Is there even any content beside endless random balltes?
This
Autocalc should always be inferior and cause more casualties than actually playing the battle; it's a shortcut/speed run similar with Total War.
You should have better outcome playing the battle vs simulation.
The only odd thing/issue is this tendency for the high-tier troop be the singular death all the time and that's just a fault of how they did their calculations.
While I get where you're coming from, this pokes a sore spot for some of us who've been around since launch. Until the recent addition of donations to improve unit XP, grinding looters was the only safe way to level your troops. Then they realized that people were autobattling to grind unit XP, so they introduced a crippling XP penalty and vastly increased the lethality of autobattle.
So the end result was that the ideal style of play would be to start a zillion easy battles and, in each one, set your units to charge then go make a sandwich IRL.
It was tedious grind in a game already lousy with tedious grind, because the way combat/recruitment works railroads us into a very boring style of play where we almost ONLY fight battles that we're destined to win.
IDK about the current version, but tactics have degraded terribly since Warband - where for instance using shieldwall made your units do virtually no damage and loose formation was always the best because of weapon clipping issues. I almost stopped playing entirely because of that bull**** on principle.
By time you're a vassal, there should be ways (skills, fief, money, influence, relations, companions) that you can acquire a decent starter pack of troops, already leveled up, every single time you wipe and a sustainable flow of them to replace the losses you take while campaigning. It would eliminate the literally pointless grind of having to stroll obsessively around the map, stripping every village you come across of appropriate troop types, then finangling ways of pinning large groups of looters in place in order to level. It is only grind we'd be losing: nothing interesting will ever happen, there are no decisions to be made and it takes IRL time. Just give decent troops.
Then there would be absolutely ZERO reason to even have these ****ty looters after the very start of the game and we can stop seeing complaints made by people who feel the need to obsessively grind them to level up all 400+ of their T6 Fashion Plates before they feel comfortable doing anything else.
Please tell me that the game has truly advanced to this point.
The last time I played, unmodded BL required - even with relevant leadership perks - months or years to level up recruits. I had to do a tweaks mod to get to my personal benchmark, which was IIRC 2 weeks for a seasoned general to turn a stack of fresh recruits into T2 units.
I think at this point it's rather obvious what happened: Bannerlord development was going absolutely nowhere and they decided to just deliver the minimum viable product they could get away with and move on to something else. It's just sad because this game could've been so much more but I guess for newcomers it's a pretty decent game.
That doesn't explain the continued feature development long past the release schedule. SOMEBODY has to be aware that this is an unfinished product and believes that additional work will fix the problem.
+1 to this
One of the most frustrating things about this game still - and I understand I'm mostly alone here - is the fact that RP traits do virtually nothing except harm your persuasion checks for not having them and gold ones are virtually impossible to get in normal play.
Specifically valor is nigh-impossible to get if you're playing on a realistic difficulty and aren't abusing broken mechanics.
Been playing this game from time to time from the date of release. When released, it was simply a piece of buggy trash-code not even worthy of downloading it from torrent trackers. Now it has many more fun aspects (props to devs) but the game core is flawed overall.
I agree with pretty much everything you said.
Heh I enjoy the exact same thing - been like that since a kid, Id see a hill over a certain area and maybe rock croppings and id imagine how id use that tactically with an army. Using terrain, troop types, and weather and winning an unbeatable battle is whats best in Life
But
@RozBritanicus and
@froggyluv does any of that junk actually work?
The last I checked formations and such were all bugged such that Loose formation is the only thing that produces any positive effects.