Killing Looters is a Full Time Job

[Danny5]

I concur, looters and bandits should not spawn at random and scale up with player level.

However, I could see the spawning tied to certain situations:
- Province has food shortages -> spawn looters
- Villages were looted -> spawn looters
- low Securitiy -> spawn bandits
- large army defeated -> spawn deserters
- there is a hideout in the province -> spawn parties but do not tie them to player level. Upgrade troops if parties are successful and hideout 'wealth' rises
- high prosperity -> spawn Bandits (are attracted by wealth to steal), but remove looter parties (finding work is better to losing life while forcing breadcrumbs out of traders)

Player interaction could also influence this a bit
- visit a hideout and give the bandits money and gear -> spawn units but have truce with this hideout and its parties. Train roguery skill
- have city crimelord give task 'create hideout' -> gather some equipment and men to found a new hideout in province. Result: train roguery, have truce with their bandits, get % of loot. While mission is open you have additional talk option when encountering bandit/looter parties "recruit for hideout". Merchants may not like you for this, if they get wind of it.
- with the right roguery skill you may found hideouts yourself - like a small castle to manage. You are a bandit king after all, aren't you?
- Negotiate truce with bandit parties (Bribe with money to be 'protected' instead).

I always wondered, why the hideout leaders are so generic. Why not have rogue NPCs that could be recruited after defeating them or tie the number of hideouts to number of NPCs doing roguery. Looters and Bandits should be a meaningful part of the game and not just XP-fodder that becomes annoying in the long run. Bring back the Manhunters if there are many looters/bandits in a region.

I like these +1

 

[KingEroc1st]

it is pointless and they are mostly harmless.

absolutely. even when i have the mod enabled and there are 800 men looter armies. they move so slow they can't catch anyone, and are so weak anyone fights them ends up wiping them out. the only exception is when a smaller party of looters fight a party, and then a larger looter group comes in during the fight as reinforcement, sometimes it results in the party being captured.

 

[ssssnake]

My problem with the looters is that they interfere with my villager parties who are trying to sell goods to towns.

My current solution is to fight large looter parties, but not kill them entirely. End battle before my men have run down all the routers.

This leaves a bunch of small, 5 to 10 man looter bands running around that can't harm anyone. Having these smaller parties seems to deter spawning of more looter parties.

It's not a perfect fix. So many of the suggestions made here seem like such common sense solutions that I don't know why none of them have been impoemented in the game.

 

[Ulfhedinn_]

I concur, looters and bandits should not spawn at random and scale up with player level.

However, I could see the spawning tied to certain situations:
- Province has food shortages -> spawn looters
- Villages were looted -> spawn looters
- low Securitiy -> spawn bandits
- large army defeated -> spawn deserters
- there is a hideout in the province -> spawn parties but do not tie them to player level. Upgrade troops if parties are successful and hideout 'wealth' rises
- high prosperity -> spawn Bandits (are attracted by wealth to steal), but remove looter parties (finding work is better to losing life while forcing breadcrumbs out of traders)

Player interaction could also influence this a bit
- visit a hideout and give the bandits money and gear -> spawn units but have truce with this hideout and its parties. Train roguery skill
- have city crimelord give task 'create hideout' -> gather some equipment and men to found a new hideout in province. Result: train roguery, have truce with their bandits, get % of loot. While mission is open you have additional talk option when encountering bandit/looter parties "recruit for hideout". Merchants may not like you for this, if they get wind of it.
- with the right roguery skill you may found hideouts yourself - like a small castle to manage. You are a bandit king after all, aren't you?
- Negotiate truce with bandit parties (Bribe with money to be 'protected' instead).

I always wondered, why the hideout leaders are so generic. Why not have rogue NPCs that could be recruited after defeating them or tie the number of hideouts to number of NPCs doing roguery. Looters and Bandits should be a meaningful part of the game and not just XP-fodder that becomes annoying in the long run. Bring back the Manhunters if there are many looters/bandits in a region.

+1

 

[Grank]

I have never played so far that my character dies, but what happens to the spawn rate if you die and is now playing your low level child? I'd assume the hordes of looters wouldn't just disappear.

I'll be fine if spawn size doesn't scale at all. It doesn't really make sense. Just make looters group to like 10 at most. Any bigger would be a new tier of enemies like mountain bandits, then deserters, and so on up to your usual lord parties. Players can pick their enemies depending on their current state. Should be easier to code too, so less potential for bugs and issues.

 

[Apocal]

I have never played so far that my character dies, but what happens to the spawn rate if you die and is now playing your low level child? I'd assume the hordes of looters wouldn't just disappear.

It doesn't noticeably change, but my new character is level 24 and my old was around level 37 or so.

 

[Lornloth00]

In Warband the player encounters looter less and less but instead there would be the higher tier enemies like forest bandits, tundra bandits, steppe bandits, desert bandits, mountain bandits, sea raiders and deserters in huge stacks. From what I am seeing the looter parties maybe a source of income for clans because now more than ever they chase down looters and sell them in towns.

 

[Aurex]

Does anyone know how looters spawn and grow?

In my current game, I am seeing looter bands as big as 100 looters.
Do they spawn that large, or do they grow? I'm guessing that they are spawning, because the larger bands seem to be in round number multiples of 10.

Do looter bands grow in size if not killed? I'm wondering if I don't kill that small, 7 looter band, will it metastasize into a 100 looter band?

Is there a cap to the number of looter bands that will spawn, or is it an unlimited number of looter bands on the map at any given time?

Anyone have answers to these questions?

I believe it's according to the player level and the amount of time that has passed since game start. I'm 410 days in and I'm seeing 100+ parties holding rulers hostage.

 

[CrazyElf]

Only thing you can do for now is use some mod like "improved garrisons" or "garrison do something" that have patrols so they'll help cull the bandit populations around fiefs.

Yes, improved garrisons is a godsend, but there should be a good solution in the base game as well.

How looters spawn and counters must be addressed in the base game, especially in the late game period.

 

[ldgarrett]

I believe it's according to the player level and the amount of time that has passed since game start. I'm 410 days in and I'm seeing 100+ parties holding rulers hostage.

Player's Clan Rank sets the spawn party size range (it scales very hard; you can see three figure looter parties at Clan t5, worse at 6).

The spawn rate is somewhat more opaque, and others with code access can likely be clearer about this, but AFAIK right now there are no linkages to the spawn rate besides "is the total number of bandit parties, globally, below limit?", "did the faction controlling this region (defined by settlement control of villages) go to war?" which roughly doubles the spawn chance for that region, and then "is there a looted out village in this region?" which -I think- is a one time trigger to boost bandit spawn.

The presence of a bandit hideout is another spawn enhancer, at any time.

But none of the proposed (by mexxico during discussions in previous months) actual linkages like Security of a region controlling spawn rate, and delinking party spawn size from player Clan Rank, have been implemented. Again, to my knowledge.

Hope this helps.

p.s. Do you see the horrid synergy of looter spawn rate increasing when a faction is at war? (( grin)) That's the very time that the faction pulls all their patrolling war parties off to armies and raids and defensive clouds. Economies -die- if the player's Clan Rank is above about 3 and that happens. Villagers and caravans slaughtered or cornered. If you miss having Manhunters from Warbands, you're not alone.

 

[Aurex]

Hope this helps.

p.s. Do you see the horrid synergy of looter spawn rate increasing when a faction is at war? (( grin)) That's the very time that the faction pulls all their patrolling war parties off to armies and raids and defensive clouds. Economies -die- if the player's Clan Rank is above about 3 and that happens. Villagers and caravans slaughtered or cornered. If you miss having Manhunters from Warbands, you're not alone.

Thanks, it was very insightful! That explains a lot of the looter shenanigans (shenanigangs? Heh.)
I saw Sturgia basically become inert while still holding all their initial fiefs because their parties keep getting captured by raiders. It's not like anybody can use that situation to their advantage, they're all in the same boat.

 

[Ananda_The_Destroyer]

If you make a faction and have 1 clan per fief (use the promote wanderer)mostly it does start to make a noticeable difference, I'm in khuzait land and after getting enough lords and sweeping the hideouts that had built up, it's a lot clearer then I usually is in AI rule. It might because there's more of them and they're somewhat weaker that they hang out killing bandits more. However... after going a way for forced war and coming back, there are of course a few hideouts for me to clear again, as nobody else will do it!

 

[ldgarrett]

Absolutely so, @Ananda_The_Destroyer
Single clan castles and the royal clan holding all the towns even works, if one if for using Imperial Towns as a policy.

I would even strongly advocate to the TW Devs that both the "bandit hideout nearby / captured by bounty hunters" anti-hideout quests and the "trouble with bandits" looter-thinning quests be automatic in a region as soon as the initiating condition exists **and that it be coded to lure AI war parties of the region owning faction (or at least the settlement owner clan) to come do them if they are not in an army**. Otherwise, the odds of an AI resolving those situations is far too low to prevent collapse once bandit party size and global spawn limit get big.

 

[Mikal Manfriedson]

I wonder...I ask you, fellow forumites: If you were a low-down looter..hungry, exhausted, with rags on your skin and ill-equipped with stones you picked up and tools you snatched from a burning farmhouse...where would you go to survive? Some easy pickings like a remote or war-ridden region or the region where the mightiest guy you heard of lives with his merry band of high-level retainers and standing army?

TW: 'TWO, we pick #two...or three!'

I mean...if you really think about this, the game throws the more looters at us the more experienced, better equipped and whatnot we are. But: we are talking looters here!? Malnourished and ill-equipped rabble, right? With coded self-preservation instincts of a lemming as it seems...
Relating party strength to player level is a bad choice. Especially so as it leads to making trade by caravans nigh impossible as the AI with auto-resolve just might wreck your 40-men max caravans by throwing buttloads of looters at it. Breaking economy.

 

[KingEroc1st]

With coded self-preservation instincts of a lemming as it seems...
Relating party strength to player level is a bad choice. Especially so as it leads to making trade by caravans nigh impossible as the AI with auto-resolve just might wreck your 40-men max caravans by throwing buttloads of looters at it. Breaking economy.

i mean most ai are coded into the game with less capacity than a roach. because TW cares about this game so very much.

But at least the larger groups of looters are slow AF so it's hard for them to catch caravans that typically have a speed of 5-6. however i still see my caravans cruising around at 6 speed getting caught by a looter group going at 1

 

[Ser Jon]

The whole game basically feels like wack-a-mole after twenty hours.

 

[Grank]

less capacity than a roach

Don't underestimate God.

Well, larger groups of looters might be slow, but a few parties of them can surround a villager/caravan and kill them. Still very annoying. That's why I think looters should be capped to a low size like 10. So villagers can have a chance, and they won't unrealistically raid caravans. Leave the more vicious bandit gangs for that. It might be even better if looters and bandits don't reinforce each other, so it solves that issue of fast looter party catching a caravan and letting a bigger but slower bandit party to penetrate them from behind.