SP Viking Conquest Balance Mod 13

Hi, @Tingyun. First of all thanks a lot for this mod, it's reaaly fun to play while we r all waiting for M&B2.
I've been playing warband, vc, some other semi-realistic-medieval mods and all the versions of balance mod and now playing 10.0 with a slower renown gain option.
A few moments I wanna let u know about:
-I tried to play as a horseman and found it extremely op. First of all horses seem to be way to fast. I manage to kill 50 men armored bandit parties by myself.
I would recommend to reduce horce speed by 30-40%, but make punch horse damage twice big, so to make it more horseriding skill-required as it is rpg, not shooter.
-After destroying a bandit liar all the loot was 3 peaces of junk, I have 10 looting skill, I can send a savefile if needed.

Nice to hear that, and thanks for the feedback!

Hersir Olgierd Osvaldsson said:

-I tried to play as a horseman and found it extremely op. First of all horses seem to be way to fast. I manage to kill 50 men armored bandit parties by myself.
I would recommend to reduce horce speed by 30-40%, but make punch horse damage twice big, so to make it more horseriding skill-required as it is rpg, not shooter.

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Agreed on the general principle that mounted soloing can achieve some outlandish results in VC (though that is even more true in Warband). Actually just on the previous page of this forum thread, we have been discussing the issue, as it was a major consideration behind the horse slowing from damage (which was first implemented in 8.0 I think). Now, the result of that discussion from player feedback was to go ahead and weaken the extent of horse slowing, so in 10.0 they mostly stay fast even when damaged again, so the mounted solo player is safer again in 10.0, which I agree is unfortunate.

There are still a lot of Balance Mod changes that do weaken the mounted solo player—decent enemy archers, more powerful basic throwing weapons, more powerful basic swords and spears—all of these make their targets a bit more dangerous. However, the reality remains that a very skilled mounted player just doesn’t get hit often.

As to your specific idea of slowing horses—I don’t think it would solve the problem. When I play the VC storyline I have a personal tradition of soloing sven’s raiders who attack Docinga on a swaybacked pony (usually about 30-40 vikingr after they beat the peasants). It isn’t a problem to do so at all, because with good timing, it really doesn’t matter much if the horse is slow. Maybe it makes you have to abort a slightly higher percentage of your attacks, but it is the same dance of bait the enemy into a bad swing, change horse direction, cut them down. As long as you have a decent length sword and the horse moves faster than a man runs, it works fine.

So if a swaybacked pony isn’t slow enough to stop this, I don’t think any speed reduction to horses would work (short of extreme speed reduction from taking damage, which raises risk from a bad hit—but the community consensus was to tone that down...and it wasn’t that effective anyway).

In the end, with the limits of the Warband system, I think build in some respects just has to function as a player choice of combat difficulty levels:

Easiest level: Horse archer without houserule against using inventory chest for ammo (even in VC)

Lower medium level: mounted with long spear, or foot archer without rule against reloads (but this one requires a lot of patience)

Higher medium level: mounted with sword

Highest level: foot melee

Basically, on the easiest choice, you are invulnerable without exercising skill, on the lower medium level, you are invulnerable as long as you play smart and safe, on the upper medium level, you are invulnerable as long as you have perfect timing, and on the highest level, you are more at risk (still, one can do crazy soloing things even then with high athletics and a good axe).

All that having been said—for a very experienced player Warband just isn’t a hard game in the early and medium stages. Even quicker from the player time investment perspective, is to trade jewelry/wine/salt and wool between Dorested and England, use the funds to hire good mercs, then just smash into bandit forces and let the men do the heavy lifting. For an experienced player, most paths are going to be a pretty smooth road through the early game.

Hersir Olgierd Osvaldsson said:

-After destroying a bandit liar all the loot was 3 peaces of junk, I have 10 looting skill, I can send a savefile if needed.

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No need, because unfortunately this isn’t something I can fix. There is some kind of native Warband or VC issue, where sometimes loot goes wrong for bandit lairs. Several months ago there was some posts about it in the VC steam forum. https://steamcommunity.com/app/48700/discussions/6/3051633726589541058/ At the time I though it was just thr player loot share issue, but I was wrong (though I think that sometimes contributes).

Now, it should be pretty rare for this to happen, especially in Balance Mod, because I capped player army loot shares in lairs (meaning whether you take 100 men in your army or not, only the 6 men who actually come with you to raid the lair count against your loot). If it starts happening frequently, let me know though.

Yeah, I agree about combat difficulty levels, I personally love to play as a pagan lord/konungr being weared norse/frisian tunic and only having onehanded sword/axe as a weapon with no shield. That kinda flashy sneaky bastard thinking that the best armor is the belief in Odin. So that's how fights start to be really challenging when u have to parry - kick - flank - attack from the back. After playing vc for about 1k hours and about 20K in-game days I found this footwork-related fighting style to be the most enjoyable for myself and highly recommend it especially after my horseman exp) I mean it's not thirteen century, lads, no knight there and none horsemen are supposed to be worth 50 peasants on the battlefield.

Well, I think I've found my first "bug", Tingyun. It's really not something I ran into before, but I found a lady with the personality type that makes her a social climber, and I'm sitting at 1200 renown, with two towns and a castle and she is still telling me that I need to make more of a name for myself before she'll consider marriage.

For what it's worth, I'm playing on the "slowed renown" version. I just thought it was funny that I'm the most landed and renowned warrior in her faction with 100 relations father and daughter and she's still telling me to go out and get 'em. Maybe it has something to do with your renown slowing equation?

@Zeqe That is strange, I managed to get married having 820 renown and a castle in the latest version of the mod with slower renown gain option. I think debug logs might help, try to check it via cheatmenu command

Hi Zeqe,

Likely it is just an unexpected result in how Warband/VC calculates marriage willingness. It is a complicated formula I haven’t really gotten into, but it involves all sorts of factors ranging from charisma to renown to relations to competitors and so on.

The slower renown version doesn’t change this at all—it literally is just a “divide by 2” line inserted when renown gains occurs, which couldn’t have any effect elsewhere in the game. Once you reach X renown, all behavior is the same, it just takes longer to get X.

I did raise the relations threshold for ladies to marry NPC lords somewhat, to slow down AI marriages and answer complaints by players who didn’t like facing fierce competition in the marriage arena (it had previously become competitive when Balance Mod fixed the vanilla issue where, say, AI lords in Denmark would pick Irish ladies as their romance targets, and so as a consequence almost no AI lords would have a chance to get married in vanilla). However, I really don’t think I raised thresholds for player marriage. EDIT checked changelogs and change seem confined to AI lord to lady courtship relations thresholds (increased them to 40-60), wouldn’t affect player courtship.

Anyway, back to your specific situation: I haven’t explored marriage much so I don’t know the details of the system, but perhaps the “make more of a name for yourself” is generic dialogue for rejection that included other factors. Is your charisma low by chance? Also, what is your current relations with her? Finally, there is that RNG element to marriage agreement, so repeated proposals might help. If you wanted to test whether renown was really the sticking point, you could make a backup save, use cheats to raise renown, and ask her again, then load your backup save. It is also possible (again, I haven’t modded the system so I am unfamiliar with it and just guessing) that renown is a factor in a larger formula, rather than an independent requirement, so for example with a low charisma or lower relations you might just need a higher renown to make up the lost points, so a higher renown might fix it even if the sticking point was really charisma or something.

Final 10.0 Changelog (sorry about the delay, posting here to link to as I update various sites):

Updated with changes from latest Viking Conquest release, 2.044

Some religion tweaks

Fixed vanilla VC bug where AI kings courted ladies (includes code to make AI kings break up for current saves)

Saxon troop recruiting rosters made a bit more elite, to show their relative ascendancy in comparison to mercia and east anglia, and give a greater chance of them being the last kingdom to stand against (and defeat) the invading norse).

Made prison break success independent of whether the lord is conscious or unconscious (just put him on a horse or something, no need to abandon him even after all guards are dead, eliminate the video game escort quest annoyance)

To balance with the above, and encourage more interesting larger fights, village elders now require a good deal more money in bribes to take on the risk of involving themselves in your plots to set fires

Made prisoner escape check happen free of a couple of conditions (in particular, it will run periodically even during day)

armor performs a little better against blunt damage

A general balancing pass on all tier 2 and above slingers, increasing many of their WP. Also slight increases to peasant sling WP of cultures that heavily use the sling

Sling rocks given less ammo (decided their stats reflect better shaped rocks, and wouldn't be so easily obtainable in battlefield conditions

Some slight increases to WP norse axe warrior

Removed range guaranteed tag from briton champions (wasn't on any other infantry),

altered lord random personality distribution to shift a bit more away from the worst 2 personalities

interupt damage threshold moved to warband levels (meshes better with the improved mail armor)

Changed some values in AI courtship

Right to rule increases slowed in a couple of places

further +2 damage increase to 1.5 handed axes, and additional +2 for non-irish basic 1.5 handed (closing the gap a bit). Dane axe -2 damage, +5 speed. Axes made swing only (thrusting being epecially poor choice for them). 1 handed battle axes given +1 damage. A couple Pict/irish 1 handed axes given -1 damage. A couple other axes slightly tweaked to create more logical progression of length/speed/damage and balance of factions.

1 handed axe speed reduced

spears made a bit more breakable

plain length 30 seaxes/knives made stab-only when on foot (should help seax armed troops quite a bit, as their cut damage is terrible)

Fixed vanilla VC bug in Thora persuasion check

Made horses slow much less from damage (they now stay pretty fast even when severely hurt)

I wish someone disabled CTRL+SPACE feature. Breaks immersion, makes everything feel shallow. I can't help but use it most of the time though cause it's indeed boring to go around slowly. But for the sake of realism, I wish someone *points at you* would disable that.

Hi tulinbogdan1,

I'm not sure there is really any one best timescale, x seconds of real life to y hours of gametime, vs 2x seconds? At any rate, I also don't like to ever remove player options (hence the 10 optional addons/alternate versions that are available on nexus).

But I do understand having a personal preference for the slower timescale to make the world feel more epic and immersive, and you have some options to achieve what you want. First, I suppose maybe you could go into warband key assignments, and make ctrl or space bind to some option, like bringing up a menu? That might work to stop you from using it. Or if you wanted a slower timescale even when using the speedup, you could open module.ini and set "time_multiplier = 0.12". It is at .25 in the default version, and .5 in the time speedup optional add-on at nexus, so basically you'd be slowing things down by half, the reverse of that optional addon.

Hey Tingyun,

Thanks for the changelog. I tracked down the marriage thing and apparently it seems to be a simple split in what the bride will do. I saved the game and reloaded and she seemed to alternate between three outcomes "No Thanks, keep trying" "Let's do it but my dad hates you!" and "Everything is fine, dad will say yes." Without changing variables I was able to reliably reload and cycle through these in almost a 33% chance split. Weird. I had always expected there to be more under the hood to that system. Maybe I was just at a weird statistical breakpoint.

I did notice one thing that is cheesing me off a bit that I hadn't noticed before. My Huskarlar are deciding to not use axe and shield and instead opting for Dane Axe when in the first rank of a shieldwall. This, understandably, gets them killed. Any way to change this behavior?

-Z

Hi Zeqe,

That's interesting. Yes, perhaps you were right on the cusp then. I know marriage proposals are subject to a fair bit of random chance in VC, but I've never looked up the specific details. I do know charisma and relations somehow factor in in liklihood to accept, but don't know much about it otherwise.

On the huscarls, that is interesting. I haven't had that problem, but a lot might depend on how you use them. For example, I usually let them fire at will, which means their shields are up, and I'm sure there are a lot of factors relating to positioning and grouping that determine how this would work out as well. I also think I remember the formation system affects weapon choice in a more complex way than the out-of-formation simple choice where the ai picks the longest weapon, but I haven't delved into formations much, and I could be misremembering, though I have a vague memory from playtests that I thought they were handling weapon switching well in formation (but that has been a long while ago now, so not sure).

I made an optional add-on just now and uploaded it to Nexus--it removes the dane axe from their inventory. Fully saved game compatible (troop inventory changes always are), it is a single file, troops.txt, so you can install it or the default balance mod troops.txt whenever you like depending on whether you want them to use dane axes or not. This should fix it if you are finding them having the dane axe doesn't work well for you.

Tingyun said:

Made horses slow much less from damage (they now stay pretty fast even when severely hurt)

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Greetings again TG. Thanks for the changelog.

Have you considered offering a "wounded horse dies - alternative file" for the mod? I'm sure i'm not telling anyone anything they don't already know, but 1 arrow? a horse is useless and would likely die. 1 arrow in a similar beast, an elk or mule deer, they won't last long. I grew up riding in a small scandi village in the 70's. I still ride today. My shetland got a cold 40 years ago & we put him out of his misery. Threw a shoe? he's done until replaced. Horses aren't completely fragile creatures, but even a destrier isn't invulnerable.

I know there has already been lengthy discussion on the topic, but I was hoping perhaps for an alternative more realistic horse damage version? That would be super. If not, perhaps a point in the direction to modify the values myself? I apologize if this has already been discussed.

My fave change in your mod is the reduced renown gain - big improvement, thank you.

As always, thanks a ton for your great changes. Sincere regards, Grimnr

Hi Grimnir9,

Glad you enjoy it—I like the alternate version for slower renown as well.

On the horse idea, a few versions ago I explored the possibility of adding an optional version for players who want horse permadeath (intended to come with a significant cost reduction to horses), but it ended up being a little more complicated than I had anticipated (the current system for horse death from wounds isn’t editable in the module system, so something new would have to be created), and I got distracted by other goals. And at this point I am too swamped with real life to delve back into it.

Sorry about that—it would be a nice optional add-on for some players, and you are right in all your points.

As for modding it yourself, as I mentioned it isn’t the kind of thing that can be tweaked. But Kalarhan offered some advice for how to mod it in in a question I asked in the Forge Q and A thread:

kalarhan said:

a horse is a agent (just like the player or any NPC in the mission). When a NPC is using a horse they are connected and you can check rider and horse ID with operations.

the horse agent is a instance of the horse item on player`s inventory. You will need to use the agent events for your condition, and the inventory horse for the consequence (reduce quality or death).

see header_triggers.py for mission template events (in this case, the death of a agent, that is also a horse, which happens to be the player`s horse. Note that the horse can die while being used by the player, but also when alone in the scene - dismounted).

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Thank you much for the reply and for shedding some light on horses, TG. I don't use them, i'm all infantry, in real life and in living history and reenacting. In the future I shall simply look upon attacking hordes of cavalry as a challenge! Be well, and travel far. Best regards.

I might be wrong but I read in a changelog that required renown was dropped from 150 to 100.
It is still 150, which file contains that requirement? I'd like to drop it to 100 myself.

Oh and with this mod, charisma is actually useful. On my full beast combat norse character it is harder to manage an army. With my Saxon character however, tactics, trainer, leadership and persuasion are a game changer. I can handle bigger armies at 111 renown than I can with my Norse at 500 renown. Also easier to manage battles.

Balance mod makes the game alot harder, however I can't go back to Vanilla because it's so buggy and unbalanced.
BIG PROPS TO YOU SIR, GREAT MOD.

Hi Jarl Sigmund Haraldsson,

Required renown for what? It’s morning here and my mind is still a bit foggy, sorry if it should be obvious. Happy to help if you specify.

On army control and morale, the formula is the same as vanilla VC, but using the realistic travel speeds means more time for morale to decay between battle/destinations, which does indeed up the importance of paying attention to such factors.

Thank you for the kind praise, although I would personally say vanilla VC is very well-polished and balanced (which is why Balance Mod changes are generally pretty subtle). Not trying to dampen your excitement about the mod, just want us to stay positive on the great game the VC devs gave us.

I keep getting save crashing around the late game with every one of my last playthroughs.

I don't know if it is a vanilla issue, something related to the mod or something on my end. However it has happened on two different computers with the balance mod installed.

This time it happened around day 900 or so, and it seems pretty random, but when it first starts it persists.

I will save the game and after a couple of seconds it will freeze and crash, when I restart the game, the game managed to save and it runs as normal until the next time it crashes.

It does not crash every time I save, but still quite frequently.

I have version 10 installed + "Optional add on Happy Companions morale doesn't go down from companion conflicts"

I have backup saves from before it started this time, but if you are familiar with why this is happening I would appreciate some tips on how to avoid or fix it.

I experienced this problem. I was with 300 and something of renown, and from nowhere I came to be with 50

Freff,

Do you save on the world map or in scenes? Try saving only in scenes (castles, towns, or even the camp scene) rather than on the world map, and see if that resolves the issue. Some warband save issues can be helped by only saving in interior scenes, as operations going on in the world map when saving can cause issues.

If you wanted to do some testing, you could temporarily reinstall vanilla, make a backup of your save, then load your save and play with the vanilla VC for a couple of minutes and try saving, see if it crashes. Then reinstall Balance Mod, load the same backup save, do the exact same things and save, see if it crashes. Since vanilla and Balance Mod are save compatible we can test that way if the problem is only from Balance Mod or also vanilla VC.

Gagafofo,

haven’t heard of renown drops before, very odd. It might just be some one-time warband glitch, please report back if it happens again.

hello could anyone give me a hand ?
I installed the Mods (the way it was on the description) ... and it worked, but not in the way I imagined.  I would like to play with the dark age troops  tree +  items.
but whenever I try to reverse, the game goes wrong and crashes.
I already have about 7 hours that I'm trying (trial and error - since I do not understand programming) and nothing.


could someone help me to change this ??
I will be forever grateful