No it is not imo... I think the XP gains are broken, too slow, too unbalanced... We need much higher XP rates at early levels, slower on mid-levels and higher at 200+ again for it to be practical. Leveling any skill past 200 is a nightmare, and getting the basic levels on skills at early game, also terribly slow. As of now the best thing you can do is just ignore background story for RPing purposes and just smash all focus points on a single skill if possible, then focus on leveling that up as much as you can early on so you can gain more attributes and focus points to "unstuck" the remaining skills you want in your build. To me, that's broken, because it only makes "stats-centered" character creation viable, anything else will actually punish you.
-
If you are reporting a bug, please head over to our Technical Support section for Bannerlord.
Athletic is much slower to rise up, than riding
- Thread starter Kshahdoo
- Start date
Users who are viewing this thread
Agreed, it's far to easy to go a decade in this game with few of your stats budging close to 100. Makes you wonder why those perks past 200 even exist.... in the event they even work at the moment.
Last edited:
My guess is they're still figuring out how to balance experience gains and all that jazz.
The current pace can't be right. Maybe when they have narrowed down the formula they like they will cut the experience necessary to level up skills drastically and we'll finally be able to reach those 200 levels.
Kshahdoo
Recruit
I scored all kills while staying still, my aim sucks, when riding.
Kshahdoo
Recruit
You won't get the same levels, while on foot. That's the problem.
Slint
Recruit
I'm close to a decade with 7 skills over 100 and 2 over 200. So it's not that hard. Maybe try investing your skill points smarter.
Sidhwen_Khorest
Sergeant
Hey Ironsun, so I got into a battle with 1 looter and decided it would be the perfect time to test this. I went into battle, did 75 damage and retreated, and gained some xp in polearm, then I re-loaded, went into battle and did 90 damage and I gained more xp. so yes, it is reliant on damage done.
As far as troop type goes, I would need to get into a battle with more than 1 troop type versus which on my current playthrough probably wont happen for a while
Botlike
Regular
The way the levelling system currently works , you want to level both as much as possible to get skill points , and thus , levels.
Same goes for all skills.
Assuming you've invested even a few points in endurance to max out something later in the game ( like smithing ) , you are left with green xp on the riding/athletics trees which you might as well level up.
Between athletics/riding , athletics is vastly superior and a game changer. As long as your PC doesn't lag too much , you can turn the tide in battles just by solo performance , even when army vs army. This is something you can't do with riding , because you rely on limited ammunition , accuracy and you don't have cleave attacks. Even if you play melee like a 2h poly swinger , the kill rate is most of the time slower than on foot with a 2hand.
However , when it comes to overall army performance , horse archery is defo superior on most setups , as long as you got the right terrain , trained mounted archers and you don't fight heavily armoured enemies ( which might be more of a thing as of 1.3.0 ) but this is unrelated to solo performance.
As for levelling the two , riding is a joke thanks to horse archery. In fact , if your main focus is athletics , i strongly suggest only levelling riding every now and then through solo engaging and shooting looters from a horseback , or any enemy when they flee. It only takes around 2 hours of relaxed gameplay to get from 10 to 90 and be eligible for the best mounts.
As for athletics , the best way i've found , is install slicer mod to get AOE dmg with 2hand , or if that's not your thing , use a 2h axe to get decent cleave , wait for your front line to engage the enemy , go around the flank and start harvesting heads. That's the best way because the enemies don't fight you back.
Until your athletics level up and you get a good weapon , killing multiple enemies in melee without a shield is NO JOKE. At least that's my experience on realistic. The AI is weird , if you are fighting army vs army , you notice that sometimes your allied front line pulls back for no reason and suddenly the entire enemy horde turns on you and chops you to pieces in 1 second. Or sometimes the enemy pulls back , you think that is your moment , you get a couple of kills and then BOOM , they all turn with those spooky wide open eyes and you get the tab screen.
I also had some less decent athletics levelling with archery on foot but it seemed to be strongly related to damage dealt.
As for running around the map without a horse , this is marginal XP at best , i don't bother , because i forget to equip a mount when i enter villages and it's also annoying not having a mount at the start of battles , since it takes a while to engage the enemy.
Overall , i feel like athletics only needs a very slight boost to xp and levelling riding through mounted archery a decent nerf.
As a final note , if all you want from riding is to be able to ride all mounts , 1 focus point and ~6 points in endurance is enough.
If you intend to max endurance to get high athletics or smithing , i doubt you even need the 1 focus at all.
Same goes for all skills.
Assuming you've invested even a few points in endurance to max out something later in the game ( like smithing ) , you are left with green xp on the riding/athletics trees which you might as well level up.
Between athletics/riding , athletics is vastly superior and a game changer. As long as your PC doesn't lag too much , you can turn the tide in battles just by solo performance , even when army vs army. This is something you can't do with riding , because you rely on limited ammunition , accuracy and you don't have cleave attacks. Even if you play melee like a 2h poly swinger , the kill rate is most of the time slower than on foot with a 2hand.
However , when it comes to overall army performance , horse archery is defo superior on most setups , as long as you got the right terrain , trained mounted archers and you don't fight heavily armoured enemies ( which might be more of a thing as of 1.3.0 ) but this is unrelated to solo performance.
As for levelling the two , riding is a joke thanks to horse archery. In fact , if your main focus is athletics , i strongly suggest only levelling riding every now and then through solo engaging and shooting looters from a horseback , or any enemy when they flee. It only takes around 2 hours of relaxed gameplay to get from 10 to 90 and be eligible for the best mounts.
As for athletics , the best way i've found , is install slicer mod to get AOE dmg with 2hand , or if that's not your thing , use a 2h axe to get decent cleave , wait for your front line to engage the enemy , go around the flank and start harvesting heads. That's the best way because the enemies don't fight you back.
Until your athletics level up and you get a good weapon , killing multiple enemies in melee without a shield is NO JOKE. At least that's my experience on realistic. The AI is weird , if you are fighting army vs army , you notice that sometimes your allied front line pulls back for no reason and suddenly the entire enemy horde turns on you and chops you to pieces in 1 second. Or sometimes the enemy pulls back , you think that is your moment , you get a couple of kills and then BOOM , they all turn with those spooky wide open eyes and you get the tab screen.
I also had some less decent athletics levelling with archery on foot but it seemed to be strongly related to damage dealt.
As for running around the map without a horse , this is marginal XP at best , i don't bother , because i forget to equip a mount when i enter villages and it's also annoying not having a mount at the start of battles , since it takes a while to engage the enemy.
Overall , i feel like athletics only needs a very slight boost to xp and levelling riding through mounted archery a decent nerf.
As a final note , if all you want from riding is to be able to ride all mounts , 1 focus point and ~6 points in endurance is enough.
If you intend to max endurance to get high athletics or smithing , i doubt you even need the 1 focus at all.
You do get XP from "running" around the campaign map on foot, just like if your riding a horse.
To narrow down the formula all they need to do is ask me to figure it out. I have academic formation on Game Design, am a old fan of the series, and I know what to aim for because I understand the project. Yet, I'm good at creating opposition whenever I have an idea, still I've helped balance countless mods for Warband
Imo it's anywhere between 50%+ experience up to 250%, the complicated part is re-balancing the rates for higher levels. The lower levels can be done with a flat global increase, but the "master" levels are almost unreachable even at rate 5x that I'm using, if you do not spend all attributes + focus on the skill you want to get there (which's suicidal for any viable build), that's because focus pts can only get you as far as level 200 on the "extra" rate, after that you are past the soft-cap, which decreases XP gain each level. Currently I'm stuck at 2h 270 something, unable to reach 275 because the rates dropped like crazy (didn't even hit the supposed cap, the skill isn't written in red yet) The only skill that I could get naturally to 275 without spending all pts to get it was Smith, but that's because it's currently exploitable (it's leveling). You still need 5 focus to remove the cap though
Last edited:
Curious, thank you for the trouble and getting back to me, much appreciated!Hey Ironsun, so I got into a battle with 1 looter and decided it would be the perfect time to test this. I went into battle, did 75 damage and retreated, and gained some xp in polearm, then I re-loaded, went into battle and did 90 damage and I gained more xp. so yes, it is reliant on damage done.
As far as troop type goes, I would need to get into a battle with more than 1 troop type versus which on my current playthrough probably wont happen for a while
This is neat, ever thought of moving to Turkey ??To narrow down the formula all they need to do is ask me to figure it out. I have academic formation on Game Design, am a old fan of the series, and I know what to aim for because I understand the project. Yet, I'm good at creating opposition whenever I have an idea, still I've helped balance countless mods for Warband
Imo it's anywhere between 50%+ experience up to 250%, the complicated part is re-balancing the rates for higher levels. The lower levels can be done with a flat global increase, but the "master" levels are almost unreachable even at rate 5x that I'm using, if you do not spend all attributes + focus on the skill you want to get there (which's suicidal for any viable build), that's because focus pts can only get you as far as level 200 on the "extra" rate, after that you are past the soft-cap, which decreases XP gain each level. Currently I'm stuck at 2h 270 something, unable to reach 275 because the rates dropped like crazy (didn't even hit the supposed cap, the skill isn't written in red yet) The only skill that I could get naturally to 275 without spending all pts to get it was Smith, but that's because it's currently exploitable (it's leveling). You still need 5 focus to remove the cap though
Yeah I hear you man, seems like they're trying different approaches though, even most recent patch changed the formula slightly, by that I mean the new change introduced in 1.2.0 "Changed Skill XP increase formula to 10 + skill level.".
Even though they did cut the experience needed for skills and troops it's the EXP gain that's still a problem imo. I can barely reach Athletics 100 by running around the map and fighting on foot, it just slows down way too much (I don't have any EXP gain modifiers or anything) to feel rewarding and becomes a drag really (as you've mentioned above even with 5x modifier).
I hope TW are looking at all the feedback though and will adjust all this accordingly, I'm the type of person who likes vanilla experience above all and I'm usually not so willing to install tons of mods and all that jazz.
240 fps medieval crossbow? Damn... Horse charging at ~90 km/h? Devs please..
I killed countless looters with this guy solo, no horse of course. Just staying out of stones range, shooting and running away) Mostly in the forests, because trees provide a lot of cover. Should I run out of arrows, I immediately retreated to reload my quivers and engage again. Well, I was having fun, until some guy posted a research that running speed is almost unaffected by armor weight. It ruined the whole idea of cosplay
Last edited:
Maximum997
Squire
No. Not only on damage.
I was able to lvl up athletic and weapon skills for my companions in tournaments by just blocking their hits. And it was pretty fast.
I guess you have:
1. Basic XP for any hit
2. Bonus XP for damage
firemomo333
Recruit
no my horse isnt charging at 90m/s, its only 20m/s (really easy to do in an asari and 100 skill in riding) since the crossbow bolt is 70m/s, its relative speed so its adding on the acceleration of my horse, as for the damage it was a looter with no damage reduction and a head shot so doubled, if i hit in the body its around 80 or leg which is around 30
I said km/h not m/s. Sure it's "only" 26 m/s or 93 km/h or 58 mph, which is impossible speed for a horse. Horse speed world record is 77.6 km/h, other sources say 70.7 km/h. And it was a race horse on a track, not some war horse in the field.
But I know that this is a game and all that. Wasn't going to delve into discussion of realism, just expressed sincere surprise at such numbers.
Last edited:
Pretty sure I have seen my athletics rise while using throwing weapons on horseback so...
Except for the fact that these numbers don't necessarily translate directly from real world to game, they are essentially just placeholder numbers so the game can do math for things like damage. So it really shouldn't matter, unless the horses are actually traveling that fast in game, in which case nerf please.
Nah, never did, I've just moved to Italy and was planning on moving to London this year, now I don't even know what I'll do tomorrow, probably continue locked up at home.
As for the mods thing you've mentioned, well, mods have allowed me to discover tids and bits of the game that need adjusting, are broken, or too unbalanced, some of which most ppl can't even reach to see without mods.
Peace treaties have no cool-down, for instance, so some nations make peace, 1 min later the weaker nation declares war (doesn't even make sense). If you kill any lord, the relations hit basically destroys late game if you are trying to form an independent kingdom, and if you don't, Lords spam Zerg Rushes of peasants on all your fiefs, and due to broken auto-calc, they win... In fact, siege assaults are broken as hell given that it should be rare for a assault to work, the losses are too low, while what I think should happen is that either the AI use fully blown siege engines before assaulting, or wins by starvation (again, that fits the diplomatic issues). And even when you actively go into a siege as the player, there are tons upon tons of bugs in many siege scenes. Parts of the game are working fine, but most of it is lacking either balance or features. Another broken thing imo is persuasion, but then again, it's currently useless in vanilla (you won't be able to properly found and manage a kingdom, so it doesn't matter all THAT much for a normal playthrough)
well, it does seem to me like lengths are in centimeters, so length 120 for a weapon means that its reach is 120 cm. 2,4 m reach for spears, and so on. Horses being in the 500 kilo range, their speed ? Km/h ? Starting sumpter is some 34 km/h. High speed ones are in 70s. Conversion from meters to second to kilometer per hour is 3,6, as 1 m/s = 3,6 km/h. A made-up horse has 75 speed. If this is 75 km/h, it translates to 20,83 m/s as base.
Then we will add riding skill which adds to its speed. With horse archery, 200 riding skill is not difficult to get if you have 7 endurance due to smithing. I deleted my archer smith char a few patches ago, and I with the noble bow managed 105 m/s shots when I released 3 meters from target them approaching, not on a horse.
105 m/s translates to 378 km/h or 234,87 m/h = 378 feet/second.
Ballista at close range has an excess of 100 m/s too.
In the video that debunked the plate-killing power of the english longbow they were using 80 gram (0,08 kg/0,17lb) arrows. 72 kilo draw weight. (160lb, 1 lb = 0,454 kg) the arrow after 10 meters had out of my head, velocity of 53 meters per second.
Other, like great crossbows, even heavy ones using bolts 3-4 times as heavy as the warbow, 570 kg draw weight (1250 lb) with a bow 1,5 meters long (5 ft) it shot bolts heavy from 0,22kg to 0,38 kg (0,48 -0,83 lb) none of them exceeded or even reached 60 meters per second. 'Muzzle' velocity measured varied from 51 - 58 m/s or so. Then you have things like higher air resistance affecting effective range. There were bigger crossbows than this, with up to 1,9 m in bow length, with proper composite bow, Interesting things could happen. Velocity and the bolt weight.
With these, a 25 kilo pavise is a no brainer, but the big composite bow crossbows were no joke.
Last edited:
Well, basic numbers are quite high.. But the problem is in riding skill inverted logic. It should not increase the speed of a horse over it's limit, but instead decrease the penalty applied by rider.
