Warband's relation system worked just fine. I was never dissatisfied with it
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Countering Influence Inflation
- Thread starter Sidrath
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drallim33
Sergeant
I haven't thought this through much so maybe it's a **** idea for an influence sink:
I'm thinking of lords charging influence to the army leader (or the cohesion buffer) whenever they lose troops or donate some troops to a garrison. So it will take more influence to get them to stick around if they are taking heavy losses.
I'm thinking of lords charging influence to the army leader (or the cohesion buffer) whenever they lose troops or donate some troops to a garrison. So it will take more influence to get them to stick around if they are taking heavy losses.
It was fairly good, but its scope was smaller. For example only kings and marshals could lead armies, as there was no systemic support for the feature outside those fixed requirements. I also found it obnoxious that beyond a vassal population of a few lords, it was impossible to manage the relationship impact of fief allocation for any lords who were quarrelsome, pitiless, calculating or debauched. This meant that more than 50% of the lords in the game were off limits in a kingdom beyond kindergarten size.
And it was just perfect. Abscence of Marshals in Bannerlord is another upset for me. Also you could gather some friendly lords for a quick raid during peace time in Warband.
It was fairly good, it was well short of perfect. It was certainly better than what the influence system currently is, but it wasn't better than what the influence system should eventually be.
somethinglightthat
Regular
I think if you want to tie influence cost to the army's ability to sustain itself, rather than do it daily, just do it up front. More influence spent gives more cohesion. This largely keeps current game (and AI) mechanics and code in place, and evaluating how much influence the AI needs to spend for a given desired amount of cohesion should be tuneable if not trivial.
Balancing available influence would have to take this into account, but that's easier than a moving daily target of influence.
Balancing available influence would have to take this into account, but that's easier than a moving daily target of influence.
It more or less works this way already, when you include the ability to pump influence in to sustain cohesion. I don't know whether the AI uses the cohesion topup function or not.
The bit that is of interest to me is the lack of linkage between the influence spent by the leader and the influence gained by the member parties, which I think is a missed opportunity. Making the entire influence system zero sum would be a large undertaken and not necessarily worthwhile, but adding parts that adhere to that principle makes it easier to control inflation and make the system feel more like it matters. Unfortunately the current upfront influence cost of getting a party into an army can't be paid directly to the member party's clan, because there's nothing stopping that member turning around and leaving the army immediately with their phat paycheck of influence. They have no obligation to earn it.
Actually, this makes me think of a potential exploit in the current system. brb, doing some testing.
Edit: OK never mind. Currently when the player joins an AI army, the AI clan does not pay influence for the privilege of you joining them. So you can't drain their influence by joining and quitting repeatedly.
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somethinglightthat
Regular
I wasn't aware you could spend influence on cohesion already, I must have missed that class. I'll have to look around the interface next time I form an army. Unless you mean indirectly by disbanding and reforming, a cost not paid for companion armies.
I just think a daily influence cost is difficult to conditionally evaluate for the AI in the greater context of influence use for the clan and kingdom, and it begs to be (poorly) hard coded in its values. It kind of leads to decisions like today we form an army, but tomorrow, well not enough influence, let's disband it. That will go strange places.
I just think a daily influence cost is difficult to conditionally evaluate for the AI in the greater context of influence use for the clan and kingdom, and it begs to be (poorly) hard coded in its values. It kind of leads to decisions like today we form an army, but tomorrow, well not enough influence, let's disband it. That will go strange places.
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To find the cohesion top up button, click the 3 flags to go into the army management panel when you have an army. You'll see your current cohesion near the top and a little to the right. Next to it there is a +10 button. Click it, and you gain 10 cohesion. The interface may have been improved in later versions, but on 1.3.1 (which I'm still on) there is no tooltip or preview telling you how much influence this will cost you. The influence cost gets subtracted from you total after you hit done. If the members are all companions, then there's no cost of course.
AI decision making in relation to daily influence cost is not a complex problem.
You could black box the solution so that all existing decision making mechanisms are retained and to every related system it is as if nothing has changed. To do this, calculate the projected cost for the life of the army as if that were the up front recruitment cost used in the current system. Life of the army = how long an army currently would go before its cohesion would run out without topup. If you wanted, you could failsafe disbanding the army at that point of time. The projected cost would also be subtracted from the influence balance for the purpose of influence based decisions while the army exists, and if it disbands for some other reason before its projected lifetime, that outstanding "virtual" balance is reconciled.
That may sound complex, but as programming design problems go, it's trivial.
Also, black boxing is not the approach I would actually recommend, it just demonstrates that the concern of unintended consequences has an answer.
somethinglightthat
Regular
Thanks for the tip on cohesion, I recently finished another run and learned a lot more.
the emphasis I add there is where it gets tricky. With multiple armies and multiple policies that change influence cost pretty soon you are looking at a modest amount of conditions to evaluate for any decision not based on static values. It would require a fair amount of programming time and testing to get right in comparison to a simpler approach. Then take into account that armies sizes change for various reasons. Just picturing a list of all the values and some conditionals I think you'll be there for some time getting that right.
Like most other things programming related the old adage is don't do it, or don't do it yet.
In managing cohesion cost for a lot of armies in my recent play I did come to realize that there is an ongoing daily cost anyway, it just isn't explicit. If I form an army for 300 influence and then spend influence to keep it going for a week, at some point you can simply say it cost x influence for y days.
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