LuciusDomitiusAurelianus
Sergeant
Hey folks, going to dip my toe in here, go easy on me - first post - but I've been lurking quite a bit.
First off I have to really take my hat off to Mexxico and forum members like Blood Gryphon and Flesson19 - I've been reading (And watching, in some cases) a lot of the work you have all done and it's fantastic. I am not a game developer, but I build data science and cybersecurity solutions with probably at least a similar codebase, and the amount of collaboration, data collection, and general work that goes into making something like Bannerlord and all of the intricacies explored here is outstanding.
I wanted to weigh in a bit on wars, I only got the game when 1.5.6 had came out so I do not have any past context but in my current campaign with SE we are either at war with 3 major factions at a time (plus hardcoded minors) or we are just not at war. I think there are a lot of things that can be done in regards to war, and many of them have been touched on here in the last 15 pages or so but I wanted to collect some thoughts and expand on them. I do not purport to be a military historian or anything - I'm just a security guy who builds ML models after all - but I did spend some time with USSOCOM in my formative days and am a big history buff for what it counts, and *think* I know what I am talking about.
Historical Context of Kingdoms/Culture Groups
I get this is a video game, and I am glad it is, I don't want to play a medieval simulator. I want to have fun and I am a huge fan of the franchise as everyone else is. That said, it would be good to get a good understand of what inspired the various cultures to maybe instill some balance. For instance, it's obvious the 3 Empires have a heavy Byzantine influence, and thus have a very well-balanced military. That said, being an "Eastern" style military, the Eastern Roman Empire employed much more cavalry and of different variations than the cataphract - you would think they would have more cav than the noble line, especially since their primary threats were in the East in the form of the Sasanians/Abasids/Umayyads/Mamluk Sultanate (Aserai, I guess?) and later the Turkic peoples tribes from the Pontic Steppe (Seljuqs/Pechenegs/Ottomans/Ghaznavids) -- so they employed various types of cavalry, multi-functional dismounted troops, anti-cavalry and specialist units.
In Bannerlord, I'd expect the various empires to reflect this - such as swapping out the crossbowmen for lighter cavalry (actual Equites) and have elite horse archers in the noble line in another branch then the Elite Cataphract. I am digging into this example primarily because that is where my knowledgebase lies - but you can look at a lot of the cultures and where they were inspired by, they'd be much more mixed or at least have their AI tactics and troops trees reflective of such. The Battanians are influenced by various Celtic/Gallic peoples - they'd actually have chariots and light cavalry instead of their elite bowmen, the Vlandians (Normans?) would have heavy cavalry but pretty poor infantry (at least if you compared them to Anglo-Saxons pre-1066/Hastings).
The point is I think some rebalance is needed to at least give the obvious culture groups more cav to counter the Khuzaits - this also means a speed nerf since cav-heavy troops (like the armies of my namesake) during the crisis of the 3rd century weren't at full gallops. I think this is addressed, and it's hard to totally nerf it, but at least leveling the playing fields would help. And while the mongols were able to sweep through places very effectively - they still had as much trouble as anyone crossing through Anatolia - and the Normans under the First Crusade kicked the crap out of the Seljuks at various engagements - so it shouldn't be so one-sided.
Logistics
You can look through antiquity and see the Romans extending their supply lines extremely far to wage war, or consolidate provinces, but that was not the rule for most of human history - definitely not the Bronze Age and after various plagues had wreaked havoc on Europe and Asia - that practice did not really continue too much. You can only fight as far as your supply line can take you, and the further it does, the more likely you are to exhaust resources which leads to decreased morale, loss of cohesion, increased chance of sickness, poor decisions, and lack of mobility. That applies to modern armies and special operations units - and to ancient armies.
Where this can be factored in is in a few ways, I am unsure how possible this is given I am unfamiliar with what metrics and datapoints are exposed in the code. Here is a more or less ordered list:
- Gold: Cannot go to war without paying people or paying for materials. There should likely be a threshold in where in financially makes sense to go to war, maybe the game can forecast out 2 years of paying double the salary of all currently enlisted troops plus the time span for food (grain, fish?) at a median price (or just use a placeholder of 10-15 per unit for double the current conscription). And if the total gold reserve of the kingdom isn't above a specific threshold they won't go to war. I know it'd be very easy to get down a rabbit hole with all of the parameters - but there needs to be some way to account for money in logistics
- Food Stores: Similar to the above point, cannot move an army if you cannot feed it, it would be great to forecast some form of loss factor when it comes to overall food. Maybe have the game calculate what would happen if half of the villages were raided (And thus didn't produce) and there is a certain threshold set depending on how negatively that would impact food prices and food of the current fiefs. The map is such that you can pretty much get anywhere decently fast and need to play both an offensive and defensive war in border zones.
- Military size (not really a pure logistics issued): I know sizes are captured, they're in the UI after all. There needs to be a weighting here where you need to both outnumber another kingdom's forces by a degree divided by how many Major Factions they are at war with. There should also be a way to account for recruitment opportunities - and some weighting to assume half of your villages will get nuked. EU4 has the Manpower pool for reinforcement - something like that would be great that is pegged to Kingdom-wide Security + Prosperity. The higher than manpower modifier is the quicker towns can replenish....this also means the AI recruitment cheat needs to go away.
- Distance: Does not make sense that Vlandia, who is also at war with Battania and Sturgia is declaring a war on SE. Not sure how distances are calculated since there is not a capital per se - but if you do not share a border you shoud have a dimished chance of going to war. I can see the various Empires at war all the time against themselves and against the Khuzaits - but not so much anyone else. Another important note: the map needs a serious rework to spread the border zones or at least funnel them through terrain features that will make castles much more important. Pretty much the perfect thing would be similar to how Dark Age of Camelot did it - where RvR zones got forced into waypoints and you pretty much ALWAYS had to siege it down.
Diplomatic Enhancements
Outside of the modern era where we fight a lot of conflict via econmic proxies (See: China), cyberwarfare and now the "5th Theater" (PsyOps/disinformation), most warmongering was very formal. Or at least in the attacker's eyes it was in the case of the Mongols - then again I guess you can stay many Turkic and Pontic Steppe peoples were less concerned about formal wars as they were in pillaging. I still think Bannerlord can make use of that. I won't belabor the points as they have been made before, most are stolen concepts from EU4 anyway.
- Casus Belli: Some penalty / AE mechanic is needed if you just declare war on anyone (especially if you yeet a random lord), as well as original ownership. A kingdom would be much more motivated to take back territory or at least take territory on their border versus marching halfway across the world to take someone's butter.
- Enforced peace periods: You can break these with a massive penalty (pretty much you lose 30 relationship with like everyone and kingdoms REALLY want to yeet you) - so hopefully that'll dissuade the AI from breaking them. Can make it 2 x War Length, that will at least get kingdoms to recover and plays into the Gold/Food/Distance/Troop Count mechanics.
- Alliances: Maybe this requires a heavy amount of relationship, influence loss, or gold loss (or all of the above) - or some important folks being married - but I don't see why I cannot enter into various alliances with other kingdoms. This can be a NAP, military alliances when at war, trade treaties, or otherwise
- Subterfuge: It would be great to fund rebels or sow discontent. You can sort of do this with a high-enough Charm (and bank account, annoyingly enough). What would be great is the ability (via quests or otherwise) to incite rebellions, assassinate clan leaders, or cause general economic mayhem. A cool extension of minor factions and Rebellion clans could be to enlist them to do the dirty work on your behalf.
- Bribes: Think of it as preemptive tribute: I'd rather just pay someone like the Khuzaits or idiots like the Sturgians to NOT declare war on me while I consolidate territory. The Eastern Roman Empire did this with Atilla, and the Western Roman Empire did this a buttload with the various Germanic tribes. Of course they didn't always listen
and neither should you. That would be fun as you can be collecting passive kingdom-wide income and use the money to fund asymmetric warfare operations in their kingdom via minor factions
Other thoughts
- Consolidation of fiefs should be a primary goal post-war, and thus have a weighting that is more likely to make a kingdom Bribes or fund guerilla warfare/subterfuge depending on how aggressive they are. I can see it both ways: I want to keep fighting a war without using my troops or I am depleted and rather funnel the tribute from my current war to someone likely to attack me
- A way to expose these various mechanics and weights to a player. Could be a good use of the Charm, Leadership, or Tactics tree to be able to more clearly predict the chance of someone declaring war. This increases with Influence + Quests + Reputation. I am thinking something similar to Scout Ratings in EA's NHL where you can predict a band of stats with a certain degree (+/- %) of accuracy
- Reworking tribute: why do I need to pay 3800 to the Aserai when I own all but one city and killed 80% of their ground armies? That's silly
- I really, really want to fight asymmetrically. Maybe because I did that in real life, but nothing would be cooler than being able to takeover the map via proxy wars and guerilla warfare. Of course, the counter to this is if your guerilla warfare clans get captured in battle they can snitch if they have low reputation / you have bad Rougery and then the kingdom will just come and try to kill you
- Economic toil needs to be more important in warfare. This can come with tripling troop wages during war, doubling it while campaigning out of your home territory, or increasing it the longer a war goes on. This will help prevent wars from happening or keep them from lasting too long. Of course there need to be some variance in there that lets kingdoms be reckless
- Give me something cool to do with castles - like an upgrade that makes the castle engage with an army / party that gets too close. Some passive attrition would be really nice - that's what castles were for anyway - small towns would crop around them, and lords could send parties to ravage a frontier.
All for now. Hope some of the above is not total garbage!
First off I have to really take my hat off to Mexxico and forum members like Blood Gryphon and Flesson19 - I've been reading (And watching, in some cases) a lot of the work you have all done and it's fantastic. I am not a game developer, but I build data science and cybersecurity solutions with probably at least a similar codebase, and the amount of collaboration, data collection, and general work that goes into making something like Bannerlord and all of the intricacies explored here is outstanding.
I wanted to weigh in a bit on wars, I only got the game when 1.5.6 had came out so I do not have any past context but in my current campaign with SE we are either at war with 3 major factions at a time (plus hardcoded minors) or we are just not at war. I think there are a lot of things that can be done in regards to war, and many of them have been touched on here in the last 15 pages or so but I wanted to collect some thoughts and expand on them. I do not purport to be a military historian or anything - I'm just a security guy who builds ML models after all - but I did spend some time with USSOCOM in my formative days and am a big history buff for what it counts, and *think* I know what I am talking about.
Historical Context of Kingdoms/Culture Groups
I get this is a video game, and I am glad it is, I don't want to play a medieval simulator. I want to have fun and I am a huge fan of the franchise as everyone else is. That said, it would be good to get a good understand of what inspired the various cultures to maybe instill some balance. For instance, it's obvious the 3 Empires have a heavy Byzantine influence, and thus have a very well-balanced military. That said, being an "Eastern" style military, the Eastern Roman Empire employed much more cavalry and of different variations than the cataphract - you would think they would have more cav than the noble line, especially since their primary threats were in the East in the form of the Sasanians/Abasids/Umayyads/Mamluk Sultanate (Aserai, I guess?) and later the Turkic peoples tribes from the Pontic Steppe (Seljuqs/Pechenegs/Ottomans/Ghaznavids) -- so they employed various types of cavalry, multi-functional dismounted troops, anti-cavalry and specialist units.
In Bannerlord, I'd expect the various empires to reflect this - such as swapping out the crossbowmen for lighter cavalry (actual Equites) and have elite horse archers in the noble line in another branch then the Elite Cataphract. I am digging into this example primarily because that is where my knowledgebase lies - but you can look at a lot of the cultures and where they were inspired by, they'd be much more mixed or at least have their AI tactics and troops trees reflective of such. The Battanians are influenced by various Celtic/Gallic peoples - they'd actually have chariots and light cavalry instead of their elite bowmen, the Vlandians (Normans?) would have heavy cavalry but pretty poor infantry (at least if you compared them to Anglo-Saxons pre-1066/Hastings).
The point is I think some rebalance is needed to at least give the obvious culture groups more cav to counter the Khuzaits - this also means a speed nerf since cav-heavy troops (like the armies of my namesake) during the crisis of the 3rd century weren't at full gallops. I think this is addressed, and it's hard to totally nerf it, but at least leveling the playing fields would help. And while the mongols were able to sweep through places very effectively - they still had as much trouble as anyone crossing through Anatolia - and the Normans under the First Crusade kicked the crap out of the Seljuks at various engagements - so it shouldn't be so one-sided.
Logistics
You can look through antiquity and see the Romans extending their supply lines extremely far to wage war, or consolidate provinces, but that was not the rule for most of human history - definitely not the Bronze Age and after various plagues had wreaked havoc on Europe and Asia - that practice did not really continue too much. You can only fight as far as your supply line can take you, and the further it does, the more likely you are to exhaust resources which leads to decreased morale, loss of cohesion, increased chance of sickness, poor decisions, and lack of mobility. That applies to modern armies and special operations units - and to ancient armies.
Where this can be factored in is in a few ways, I am unsure how possible this is given I am unfamiliar with what metrics and datapoints are exposed in the code. Here is a more or less ordered list:
- Gold: Cannot go to war without paying people or paying for materials. There should likely be a threshold in where in financially makes sense to go to war, maybe the game can forecast out 2 years of paying double the salary of all currently enlisted troops plus the time span for food (grain, fish?) at a median price (or just use a placeholder of 10-15 per unit for double the current conscription). And if the total gold reserve of the kingdom isn't above a specific threshold they won't go to war. I know it'd be very easy to get down a rabbit hole with all of the parameters - but there needs to be some way to account for money in logistics
- Food Stores: Similar to the above point, cannot move an army if you cannot feed it, it would be great to forecast some form of loss factor when it comes to overall food. Maybe have the game calculate what would happen if half of the villages were raided (And thus didn't produce) and there is a certain threshold set depending on how negatively that would impact food prices and food of the current fiefs. The map is such that you can pretty much get anywhere decently fast and need to play both an offensive and defensive war in border zones.
- Military size (not really a pure logistics issued): I know sizes are captured, they're in the UI after all. There needs to be a weighting here where you need to both outnumber another kingdom's forces by a degree divided by how many Major Factions they are at war with. There should also be a way to account for recruitment opportunities - and some weighting to assume half of your villages will get nuked. EU4 has the Manpower pool for reinforcement - something like that would be great that is pegged to Kingdom-wide Security + Prosperity. The higher than manpower modifier is the quicker towns can replenish....this also means the AI recruitment cheat needs to go away.
- Distance: Does not make sense that Vlandia, who is also at war with Battania and Sturgia is declaring a war on SE. Not sure how distances are calculated since there is not a capital per se - but if you do not share a border you shoud have a dimished chance of going to war. I can see the various Empires at war all the time against themselves and against the Khuzaits - but not so much anyone else. Another important note: the map needs a serious rework to spread the border zones or at least funnel them through terrain features that will make castles much more important. Pretty much the perfect thing would be similar to how Dark Age of Camelot did it - where RvR zones got forced into waypoints and you pretty much ALWAYS had to siege it down.
Diplomatic Enhancements
Outside of the modern era where we fight a lot of conflict via econmic proxies (See: China), cyberwarfare and now the "5th Theater" (PsyOps/disinformation), most warmongering was very formal. Or at least in the attacker's eyes it was in the case of the Mongols - then again I guess you can stay many Turkic and Pontic Steppe peoples were less concerned about formal wars as they were in pillaging. I still think Bannerlord can make use of that. I won't belabor the points as they have been made before, most are stolen concepts from EU4 anyway.
- Casus Belli: Some penalty / AE mechanic is needed if you just declare war on anyone (especially if you yeet a random lord), as well as original ownership. A kingdom would be much more motivated to take back territory or at least take territory on their border versus marching halfway across the world to take someone's butter.
- Enforced peace periods: You can break these with a massive penalty (pretty much you lose 30 relationship with like everyone and kingdoms REALLY want to yeet you) - so hopefully that'll dissuade the AI from breaking them. Can make it 2 x War Length, that will at least get kingdoms to recover and plays into the Gold/Food/Distance/Troop Count mechanics.
- Alliances: Maybe this requires a heavy amount of relationship, influence loss, or gold loss (or all of the above) - or some important folks being married - but I don't see why I cannot enter into various alliances with other kingdoms. This can be a NAP, military alliances when at war, trade treaties, or otherwise
- Subterfuge: It would be great to fund rebels or sow discontent. You can sort of do this with a high-enough Charm (and bank account, annoyingly enough). What would be great is the ability (via quests or otherwise) to incite rebellions, assassinate clan leaders, or cause general economic mayhem. A cool extension of minor factions and Rebellion clans could be to enlist them to do the dirty work on your behalf.
- Bribes: Think of it as preemptive tribute: I'd rather just pay someone like the Khuzaits or idiots like the Sturgians to NOT declare war on me while I consolidate territory. The Eastern Roman Empire did this with Atilla, and the Western Roman Empire did this a buttload with the various Germanic tribes. Of course they didn't always listen
and neither should you. That would be fun as you can be collecting passive kingdom-wide income and use the money to fund asymmetric warfare operations in their kingdom via minor factionsOther thoughts
- Consolidation of fiefs should be a primary goal post-war, and thus have a weighting that is more likely to make a kingdom Bribes or fund guerilla warfare/subterfuge depending on how aggressive they are. I can see it both ways: I want to keep fighting a war without using my troops or I am depleted and rather funnel the tribute from my current war to someone likely to attack me
- A way to expose these various mechanics and weights to a player. Could be a good use of the Charm, Leadership, or Tactics tree to be able to more clearly predict the chance of someone declaring war. This increases with Influence + Quests + Reputation. I am thinking something similar to Scout Ratings in EA's NHL where you can predict a band of stats with a certain degree (+/- %) of accuracy
- Reworking tribute: why do I need to pay 3800 to the Aserai when I own all but one city and killed 80% of their ground armies? That's silly
- I really, really want to fight asymmetrically. Maybe because I did that in real life, but nothing would be cooler than being able to takeover the map via proxy wars and guerilla warfare. Of course, the counter to this is if your guerilla warfare clans get captured in battle they can snitch if they have low reputation / you have bad Rougery and then the kingdom will just come and try to kill you
- Economic toil needs to be more important in warfare. This can come with tripling troop wages during war, doubling it while campaigning out of your home territory, or increasing it the longer a war goes on. This will help prevent wars from happening or keep them from lasting too long. Of course there need to be some variance in there that lets kingdoms be reckless
- Give me something cool to do with castles - like an upgrade that makes the castle engage with an army / party that gets too close. Some passive attrition would be really nice - that's what castles were for anyway - small towns would crop around them, and lords could send parties to ravage a frontier.
All for now. Hope some of the above is not total garbage!
