SP - General Too big focus on leveling your troops

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Kreu2009

Sergeant
In my opinion leveling units up is a too big part of bannerlords gameplay.
Hunting bandits and later weak lords isn't a lot of fun. There are a lot of threads that talk about this problem already.
Most of them suggest to give the player more ways to lever their units. Giving the player more and easier ways to level up his troop can of course cause balancing issues.
Also these suggestions don't really make the leveling more fun. They just offer ways to get arround the leveling process.
Problem is i can't think of any way to make leveling more fun either.

In my opionion the "difficult" thing should not be to level your units.
The difficult thing should be to get enough money to affort high tier units.

It should be possible to buy high tier units. At least to a certain amount.
Also it should be possible to pay someone to train units or to buy buildings where units can be trained.
To balance this out it should be much harder to get money in the first place.

How would this make the game more fun?
Like i said i can't think of ways to make leveling more fun.
But getting money can be fun. There are just a lot more possibilitys to earn money.
Quests, Battles, Raiding, traiding, build building, rent workshops.
So the challenge should be to get money and use it the most efficient way.
This would also open up the game for more playstyles.


Edit:
A user brought up a valid point.
In order to avoid the same thing getting discussed over and over again, im including it here:

User said:
I really don't see the problem. Actually it does seem a bit too easy to instantly get tier3+ troops IMO

Answer:
Here a question. How often do you reload an older save after you lost your army in a battle? How often to you engage partys that have a big chance to defeat you? From what i can tell most people never want to deal with the setback after loosing all of their men or even just a part of them.
The reason is, releveling your soldiers isn't fun. So far i haven't seen a single player who actually enjoys that.
The problem is not that people can't deal with setbacks. Games like dark souls or warhammer vermintide proof that.
The problem is that people don't want to deal with a setback, if that forces them to do a very boring activity again for several hours.
If the problem wouldn't be to relevel your entire army but to have enough money to afford a new one, a setback would be a totally different thing.
Simply because getting enough money back can be fun. Releveling your troops isn't.

Again i don't want it easy to get high level troops.
I want to shift the problem from leveling units to being able to afford units.
Being able to buy high tier units doesn't make it easier to get high tier units, if it is hard to afford them.

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How about troops level up faster depending on how difficult the battle is and how much higher leveled the enemies are. So i'm thinking that taking on large groups of bandits or small lords could be a viable way to level troops, if you are good enough with tactics. And if you win a battle that was not in your favor then your men will level up by a lot. It's also very realistic, in real life you don't get better by slaughtering kids, you get better by defeating people who are better then you. And being in intense and dangerous situations will toughen you up.
But also if you make building armies easier then you might need to make losing your whole army a bit more punishing.
 
A building you can make in Towns and castles to train troops up for gold or influence would be handy. Kinda like training Troops in the practice area in Warband or the XP they get everyday in Warband. As I've seen a lot of threads of people saying it takes far to long would be nice to have a option to if you wanted
 
Ehmm excuse me, but that is already a thing, powerfull notables in towns and villages will sometimes sell higher tier troops...
Yes, but the problem is that they are fairly rare. Because in order for them to sell high tier troops, they need to be sitting in the village or city for quite sometime. And considering there are a bunch of other lords taking all of these high tier troops you are mostly just getting recruits and tier 2's. Yes it is a feature and it does help but is not substantial enough.
 
Using money to get better troops either through training or outright buying them should be a thing. Unfortunately the economy is fundamentally broken so until that's fixed we can't have nice things.
 
Using money to get better troops either through training or outright buying them should be a thing. Unfortunately the economy is fundamentally broken so until that's fixed we can't have nice things.
Totally agree. The economy needs to be fixed first. I really hope they are working on that.


Many of those troops will get yanked by AI lords before you reach them. It does help but not substantial enough to keep a working army without farming XP
Also agree. I have very high relationship with most of the vlandian villages. Sometimes im lucky and can get a decent number of mid tier troops (7 for example just by visiting 5 villages.) But most of the time especially if my faction (valndia) is at war, the villages either have no recruits at all or only T1.


A building you can make in Towns and castles to train troops up for gold or influence would be handy. Kinda like training Troops in the practice area in Warband or the XP they get everyday in Warband. As I've seen a lot of threads of people saying it takes far to long would be nice to have a option to if you wanted
Yeah that would be nice. But i think if you play as a merchant for example and you don't have any fiefs you should still be able to get high level troops just by buying them. They just should be really expensive and getting enough money for them as a merchant should be hard.
 
How about troops level up faster depending on how difficult the battle is and how much higher leveled the enemies are. So i'm thinking that taking on large groups of bandits or small lords could be a viable way to level troops, if you are good enough with tactics. And if you win a battle that was not in your favor then your men will level up by a lot. It's also very realistic, in real life you don't get better by slaughtering kids, you get better by defeating people who are better then you. And being in intense and dangerous situations will toughen you up.
Would of course be a way to make leveling more fun. But the experience bonus for fighting big army's needs to be quite significant to make up for the soldiers you loose in such battles.
 
Improve your relations with villages and you get tons of tier 3+ troops. Super easily done by doing hideouts. Yes during prolonged wars, the pool of available troops will be exhausted. That is not only realistic, but an excellent way to prevent snowballing. Buy up troops during peace time and stick them in a garrison.

Also, if you take all decent tier 3-4 troop prisoners and keep them for a few days, you will pretty much be able to replace any troop you looses as you go. Have not had to recruit troops normally(outside speciality trees) for ages. And I even used this for upgrading companion armies troops too, while they were in army with me. You will especially be raking in new troops from prisoners during sieges.

I really don't see the problem. Actually it does seem a bit too easy to instantly get tier3+ troops IMO. Specially seeing as how the NPCs usually run around with 90% peasants.
 
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Improve your relations with villages and you get tons of tier 3+ troops. Super easily done by doing hideouts.

Also, if you take all decent tier 3-4 troop prisoners and keep them for a few days, you will pretty much be able to replace any troop you looses as you go. Have not had to recruit troops normally(outside speciality trees) for ages.

I really don't see the problem,
Read what i said.
"Yes, but the problem is that they are fairly rare. Because in order for them to sell high tier troops, they need to be sitting in the village or city for quite sometime. And considering there are a bunch of other lords taking all of these high tier troops you are mostly just getting recruits and tier 2's. Yes it is a feature and it does help but is not substantial enough."
You cannot reliably recruit high tier troops because other lords take them. Also with the prisoner thing. The problem is that you don't have very much control of what type of troops you want in your army. If you want to just be Vlandian and you NEED Vlandian troops for your specific tactics, then Sturgian prisoners are not going to fit in. How am i going to build an army off of Vlandian prisoners when i am part of Vlandia? Plus you can't get a large amount quickly, you need to take out a lord and wait a long time all while being slowed down by them. And you get prisoners assuming you take out a lord. Which means you already have troops! We are talking about building an army, not strengthening an army. I have 280 hours and it is very rare for me to get tier 3+ troops from towns or villages. And prisoners are nothing more then a bonus outside of the late late game but even then they don't make up the bulk of my army.
 
Improve your relations with villages and you get tons of tier 3+ troops. Super easily done by doing hideouts.
Yeah but during war when you need new troops all those get cleared out by AI Lords.


Also, if you take all decent tier 3-4 troop prisoners and keep them for a few days, you will pretty much be able to replace any troop you looses as you go
Only if you don't want a pure playthrough a lot of people like using Faction troops for the RP value. It also takes multiple days in which you may have a dozen battles where you lose troops. They also slow you down
 
Improve your relations with villages and you get tons of tier 3+ troops. Super easily done by doing hideouts.
I have very high relationship with most of the vlandian villages. Sometimes im lucky and can get a decent number of mid tier troops (7 for example just by visiting 5 villages.) But most of the time especially if my faction (valndia) is at war, the villages either have no recruits at all or only T1.


Also, if you take all decent tier 3-4 troop prisoners and keep them for a few days, you will pretty much be able to replace any troop you looses as you go.
Especially if you don't care if your army is only made of soldiers from your faction, this can work quite well i agree.


I really don't see the problem. Actually it does seem a bit too easy to instantly get tier3+ troops IMO.
Here a question. How often do you reload an older save after you lost your army in a battle? How often to you engage partys that have a big chance to defeat you? From what i can tell most people never want to deal with the setback after loosing all of their men or even just a part of them.
The reason is, releveling your soldiers isn't fun. So far i haven't seen a single player who actually enjoys that.
The problem is not that people can't deal with setbacks. Games like dark souls or warhammer vermintide proof that.
The problem is that people don't want to deal with a setback, if that forces them to do a very boring activity again for several hours.
If the problem wouldn't be to relevel your entire army but to have enough money to afford a new one, a setback would be a totally different thing.
Simply because getting enough money back can be fun. Releveling your troops isn't.
 
Read what i said.
"Yes, but the problem is that they are fairly rare. Because in order for them to sell high tier troops, they need to be sitting in the village or city for quite sometime. And considering there are a bunch of other lords taking all of these high tier troops you are mostly just getting recruits and tier 2's. Yes it is a feature and it does help but is not substantial enough."
You cannot reliably recruit high tier troops because other lords take them. Also with the prisoner thing. The problem is that you don't have very much control of what type of troops you want in your army. If you want to just be Vlandian and you NEED Vlandian troops for your specific tactics, then Sturgian prisoners are not going to fit in. How am i going to build an army off of Vlandian prisoners when i am part of Vlandia? Plus you can't get a large amount quickly, you need to take out a lord and wait a long time all while being slowed down by them. And you get prisoners assuming you take out a lord. Which means you already have troops! We are talking about building an army, not strengthening an army. I have 280 hours and it is very rare for me to get tier 3+ troops from towns or villages. And prisoners are nothing more then a bonus outside of the late late game but even then they don't make up the bulk of my army.
Yeah but during war when you need new troops all those get cleared out by AI Lords.



Only if you don't want a pure playthrough a lot of people like using Faction troops for the RP value. It also takes multiple days in which you may have a dozen battles where you lose troops. They also slow you down

During a prolonged war it is perfectly realistic that you will run out of troops if you incur heavy losses. During late WW2, the German army was mostly just young boys and crippled old men. And it is a fantastic realistic way to prevent any few factions from snowballing. But even so, I quite regularly see lots tier 3-4 troops in villages that are slightly out of the path of other nobles, or areas where massive armies weren't just created.

What I do is stock up on high tier troops during peace times and stick them in a garrison. Then as war goes on later, I can go back and exchange any unwanted recruits from prisoners with the troops I actually want, or simply just restock troops from it. Additionally you can even cheese it and just form an army with your companion parties and take their best troops, then send them away again to recruit more.

Outside of the very early game, you will also quite frequently encounter nobles with your own culture who have changed kingdom. Or encounter nobles with prisoners from your faction(that you can recruit directly).

I really really don't see this problem, and think increasing the number of strong troops already so readily available will only cause massive imbalance.
 
@rhn
An answer to this would be nice.

rhn said:


I really don't see the problem. Actually it does seem a bit too easy to instantly get tier3+ troops IMO.
Here a question. How often do you reload an older save after you lost your army in a battle? How often to you engage partys that have a big chance to defeat you? From what i can tell most people never want to deal with the setback after loosing all of their men or even just a part of them.
The reason is, releveling your soldiers isn't fun. So far i haven't seen a single player who actually enjoys that.
The problem is not that people can't deal with setbacks. Games like dark souls or warhammer vermintide proof that.
The problem is that people don't want to deal with a setback, if that forces them to do a very boring activity again for several hours.
If the problem wouldn't be to relevel your entire army but to have enough money to afford a new one, a setback would be a totally different thing.
Simply because getting enough money back can be fun. Releveling your troops isn't.


Again i don't want it easy to get high level troops.
I want to shift the problem from leveling units to being able to afford units.

Btw this is not the case anymore in the latest beta:
Specially seeing as how the NPCs usually run around with 90% peasants.
 
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Another thing that makes the experience so different from Warband is the Surgery skill.

In Warband you just needed level 5 in surgery to get a decent survival rate. E.g.: 4 from a companion + 1 from leader bonus * 4% survival instead of death per level = 20% of lethal kills become knock outs.

In Bannerlord, to get the same effect you would need Medicine level 1990. Base 0.1% + 1990 * 0.01% survival instead of death per level = 20% of lethal kills become knock outs.

But that's impossible, and even with a level 250 surgeon, you only get a 2.6% survival rate.

Just another thing to consider when discussing troop tiers. In Bannerlord, there is more emphasis on recruiting units repeatedly.
 
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