Why Sturgia often grows weak, Khuzait often grows strong

[durbal]

For last 3 days I tried to understand reasons of lords remaining with 0 gold situation which happens at 1.3.0. It is not common but when happens it is so disturbing, lords even cannot buy food and starving. I was also expecting to prove Sturgians are suffering mostly as economical because their towns has very low prosperity compared others. However I see that Aserai suffers more as economical compared to Sturgia even they have several towns with high prosperity. Also Battanians were in a good economical situation in most games even their total number of towns and total prosperity is less than others even from Sturgia and Aserai. Then it was obvious total income is not mainly come from taxes. I was expecting 80% of npc clan's income comes from taxes but this ratio was lower it seems. Then I collect data from battle loots too in addition to taxes. Made a table all together. In the table it was clearly seen battle loots are so important for Npc clans. Long peace times (identified as blue rectangles in table) damage kingdom's economy because lords cannot get loots, in opposite in war times kingdom clans get rich (red rectangles). As you see at table a kingdom's income source mainly comes from tax from towns / castles / villages but it is only 60% was not 80% like I expect. Remaining 35% come from battles. About 5% others (prisoners, etc).

In table there is only one game 10 year run data. In that game Sturgia was not isolated much and joined lots of battles thats why their economy did not go bad. However in some gameplays Sturgians can be so isolated and they can have long peace times. This also damage their economy. Then if they go in war when their economy is not good they lose settlements because of weak garrisons. Also yes second reason is their tax income per fortification is least among all kingdoms. (in table it is not so obvious because they captured 1-2 extra towns)

By the way empire column for poor clan leaders (last 6 columns) is for all 3 empire factions. You can divide it to 3 to compare with others.

As conclusion, with a patch we will decrease loot income from battles (for only npcs, they get this income as gold instead of items for now, however there was no trade penalty applied, we will add that) by 50% and we will increase all tax incomes from settlements by 25%. This will make economy of kingdoms more stable, they will not need battles to save their economical balance, also player will get 25% better tax too. Current bonuses for Sturgia and Aserai can change in future they are not effective and these two factions should get some important bonus because they suffer from geographical positions also Sturgia has lowest prosperity and they get 30-40% less tax income compared average of others.

One addition : while examining all prosperities I see 3 Aserai castles start game with 0 prosperity. This is weird we did not notice it for 1 month. It will be also fixed with patch.

There are some reports also 1.3x cavalry bonus also damage Sturgia parties in simulations. Will also examine its effects on Sturgia's weakness and give report to teams added that constant.

Why are you treating the AI and player differently? Nerf all plunder and battle loot income. It's way over the top and it's the same issue for players. If a player owns a low-prosperity fief and needs a huge garrison they will be in the negatives huge in income. That's fine by me. What's not fine is more bandaids for the AI which is exactly what this is. Every time you create a bandaid you solve one problem and create 3 more. Stop the nonsense economy. Stop the 600K armor and stuff that isn't worth anything near that (oh wow 3 extra armor on my arms!). The economy should be based on taxes, tariffs, holdings, policies, and everything associated with kingdom management -- not slaughtering T5 troops for their overpriced gear to sell at Ye Olde Pawn Shoppe.

 

[Dabos37]

Why are you treating the AI and player differently? Nerf all plunder and battle loot income. It's way over the top and it's the same issue for players. If a player owns a low-prosperity fief and needs a huge garrison they will be in the negatives huge in income. That's fine by me. What's not fine is more bandaids for the AI which is exactly what this is. Every time you create a bandaid you solve one problem and create 3 more.

So, which is your suggestion? Bringing back the old situation where lords were leading parties full or recruits and where they were not even able to recruit 2/3 of their party size? Sure, most of changes will bring more issues but the game is looking more promising after every patch.

I do agree with player is able to get tons of money though, but I disagree that It is due to fiefs. I can get 3 workshops and 2 caravans in the first 70 days and still keep some money playing at hardest difficulty. Then I can get 2k daily passively while still getting more money trading, winning battles, etc.

 

[octavian]

Why not an attrition mechanic? Adding more cities is all well and good, but northern wastelands don't traditionally have huge populations. They do however have a proud tradition of killing invaders as the winter snows set in. Give units varying degrees of weather resistance. Sturgians do well in snow, Aserai do well in heat, the kingdoms in the temperate region are somewhere in between. Waging war with Vlandian Knights in the middle of Summer in Aserai should cause attrition losses. Same goes for Winter in Sturgia. These types of regions historically have defended themselves with not just their people but their geography. There are ways to balance this while adding realism and without just slapping more cities into the mix I think.

 

[durbal]

So, which is your suggestions? Bringing back the old situation where lords were leading parties full or recruits and where they were not even able to recruit 2/3 of their party size? Sure, most of changes will bring more issues but the game is looking more promising after every patch.

I do agree with player is able to get tons of money though, but I disagree that It is due to fiefs. I can get 3 workshops and 2 caravans in the first 70 days and still keep some money playing at hardest difficulty.

There's too much money in the game as a whole. Probably 5-10x too much. It's a nonsense economy. They might as well delete gold as a resource because it's meaningless. Boom, AI bankruptcy problem solved. Since they're apparently not interested in fixing the economy, they might as well just remove it to resolve the bankruptcy problem since gold is meaningless anyway with the broken economy.

AI lords go bankrupt because they lose their income passive income sources (i.e. fiefs) and keep respawning with troops they can't afford (due to the zombie lord respawn bandaid). The only thing their proposed fix is going to do is delay at which point AI lords arrive at bankruptcy. It doesn't take much foresight to realize that a bonus to their fief income is pointless since x * 0 where x is some arbitrary multiplier still equals 0.

My suggestions are to stop making bandaids and start fixing core issues.

Lord bankruptcy problem:
- Allow lords to petition other lords for money. They spend influence and get gold in return. The petitioned lord gets the influence.
- Allow lords to get income through character interactions like marriage. They agree to marry someone's daughter or marry their children off in return for cash.
- Lords should be able to buy workshops and caravans just as players do.
- Lords with a negative income balance and no ability to resolve it (no army, no fiefs, etc.) should switch to being mercenaries.
(wow, see how we proposed ways to solve the problem through existing game systems rather than just fudging numbers and making magic AI cheats via bandaids!?!?)
- Remove free respawn armies since bankrupt lords can't afford them and they're annoying anyway. This would probably require some AI overhauls and fine-tuning, but it needs to be addressed sooner or later.
- Lords need a sense of income/expense balance. It seems like currently they have none. They recruit troops and spend money because they can, not because they should.


Bandits:
- Endless respawns on a weekly timer is lazy. They need to spawn based on triggers like prosperity loss and such.
- AI needs to clear hideouts. I don't care if it's some lazy code where a lord disappears from the map for two days and afterward the hideout is gone. Need to start somewhere, because some AI lords have their economy wrecked because of bandits killing villagers endlessly so their villages have no hearths.
- Fix steppe bandits. They are uncatchable and both the AI and player can't reliably deal with them.

AI:
- The AI needs some sense of a budget. Currently it seems like it has none and just relies on getting endless gold to do whatever it wants. When you take out their fiefs, their income goes poof and they keep recruiting as long as they have gold until they're bankrupt and stuck with 150 troops they can't pay for.
- ADHD AI that has no sense of priority or commitment and randomly aborts a siege to try to defend a 100-garrison castle being assaulted 4 days away. No more please.

Economy:
- Make equipment prices make sense. If it costs 100 gold to get a Palatine Guard trooper, it should not cost 100K to get his gear. I should not be able to upgrade 10 troops with entirely new suits of armor from the proceeds of selling one of their rusty boots.
- Economy in general needs to shift more toward a balance sheet approach with income/expenses. Right now it's not a matter of if you're in the red or the black, but how far in the black you are.

Diplomacy:
- This doesn't even exist. Basic stuff -- peace deals, alliances, non-aggression pacts, etc. are needed. Actually, at this point I'd just settle with war and peace votes in the kingdom.

There's a ton more that needs to be done, but bandaids are not one of them. Fiddling with numbers and giving the AI hidden bonuses doesn't resolve the core issue that gold income from plunder and loot is too high because item prices make no sense.

 

[Dabos37]

Well, to be honest, I do agree with most of your suggestions.

- AI lords should be aware of their finances and act in consequence. Disband units and stop recruiting if needed.
- Equipment should be much more cheaper.
- Getting gold in game should be much more harder.
- The amount of bandit parties are currently a nonsense and they could be halved and we still would have tons of them.
- Improvements for AI are always welcome.

Anyway, these things will come soon or later but I think the game is going to the right direction and while the current state of 1.3.0 version is unplayable for me due to economy issues, I think that the game is getting better which is a good signal.

 

[Goods]

Wrong. Look at their percentage of won battles. Ask yourself why. (The answer is the ability to only engage on favorable terms due to campaign movespeed and higher percentage of cavalry.)

This is interesting. At any given army speed, the khuzait can have a larger force. If the faction bonus to map speed from cav is working correctly, this advantage is compounded.

AI battles seem to come down to raw numbers with the autoresolve feature as limited as it currently is. Even if we leave out the 30% effectiveness bonus for cav, 50-100 troops can be the difference between losing a handful of Lord's for a few days or not, exacerbating the the already poor sturgian replenishment capacity.

Sturgia is also among the worst in access to mounted troops making the speed differential even worse.

 

[Earth Dragon]

I’d rather Sturgians have a higher percentage of higher grade troops for recruitment as a fix then getting rid of the very reasonable buff to Cav. There are faction bonuses, both as a region and as a kingdom, that can also help to iron these things out that would exemplify the game versus degrade it.

 

[Aposynth]

Regarding the AutoCalculation:

The flat buff for Cavalry should be replaced by more complex mechanics, but I guess, this flat buff is an Early Access Thing.

Instead Terrain and Morale (and Army Cohesion too) should be the key factors in the auto calculation, like Cavalry gets their buff on steppes, but debuffs in more enclosed terrain like forests, mountainous land and rivers.
Infantry should get buffs in siege battles and enclosed terrain
Ranged imho doesn't need any buffs, they're strong in their own regard, probably debuffs in difficult terrain like e.g. forrests.

Armies with low morale would break sonner in Auto Calculation Battles, armies with high morale would last longer, maybe even get a slight buff to combat power.

And Army Cohesion, since it represents how good the Commanders work with each other, should have an influence, above 50% the units in the Army get buffs to their combat power, below 50% debuffs.

And Culture should have influence on the troop combat effectiveness, e.g. Sturgian Units gets normal combat stats in snowy terrain while units of other nations get problems there, like e.g. a Morale hit for difficult terrain.

 

[durbal]

Regarding the AutoCalculation:

The flat buff for Cavalry should be replaced by more complex mechanics, but I guess, this flat buff is an Early Access Thing.

Instead Terrain and Morale (and Army Cohesion too) should be the key factors in the auto calculation, like Cavalry gets their buff on steppes, but debuffs in more enclosed terrain like forests, mountainous land and rivers.
Infantry should get buffs in siege battles and enclosed terrain
Ranged imho doesn't need any buffs, they're strong in their own regard, probably debuffs in difficult terrain like e.g. forrests.

Armies with low morale would break sonner in Auto Calculation Battles, armies with high morale would last longer, maybe even get a slight buff to combat power.

And Army Cohesion, since it represents how good the Commanders work with each other, should have an influence, above 50% the units in the Army get buffs to their combat power, below 50% debuffs.

And Culture should have influence on the troop combat effectiveness, e.g. Sturgian Units gets normal combat stats in snowy terrain while units of other nations get problems there, like e.g. a Morale hit for difficult terrain.

Why should factors which don't exist in real battles apply to autoresolve battles? Not to mention it's just more stuff the AI can't handle.

 

[Apocal]

Wrong. Look at their percentage of won battles. Ask yourself why. (The answer is the ability to only engage on favorable terms due to campaign movespeed and higher percentage of cavalry.)

How do you see this information?

 

[kweassa]

This is interesting. At any given army speed, the khuzait can have a larger force. If the faction bonus to map speed from cav is working correctly, this advantage is compounded.

AI battles seem to come down to raw numbers with the autoresolve feature as limited as it currently is. Even if we leave out the 30% effectiveness bonus for cav, 50-100 troops can be the difference between losing a handful of Lord's for a few days or not, exacerbating the the already poor sturgian replenishment capacity.

Sturgia is also among the worst in access to mounted troops making the speed differential even worse.

In the end, this is true. The largest factor in autocalc is merely numbers. The bonuses to the cavalry is not going to turn the tides when 600 army meets 800 in autocalc. The decisive factor is which side has the bigger army -- and because that there's rarely a battle where same numbers meet (less than 100 men difference), it basically comes down to the situation at the moment one side declares war on another.

The odds the Sturgians are at, is that after they've finished a war and their lords are still recovering from the loss in men, another will go to war -- or as much likely, be engaged in a war at multiple fronts. The average size of the army the Sturgians will be able to muster, will always be smaller than any of the Vlandians, Battanians, NE, SE, that will likely be targeting for Varcheg and Omor.

In comparison, the Khuzaits rarely fight on their own territory, because as laid out in the beginning, they don't have that much combatants adjacent to themselves. Someone mentioned that they've seen the Vlandians wage war against Khuzaits early on, and if the declaration of war is based on some amount of chance then it can happen. But if anyone is up for it, I'd issue a challenge to mark down just how often such things happen in the first 3-5 years of the campaign. I will dare say the chances are negligible at best.

As much, in the extremely rare cases where the initial roll of the dice is extremely favorable against Sturgians -- where NONE of Vlandians, Battanians, SE, NE declare the "next war," in this scenario Sturgia actually manages to survive. Not necessarily thriving, but still strong.


People's preconceptions and biases revolving around the complaints they have against horse archers, are seriously clouding the issue. This so-called "problem" of Sturgians and Khuzaits, is not about unit balance -- but about geographical and strategical elements.

...and under that context, I'm not sure if I want it to be "fixed."

The existence of a potential threat from a different civilization outside of the local group, coming from the eastern steppes, that will become immensely powerful if the squabbling amongst the nations do not end quickly -- this has pretty high thematic value. If someone doesn't rise to power in the ashes of old Calradia and unify the people, the "outsiders" are gonna pour in steam-rolling. And as one hero rises and finally unites most of the land, the "last boss" will be the "horde."

If this doesn't fit the bill for an excellent strategic role-playing, I dunno what will.

 

[kweassa]

(ps) I mean, it's the timeless tale of all famous legends. If you implement the above "thematics" to Britain, you get the Arthurian legend. So, in a sense, Bannerlord's "lore" can be sort of crafted toward the tale of someone rising up and either rebuild Calradia or replace it, and then stop the looming threat of a large-scale invasions from outsiders coming from the eastern steppes.

In actual "history of Calradia," this did not happen, the lands remained divided and became independent kingdoms, but the Khuzaits themselves were engaged in a civil war by a coup from the Khergit clan, so 200 years passed and the age of Warband arrives.

 

[Stratigo]

(ps) I mean, it's the timeless tale of all famous legends. If you implement the above "thematics" to Britain, you get the Arthurian legend. So, in a sense, Bannerlord's "lore" can be sort of crafted toward the tale of someone rising up and either rebuild Calradia or replace it, and then stop the looming threat of a large-scale invasions from outsiders coming from the eastern steppes.

In actual "history of Calradia," this did not happen, the lands remained divided and became independent kingdoms, but the Khuzaits themselves were engaged in a civil war by a coup from the Khergit clan, so 200 years passed and the age of Warband arrives.

They were also invaded from the east by another faction, perhaps another steppe people

 

[durbal]

How do you see this information?

Look at the log. I should make a mod that dumps it to a text file while I play but in my current playthrough I eradicated the Khuzait so now I can play a normal game.

 

[durbal]

People's preconceptions and biases revolving around the complaints they have against horse archers, are seriously clouding the issue. This so-called "problem" of Sturgians and Khuzaits, is not about unit balance -- but about geographical and strategical elements.

Please stop repeating this. It's pure conjecture. The Khuzait start situation probably helps a bit, but it doesn't explain why they can steamroll past their starting point so well. If you swapped their cities and Sturgia's you'd see the same situation.

Unit differences like Sturgian Archers vs Palatine Guard don't make a difference, but if you think having quick access to T2 cav doesn't make a difference then you're either disingenuous or delusional. Khuzait get to choose all of their battles because of their feat combined with the naturally high proportion of cavalry increasing their average move speed even more. When they siege they can almost always get away. When the enemy sieges, they get mobbed by Khuzait cavalry and destroyed because there's no escape. After one battle or so they get even more cavalry due to all the recruit upgrades and the ball starts rolling.

I don't care if they have T2 cav or horse archers or whatever. But campaign movement speed is broken and they need to implement a system to stop it from being a constant so a) we can deal with stuff like the Khuzait OPness b) aren't required to bring hundreds of horses with us and hunt them down if we should lose a battle and c) stop having to chase parties from one end of the world to the other -- especially through our own territory -- because we're only 0.1 faster and will always only be 0.1 faster.

 

[Dabos37]

I would not care too much with autocalc battles until economy issues get fixed and see how It goes. Godun, the clan leader which owns Tyal and nearby castle, has always huge economy issues, all his army wounded and 100 defenders as much in his fiefs. So Khuzait attack Tyal with 900 men and Sturgia create one of two big armies but a lot of men die in the long way and they get wrecked once face Khuzait armies. It is all about this in all my campaigns.

 

[GeluHUN]

...

@mexxico I have seen another thing that might interest you regarding a new game start in 1.0.3:

• At the start of a new game only low level militia is spawning. (This kinda is a bug I suppose?)
• Spawning a lot more militia at the start made the game more "stable" in such that no kingdom was able to take towns or castles early on.

 

[ZydrateTheSmoothCriminal]

Yeah Sturgia has no strategic depth and is usually overrun in my games. Current game I had to bail and join someone else because I didn't want to go down with that ship haha

I think Sturgia could be made more viable with the addition of some depth to its north, which would be a safe spot for recruitment and give an extra path to travel for reinforcements. Something like this:

Please no, do you see how wide that strait is? It doesn't make any sense for there to be a bridge. Please no.

 

[pyerr]

Anyone knows does every AI Lord in game have perk tree and all buffs like my character and my companions?

 

[brognar]

I’d rather Sturgians have a higher percentage of higher grade troops for recruitment as a fix then getting rid of the very reasonable buff to Cav. There are faction bonuses, both as a region and as a kingdom, that can also help to iron these things out that would exemplify the game versus degrade it.

This could be a solution and it would kind of reflect a "warrior culture" lore-wise. The only thing to do after that is to make Sturgian units not suck.

Even their infantry, which is supposed to be their strength, suck until they get to top tier. There's no real progression; they just get slight armour upgrades (way less than other factions it seems) until BAM they're suddenly the best infantry in the game. Any non-top tier infantry gets absolutely trashed in battle so it's lots of grinding looters until you can get a core of high tier infantry.

Oh yeah, and you have to do this with the worst archers in the game, and cavalry that's so hard to get it basically doesn't exist.