Dear Taleworlds, Is there any way you can remove the 2048 unit cap on battle size for the game?

[MostBlunted]

Since choice of battle size is placed under 'Performance' sub-category of 'Setting', I doubt those who can not notice battlesize will affect performance can actually read.

Battle size slider change from the previous patch has more than one reason.

All of the other options have quality definitions, but battle size slider didn't have those. It didn't conform to other performance options. Related to this, if a player maxed out the slider, they might not notice how this change will affect their battle performance and wonder why their performance so much worse compared to their expectations from their rig. Since they didn't have a reference point for the quality of the option. If a performance option doesn't have quality definitions, the player cannot expect what to get(performance wise) with the number they're selecting. Is 200 low? Is 300 low? Is 1000 very high or is it not? What number is the medium?

We had many instances of players reporting bad performance in battles and in their options, the battle size option was maxed out. This is mostly because previously we didn't give enough information about the quality equivalence of this option. Players didn't know what to expect with the number they're selecting.

If the game supplies an overall option, the options below the overall option have to be affected in accordance to the selection (If a player selects medium overall, they should see that medium selection, reflected in the other options). Just setting the slider value after an overall selection isn't enough since the player may want to change options after selecting an overall option. I do that as well. Most of the time, I select High overall and lower the AA to off or FXAA since I have a high res monitor. To represent this, battle size needed to be a selection dropdown.

TW doesn´t care about "sane/smart" players.

Who thought, without those options that 1000/1000 is high and 280/1000 is low?

If they would handle all those "siege AI is broken" bug reports like this...

But you have to set your priorities, and that´s a console release soon! Consoles also have EA models nowadays. More money!

And if CDPR can release a broken game (and receive GOTY critics) why shouldn´t TW be able to do the same thing? You only need like 4 options for consoles:

Xbox One / PS 4 = low = 200
Xbox One Pro / PS 4 Pro = mid = 400
Xbox Series S = high = 750
Xbox Series X / PS 5 = max = 1000

As PC players, with dozens of different setups, we don´t need the difference between 780 or 620 troops. Low/Mid/High/Max shoud be enough!

Critics will play this mess for like 3-4 hours and rate it 8/10 or 9/10 and move on to the next game.

 

[TheBerserk]

We had many instances of players reporting bad performance in battles and in their options, the battle size option was maxed out. This is mostly because previously we didn't give enough information about the quality equivalence of this option. Players didn't know what to expect with the number they're selecting.

everytime i look at this explanation post from the dev emrozdemir, I'm really starting to feel like they're kidding us

seriously, of all the requests made by players, I have the impression that they take into account the most banal or even invent them to give credibility to their approach

 

[NamingIsHard]

TW doesn´t care about "sane/smart" players.

I really don't think being capable of reading a single word is sufficient to be categorized as 'sane/smart'. On the countrary, incapability of doing that is sufficient to be categrized as 'insane/dumb'. This has been 20 years since 21th century, it's unimaginable that a person who can use computer cannot read. Minority is more likely to be this kind of players.

TW doesn´t care about "sane/smart" players.

Who thought, without those options that 1000/1000 is high and 280/1000 is low?

If they would handle all those "siege AI is broken" bug reports like this...

But you have to set your priorities, and that´s a console release soon! Consoles also have EA models nowadays. More money!

And if CDPR can release a broken game (and receive GOTY critics) why shouldn´t TW be able to do the same thing? You only need like 4 options for consoles:

Xbox One / PS 4 = low = 200
Xbox One Pro / PS 4 Pro = mid = 400
Xbox Series S = high = 750
Xbox Series X / PS 5 = max = 1000

As PC players, with dozens of different setups, we don´t need the difference between 780 or 620 troops. Low/Mid/High/Max shoud be enough!

Critics will play this mess for like 3-4 hours and rate it 8/10 or 9/10 and move on to the next game.

This does not make sense, what you are talking about is simply a Setting Panel UI design issue. TW can still do what you described on console while let PC player choose whatever they want easily

 

[MostBlunted]

This does not make sense, what you are talking about is simply a Setting Panel UI design issue. TW can still do what you described on console while let PC player choose whatever they want easily

They can but they won´t. And the command wheel? Did you ask for it?

They try to make it as simple as possible.

And it´s not an "issue", they want it to have it this way. What was wrong with the slider? I mean if you have a brain? Is there really any advantage if you have to choose between 5 options or like unlimited options? Who ever complained about this slider in this forum? Did you ever think:

"Omg, I can choose between 240 and 460 troops, I don´t know what to do? I can also choose 200 or 400 or 600 troops, that´s too much for me!" or "My pc is like 7 years old, graphics look good, my PC should be able to handle 1000 troops with my Pentium 2 CPU and Voodoo graphics card!".

 

[NamingIsHard]

They can but they won´t. And the command wheel? Did you ask for it?

They try to make it as simple as possible.

And it´s not an "issue", they want it to have it this way. What was wrong with the slider? I mean if you have a brain? Is there really any advantage if you have to choose between 5 options or like unlimited options? Who ever complained about this slider in this forum?

I'm not talking exactly about the slider, but TW are putting their work on meaningless/pointless changes. They don't even need to chagne that for PC, simply implement the '5 options' for console version, and leave that part of PC version as what it was, then distributed the program as different branchm like how we can play on older version on steam currently. Less work need to be done by developers(even simply copy and paste from console version to PC version, this is extra work), same result on console, and PC player will be happier because they have larger space to modify, all three aspects satisified.
As for 'make it as simple as possible', refer to my post about changes since pre-development diaries, 'they are treating players like monkeys.' As a common sense, if from someone's perspective everyone else is inferior/stupid/incapable, then it's more likely that this guy is the truly dumb one.(though for true genius this will reverse, but since this is a game, not science/philosophy concept, and regard feedback of forum, I don't think this is the case)
Oh I have also edited above replies to add something

 

[Midnitewolf]

it would be nice for 10yrs from now when we're all waiting for Mount and blade 3 with PCs 5x or more better than current hardware

Yeah this is exactly my point. I can run a "modded" 1500 battle sizes right now or could until I was running a Khuzait Culture Kingdom with a very Cavalry heavy roster on my end against the main Khuzait Faction which also tends to be very heavily cavalry centric themselves which I realized pushed my total entities trying to loaded well above the 2048 entity limit and caused crashed. If there wasn't a 2048 entity limit, I think I could push thing to 2000 right now and I am using a Ryzen 3800x processor. Just dropping in a Ryzen 5000 series alone would give me a 20% uplift in processing power with mean right now with just upgrading to the current gen of CPU I could probably hit 2400 entities without issue. I played Warband up to the EA release of Bannerlord so what is that like 10 years?? If I could hit 2000+ now, I should be able to easily hit 4000-5000 entities 10 years from now. Point being, the 2048 entity limitation is going to be a huge limitation down the road if it is engine related. However if it is just performance related I would like to see them unlock it so more powerful computer can take advantage of it.

1000 is the limit their engine can handle without any issues and that´s totally fine for me.

Limiting options between 1-1000, as they did with the last update, because some people don´t understand that more troops means less performance on their potatoe PCs is not okay though...

See this is the big question. Is it an engine limitation? This has not been made clear. We know it is a hard limit that can't be changed even by a mod, but it could very well just be hardcoded because they didn't officially want to support larger than a 1000 unit battle size. Also I am finding some of the maps can be a little small even for 1000 units and I have 50 units falling of a cliff on a part of a map no units should spawn on. Point is, this might not be a engine limitation but rather a performance limitation. My point is, if it is just a performance limitation, I wish that Taleworlds would unlock it at least expand so that people with very powerful computer that CAN actually run more than 2048 entities can run larger battles as long as we are OK running and "unofficial" Mod. Also I mentioned above, even if you can't run that battle size now, computers will advance, and in probably 4-5 years, even a middling spec'ed computer would be able to run 1500-2500 unit battle sizes.

 

[Midnitewolf]

I'm not talking exactly about the slider, but TW are putting their work on meaningless/pointless changes. They don't even need to chagne that for PC, simply implement the '5 options' for console version, and leave that part of PC version as what it was, then distributed the program as different branchm like how we can play on older version on steam currently. Less work need to be done by developers(even simply copy and paste from console version to PC version, this is extra work), same result on console, and PC player will be happier because they have larger space to modify, all three aspects satisified.
As for 'make it as simple as possible', refer to my post about changes since pre-development diaries, 'they are treating players like monkeys.' As a common sense, if from someone's perspective everyone else is inferior/stupid/incapable, then it's more likely that this guy is the truly dumb one.(though for true genius this will reverse, but since this is a game, not science/philosophy concept, and regard feedback of forum, I don't think this is the case)
Oh I have also edited above replies to add something

Don't get me started on consoles. They absolutely should have a separate version for consoles and NOT DUMB DOWN THE PC VERSION. I said it in another thread, I didn't spend 7 times to cost of a P/S 5 on my current gaming computer to run games that were dumbed down to run on a console. If I wanted to have severely low end specs that limited my gaming experience, I would have just bought a damn console. Please don't screw me like that, not when it can be avoided by having two separate versions. I mean its not like they have to have two completely different sets of code. 95% of it would be the same code the the only difference being how high you can set the performance settings. Please don't make me play a console level version of this game, that would be the biggest betrayal of them all.

Now as far as the Native PC version of the game, honestly I don't care what the do with the "official" settings as long as they can be change with Mods. I for one believe that the entire strength of the Mount & Blade franchise lies within its modding community. I mean just look at Warband, most of its total conversion mods are at least 10x better then the Native experience so I have 10x more faith in modders than I do Taleworlds.

 

[Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James]

You are right the overflow error is tenuous at best. It is only based on it being a power of 2. If someone has a more firm answer I'm all ears.

Based on what some of the tech artist developers have said, my theory is that it has something to do with a GPU buffer that handles animations. It basically writes animations to a kind of texture every frame which the GPU then reads, and because of the way GPUs read textures they are forced to stick to powers of two. 4096 might be just too high.

I am completely speculating here though.

 

[NamingIsHard]

Don't get me started on consoles. They absolutely should have a separate version for consoles and NOT DUMB DOWN THE PC VERSION. I said it in another thread, I didn't spend 7 times to cost of a P/S 5 on my current gaming computer to run games that were dumbed down to run on a console. If I wanted to have severely low end specs that limited my gaming experience, I would have just bought a damn console. Please don't screw me like that, not when it can be avoided by having two separate versions. I mean its not like they have to have two completely different sets of code. 95% of it would be the same code the the only difference being how high you can set the performance settings. Please don't make me play a console level version of this game, that would be the biggest betrayal of them all.

Now as far as the Native PC version of the game, honestly I don't care what the do with the "official" settings as long as they can be change with Mods. I for one believe that the entire strength of the Mount & Blade franchise lies within its modding community. I mean just look at Warband, most of its total conversion mods are at least 10x better then the Native experience so I have 10x more faith in modders than I do Taleworlds.

I do agree what you said. Now I feel more and more certain that TW are treating players like ignorant monkeys. This may not be true, but since TW give no responses regarding all these design changes except some statements like "we think this is too complex", it's hard for me to believe in some other way.

 

[helari]

Is the unit cap truly hardcoded? I thought bannerlord was largely decompileable. Is the limit possible to lift with a mod just by finding the related code?

edit: i guess it do be technically hardcoded even in that case but it shouldn't require any weird reverse engineering with the way most of brlord code is accessible

 

[Julio-Claudian]

Is the unit cap truly hardcoded? I thought bannerlord was largely decompileable. Is the limit possible to lift with a mod just by finding the related code?

edit: i guess it do be technically hardcoded even in that case but it shouldn't require any weird reverse engineering with the way most of brlord code is accessible

This lets you set it to any number up to 1600.

Bannerlord Tweaks - Update

A non-developer's update for Mipen's Bannerlord Tweaks mod which stopped working after the 1.4.3 update, and extended with tweaks I find useful. Feel free to use it and best of luck.Update

www.nexusmods.com

Any large battle involving a lot of cavalry will almost always crash though, since riderless horses hanging around on the battlefield and cavalry reinforcements spawning will push the number of entities over 2048 and immediately crash the game.

 

[Midnitewolf]

TW doesn´t care about "sane/smart" players.

Who thought, without those options that 1000/1000 is high and 280/1000 is low?

If they would handle all those "siege AI is broken" bug reports like this...

But you have to set your priorities, and that´s a console release soon! Consoles also have EA models nowadays. More money!

And if CDPR can release a broken game (and receive GOTY critics) why shouldn´t TW be able to do the same thing? You only need like 4 options for consoles:

Xbox One / PS 4 = low = 200
Xbox One Pro / PS 4 Pro = mid = 400
Xbox Series S = high = 750
Xbox Series X / PS 5 = max = 1000

As PC players, with dozens of different setups, we don´t need the difference between 780 or 620 troops. Low/Mid/High/Max shoud be enough!

Critics will play this mess for like 3-4 hours and rate it 8/10 or 9/10 and move on to the next game.

No honestly it goes deeper than this. It is not only the unit count that is an issue with consoles, it is the AI that controls those units is going to be an issue with consoles. Bannerlord is one of the most CPU intensive games I have ever seen. My 12 core Ryzen processor is running all 12 cores maxed all the time and it is probably at least 20% more power than the console CPUs. They are going to have to dumb down the AI as well to be able to run on the consoles most likely.

 

[Apocal]

No honestly it goes deeper than this. It is not only the unit count that is an issue with consoles, it is the AI that controls those units is going to be an issue with consoles. Bannerlord is one of the most CPU intensive games I have ever seen. My 12 core Ryzen processor is running all 12 cores maxed all the time and it is probably at least 20% more power than the console CPUs. They are going to have to dumb down the AI as well to be able to run on the consoles most likely.

The battle AI doesn't eat up that much CPU though.

 

[MostBlunted]

I have no issues with 1000 troops battles with my Ryzen 7 3800 XT 4,2 ghz (overclocked). I mean that´s not the worst CPU but also not the best.

 

[Midnitewolf]

The battle AI doesn't eat up that much CPU though.

OH YEAH IT DOES.

I didn't think so at first however I download a mod that greatly enhances the AI making it so units block and use shield much more often and more appropriately. It also does a much better (buy unfortunately not perfect) job of managing enemy formations which has made it so on many occassions, the AI has actually surprised and challenged me with some of the tactics it has used. It has been pretty night and day for me.

However, I went from being able to run 1500 man battles on max setting in any scene or setting in the game, smooth as butter with no hitches or frame drops to having to drop the battle size back down to 1000 and even that isn't enough to to alleviate all the stuttering and frame drops I now experience any time I have a large battle or a very complex scene. It honestly took me a while to figure out what was going on because I too believed the battle AI didn't eat up that much CPU. I even though my RTX 3080 was going bad or something but nope, soon as I removed the AI module, it was back to butter.

Honestly when you think about it a bit, it makes tons of sense. The CPU is tracking hundreds of units and all their moves and actions including collision. It is also tracking the trajectory of armors and swings of weapons, including things like speed and distance of those arrows and weapons. Let say you now just add in additional calculations for when to use shield and when not to. That is probably literally thousands of additional calculations the CPU has to process JUST to enhance shield usage.

 

[GMBarak]

I would like to join the request to enable maybe in config file? or though some mod? the option to play with more than 1000 or 2048 troops in a battle for people like me who have a super strong PC (11900K, 64Gb, RTX 3070). Please? BTW how did you make that mod work? it says on nexus that this mod doesn't work after latest patches...

 

[Julio-Claudian]

I would like to join the request to enable maybe in config file? or though some mod? the option to play with more than 1000 or 2048 troops in a battle for people like me who have a super strong PC (11900K, 64Gb, RTX 3070). Please? BTW how did you make that mod work? it says on nexus that this mod doesn't work after latest patches...

Mod unavailable

This mod is not currently available

www.nexusmods.com

BattleSize

Change the number of units on the battlefield (2 to 2040)

www.nexusmods.com

These work. You will get crashes and bugs like reinforcements not spawning though, no matter how good your PC is.

 

[GMBarak]

Thanks Julio-Claudian, greatly appreciated! I wish Taleworld will enable these in config and support it, because eventuality we will all have a much stronger PCs...

 

[Julio-Claudian]

Thanks Julio-Claudian, greatly appreciated! I wish Taleworld will enable these in config and support it, because eventuality we will all have a much stronger PCs...

Yeah it would be great. I don't think a game engine upgrade will ever happen though. I don't know if that's even possible without rebuilding the game, I hope it is.

 

[NamingIsHard]

Yeah it would be great. I don't think a game engine upgrade will ever happen though. I don't know if that's even possible without rebuilding the game, I hope it is.

Not sure why there is a 2048 cap on battlesize. If it were hard-coded like this

if battlesize>2048:
    raiseerror and exit

then it woule be very simple to remove this cap.
If this cap were resutled from algorithm and structure of engine, then the reason behind would be very interesting topic to discuss. Like it's very weird to have a specific number common for every machine being the break point