting bandits, 19 of them. I thought nothing of it, as there is only 19 of them (in native/most other mods, that was a sure sign of victory). I fight them for a bit before I realize I will end up their prisoner and lose all my soldiers.
So I do
Then I go back to the villages, pissed. Gather 30 men again and go out again. This time I will avoid those assholes. I run into the exact same party that kicked my ass earlier. 15 dudes with 12 of my grunts as prisoners. I attack them and only lose 7 men, gaining 12 grunts. After this battle, every recruit became a grunt and I even had some infantry and a guard.
Confident, I head back to the villages to make my army even stronger. I notice im being chased by a much faster party of gun toting bandits. Ass. I manage to get to my fife and get 10 recruits. It is 42 of my dudes against 20 of theirs. Easy stuff, right?
I get my **** pushed in hardcore. All my guys were knocked out/dead and by the end it was me against 4 of them. I shot 3 of them and was finished off by the other one. Again, all my men were gone. I thought I could find them after I run away since it would be one guy. Turns out it was somehow 9 guys (with a ****load of my former men as prisoners).

I really think the bandits should travel in much smaller groups/be weakened at the start of the game
I suggest give them much weaker swords. I lost most my guys due to their huge sword rather than to their guns.
I was just starting a new game before being molested by them repeatedly.

I have to tell you, that made me laugh my ass off 
Anyways, plenty of people have complained about the gun toting bandits being huge badasses, kicking their butts, stealing their girlfriends, etc. so I have nerfed them a bit for the next version. My suggestion at this point would be: get some cavalry, they don't have to be the best, they just have to be able to approach them, they will be forced to use their swords instead of their guns, leaving your state troops free to shoot them.

But mommy the gun toting bandit took my candy!

Yeah, I'm getting owned by this mod too.

I find myself just about running from everyone, and therefore dieing tired as everyone runs faster than me.

My play style has been to tour around doing Guildsman quests and finding the "Heros". But now I have all eight heros and a handfull of Ellis spearmen as I have a quest to train 6 Ellis Phalanx, and morale is low so they keep leaving. Gah!

So a few questions, I looked at my morale report and it said 10, base +50, party size -29, leadership +11, food variety +9 or something, whatever, anyway it didn't add up to 10, it added up to something more like 49,(pitifull I know) but still only showed 10. (Very pitifull)

What's up with party morale not adding up?, What's the hidden minus value I can't see?

Similar, I have a potential party size of something like 63, I'm still only lvl 7 or 8! The party size report doesn't add up either. According to the onscreen math on that one I should have a party size of about 27 which is what I'd expect but in practice I could go to 63 atm.

What's up with party size not adding up?, what's the hidden positive value I can't see?

I have the Zendar hunt down the River Pirates quest too, only problem is it's like day 87 or such and I've seen exactly one river pirate party. Where are they now as they're not anywhere near the traditional Zendar river delta area in native. Atleast not I my game thus far. The one party I saw, and defeated, were beyond Tihr.

Back to the Ellis troop training quest, is there a troop tree list online someplace as I'm guessing, based on my limmited knowledge of what a Phalanx unit was, that Phalanx troops are further along the spearman path, rather than the skirmisher path, but it would be nice to know this for sure.

And finally to play style, do I basically just NEED to get a big party to play this mod cause I haven't decided on a faction yet, not that I could join with my renown of 53 anyway, and I don't really want 20, or more, of the wrong guys in my party when I do join a faction.

Do any of you mod builders play lvl 1 characters anymore or do you all just export/import lvl 29 characters cause I find alot of mods really hard at the start. Party sizes allways seem bigger in mods than native, all heros at lvl 1 seems popular in mods too, and I admit to liking that myself for build reasons, but since village or tavern recruits go up 4 lvls or so everytime they level and a hero with Training can level up recruits in a couple of days, heros taking forever to get to lvl 4, which is still poor, adds to the difficulty. So basically for the first 70 days I've been travelling around with the equivalent of 8 "Farmers" or "Recruits".

D'Sparil said:

I have to tell you, that made me laugh my ass off 
Anyways, plenty of people have complained about the gun toting bandits being huge badasses, kicking their butts, stealing their girlfriends, etc. so I have nerfed them a bit for the next version.

Click to expand...

WTF i dident know there was so much problems with them 

Now serious question how can i have girlfriend in this mod?

Suggestion for Badbru hire some drunked nord women they own every army...

@ Badbru, I had the same miscalculations of party size, prisoners and morale bug and sparil is aware of it, he's trying to fix it for next version.

IMO A few parties could be a bit slower, the major problem is that in early game you get chased down by gun toting bandits and the like and finding and chasing down parties that you can handle even seems quite hard.
I don't think gun toting bandits are all that bad once you have a party of double thier size. What I do is have about 4 points in FA skill, order my party to hold position in tight formation, infantry infront of archers, cavlary at the rear. I charge in alone and take a few down before getting my arse handed to me, then you have maybe 2/3 health or so in the next battle which is 40 of your guys about 15 of thiers. Do the same again with your troops and this time let the bandits come, with infantry in front hopefully a lot of gunfire is wasted on shields, the bandits tend to get drawn in closer, when a lot are close tell your troops to charge. Hopefully a fair few get caught by infantry and have trouble getting away. Your cavlary ride off and chase them to the corners of the map, then all you have to do is tell infantry and archers to hold while you go and help out your cavlary. Sure you take a fair few losses but you and your troops get good xp and you might even get a gun out of it. 

stratusfear said:

@ Badbru, I had the same miscalculations of party size, prisoners and morale bug and sparil is aware of it, he's trying to fix it for next version.

Click to expand...

I think I have identified the problem, it should be easy to fix, gonna give it a try right now.

Ah good good, although it was kind of cool being level 7 with 100 recruits!

Stop being a ***** and asking for an easier mod I find bandits easy to pwn dont let your weakness make this mod ****ty for me . Playing imperial state  never lost to bandits even if outnumber easiest way to kill them (for me) is mounted/handgun tactics .

Thanks.

I want larger enemy parties plz ... too easy .

And please get rid of the ship battles. Seriously, it just seems too buggy to be of any value at the moment. I just lost a huge chunk of my men against river pirates, because the idiots stepped out of the ship and died. Some died after the battle, before I could Tab out. It sucks.

Vympel said:

Stop being a ***** and asking for an easier mod I find bandits easy to pwn dont let your weakness make this mod ****ty for me . Playing imperial state  never lost to bandits even if outnumber easiest way to kill them (for me) is mounted/handgun tactics .

Thanks.

Click to expand...

Vympel said:

I want larger enemy parties plz ... too easy .

Click to expand...

So they shouldn't listen to us but should listen to you? Very smart.

all I'm saying is that it's difficult to get all my dudes to a proper tier in which they can actually defend themselves and not get shot/slashed. The bandits' melee weapons are the 'problem', I think. why would a cowboy type bandit have a large sword? a butchering knife perhaps.

Vympel said:

I want larger enemy parties plz ... too easy .

Click to expand...

So they shouldn't listen to us but should listen to you? Very smart.
[/quote]

If they choose to do so , but I really dont give a damn right now ;TaTA

Once they fix the party size bug, it might get harder, although it was fun to have 60 people in the party so fast.

Vympel said:

Vympel said:

I want larger enemy parties plz ... too easy .

Click to expand...

So they shouldn't listen to us but should listen to you? Very smart.

Click to expand...

If they choose to do so , but I really dont give a damn right now ;TaTA
[/quote]

Surely it can't be too hard to comply with both of our requests. Have "some" (slower please) parties of 30,40,50 whatever, that those who don't/can't fight against so many can avoid, and some parties more like native of 7, 9, 13 or even 15, (which can be fast)
that those playing not imported/exported uber dudes, but lvl 1 onwards charaters can train on. What would be good is if spawn numbers could vary based on days passed so that parties gradually get bigger as the players character and followers get better.

That sounds good.

And I must ask, how do I keep my men from jumping off the ship? I've lost many that way. 

Hey I posted a little thing like this in the bugs area, but in this place people seem to be talking about bugs as well, so ill post a little more .  The Imperial States leader seems to be on a boat all the time, can anyone help me out with that?  Should I just make a new character or something?

To Keep Men From Jumping off ship:

1) hit the 'i' key to cycle through commands for your ship.
2) select the "drop anchor" command
3) hit F1 to "Hold your Positions"

Wait for the enemy to come into rifle range and open fire ... you DO have a rifle right?

..right?

Oh so thats how you control the ship....