Bannerlord Armor System as a bottleneck for tactical gameplay

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Confusing because there was nothing given to tell you whether those numbers referred to supply or demand. Why did you cut out that part of my post when it answers what you just said?
Because it doesn't matter.
This isn't just hitting someone, this is getting the speed bonus too. And you don't just ride your horse at them, you have to time your swing right and do the direction properly (while steering the horse in circles around crowds of enemies and not bumping into anything), otherwise you get -20% damage instead of +128%, or you veer into a rock and get mobbed. It's not the hardest thing in the world but it does take some practice and add to the effort required.
Ride towards. Hit them. You get a speed bonus. It is that simple.
So are you going to reply to the part about the cost of the dyeworks, or are you just going to cherrypick the weakest-looking parts of my post from the context that makes them solid arguments (again)?
I don't think it was ever under question how much a dyeworks costs. Uh, yeah, it costs 10,000 to buy one. If you want to make the point that the average player couldn't manage that, sure, I agree. But then again the average player couldn't even get a fief, so we either accept this game needs to be made a lot more simple or ignore average players and focus instead on super-fans with 100+ hours.
 
The thing is, players don't have any problems with AI archers. It's player archers that are problem for the AI. Which shows that it's not a problem of the archers or the armor. It's problem of the AI.
It is not AI problem.

Becosue for me as a player Cavalry army is a joke
Infantry army is a joke
But archer heavy army is actual threat.
 
Try shieldwall.
Frst. how can you read "actual threat." as "omg i cant deal with them, help me pls"
So i didint ask and i dont need your stupid advise.

Second
Shield walls are garbage
1) archers can just kite shield wall forever
2) you will get surrounded by enemy reinforcments after killing 1st wave
3) your reinforcments will spawns miles away
4) shield wall is awful in melee

So I found the best way to deal with archer heavy armies - just more archers and few shieldmen as arrowsponges
 
Shield walls are garbage
1) archers can just kite shield wall forever

You would need to teach AI to kite first.

2) you will get surrounded by enemy reinforcments after killing 1st wave

You will be surrounded by enemy reinforcements after killing anything. That's how reinforcements work.

3) your reinforcments will spawns miles away

And that makes shieldwall garbage how? What does it even have to do with shieldwall, can you explain?

4) they are awful in melee

Then disband them once in melee.

So I found the best way to deal with archer heavy armies - just more archers

Try shieldwall.
 
Because it doesn't matter.
As in this argument doesn't matter yeah. But in the context of this argument- whether it's easy to learn how to exploit the economy without foreknowledge- it matters. But you desperately want to avoid admitting you're wrong for some reason, and you're out of responses other than admitting being wrong, and that's why you say it doesn't matter.
Ride towards. Hit them. You get a speed bonus. It is that simple.
If you do not time your swing right, or get the direction wrong while moving your mouse to change your vision while circling your horse, or ride your horse into an obstacle, you do not get the speed bonus. So it's not as easy as you make it sound, and does require a little practice.
Uh, yeah, it costs 10,000 to buy one. If you want to make the point that the average player couldn't manage that, sure, I agree. But then again the average player couldn't even get a fief, so we either accept this game needs to be made a lot more simple or ignore average players and focus instead on super-fans with 100+ hours.
Back up for a second. Nowhere did I suggest the game should be simplified (Why would I be suggesting any change to Warband at all lmao). This was solely a discussion about whether something is easy to do.

The key word here is easy. As in, buying a cheap crossbow and firing it is easy. Learning how the game's poorly-explained trade mechanics work, then interrogating multiple guild masters and comparing demand for all good types to discover that a dyeworks is the most exploitable type of enterprise, then going around the game world grinding up 10,000-20,000 denars for a couple dyeworks, then waiting for them to make enough profit so you can buy your sword, then fighting a group of mid-tier enemies and moving your horse around them while avoiding obstacles and timing and directing your swing correctly isn't the hardest sequence of events ever but it isn't easy to achieve.
 
Blunt trauma is nothing more then energy distributed over area. So again, it does not matter what weight weapon have, it only matters what energy it carries. Smaller mass object with higher velocity will do just as much blunt damage as larger mass object traveling at slower velocity.

And then it's down to how well will armor distribute that energy. Plate will do it very well, distributing energy over large area, unless it cracks or deforms catastrophically. On the other hand been hit by a arrow fired from a war bow wearing just chainmail will break ribs, even if it will not penetrate. Chain mail is bad at distributing energy over larger area and most of the energy will get transferred on point.

Then of course one can wear padding in form of say gambeson under chain mail, so that will help.

But in principle, spear is no more or les effective in delivering blunt trauma then an arrow. It's just an object traveling at speed and impacting another object. No difference between the two.

Of course not all bows and arrows are the same and neither are all spears and hands that trust them. I am not arguing about all weapons in the game to have the same damage, I am arguing that damage calculation should be the same.



Armor is angled in all directions. Spear trust can get deflected as easily as arrow can if it does not hit square. Than again, chainmail is not going to deflect as well as plate can.

Here you can see how circa Hundred Years War plate armor deflects/stops arrows that are been shoot from a powerful war bow in a strait line:


There is definitely something wrong with the calculations currently though... I'm guessing the mass of the arrow and spear isn't taken into account properly. Spear would have far more mass behind a thrust than an arrow would have velocity, even without adding any body weight into it, yet spears do like half the damage.

I'm no physicist or historian, yet I calculated some rough estimates of kinetic energy for each and the spear has a little more even without adding body weight (which massively increases it) (~117J for a 50g arrow at ~68m/s, ~162J for a 3kg spear @ 10.4m/s).
 
When you talk to the guild master he dumps an entire Excel spreadsheet's worth of confusing figures on you. The values he gives you for dye and other things don't even explain what they're referring to (are the numbers demand to be filled, or stocks)? So basically, you have to figure out the game's trade system and workshop system before you can even think about exploiting the profitability of dyeworks.
But in the context of this argument- whether it's easy to learn how to exploit the economy without foreknowledge- it matters. But you desperately want to avoid admitting you're wrong for some reason, and you're out of responses other than admitting being wrong, and that's why you say it doesn't matter.
Alright then, allow me to demonstrate how easy this is to understand and why most players don't have trouble with it:
how-is-this-confusing.png

The only number a player needed to care about was the last one, which was clearly stated to be expected profit.
 
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There is definitely something wrong with the calculations currently though... I'm guessing the mass of the arrow and spear isn't taken into account properly. Spear would have far more mass behind a thrust than an arrow would have velocity, even without adding any body weight into it, yet spears do like half the damage.

I'm no physicist or historian, yet I calculated some rough estimates of kinetic energy for each and the spear has a little more even without adding body weight (which massively increases it) (~117J for a 50g arrow at ~68m/s, ~162J for a 3kg spear @ 10.4m/s).

I don't think that game calculations go as far as calculating energy. Damage of the weapons is probably set arbitrarily based on dev's "feeling" and intended game balance rater then been based on some realistic calculation. Damage model is just too abstract for that.

Then again, I am not developer so that's just my guess.

No if i just camp with my own pile of archers on my spawn.

tey to read this again few times

So keep sitting there and stop complaining.
 
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Clearly our friend Winter Spacie has never tried attacking Arboreal mercenary companies, they are a paaaain... because they are mostly archers and sit ducks. Cav, which I kind of expected to be the best option doesn’t work against them: they either get sniped early on or charge, kill 3-4 dudes and then get shot/dismounted... repeat until all cav is dead. And infantry... I don’t understand how shields can be so op (block a large zone, basically never break) yet the AI seems completely inept at using them to protect themselves. :facepalm:
 
There is definitely something wrong with the calculations currently though... I'm guessing the mass of the arrow and spear isn't taken into account properly. Spear would have far more mass behind a thrust than an arrow would have velocity, even without adding any body weight into it, yet spears do like half the damage.

Btw.: I do agree with you that spears feels underpowered. Save some high tier ones that have decent damage. I think their damage was set so low to not make polearms overpowered while mounted (speed bonus and stuff). Unfortunately that makes them underpowered in foot combat, along with swing/trust speed mechanic that does not really represent spear trusts well (with max damage only at the end of the trust and hard to perform).
 
Alright then, allow me to demonstrate how easy this is to understand and why most players don't have trouble with it:
how-is-this-confusing.png

The only number a player needed to care about was the last one, which was clearly stated to be expected profit.
I was talking about the "how is the trade around here" dialogue option, not the purchasing one; and I'll be honest, I'd forgotten the expected profit was a thing. So I will admit that is a flaw in my argument (something you seem entirely incapable of ever doing), but it doesn't invalidate the overall argument either.

The player is specifically told they can't trust that number (also, guild masters I visited tend to suggest 500) and you still need to grind up 10,000 denars and then spend 20 in-game weeks waiting (if you're spending no money on weapons or armor or horses or food or party wages) to even make back your investment so you can have enough to invest in another dyeworks, which means it is not easy to get a masterwork two-handed sword right off the bat solely by building dyeworks. Can you agree with that, or are you just going to reply to a single sentence of the post and spend another 10 posts avoiding replying to the rest?
 
The player is specifically told they can't trust that number (also, guild masters I visited tend to suggest 500) and you still need to grind up 10,000 denars and then spend 20 in-game weeks waiting (if you're spending no money on weapons or armor or horses or food or party wages) to even make back your investment so you can have enough to invest in another dyeworks, which means it is not easy to get a masterwork two-handed sword right off the bat solely by building dyeworks. Can you agree with that, or are you just going to reply to a single sentence of the post and spend another 10 posts avoiding replying to the rest?
You're right.

But I never said it literally required a dyeworks, only that was the rough level of knowledge a player should have to successfully get a one-shot weapon. I deliberately picked the most direct in-game explanation thinking that everyone who played Warband knew and understood but clearly that was wrong.

And this entire sidebar began because you think my preferences on damage somehow reflect Bannerlord's design, when they don't. If there were no one-shot capable weapons, I still wouldn't change my opinion on relative damage, I'd just mentally file it away that Bannerlord has terrible damage numbers. I try not to talk about how I see and play games (because, again, it doesn't matter for purposes of balancing them) but I'll make an exception since you seem unclear: I prefer high frontloaded damage in single shots because it allows for defeating an opponent without being subject to his following attacks. That means winning duels without damage, which is important when you're fighting on a fixed HP pool against enemies with a much, much larger HP pool. It isn't a preference that matters depending on game design or balancing because the fundamental reasoning is consistent across games. So when I say that peasant with a scythe isn't doing decent damage in my eyes unless he's one-shotting the cataphract, that has nothing to do with the unit tiers or armor viability and everything to do with the way I play games, in general.
 
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Clearly our friend Winter Spacie has never tried attacking Arboreal mercenary companies, they are a paaaain... because they are mostly archers and sit ducks. Cav, which I kind of expected to be the best option doesn’t work against them: they either get sniped early on or charge, kill 3-4 dudes and then get shot/dismounted... repeat until all cav is dead. And infantry... I don’t understand how shields can be so op (block a large zone, basically never break) yet the AI seems completely inept at using them to protect themselves. :facepalm:

Was this directed at me? Sorry, forgot which April girl I was.

If yes then were mercenary clans rebuffed after the infamous debuff? I was on and off Warband recently so I did not play last patches. Last time I played Arboreals were rather pathetic, along with most other mercenary clans and I felt like forest bandits are more dangerous.

As I said before, the easiest and most trivial way to counter AI archers is shieldwall. Just order your infantry in to the shieldwall, make it move towards the archers and then charge them once melee starts. Ironically enough, closer to the archers you are, more effective shieldwall is, because AI always targets torso, so more accurate their fire, less of a chance that stray arrow will hit unshielded parts of the body. There is short stagger when arrow hits and it seems, that if another follows right at that moment, it can pass. But for that you need to have multitude of archers shooting at the same target at the same time.

Cavalry can also be effective but the trick is to split your cavalry in to more groups (2 should generally be enough) and time waves so that one wave attacks as the other one disengages. Try to send them from slightly different angles so that they don't bump in to one another. Point is to have archers always engaged and thus not allowing them time to shoot in to the backs of disengaging riders that are reforming for another charge

Combination of melee cavalry and skirmishing one also works well as skirmishers will circle around archers and confuse their aim, again preventing then shooting at the melee cav effectively.

And don't forget that you can shieldwall cavalry as well. Shieldwall them and then order charge, they will keep their shields up thus reducing casualties during their head on runs.

Of course the most effective way is to use combined force. Make your infantry in a shieldwall attack them frontally, then hit them with cavalry from the flank or rear.
 
You're right.

But I never said it literally required a dyeworks, only that was the rough level of knowledge a player should have to successfully get a one-shot weapon. I deliberately picked the most direct in-game explanation thinking that everyone who played Warband knew and understood but clearly that was wrong.

And this entire sidebar began because you think my preferences on damage somehow reflect Bannerlord's design, when they don't. If there were no one-shot capable weapons, I still wouldn't change my opinion on relative damage, I'd just mentally file it away that Bannerlord has terrible damage numbers. I try not to talk about how I see and play games (because, again, it doesn't matter for purposes of balancing them) but I'll make an exception since you seem unclear: I prefer high frontloaded damage in single shots because it allows for defeating an opponent without being subject to his following attacks. That means winning duels without damage, which is important when you're fighting on a fixed HP pool against enemies with a much, much larger HP pool. It isn't a preference that matters depending on game design or balancing because the fundamental reasoning is consistent across games. So when I say that peasant with a scythe isn't doing decent damage in my eyes unless he's one-shotting the cataphract, that has nothing to do with the unit tiers or armor viability and everything to do with the way I play games, in general.
Sounds agreeable to me.
 
I don't think that game calculations go as far as calculating energy. Damage of the weapons is probably set arbitrarily based on dev's "feeling" and intended game balance rater then been based on some realistic calculation. Damage model is just too abstract for that.

Then again, I am not developer so that's just my guess.



So keep sitting there and stop complaining.
Yes. There is actually pretty good KE calculation in the code (basic and special magnitude) however it gets then devided by like 8 or so and then it is multiplied by damage factor on crafting pieces (mostly blades). This way you have some sort of semi-relativistic scaling while having also control over whats hapenning in the game. In RBM we went full kinetic energy route (though we often employed the same trick with damage multiplier to get values we wanted, in our case we wanted real life KE values most of the time).
 
@hruza
how about this?

t5 died while dueling the second recruit. if we consider the pilum thrown at the start a kill, t5 can kill 2 recruits before getting killed.

i used enhanced battle test for this.

i did the test 10 times.
the average is 2.5. the numbers are without the pilum kill. with it, the average would be 3.5. it's too low.
test number...... .........number of t5 unit kills
t10
t21
t34
t42
t54
t63
t74
t82
t90
t105
 
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Was this directed at me? Sorry, forgot which April girl I was.

If yes then were mercenary clans rebuffed after the infamous debuff? I was on and off Warband recently so I did not play last patches. Last time I played Arboreals were rather pathetic, along with most other mercenary clans and I felt like forest bandits are more dangerous.

As I said before, the easiest and most trivial way to counter AI archers is shieldwall. Just order your infantry in to the shieldwall, make it move towards the archers and then charge them once melee starts. Ironically enough, closer to the archers you are, more effective shieldwall is, because AI always targets torso, so more accurate their fire, less of a chance that stray arrow will hit unshielded parts of the body. There is short stagger when arrow hits and it seems, that if another follows right at that moment, it can pass. But for that you need to have multitude of archers shooting at the same target at the same time.

Cavalry can also be effective but the trick is to split your cavalry in to more groups (2 should generally be enough) and time waves so that one wave attacks as the other one disengages. Try to send them from slightly different angles so that they don't bump in to one another. Point is to have archers always engaged and thus not allowing them time to shoot in to the backs of disengaging riders that are reforming for another charge

Combination of melee cavalry and skirmishing one also works well as skirmishers will circle around archers and confuse their aim, again preventing then shooting at the melee cav effectively.

And don't forget that you can shieldwall cavalry as well. Shieldwall them and then order charge, they will keep their shields up thus reducing casualties during their head on runs.

Of course the most effective way is to use combined force. Make your infantry in a shieldwall attack them frontally, then hit them with cavalry from the flank or rear.

Yes it was you, I'm sad the April fools joke didn't last longer, I was quite fond of it :grin:

Mercenaries have indeed been nerfed, and I do use all the tactics you mentionned, but somehow they still kill a lot of my armoured men really quickly (which is what bothers me, lower tiers dying to arrowfire doesn't bother as much since it makes sense). They better work on the AI as well, because allied armies just walk into ennemy fire, form shield wall when they are relatively close and die...

But about the combined force, what if I want to play only infantry? Archers then become an absolute pain that cannot really be dealt with at all... which is not good, I should be able to field an only infantry army. That was possible in Warband: it was hard, but not as hard as in Bannerlord.

Anyway, I doubt this will be adressed by Taleworlds (I have grown very much pessimistic those last 6-8 months), this was mostly a response to your post. Take care.
 
how about this?
...

Interesting test, thanks for sharing. Can you may be do that with recruits with swords or axes? Result is indeed lower then what I would expect but recruits you have used use blunt weapons which almost ignore armor. I would like to see how unit with cut damage would do. If you have time.
 
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