There was a major oversight when the class system was being devised and troops were being distributed to the different factions. Except for Battania, every faction is completely missing Medium Infantry. Medium Infantry are very important because they represent a well rounded, but not overkill in any category, unit that can deal with multiple situations without being completely useless in others.
What is a Medium Infantry?
In order to fit into this category you need 4 things.
Why We Need Them
Infantry in Bannerlord simply have no middle ground. Infantry classes are built to be very "min-maxed" into their roles. You have the Beserkers. They can dish out an absurd amount of damage with longer reach weapons and higher speeds, but generally have less than 10 armor and no shields, and therefore have the staying power of a baby in a barfight. You have the Heavy infantry. They are very tanky with the most diverse selection of weapons, who trade tankiness and their support weapons for (soon even more so) movement like molasses. And you have the peasants, who are dirt cheap but lack the perk options to effectively counter multiple types of opponent in the same life. Players are forced to commit all in to a playstyle before they have seen the enemy composition. Its clear that this is by design, going by quotes such as this.
The Armor Chasm
Why does armor need to be either SUPER HEAVY or super light? Every infantry in the game is either a toothpick or a sequoia. I made a chart to demonstrate what I am talking about. The Horizontal Axis is the price while vertical axis is the armor value.
Notice how nearly every infantry class has a default armor value of either below 15 or above 35. Out of 19 units, there are 3 exceptions. Apart from the Wildling, which I have talked about, there is also the Tribal Warrior and the Khuzait Spearman. Neither of these units fill the role of Medium infantry for a few reasons. For starters, they are both absurdly slow. The Khuzait Spearman has 76 speed. That is the slowest infantry unit in the game. Every Infantry unit is either faster or tied. Even the 46 armor Oathsworn has 79. The Wildling who shares both its armor value (22) and price (120) has 80. Archers have 75. The Khuzait spearman is closer in speed to archers than it is to infantry. This makes it a terrible class that people largely hate playing. The Tribal Warrior hardly fares better with 78. That is still slower than what it should be and definitely too slow for an infantry that only has 19 armor. You can get a perk that buffs the armor to 28, but in doing so you remove the ability to take a shield with any decent protection.
There is not a single unit with a default armor between 25 and 35. That is a pretty big problem for balance. An entire subclass that exists in Warband multiplayer and Bannerlord singleplayer is not present in the current perk system. There is not a single infantry class in the game who has the tools to survive a 2v1 against a cav and an archer. The current classes and perks which infantry have create situations where you are either playing Heavy Infantry and adequately equipped to deal with both, but too slow to catch the archer, or you are playing one of the light classes that are fast enough to catch the archer, but are also super squishy and not equipped to fight off the cav or block the archers arrows.
Infantry Players Are Underperforming Compared To Archers and Cavalry
Here are more charts. This data is taken from NABB. Thank you Hancock for the spreadsheet. These charts represent the K-D ratio and class of every player on the top 4 teams according to my power rankings. If you feel that these charts are an unfair representation of the tournament somehow, please join your local Ebdanian Charts Unfair Foundation (ECUF.) If your city does not have one, start one. The vertical Axis is the K-D and the horizontal axis is the class they play.
These charts tell us a few things.
TDM And Siege Need a Cheap Class That Isnt Awful or Spam.
TDM is really suffering right now. I realize that most of the people who tune into my balance posts are from the skirmish community, but TDM balance should not be completely ignored. As you know, TDM is also based on the gold system. The better you do, the more gold you get. The issue this causes is that every player starts with a very low amount of gold, and needs to do well to unlock the better classes. If you are an average player you are going to be stuck around the 120-130 gold range for quite awhile. This is a massive problem because every cheap class in the game is either a light archer, a peasant or a twohander. When 70% of the players on the server are either
The Class I'm Asking For Basically Exists In Cavalry Form.
About 25 Armor
Big Spear
Big Shield
Long OneHanded Weapon
Costs 130 Gold
Sounds like a pretty reasonable Medium Infantry right? Well it is! Except those are the stats for pretty much every Light Cavalry subclass in the game. My question is why do the Cavalry mains get a more balanced infantry class than the infantry mains? Replace the horse with 80 movement speed and the horse related perks with more weapon options and you have an excellent infantry for every faction, with basically no work involved. Im not saying outright replace the Light Cav, because that would be dumb, but I don't see a reason why you couldn't borrow its model and weapons and create an entirely new class based off it. Like I said, all you have to do is replace the horse with 80 footspeed and give it a slightly larger shield for some faction variants. If the armor and weapons are balanced on horseback they will also be balanced on foot.
In Conclusion
I know that Taleworlds wants infantry to be balanced. They are not meant to be performing as terribly as they currently are. My main point is that the current infantry classes will never do as well as the Cavalry and Archers. You can make the TwoHanders the most powerful godkillers on the planet that are beyond OP for their intended purpose, and they will still perform poorly because their intended purpose is simply too narrow and clearly defined compared to Archers and Cav. Until you have a solid "good but not great" infantry that can perform well in multiple scenarios, the class will always be weaker than the Archer and Cav who have the capacity to fill multiple roles without the glaring weaknesses of all the different inf classes.
What is a Medium Infantry?
In order to fit into this category you need 4 things.
- About 25 armor.
- Enough speed to catch kiting players on foot. Anything above 79 athletics works.
- A shield large enough to cover their feet from arrows.
- A spear.
Why We Need Them
Infantry in Bannerlord simply have no middle ground. Infantry classes are built to be very "min-maxed" into their roles. You have the Beserkers. They can dish out an absurd amount of damage with longer reach weapons and higher speeds, but generally have less than 10 armor and no shields, and therefore have the staying power of a baby in a barfight. You have the Heavy infantry. They are very tanky with the most diverse selection of weapons, who trade tankiness and their support weapons for (soon even more so) movement like molasses. And you have the peasants, who are dirt cheap but lack the perk options to effectively counter multiple types of opponent in the same life. Players are forced to commit all in to a playstyle before they have seen the enemy composition. Its clear that this is by design, going by quotes such as this.
I agree with the last sentence of this quote. The giant tank with 45 armor and a 90 damage axe should not be running around as fast as the skirmishers. The unit has a clearly defined role as a point defender and it excels at that role. It is very good at what it does and should not be stealing other classes jobs. The problem is that the classes which the heavy infantry is supposedly stealing the jobs of...dont actually exist. Infantry players who know what they are doing are forced to play Heavy Infantry because the other infantry classes are terrible at being infantry. They are either horribly squishy against archers (the TwoHanders) or horribly squshy against, well, everything. (the Peasants.) Until you give all the factions another unit that can have both a decent spear and a decent shield at the same time, every infantry main is going to continue using Heavy Infantry no matter how hard they get nerfed just because it is viewed as the only reasonable unit.Yes Heavy infantry can not catch them right away, but they don't get kited as well as long as they chase. There are 3 other infantry classes that can catch and kill archers. Heavy Inf can not be the answer to everything.
The Armor Chasm
Why does armor need to be either SUPER HEAVY or super light? Every infantry in the game is either a toothpick or a sequoia. I made a chart to demonstrate what I am talking about. The Horizontal Axis is the price while vertical axis is the armor value.
Notice how nearly every infantry class has a default armor value of either below 15 or above 35. Out of 19 units, there are 3 exceptions. Apart from the Wildling, which I have talked about, there is also the Tribal Warrior and the Khuzait Spearman. Neither of these units fill the role of Medium infantry for a few reasons. For starters, they are both absurdly slow. The Khuzait Spearman has 76 speed. That is the slowest infantry unit in the game. Every Infantry unit is either faster or tied. Even the 46 armor Oathsworn has 79. The Wildling who shares both its armor value (22) and price (120) has 80. Archers have 75. The Khuzait spearman is closer in speed to archers than it is to infantry. This makes it a terrible class that people largely hate playing. The Tribal Warrior hardly fares better with 78. That is still slower than what it should be and definitely too slow for an infantry that only has 19 armor. You can get a perk that buffs the armor to 28, but in doing so you remove the ability to take a shield with any decent protection.
There is not a single unit with a default armor between 25 and 35. That is a pretty big problem for balance. An entire subclass that exists in Warband multiplayer and Bannerlord singleplayer is not present in the current perk system. There is not a single infantry class in the game who has the tools to survive a 2v1 against a cav and an archer. The current classes and perks which infantry have create situations where you are either playing Heavy Infantry and adequately equipped to deal with both, but too slow to catch the archer, or you are playing one of the light classes that are fast enough to catch the archer, but are also super squishy and not equipped to fight off the cav or block the archers arrows.
Infantry Players Are Underperforming Compared To Archers and Cavalry
Here are more charts. This data is taken from NABB. Thank you Hancock for the spreadsheet. These charts represent the K-D ratio and class of every player on the top 4 teams according to my power rankings. If you feel that these charts are an unfair representation of the tournament somehow, please join your local Ebdanian Charts Unfair Foundation (ECUF.) If your city does not have one, start one. The vertical Axis is the K-D and the horizontal axis is the class they play.
1= Infantry, 2= Archer, 3= Cavalry.
DoF | |
Unknown | |
RCC | |
HB |
- There are simply less infantry mains than there were in Warband. Throughout the entirety of my time in the competitive scene, Infantry made up at minimum 50% of a teams composition on closed and mixed maps. (Every map in Bannerlord is closed or closed-mixed) In Bannerlord that number is down to 33% on most teams. What should be the backbone of every squad is severely depleted. You can argue about whether this is because the class isnt as good or isnt as fun, or both.
- Infantry are doing significantly worse than the other classes. The only infantry main who has been able to put up REMOTELY similar numbers to the rest of his team is MihaWk with Unknown. Every other infantry player is getting less kills and dying more often than the rest of his team. In a game where the classes are balanced we would not see numbers this disproportionately skewed. It is not that the infantry players are just worse at the game, its just the class does not have the tools to deal with the other 2 classes with the subclasses and perks currently allocated to them.
TDM And Siege Need a Cheap Class That Isnt Awful or Spam.
TDM is really suffering right now. I realize that most of the people who tune into my balance posts are from the skirmish community, but TDM balance should not be completely ignored. As you know, TDM is also based on the gold system. The better you do, the more gold you get. The issue this causes is that every player starts with a very low amount of gold, and needs to do well to unlock the better classes. If you are an average player you are going to be stuck around the 120-130 gold range for quite awhile. This is a massive problem because every cheap class in the game is either a light archer, a peasant or a twohander. When 70% of the players on the server are either
- Light Archer
- Twohander
- Literally just a guy with his pitchfork
- The Archers are demolishing the Twohanders
- The Twohanders are getting in melee range and demolishing the archers.
The Class I'm Asking For Basically Exists In Cavalry Form.
About 25 Armor
Big Spear
Big Shield
Long OneHanded Weapon
Costs 130 Gold
Sounds like a pretty reasonable Medium Infantry right? Well it is! Except those are the stats for pretty much every Light Cavalry subclass in the game. My question is why do the Cavalry mains get a more balanced infantry class than the infantry mains? Replace the horse with 80 movement speed and the horse related perks with more weapon options and you have an excellent infantry for every faction, with basically no work involved. Im not saying outright replace the Light Cav, because that would be dumb, but I don't see a reason why you couldn't borrow its model and weapons and create an entirely new class based off it. Like I said, all you have to do is replace the horse with 80 footspeed and give it a slightly larger shield for some faction variants. If the armor and weapons are balanced on horseback they will also be balanced on foot.
In Conclusion
I know that Taleworlds wants infantry to be balanced. They are not meant to be performing as terribly as they currently are. My main point is that the current infantry classes will never do as well as the Cavalry and Archers. You can make the TwoHanders the most powerful godkillers on the planet that are beyond OP for their intended purpose, and they will still perform poorly because their intended purpose is simply too narrow and clearly defined compared to Archers and Cav. Until you have a solid "good but not great" infantry that can perform well in multiple scenarios, the class will always be weaker than the Archer and Cav who have the capacity to fill multiple roles without the glaring weaknesses of all the different inf classes.