Changes in Leadership perks on the 1.5.5 beta branch.

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Apocal

Grandmaster Knight
tl;dr Some are good but others are really bad.

First off, they were totally unannounced in the patch notes. Why would you do this?
  • Leadership 25 -- Boosted the XP gains of both so they actually matter, great. Good stuff.
  • Leadership 50 -- Additional 20 morale has been reduced to 4 and 8 for attacking and defending, respectively. Since morale doesn't matter, the reduction doesn't matter. But it does come with a doubled-rate of recruiting either low-tier or high-tier prisoners, including top-tiers. Overall, that's pretty sweet.
  • Leadership 75 -- Governor perks are useless for players and 20% additional security is "who cares?" but +1 loyalty per day is nice enough. One of the secondaries is mildly nice though, reduction in disorganized duration, but the other, increased morale damage, is useless.
  • Leadership 100 -- This is where it turns bad: having Tier 3 troops never retreat in battle is (mostly) useless. Troops don't start retreating until most of them are dead, so you're not gaining anything by having a few survivors stick around to get cleaved instead of turning tail. Increased renown gain on the other perk is OK but having troops start off with a free 200 XP might be solid. Of course, that doesn't really do much at higher tier, but it is nice when paired with the Leadership 25 perks. But with that said, these perks are overhauled and replaced the pair of 15% wage reduction perks that were in place previously. That wage reduction was ultimately much stronger than either of these. You could also grind up renown faster and more efficiently by smashing bandits solo but there weren't many ways of slowing down the inevitable increase in party costs.
  • Leadership 125 -- Press F to pay respects: Disciplinarian, one of the earliest working and most-beloved perks, is now gone. Instead it has apparently been replaced by (since its the perk currently active on my character after I didn't get a full respec) +5 party size per town held by your clan. Uh, OK. The other perk is mostly the same (which is to say that it sucks) except they added "Remove morale penalty for recruiting troops of your faction." I'm going to assume that's not implemented but I don't like what it is implying...
  • Leadership 150 -- A completely reworked Veteran's Respect that no longer gives a wage reduction, but is instead a pair of governor only perks: +20 garrison size (lol) and +1 daily morale when under siege. My other choice is 20% more high-tier militia as a Governor and 20% more morale gain from victories. Garrison size is mostly irrelevant and morale is completely irrelevant in 99% of the fights the player is in. Also, I can't use governor perks and none of the companions can realistically level Leadership up to 150 to unlock this. Yeah, this change is gonna be a "naw" from me.
  • Leadership 175 -- 20% less influence to call parties to your army seems good but (IME) by time you move past clan-only parties, you have enough influence that 20% extra doesn't matter and your main limiting factor in how big the armies you want to call together is how bonkers slow you will move and how much food they'll eat. It also adds 5% shared experience, which is a nice secondary. The other perks gives +10 morale (again, pointless) and +10 party size and replaces the 20% cohesion decay reduction, which seems like a fair trade.
  • Leadership 200 -- Another morale perk (brokenrecord.mp3) with archer shared experience vs. not implemented and an extra shared cavalry experience secondary. Cavalry being as mediocre as they are, you should probably pick the archer one. But either one is better than the pair of governor perks that were here before.
  • Leadership 225 -- A not implemented yet implemented 20% troop XP gain in simulated battles against (wait for it) more useless morale perks. These replaced the 20% XP gain for heroes or troops perks that are in 1.5.4. Not a good look, since most players don't bother simulating enough battles to notice a difference in XP gains there. Personally, I would take the XP gain perk, even without it being implemented because it is probably equally useful as the morale one.
  • Leadership 250 -- Now we're talking: +1 companion or +1 party. Technically, it is supposed to be 3 random focus points to three random companions when you get this perk, but randomly distributed FPs aren't nearly the boon that being able to field five total clan parties is. This easily can make up for the relative handful of troops you'd get with the previous Ultimate Leader perk (1 for every +5 skills above 250).
  • Leadership 275 -- The same perk as it has always been, made less redundant by getting rid of its weaker sibling. There can only be one.
So yeah: morale is an undercooked system not really worth your time to consider, there are no more economy perks and everyone's favorite is gone but it isn't as dire as I first thought. I haven't gone through and tested most of these, and some are explicitly labelled "NOT IMPLEMENTED", so I'm just looking at them in isolation.

How does everyone else feel?
 
Losing disciplinarian hurts I loved recruiting forest bandits and raiders now there is nothing to do but sell them. It's strange that they just got rid of that perk because recruiting bandit's has been in M&B since the original and as far as I can remember it's been in just about every mod out there. If TW thought it was overpowered turning bandits into noble troops they could've just made them turn into regular troops.

I do like the 250 level perk, but man I can't even imagine how much grinding I'd have to do to get to 250. The highest I've personally ever gotten is 175 and that is leading an army continuously for 300+ days. They really need to re-look at how inconsistent skills level up.

The biggest issues with perks in general are:
1) There are plenty of times we can only select from 2 governor perks Imho that's just bad design.
2) Half of the perks are related to captains and if you're like me your companions and family are acting as governors or party leaders it makes those perks useless.
3) Perks for instance that maximize party size are scattered all over the skill trees and are pretty much impossible to get them all.
 
+20 garrison size would be a good early leadership perk if the basic garrison size (what is it? 300? +3x 100 per additional garrison level?) wasn`t so ridiculously overpowered.
 
Yeah honestly why they keep giving us garrison size bonuses when they have also decided to keep the number of garrison troops low seems like some major miscommunication.

We don’t need garrison size bonuses. Give us food bonuses or something that would actually allow for more garrison troops and militia troops to exist considering that’s what ends up gating their growth... not garrison size
 
I do not love the Disciplinarian perk and I find it silly that you can turn bandits into nobles for some reason, but the complete loss of it is a bit much. I would have just rearranged the upgrade paths to common troops instead or something, and maybe add in special rogue nobles troops that be converted into nobles.

Never really gave a **** about leadership aside from that, and now I don't think I ever will. But this does make my own troop mod a lot more annoying now. Access to recruiting Skoldabrotva required Disciplinarian, so this is rough.
 
I feel like getting the level 50 perk for prisoners might be worth getting, but everything else is just okay, some useless though. The 250 +1 party would be okay but I don't know if it's worth raising SOC and leading armies forever.
If we could ditch the attribute system I'd feel better about them and this is true for many skill/perk lines. They're okay but not worth taking over another attribute set.

As for disciplinary I feel I barely even got the chance to use it.
In my early game I barely got leadership for it by the time that game was in day 600 with many towns and it was time to move on top new games in updated versions. After that I found out about using companions and garrisons so I never did leadership again. Since they fixed those exploits I still never had the need to raise it yet as I planned to use brother to do it, though I never actually did, don't even know 100% if it worked on a companion after exploit fixes.

Although I always enjoyed amassing Khans Guard and Fians, I soon left them in garrisons because they were too good to waste......
They were just for someday when it was really serious I would take out my 300 KG and fians and completely crush.... but it never happened, generic T5 HA and archers always were enough to man handle the AI and eventually the map was finished or a major update came.

I guess I'm disappointed in the overall "make the good stuff suck" approach TW is taking. It's not so much the individual nerfs but all together each new game just feels like my forces are stupider and less effective and the game is slightly more miserly with getting going.
 
  • Leadership 125 -- Press F to pay respects: Disciplinarian, one of the earliest working and most-beloved perks, is now gone. Instead it has apparently been replaced by (since its the perk currently active on my character after I didn't get a full respec) +5 party size per town held by your clan. Uh, OK. The other perk is mostly the same (which is to say that it sucks) except they added "Remove morale penalty for recruiting troops of your faction." I'm going to assume that's not implemented but I don't like what it is implying...
Curiously... can we still work around by having our bandit units upgraded for us by leaving them in a governed city overnight?
 
I do not work on perks but after seeing lots of people wonder why disciplinary perk is removed i asked team about it. If I get any answer I will share it. However its weekend answer can come at monday.
 
I do not work on perks but after seeing lots of people wonder why disciplinary perk is removed i asked team about it. If I get any answer I will share it. However its weekend answer can come at monday.
Good stuff. Even if we might not like it, at least knowing why will make all the difference.
 
We don’t need garrison size bonuses. Give us food bonuses or something that would actually allow for more garrison troops and militia troops to exist considering that’s what ends up gating their growth... not garrison size

Amen. I'm getting big garrisons without the financial means to pay for them.

I'll deeply miss the disciplinarian perk. I feel it was the only way to get a Fian in your army as the 3 (or is it 4?) villages that supply them are always devoid of recruits. Although I never had a problem with it myself I agree with HalfMetalJacket that it's realistically speaking a bit silly that bandits become nobles. It would be, to use a dirty word, more immersive if there was a perk that made it possible for regular troops to upgrade to noble. This would also work better with the planned morale penalty for recruiting bandits.

You could do some interesting things with the perk if it applies to common troops being able to upgrade to noble. Make it so the troops can only upgrade to noble if they have been with the army for a specific time and a specific number of battles. Or, maybe more interesting, only make it possible to split off to the noble tree at tier 3 and make the noble upgrade cost 5x the exp of the normal tier 4 upgrade. That way you have squishy troops that can become noble that need to survive a lot of combat to get there. The noble upgrade should also not benefit from any perk xp because I know there will be people putting their troops in formation 8 in a corner of the battleground maps until they can upgrade.

Overall, I'd have to agree with Apocal that the new emphasis on morale in this perk tree should have come with improvements in the morale system at the same time to be viable. I also have never needed bigger garrisons, I need ways to afford the ones we have by default and you can already build expansions for those. I don't consider a governor perk to be useless, that's for the companions. But it is odd to me that in the Leadership tree you have companion exclusive perks while in other trees you would find perks that apply differently to the player as it does to the companions (i.e. personal/captain or personal/governor).
 
I do not work on perks but after seeing lots of people wonder why disciplinary perk is removed i asked team about it. If I get any answer I will share it. However its weekend answer can come at monday.
I think I can speak for a lot of forum user when I say that all your hard work and ongoing communications are greatly appreciated. :grin:
 
Removing the Disciplinarian perk while still leaving the bandit upgrade paths in place is indicative of the slapdash way they like to make balance changes. They seem to just change things at will without thinking through all of the related issues. If they want to change how bandit recruiting works, they should work out the whole system in detail first and release it all at once. Then they can say something like "removed the disciplinarian perk and replaced it with expanded bandit troop trees" or whatever. Instead, they just change one part of a system now and you have to wait for some unspecified date in the future for the rest of the system to work. It gives the impression of a very sloppy development process and doesn't instill confidence in their ability to ever finish the game
 
It could also be they intend you to still be able to flip T4 bandits into nobles, but with a different mechanic.
That could be, but wouldn't it make more sense get that new mechanic working before removing the old mechanic? That's my point. They change everything piecemeal and we're left guessing about what the intended gameplay will be. Its the same as how they removed the One Step Ahead perk with no explanation, so we just have to guess about if its going to become a standard function with no perk needed or if its gone for good. At least they could explain their reasons for the changes. It makes it seem like they don't know what they're doing and are just randomly pulling levers.
 
I wish they would add unique skill trees for each race (not limiting options but buffing certain skills, like archery for Battanians etc) and get rid of the governor skills for the player. For the companions two type of skill trees, melee/ranged fighter and governor/trader. And unique skill trees for indivual lords which would make some of them more desirable for our future kingdom.
 
As Governor perks are rather useless for the player what about the Captain part of the perks? Does this only trigger if you are part of an army and control a group of units or does this also trigger if you are the commander of all the troops, which is usually the case if you fight alone. Could you be so kind and clarify this @mexxico? Thanks in advance.
 
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