Damage in this game is Ridiculous

[Gerrodot]

Repeating again, more slowly this time, "realism" in a game is selective. Games are not real life, nor can it ever hope to be no matter how well-simulated it is.

Obviously you think maximal realism is just the best for everything, but then why stop at armor and weapons?

-- Let's implement battle pacing to the real life standards of at least 2 hours real-time, to at maximum a whole 24 hours.

-- How about recruiting and training? Does manpower just pop up at regular intervals in real life? Why not implement realistic population limits and have a country which loses major battles suffer its effects to the military and the economy for generations?

-- Do people instantly go from a novice, to a top-tier elite soldier just because they win a few battles within a week? Have all the soldiers stay low tier, and requiring years worth of experience to reach at least tier 4. Sounds good right?

-- When the reality of the in-game economic situation is that lords with multiple fiefs can maintain at maximum 150~200 soldiers, how the heck is it possible for a mere landless mercenary to maintain bands of soldiers 200+? Economically and logistically totally unrealistic. The player shouldn't be able to field as much soldiers as lords.

-- How can it be possible for the player army to traverse long distances without sleeping? The players should be forced to stop and make camp at least every 2 in-game days, right?

-- As mentioned in previous posts, all the equipment of your soldiers should cost significantly more. The player's =oneself requires at least like 10k to have a decent mid-tier level gear. But the soldiers you just pay at max a few hundred gold and they instantly transform into higher tier gear. Is this realistic? Way too easy for the player to field high-tier armies with superior gear. Each soldier should be paid at least 10k every time it levels up to the next tier.

-- Hygiene is a thing. Regular outbreaks needed in armies that are fielded for too long a time. Have random diseases and ailments strike your army so it constantly reduces your battle-ready soldiers.

-- Player characters being unlikely to die even with death settings on. Way too convenient for the player. If the player receives a big wound, or gets knock out in the field, should be a very high chance they would just die and the game be over at that moment.


Sounds good, right? Under your standards, all of the above should be in the game. Let's see how many people would play that.

You'd probably say "not every realism adds to the game" -- which, is indeed, correct. But the fact you choose certain areas of realism whereas leave others to gamey convenience, is itself "game balancing." But if certain areas can be simplified, omitted, or portrayed fantastically for the sake of a game, why shouldn't armor and damage be the same? Especially when the vanilla game already is pretty much realistic in its results?

Toilet and fighting diarrhea!

 

[kweassa]

Toilet and fighting diarrhea!

Soldiers getting STD from brothels in the towns??

 

[Philozoraptor]

Repeating again, more slowly this time, "realism" in a game is selective. Games are not real life, nor can it ever hope to be no matter how well-simulated it is.

Obviously you think maximal realism is just the best for everything, but then why stop at armor and weapons?

-- Let's implement battle pacing to the real life standards of at least 2 hours real-time, to at maximum a whole 24 hours.

-- How about recruiting and training? Does manpower just pop up at regular intervals in real life? Why not implement realistic population limits and have a country which loses major battles suffer its effects to the military and the economy for generations?

-- Do people instantly go from a novice, to a top-tier elite soldier just because they win a few battles within a week? Have all the soldiers stay low tier, and requiring years worth of experience to reach at least tier 4. Sounds good right?

-- When the reality of the in-game economic situation is that lords with multiple fiefs can maintain at maximum 150~200 soldiers, how the heck is it possible for a mere landless mercenary to maintain bands of soldiers 200+? Economically and logistically totally unrealistic. The player shouldn't be able to field as much soldiers as lords.

-- How can it be possible for the player army to traverse long distances without sleeping? The players should be forced to stop and make camp at least every 2 in-game days, right?

-- As mentioned in previous posts, all the equipment of your soldiers should cost significantly more. The player's =oneself requires at least like 10k to have a decent mid-tier level gear. But the soldiers you just pay at max a few hundred gold and they instantly transform into higher tier gear. Is this realistic? Way too easy for the player to field high-tier armies with superior gear. Each soldier should be paid at least 10k every time it levels up to the next tier.

-- Hygiene is a thing. Regular outbreaks needed in armies that are fielded for too long a time. Have random diseases and ailments strike your army so it constantly reduces your battle-ready soldiers.

-- Player characters being unlikely to die even with death settings on. Way too convenient for the player. If the player receives a big wound, or gets knock out in the field, should be a very high chance they would just die and the game be over at that moment.


Sounds good, right? Under your standards, all of the above should be in the game. Let's see how many people would play that.

You'd probably say "not every realism adds to the game" -- which, is indeed, correct. But the fact you choose certain areas of realism whereas leave others to gamey convenience, is itself "game balancing." But if certain areas can be simplified, omitted, or portrayed fantastically for the sake of a game, why shouldn't armor and damage be the same? Especially when the vanilla game already is pretty much realistic in its results?

Actually I expect half of those features to be added to the game at some point, at least in basic form so they can be properly modded. Proper attrition, population growth, difference between forced marching and and some sorf of safe stance when troops get to rest properly and build camp for the night to name a few of the reasonable things.

 

[Bjorn The Dead]

Fo me, what is good about RBM is it is more fun than native. We all want to get away from real life sometimes, which is literally a game where rules much more brutal than video games, to get fake earned dopamine. But if the game can not trick my mind that you deserved this achievement, i am not able to get that fake earned dopamine so that is why for some guys this realism argument is important because the game does not offer them the level of representation of realism they desire. So your toilet, brothel or extreme realism arguments are not relevant.

 

[CrazyElf]

Please, for the love of god, either nerf the damage of every weapon in SP into the ground to make fights drag out for an actual length of time instead of these ridiculous anime-esque battles with people wielding lightsabers disguised as arming swords, or at least give us the modding tools (or just module armor soak and armor reduction values to damage) to do it ourselves ASAP. I'm pretty much losing all interest in bannerlord for the time being until something is done, as the combat is just dull compared to Warband.

As many others have hinted, it's one of the reasons why I use Realistic Battle Mod.

It makes or breaks the game for me IMO.

Actually I expect half of those features to be added to the game at some point, at least in basic form so they can be properly modded. Proper attrition, population growth, difference between forced marching and and some sorf of safe stance when troops get to rest properly and build camp for the night to name a few of the reasonable things.

I'd hope so - I think that some degree of RBM is needed in the base game as well.

 

[Philozoraptor]

As many others have hinted, it's one of the reasons why I use Realistic Battle Mod.

It makes or breaks the game for me IMO.





I'd hope so - I think that some degree of RBM is needed in the base game as well.

Devs are free to do whatever they wnat with RBM, we offered them help long time ago. And I am fully aware that if some of the RBM combat stuff would ever make it to the vanilla game it would be in modified state. For example more guaranteed damage for swords, arrows etc. Unless ofcourse there would be armor effectivness slider in the game menu, something like arcade (current vanilla state), semi-relistic / balanced (something between RBM and vanilla or RBM with more guaranteed damage) and realistic (RBM).

 

[Wyzilla]

Devs are free to do whatever they wnat with RBM, we offered them help long time ago. And I am fully aware that if some of the RBM combat stuff would ever make it to the vanilla game it would be in modified state. For example more guaranteed damage for swords, arrows etc. Unless ofcourse there would be armor effectivness slider in the game menu, something like arcade (current vanilla state), semi-relistic / balanced (something between RBM and vanilla or RBM with more guaranteed damage) and realistic (RBM).

I'm going to bump this topic as this touches upon something I would have otherwise made my own thread on. A mod I've been using for a while, Drastic Battle, a very good mod that essentially gives the user total control over all damage mechanics seems to be moving away from that feature which basically leaves me without an answer to even enjoy Bannerlord in the first place and makes it a completely inferior game to Warband. In a sense the coding complexity is elitist because while I can easily curtail the Warband experience to my desires via the MCM values in the module.ini file for native and all mods, this feature does not exist in bannerlord. And I frankly hate the "balance" and total fictitious nonsense of vanilla and have no desire to engage with it whatsoever as completely ahistorical nonsense that doesn't even feel like a proper armored fight which I know exactly how it should play out. And even your mod, while a step quite above vanilla, still does not reach the standards of what I would actually consider realistic, such as there being zero cutting damage in the first place against armor and only mild blunt transference being converted which drastic enabled via its old config files.

But Bannerlord should either have simple MCM value function like Warband did or add it in as literal slider settings as suggested here in not just a simple matter, but total control over all damage variables in vanilla for the experience I want. Because I can't code C# or understand a lick of it, and a fairly comprehensive, if not even elite literacy of C is required to modify this game. Thus as a consumer and one with a historical mind and fencing realism, either Bannerlord is a completely wasted purchase of mine and completely inferior of Warband, or the Devs can implement user total adjustment of damage settings. And that's almost a kind of an ultimatum, as an individual user I have zero interest in playing Bannerlord either by vanilla settings or even those of many mods, as they simply aren't sufficient while Warband is.Bannerlord feels like a poorly thought out concept when virtually the entire appeal of Warband was how the user could simply, easily adjust any and all features to their inclination, leading to a modding community as virile as that of Skyrim's, and even just a simplicity of user tweaks outside of "real" modding via MCM values or the introduction of Morgh's simple modification of all in-game items. The Devs should work with the modders, and more importantly have modding documentation that isn't currently broken at the moment to implement programs like these rather than just having to wait for what may be a year, two years, or even four years hoping that someday Bannerlord maybe actually has support like Warband.

I am also absolutely infuriated and remain so that modification of the .xml files no longer works. When this game launched I could simply manually adjust the damage values of each individual weapon and the armor values of each individual armor pieces in \Mount & Blade II Bannerlord\Modules\SandBoxCore\ModuleData\ item.xml files. Then this was changed, what used to be a single xml of items was split into individual types, and now when I adjust ANY of those values my game crashes to desktop. When I first bought Bannerlord, editing these item.xml values was fundamentally how I enjoyed my game and my purchase, and until I found mods at the time that were to up to my preferences the game was dead to me. Even without a nice slider list of core damage values in bannerlord, being able to actually edit the itemxml's to my preferences in /sandboxcore/ without my game CTDing immediately and requiring files to verify would be an improvement. But as is I can only consider vanilla Bannerlord a complete and utter disappointment as an experience, depending solely on the mercy of modders to not only provide mods, but to keep them updated with the pace of development.

 

[Wyzilla]

That's not the point.

The point is with the way how the game makes it easy to recruit the troops you desire, and provide upgrades to higher tier soldiers with just a mere paltry sum of gold paid in a one-off-deal, and then bam! the entire troop just transforms and comes with higher grade armor, just like that. The end result is a player can very easily amass an army with "unrealistically" high ratio of top-tier soldiers, without having any of the real-life drawbacks in terms of logistics and upkeep attached to it.

If people want to drag in how real life armor works against melee weapons and arrows, they should also drag in the real-life circumstances of how a typical field army would not be so equipped uniformly with high-grade gear. In this game just a little bit of time investment and you can have 100% of your troops fully armed to the teeth, in which the end result of "realistic armor" is nothing but the entire class of ranged troops being turned obsolete, as well as all battles played out will also begin to spend "realistic amounts" of time. In this game that features non-stop battles, do the players really want every fight to take like an hour or so?

So, if people want "realistic armor" in the game, then like it or not it's gonna come with significant changes to how the troops are recruited and upkept. Like, how would you like it, if you have to pay as much as you equip yourself, for each and every soldier you field? Of course, you aren't going to be able to pay that money so easily until endgame, so that means only a relatively smaller fraction of your forces will be able to have good quality armor that can stop blows and arrows, and the majority will have to be equipped with varying degrees of inferior equipment.

Do the players really want that? Me, personally, I wouldn't mind. I'd find it even more immersive since it adds significant more realism to the game. But I don't think other people's gonna like it when they see they have to pay something 10k gold per each leather/gambeson armored troop getting their hands on mail or higher-grade armor.

Realistically all troops below Tier 2 or 3 shouldn't even exist outside of desperate garrisons or last ditch efforts to get every single warm body on a wall when the mongols come a knockin. Realistically money shouldn't even be much of a problem for the player once they read lord-level status and own multiple demesnes and should have the financial ability to casually raise a very well armed elite retinue of 100 men, many mounted, and there should be zero troop training either. All troops should be raised as Lances or garrisons of the Imperials with no form of XP based progression at all, instead modelled on how the 1257 AD mod handled things where a knight is a knight and has no levels above or below knight, because they're a knight. There is no such thing as the "levy infantry" in Medieval history as popularly conceptualized as dirt eating peasants tossed into war. Even a gambeson is expensive equipment recorded in armories for being no small or cheap thing and the man wearing it often a hardened veteran of his own right, either from skirmishes across his life. Casting a glance at Eastern Roman treatises from the Early and High periods of the Medieval era, even the greenest of infantry enters as a man equipped with a bow or javelins he would already be familiar with and semi-proficient. Armies are small and of decent quality, the Mount and Blade use of literal peasants has always been an atrocious breach of realism and history that shouldn't be present. All the troops you want should be instantly available so long as the demographics provide, the only barrier being cost.

I agree games don't necessarily have to be realistic, which is why armor doesn't necessarily have to roflstomp incoming arrows and blows like it should for sake of a better, faster-paced game.

But if you bring in "realistic armor protection" it can, and it WILL inadvertently affect things that directly impact that gameplay. Ranged units becoming unilaterally useless, as mentioned, is only one just instance.

For example. one of the most useful early-game progression methods of "tournament rounding" is seriously going to suffer, as you'll basically have no chance to defeat anyone with your starting level gear, if armor protects so well against blows.

Much the same, your starting level army will be "realistically" and hopelessly be outmatched against any non-bandit army in the game that's better equipped than yours -- often even with numbers advantage -- and you'll be limited to fighting non-armored bandits for a way longer a time, which will slow down your character progression accordingly.

It's literally a "be careful what you wish for" situation just waiting to happen.

Realistically the player character should obviously simply start off as a person of wealth and power by familial heritage or have to progress through the basic ranks of an army as in Freelancer. Otherwise you would obviously not be able to amount to much as a meager peasant or freeman without obscene luck. Terrain should take far more prominence in combat as well, grealtly affecting the speed of cavalry or infantry with the role of ranged combat should almost exclusively be of morale and shock. Arrows comparatively kill little, but act as suppressive, disruptive fire, and mostly exist to support complimenting troops. If the player, or any lord for that matter, is able to assemble a force as large as Bannerlord armies but comprised exclusively of elite cavalry, they should absolutely pound everyone else to dust without flaw with the only means to defeat them being use of terrain. The crushing defeats against the Knight dominated armies of the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries were not achieved because of some magical employment of bows, but because tactical use of terrain combined with commander stupidity saw crude employment of cavalry into the single worst possible fields, such as rain-churned farmland, swamps, rivers, or forests. Which is one of the primary lacking features of all realistic mods I've seen yet far, as while armor must be fixed along with the penetrative performances of arrows and other weapons, but that terrain is the preeminent judge of victory or defeat. Mud should slow all cavalry to a crawl, along with rivers, and morale should be more vital than HP.

For example my main criticism of the Realistic Battle mod here

Oh gee. You think so?

Looks more like "higher-tier/thicker armor = auto-win" to me.

No offense to the creator of RBM, but I wouldn't rate RBM anywhere near "realistic." It simply plays to people's expectations which are biased toward convenience in the first place. (which isn't a bad thing, since that's what mods are)

Is not any over-peformance. This outcome is completely justified. The only issue is that the dead should never outnumber the wounded or routed as a rule of thumb. Deaths in any battle should ideally not be more than 30% for the loser, and the victor should be awash in prisoners to ransom or enslave. This was one of the fantastic abilities of the drastic battle mod, as armor would convert damage to blunt typically, and could be tweaked entirely as the user desired. Thus lightly protected troops are more likely to be killed from damage, while high quality ones are more likely to shrug it off. This is deviating from the core topic, but the issue with mods like drastic or RBM is that, while improving things to behave energetically as is proper is well and good, regardless of terrain as is currently implemented it's basically a vacuum. In a vacuum a man at arms on a horse will defeat crappier infantry 10/10 times. Total superiority of forces is overcome by force multipliers, tactical expertise, and incompetence of one's foes to triumph over them. Thus if mud actually crippled horse movement, high ground stymied speed truly, horses had stamina, lances broke, and morale was truly present, an inferior force could outmaneuver and crush a superior one with relative ease if the commander were competent. This is of course, completely outside of the scope "armor work better" mods.

 

[Philozoraptor]

And even your mod, while a step quite above vanilla, still does not reach the standards of what I would actually consider realistic, such as there being zero cutting damage in the first place against armor and only mild blunt transference being converted which drastic enabled via its old config files.

You can actually set this up in the config file. Go to users/"user"/Documents/Mount and Blade II Bannerlord/Configs/RBMCombatModule and edit the config there, blunt factor of each weapon represents the percentage of damage absorbed by armor that is transferred into blunt trauma (trauma is further reduced depending on armor).

 

[froggyluv]

Completely agree with Wyzilla on the absence of important things like terrain on battles. Thats literally the strategy - how will my _x troops do against those _y type of troops on THIS specific terrain and how can i take advantage of it. Better yet how does the AI take advantage of it. I thought by this year in PC gaming that would be standard in real time strategy type games but even Total War games barely scratch the surface on terrain effects and how to best use them

 

[Philozoraptor]

Completely agree with Wyzilla on the absence of important things like terrain on battles. Thats literally the strategy - how will my _x troops do against those _y type of troops on THIS specific terrain and how can i take advantage of it. Better yet how does the AI take advantage of it. I thought by this year in PC gaming that would be standard in real time strategy type games but even Total War games barely scratch the surface on terrain effects and how to best use them

I think Total War actually went away from it, these kind of features will not sell the game to normies, half naked demons will. However they still could do half naked demons and terrain at the same time.

 

[mujadaddy]

Completely agree with Wyzilla on the absence of important things like terrain on battles. Thats literally the strategy - how will my _x troops do against those _y type of troops on THIS specific terrain and how can i take advantage of it. Better yet how does the AI take advantage of it. I thought by this year in PC gaming that would be standard in real time strategy type games but even Total War games barely scratch the surface on terrain effects and how to best use them

For sure. I'm only asking for a difference between a Battle and an Ambush. Everything is an ambush. And it's usually at night ????

 

[CrazyElf]

Devs are free to do whatever they wnat with RBM, we offered them help long time ago. And I am fully aware that if some of the RBM combat stuff would ever make it to the vanilla game it would be in modified state. For example more guaranteed damage for swords, arrows etc. Unless ofcourse there would be armor effectivness slider in the game menu, something like arcade (current vanilla state), semi-relistic / balanced (something between RBM and vanilla or RBM with more guaranteed damage) and realistic (RBM).

I think that even a partial implementation would be a major step in the right direction. Right now archers are unrealistically powerful and armor just doesn't do that much.

The only major issue with RBM is compatability with mods - Eagle Rising, Trial of the Seven Kingdoms, Calradia Expanded Kingdoms, etc. For that only Drastic Battle is the only option.

Eagle Rising's team has said that they will be making an XML compatibility patch. Calradia Expanded though has unfortunately dropped RBM altogether, although with Open Source armor and a few XML changes, it might still be possible.


----

In regards to the Autoresolve, try this mod:

Auto Resolve Rebalanced

Ensure that your Cataphracts are not easily lost against Looters in Auto Resolve (Send troop). This mod change Auto Resolve to simulates each individual's HP and damage as in a real battle.

www.nexusmods.com

 

[CallmeWayne]

I think that even a partial implementation would be a major step in the right direction. Right now archers are unrealistically powerful and armor just doesn't do that much.

The only major issue with RBM is compatability with mods - Eagle Rising, Trial of the Seven Kingdoms, Calradia Expanded Kingdoms, etc. For that only Drastic Battle is the only option.

Eagle Rising's team has said that they will be making an XML compatibility patch. Calradia Expanded though has unfortunately dropped RBM altogether, although with Open Source armor and a few XML changes, it might still be possible.


----

In regards to the Autoresolve, try this mod:

Auto Resolve Rebalanced

Ensure that your Cataphracts are not easily lost against Looters in Auto Resolve (Send troop). This mod change Auto Resolve to simulates each individual's HP and damage as in a real battle.

www.nexusmods.com

I was eager to make patch for Eagle Rising but when I saw how stuff is calculated. I had run in a fear and despair.

 

[froggyluv]

I think Total War actually went away from it, these kind of features will not sell the game to normies, half naked demons will. However they still could do half naked demons and terrain at the same time.

Call me a terrain geek but I would literally buy just about any strategy game if they had real time terrain dynamics enabled. Im talking muddy steep hillsides in which less trained or overburdened troops forced to move too quickly would literally have a chance to stumble down. Where horses and heavy knights could get bogged down in mud during dynamic storms or even the next day etc.. I would play that game forever

 

[Akka]

Repeating again, more slowly this time, "realism" in a game is selective. Games are not real life, nor can it ever hope to be no matter how well-simulated it is.

Yes, and having paper armor and magical blunt are part of what breaks the suspension of disbelief and the fun of the selective-realistic expectation of a game with hand to hand fighting ?

 

[CrazyElf]

I was eager to make patch for Eagle Rising but when I saw how stuff is calculated. I had run in a fear and despair.

No worries - the modders themselves will be creating an XML file for Eagle Rising.

It's Trial of the Seven Kingdoms that I would also like this as well. Right now Drastic Battle + Realistic Battle AI is a good compromise.

Both mods are currently incomplete and missing assets. Trial of Seven Kingdoms still needs to undergo balancing.

 

[CallmeWayne]

No worries - the modders themselves will be creating an XML file for Eagle Rising.

It's Trial of the Seven Kingdoms that I would also like this as well. Right now Drastic Battle + Realistic Battle AI is a good compromise.

Both mods are currently incomplete and missing assets. Trial of Seven Kingdoms still needs to undergo balancing.

Drastic Battles is bugged or got rid of many features, or even worse both. I have disabled it and having more fun without it.

 

[kweassa]

Yes, and having paper armor and magical blunt are part of what breaks the suspension of disbelief and the fun of the selective-realistic expectation of a game with hand to hand fighting ?

If you'd rather fight average 3 hours with every battle in the game, sure, why not.

 

[Philozoraptor]

Drastic Battles is bugged or got rid of many features, or even worse both. I have disabled it and having more fun without it.

Actually I find it funny that Will had to get rid of mod options and sliders becaue they were underutilized by majority of players while we started to add them because they were demanded often. I guess you can never please everyone.