Why are you on literally every post defending BL and undermining Warband as if you made BL yourself ? Honor supported your RtR indirectly. Example : It was easier to recruit lords with high RtR and Honor compared to only Honor or RtR alone, that duo increased your chances of recruiting lords, building claim. It was a good system as many of us think as they were complementary to each other, have fun with your influence system in BL. RtR + Honor + Relationship trio were miles better than we got in BL, and its a fact.
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What changes would you like to see to the influence system?
- Thread starter Totalgarbage
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Warband was not a particularly deep or well design game, pointing this out doesn't mean apocal is defending bannerlord.
It doesnt. Warband lord recruitment was as random as Bannerlord, the percentages were just hidden there.
The biggest Bannerlord apologist strikes once again.
I'm not defending Bannerlord. You can literally see any number of posts I've made where I called influence bad in some way, shape or form.
I'm saying Warband's system was bad because that system was bad. You could ignore the deliberate RtR mechanics (sending companions abroad and getting a message from a king) yet still recruit lords through stacking Honor and recruiting friendly lords.
Zerosaiko
Knight at Arms
Honor itself was also a problem because the best lords for your kingdom (as in they're both easy to please and unlikely to run off with your fiefs) were good natured lords, though martial lords weren't bad either iirc. Pretty much incentivized running high Honor only and you'd only take one of the sadistic/dishonorable lords early on if you were desperate, and just give them a village since they couldn't take those with them.
Influence should've been finite, so there's some tug-of-war aspect within a kingdom on accumulating it and it having actual value for hoarding or using.
Even if there is a significant lack of uses currently, at least it makes those few 'expenditures' more meaningful than they are now.
Even if there is a significant lack of uses currently, at least it makes those few 'expenditures' more meaningful than they are now.
In that case it would actually work quite well as just an indicator calculated by your clans relationships and achcievements compared to other clans, not something any system or player can influence directly. Then replace the clan tier system with that, and remove all the influence checks except the ones for voting, and i wouldn't mind it so much.
After thinking it through and through, I would say keep it mainly as it is. Any plans to make influence finite and a struggle for percentages among nobles smells dangerously like reintroducing a kind of marshal system. I hated it in WB and for me the single best festure of BL is to abandon a mechanic which kept the player away for a long time from bigger war efforts.
Influence as currency is kind of weak, but influence only from fiefs would be weak too. Related to the decisions to make, big fiefs not always meant big influence, personal backgrounds and deeds counted too. That the biggest lord led "the army" was often only on paper, not the real thing.
I would prefer that the inner politics and relational things with nobles would get more elaborated and logical, so having and using influence would get more important and useful. As some mods start to cater with it, it should be possible to get a better system as the dumb voting we have now. There should be more political options, like using influence to delaying votes and cooperating with nobles in the background.
Influence as currency is kind of weak, but influence only from fiefs would be weak too. Related to the decisions to make, big fiefs not always meant big influence, personal backgrounds and deeds counted too. That the biggest lord led "the army" was often only on paper, not the real thing.
I would prefer that the inner politics and relational things with nobles would get more elaborated and logical, so having and using influence would get more important and useful. As some mods start to cater with it, it should be possible to get a better system as the dumb voting we have now. There should be more political options, like using influence to delaying votes and cooperating with nobles in the background.
It was less random than BL, you actually could manipulate the odds with your character's overall honor and RtR, it wasnt a magical mana currency at least, that alone makes it a 100x better system to BL's influence system, since they mattered in a way that your character's and other lord's personalities somewhat mattered on the decisions you and they make and get away with.
The problem is that those two things are in direct contradiction. If you make a detailed and deep politics system, a global currency is just going to cannibalise it. The more "influence" you give to the influence system, the less deep the politics is going to be since you can just bypass it with the friendship cryptocoins.
You can do this for lord recruitment in BL too: relations, traits, Charm, etc. all combine to make the persuasion checks for lord recruitment extremely easy to pass. The biggest limiter is the sheer cost of getting lords to flip but even then they charge somewhat less if they like you.
It would be the opposite of the marshal system, really. Since armies burn influence, in any system with finite influence either you're actively doing something with that army (the AI won't manage that), it is a net loss. If influence was just a constant flow, you couldn't even bank it to keep your army intact. If it still proved to be an issue, perhaps the influence gain for being in an army should come directly from the influence flow of the person forming it, which would create an automatic incentive away from the biggest giga-chunk of parties you can amass to speed-siege factions into the ground?
Honestly though, I really don't like influence being yet another bankable resource, atop of all the others (food, denars, renown, troops, horses, etc.) already in existence.
Retrobarbaari
Recruit
Playing 1.8.1e but influence is useless to me. First of all, I have much, much more of it than I need. Second, all my lords give immediately their prisoners away, to get influence, which means prisons are full and leaking.
How do you get influence? In votes (see below), and I think generally you should get influence by being wise and strong leader, and having good relationships. Have high tier clan, towns that are prosperous and loyal, castles and town forts that are well manned, have vassals, be rich (relatively within the kigdom), marry high influence clan members (even if your actions would reduce your influence, these would slowly build it up again). Also aiding someone in a battle, doing quests, giving money & items.
Yeah I agree there should be only certain amount influence available. In votes, you would not actually spend influence, but influence would attract other lords to join the proposal one lord makes. If the lord is very influential, he probably gets backed up by many lords. Others would oppose the proposal. If as a king you agree with the proposal which has more support, your influence increases, and so does the influence of the lords who supported the winning proposal. If you support the less support proposal, your influence reduces. If you're a vassal, your influence grows or reduces based on if you supported the winning proposal.
How much influence should be in a kingdom? I think it should depend on how many clans (or lords) are there. Influence of a clan (or a lord) would never drop to zero nor rise sky high, but it might change let's say, between 10 to 50 points, for example.
How do you get influence? In votes (see below), and I think generally you should get influence by being wise and strong leader, and having good relationships. Have high tier clan, towns that are prosperous and loyal, castles and town forts that are well manned, have vassals, be rich (relatively within the kigdom), marry high influence clan members (even if your actions would reduce your influence, these would slowly build it up again). Also aiding someone in a battle, doing quests, giving money & items.
Yeah I agree there should be only certain amount influence available. In votes, you would not actually spend influence, but influence would attract other lords to join the proposal one lord makes. If the lord is very influential, he probably gets backed up by many lords. Others would oppose the proposal. If as a king you agree with the proposal which has more support, your influence increases, and so does the influence of the lords who supported the winning proposal. If you support the less support proposal, your influence reduces. If you're a vassal, your influence grows or reduces based on if you supported the winning proposal.
How much influence should be in a kingdom? I think it should depend on how many clans (or lords) are there. Influence of a clan (or a lord) would never drop to zero nor rise sky high, but it might change let's say, between 10 to 50 points, for example.
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The main issue with the marshal system is that it was straight up bugged. There was a stat called "controversy" which would go up if you were a marshal and you suffered defeats, but it would also increase for virtually anything bad that happened to any party in your faction, meaning there was no real way to avoid losing marshalship. This was almost certainly not intended, but like most mechanics in Warband they didn't test it or even think about it for more than 5 seconds.
The Army system goes to the opposite extreme. There are multiple parties of 1000 guys running around with no clear leader and no personality, just a blob hivemind. The coolness factor of seeing one guy riding ahead of the rest with a noticably larger party is gone, and you dont get to scare off all the minions with your own party anymore. Warband had a ton of flaws in the campaign department but it had fairly good pacing of battle scale. You might only fight 2-3 marshal vs marshal battles in a playthrough, but they were usually decisive in a way that nothing in Bannerlord is, because every other battle is that big.
Agreed, but the culprit of doomstack armies being too common is influence as well, mainly due to how easy it is to acquire and stockpile, even for the AI. If calling armies were made more expensive or the amount of influence available decreased (e. g. through making it finite), it should theoretically make armies scarcer.
Although this is a different subject and purely theoretical, I think that summoning and/or maintaining armies should also cost the army leader a significant amount of money (maybe something like 50% of the summoned parties' daily cost), so that having armies becomes risky and gold becomes valuable throughout the game.
Retrobarbaari
Recruit
Ballony. If influence was hard to get, and you would only occasionally see armies, that would be even bigger problem. And somebody always has influence.
One would either need to limit the size of armies, or remove them entirely. Making influence harder to get would not be a help at all.
Maybe I'm wrong but there doesn't seem to be any 'counter' effect with influence, it's just a straight currency. Unless it's finite, it won't have any meaningful value, much like in RL.
Me voting the max 100 out of my 5K influence is exactly the same 'value' as someone who votes 100/200 as it's just straight numbee values.
There's no slider/scaling costs/ratio. Even donating my excess influence to another clan is meaningless since I'm not taking away from a pool or 'stealing' from another clan for any sort of political play/ploy; I'm just generating influence from nothing and giving it away. So I can't even have like a 'nepotism' playthrough trying to take over a kingdom internally by favoring one clan only and us taking over or something (or kicking clans out - barely works when it does).
I can't use it to 'steal' an AI party from another army to join me instead, causing those guys to lose defeat possibly (and subsequent influence lost to all those nobles) and our army able to take our objective and gain said influence through victory.
Me voting the max 100 out of my 5K influence is exactly the same 'value' as someone who votes 100/200 as it's just straight numbee values.
There's no slider/scaling costs/ratio. Even donating my excess influence to another clan is meaningless since I'm not taking away from a pool or 'stealing' from another clan for any sort of political play/ploy; I'm just generating influence from nothing and giving it away. So I can't even have like a 'nepotism' playthrough trying to take over a kingdom internally by favoring one clan only and us taking over or something (or kicking clans out - barely works when it does).
I can't use it to 'steal' an AI party from another army to join me instead, causing those guys to lose defeat possibly (and subsequent influence lost to all those nobles) and our army able to take our objective and gain said influence through victory.
DrDragonlance
Sergeant
Definitely needs some sort of decay, I have 56k+ Influence in my current game. Numerous Clans in my Kingdom have 7k+
It would help tremendously by making it so that defeating armies actually makes a difference rather than being almost inconsequential as it is right now. While creating armies shouldn't be made too expensive, influence is simply too easy to obtain and bank right now and basically every lord can summon and maintain an army indefinitely in only a few in game years (unless you pass specific policies and drain lords' influence by starting votes they oppose). Influence definitely needs to be scarcer, influence decay be scales or influence itself should be finite.
DrDragonlance
Sergeant
I like the idea of Influence being a Static Number based on Notables supporting you, what other Clans in the Kingdom think of you, Clan level and then a dynamic portion based on current events similar to Morale.
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