How will TW balance class system in battle mode?

Would you rather have more than 3 perks to choose from in battle mode?


  • Total voters
    54

Users who are viewing this thread

Every match of battle mode, I see the same substantial group of players getting killed in the first round, then spending most of the remaining four rounds stuck as peasants, languishing in trash class hell. I almost feel bad for them, but I quickly forget about their plight as I ruthlessly farm them for a score of 27-0. The whole Bannerlord Battle experience must be maddening for those poor souls, but for me....
bison-it-was-tuesday-3.gif
 
Every match of battle mode, I see the same substantial group of players getting killed in the first round, then spending most of the remaining four rounds stuck as peasants, languishing in trash class hell. I almost feel bad for them, but I quickly forget about their plight as I ruthlessly farm them for a score of 27-0. The whole Bannerlord Battle experience must be maddening for those poor souls, but for me....
bison-it-was-tuesday-3.gif

Technically their fault for choosing heavy cav first round :razz:
 
To be honest, trying to argue over and over again that being able to choose from 50 items is easier to balance then to choose from 6 perks is just overall wrong. Everyone would obviously prefer the Warband equipment system because it was obviously nicer cause you could customize your character and choose specific weapons which u liked / were good with etc. . Thats a fair point etc. but it defenitly does not lead to easier balancing. There will always be some "top tier" go to stuff for each troop. The same thing as for perks right now.
 
There will always be some "top tier" go to stuff for each troop. The same thing as for perks right now.
Yes but game balance isn't a black and white thing, it's a matter of degrees.
Few, if any games out there are perfectly balanced, unless they make both options reskins of each other. What matters is that there is not a huge difference of viability between the tiers, or that there is a good variety of options on the top tier.
 
To be honest, trying to argue over and over again that being able to choose from 50 items is easier to balance then to choose from 6 perks is just overall wrong. Everyone would obviously prefer the Warband equipment system because it was obviously nicer cause you could customize your character and choose specific weapons which u liked / were good with etc. . Thats a fair point etc. but it defenitly does not lead to easier balancing. There will always be some "top tier" go to stuff for each troop. The same thing as for perks right now.
The Warband gear system is easier to balance because the armours work in “tiers”. Each more expensive piece of armour is better than the preceding cheaper one. The complexity is in choosing which part of the body you want to spend your gold on upgrading and how much armour you want to trade-off for your weapon of choice. Most weapons work in tiers as well, at least the primary weapon type for each faction does.

The class system is a nightmare for battle not because of the perk system but because of the dramatic difference in strength between certain classes and their respective costs. You can get stuck in a loop of only being able to afford a weaker class if the other side simply keeps winning with their stronger classes. Snowballing is so much more extreme in Bannerlord than it was in Warband because to outfit yourself like a heavy inf class in Warband you’d have to win multiple rounds consecutively and get lots of kills. In Bannerlord it’s much easier for one side to snowball up to the top level gear and is then consequentially much harder for the other side to make a comeback.
 
If thats your point then its less about a gear system or class system then but about the general decision to give all body parts the same armor values.
Aside of that it would be easily fixable by reducing the start gold drastically. So a class system can work but you have to earn a lot of gold to pick better classes. That will lead to a Warband like effect but just gives you less options in total.
Obviously other factors affect these problems too. Like not having heavy inf on Aserai for example. Its obviously not fair for them since gold will be useless for infantry players anyway.

Taleworlds stated multiple times that they are not going back to the equipment system, even tho they could obviously easily do it by increasing the perk amount to 4-6 and adding like 6 perks of gear to each "perk" + cost, but thats not gonna happen.
 
So much more engaging working towards something than having anything upfront. I like playing inf so sometimes no matter how well you do you just play the same equipment all game.
 
If thats your point then its less about a gear system or class system then but about the general decision to give all body parts the same armor values.
Aside of that it would be easily fixable by reducing the start gold drastically. So a class system can work but you have to earn a lot of gold to pick better classes. That will lead to a Warband like effect but just gives you less options in total.
Obviously other factors affect these problems too. Like not having heavy inf on Aserai for example. Its obviously not fair for them since gold will be useless for infantry players anyway.

Taleworlds stated multiple times that they are not going back to the equipment system, even tho they could obviously easily do it by increasing the perk amount to 4-6 and adding like 6 perks of gear to each "perk" + cost, but thats not gonna happen.
I know that TW will not go back to an equipment based system, my point is simply that an equipment based system is much easier to balance for Battle than a class system is.

An equipment based system has incremental upgrades, meaning that nobody instantly goes from peasant to fully armoured tincan - they upgrade their gear piece by piece over several rounds. A class system in a single-life round mode like Battle does the opposite, as winning or losing a round can mean the difference between having 5 armour or 50. With a lower starting gold this issue is lessened but cannot be removed entirely as the current system has no incremental upgrading. It's not just about all body parts having the same armour value, though that is relevant in relation to the general advantage of a tier-based upgrade system like Warband's, but is about how instant and dramatic the upgrade is from one class to another, rather than being something gradually achieved over several rounds and by fewer players.
 
Bannerlord's class system is easier than Warband's equipment system for balancing battle since there's significantly less variables. That makes it worse in a number of ways, but easier to balance.
 
Bannerlord's class system is easier than Warband's equipment system for balancing battle since there's significantly less variables. That makes it worse in a number of ways, but easier to balance.
I don’t agree. In the games Super Smash Bros (64) and Super Smash Bros Ultimate, there are a wide variation of characters. The first has 12, the latter has 89 (currently). There is still a short list of useable characters in competitive, and a vast majority are seen as completely unplayable. This is the same with every iteration of the series. So, no, balancing isn’t made easier/harder by having more variables, some will always rise to the top while others will be garbage unless massive changes are made. That’s just how it is.
 
I don’t agree. In the games Super Smash Bros (64) and Super Smash Bros Ultimate, there are a wide variation of characters. The first has 12, the latter has 89 (currently). There is still a short list of useable characters in competitive, and a vast majority are seen as completely unplayable. This is the same with every iteration of the series. So, no, balancing isn’t made easier/harder by having more variables, some will always rise to the top while others will be garbage unless massive changes are made. That’s just how it is.
This comparison is nonsense since Smash was never originally designed or marketed as a competitive game, but as a party game for children. It's the characters themselves and their gimmicks that they are being put in the game for, with no promise for competitive viability.
 
I don’t agree. In the games Super Smash Bros (64) and Super Smash Bros Ultimate, there are a wide variation of characters. The first has 12, the latter has 89 (currently). There is still a short list of useable characters in competitive, and a vast majority are seen as completely unplayable. This is the same with every iteration of the series. So, no, balancing isn’t made easier/harder by having more variables, some will always rise to the top while others will be garbage unless massive changes are made. That’s just how it is.

Neither of those games are balanced for top tier competitive play.

The more complex a game is the more difficult it is to balance, because each change will have a greater impact on the balance web.

Balancing an equipment system like warband would require you to calculate the relative value each piece of equipment brings by itself and correlate that to gold. If changed, you’d need to consider how the new gold value affects breakpoints when purchasing a high number of load outs, because your gold change for one equipment directly affects the expected gold value for commonly paired equipment if the changed piece becomes harder or easier to purchase. You’d have to do this for every piece of equipment and consider hundreds of potential loadouts.

(And this is assuming all troops have the same base stats and equipment pools, which they dont, which exponentially increases the complexity.)

Bannerlord is actually quite similar where you have to calculate the relative value of classes and how their cost affects breakpoints when buying multiple classes in a round. (Ex: many rounds you’ll buy a Heavy class and a Light class based on how much gold you have.)

The number of classes is significantly less than the number of equipment. The amount of potential groupings/pairings for classes is also significantly less than the possible number of equipment combinations.

Again, I’d prefer if the game was more complex. But it’s not, and as a result it’s easier to balance.
 
Last edited:
This comparison is nonsense since Smash was never originally designed or marketed as a competitive game, but as a party game for children.
It doesn’t matter how a game was designed or the target audience, if there’s a competitive scene for it, then it’s competitive. There’s a competitive scene for Melee, a two decades old game, in which there are clear S tier and bottom tier characters.

Neither of those games are balanced for top tier competitive play.
That’s my point. Differences in equipment, playstyle and/or character won’t ever be “even”, and if it was, it would be boring as there’s no skill to it. The beauty of it is different things countering others, although as with pretty much every game, most of it will be invalidated by the meta. You can change values here and there, and that may change the meta, but there will always be a meta, assuming it isn’t one type of weapon vs. the same. Which I don’t think anyone wants.
Again, I’d prefer if the game was more complex. But it’s not, and as a result it’s easier to balance.
And yet it’s still a pile of ****.
 
It doesn’t matter how a game was designed or the target audience, if there’s a competitive scene for it, then it’s competitive. There’s a competitive scene for Melee, a two decades old game, in which there are clear S tier and bottom tier characters.
I don't think you understood what I said. I didn't say it's not competitive, I said it wasn't designed to be played competitively, which is exactly the reason why only such a small number of characters ended up being played by the best players. In BL everything can be adjusted with statistics and feedback of competitive players, eliminating a situation where certain classes are totally unviable (assuming the work is actually done).
 
Smash bros ultimate is balanced for competitive play tho. ? Didn't read the discussion tho so I'm just shouting things from the back row.
The person said that only a small number of characters were viable at the top level, so I guessed that Ultimate is balanced for a more general audience than the peak 0.001% of players. (I could be wrong.)

This is a huge tangent, and the original argument was not worth having.
 
Bannerlord's class system is easier than Warband's equipment system for balancing battle since there's significantly less variables. That makes it worse in a number of ways, but easier to balance.
this game isnt balanced, warband was ALOT more balanced. Now im forced to play as a character with a specific weapon that I dont want to use. Maybe my melee character wants a 1 handed mace and not a sword, maybe my melee wants to have a strong head piece cause I keep getting pelted with arrows around my shield there. The fact that im forced into a certain melee weapon type and like 3 to choose from makes the game un fun and unbalanced for me and others since I cant play what im best at and ill keep snowballing since im un able to play my playstyle.

currently theres meta "classes" and there will always be meta classes over others no matter what you do. If we made this like every other game on the market where i pick my "archer" class or "melee" class and give me options of 10 weapons in tiers and armor based on cost, now i can start out as a mace and shield with a crappy mace and upgrade to either a better mace or better shield or better chest piece when i get some kills and adjust the cost accordingly. your character levels in SMALL increments while now you get some kills and go right to the best class!
 
this game isnt balanced, warband was ALOT more balanced. Now im forced to play as a character with a specific weapon that I dont want to use. Maybe my melee character wants a 1 handed mace and not a sword, maybe my melee wants to have a strong head piece cause I keep getting pelted with arrows around my shield there. The fact that im forced into a certain melee weapon type and like 3 to choose from makes the game un fun and unbalanced for me and others since I cant play what im best at and ill keep snowballing since im un able to play my playstyle.

currently theres meta "classes" and there will always be meta classes over others no matter what you do. If we made this like every other game on the market where i pick my "archer" class or "melee" class and give me options of 10 weapons in tiers and armor based on cost, now i can start out as a mace and shield with a crappy mace and upgrade to either a better mace or better shield or better chest piece when i get some kills and adjust the cost accordingly. your character levels in SMALL increments while now you get some kills and go right to the best class!

My argument has never been that this game is balanced.
 
Back
Top Bottom