Patch Notes v1.2.3 ...?

[anoddhermit]

Which specific shields should get which speed rating/durability changes in your opinion?

I agree, and that's in there. Perhaps I should even change it to +20%.

Agreed. Do you think they should throw faster in addition to having more damage? Or would a damage buff be enough?

What change would you propose? I'm proposing a speed buff to spears because their attack speed is so unrealistically slow, like they're stabbing underwater. I'm sure other things could have a look at too, but I think faster stab speed would be an immediate improvement that would make them more realistic.

There are too many to count, but the vast majority of 82 speed shields should have more varied speeds between ~80 and 100.

Most cavalry kite shields should be faster and lighter in virtue of relatively smaller size - currently a few are, but many aren't. Targes, for example, being fairly small should be faster as well. Some of the larger Sturgia round shields are faster than smaller ones and should be swapped/adjusted.

Right now there's just no rhyme or reason to it at all, really.

Draw speed increase would help with the issue of not having time to use throwing axes without making their damage too high against troops themselves rather than shields. It should be on the table, but I'd try incremental changes based on results.

For spears you'd want a reasonable balance between damage, speed, and reach at the end. I'm not against speed buffs, but hitting all spears with the same % speed increase could give some spears too much of a boost. For example, if we buffed speed by 50% for all spears, well 50% of 50 is +25 while 50% of 100 is +50 - so already faster spears would get much higher speed and benefit much more from it. Universally hitting weapons that have very different baselines with the same percentage boostsfor this reason is generally too imbalanced a method.

 

[Schmutz]

Beta v1.0.4

Latest Changes:​

Singleplayer

Kingdoms and Diplomacy

• Kingdoms now correctly determine their strength in tribute calculation, and offer to pay tribute for peace if they have taken much heavier losses.
• The AI is slightly less likely to declare war on weaker kingdoms.
• Having high relation with a noble now makes it 50% cheaper to bribe them to defect (was 5%).

Voting

• AI vote choices are now influenced by their Personality Traits.
  • Brave nobles are more likely to vote for war, Cautious ones more likely to oppose it.
  • Greedy nobles are more likely to give fiefs to themselves and vote for Policies that benefit them, Generous ones are more likely to vote for Policies that benefit the kingdom and give others fiefs.
  • Impulsive nobles are highly influenced by their Personality Traits when voting. Calculating ones are less influenced by their Personality Traits.
• AI nobles now spend more Influence to support votes proposed by someone they have high relations with.
• The AI will no longer repeat a vote which has already been called in the past 20 days.

Campaign Map

• Siege artillery is now automatically placed in reserve once constructed, with a UI notification that it is ready to deploy.
  • AI will wait to deploy artillery until they have 3 engines ready.
• Enemy nobles and garrisons now sometimes agree to surrender if heavily outnumbered.
  • Garrisons will surrender after 10 days of being besieged, if your army has 10x higher strength than theirs.
  • Nobles will agree to surrender if your party is 5x stronger than theirs.
  • Cautious nobles will agree to surrender if your party is 3x stronger than theirs.
  • Brave nobles will never surrender.
• Some enemy nobles now set the player free if they surrender.
  • Merciful nobles, or nobles with 50+ relations with the player, will let the player go free with all their items and their companions. Troops are taken prisoner.
  • If the player has the Sadistic trait or less than -50 relations, the enemy will not let them go free.
• Minor faction clan parties now replace the troops in their party with unique troops of their own culture. Eg: if a Company of the Boar party picks up a Vlandian Billman, it will convert into a Boar Champion.

Combat

• Armour Effectiveness improvements:
  • Increased armour protection against pierce damage by 1.7x.
  • Increased base damage of all spears and pikes by 2x.
  • Increased base damage of all other piercing melee weapons, and javelins, by 1.7x.
• Increased attack speed of all spears and pikes by 50%.
• Troops with a spear/pike now use it by default instead of their sidearm.
• Two-handed swinging polearms now have a 20% damage penalty when being used from horseback.
• Shields' HP have been reduced across the board by 15%.
• Throwing axes' base damage have been increased across the board by 15%.

Troops and Equipment

• T5 units have been added to the military minor factions.
  • Ghilman new T5 troop: "Ghulam Kingmaker."
  • Last Legion new T2 troop: "Velites." Triarii, Principes and Hastiati have each been moved up a tier and their equipment improved.
  • Skolderbroda new T3 troop: "Shield Broda." Veteran Broda and Warrior Broda have each been moved up a tier and their equipment improved.
  • Company of the Boar new T3 troop: "Boar Campaigner." Veteran and Champion have been moved up a tier and their equipment improved.
• Equipment of various nobles and troops updated:
  • All faction rulers now wear crowns and fine clothes in their civilian outfits, and battle crowns in their combat outfits.
• • More nobles use high quality helmets and armour.
  • Banner Knight now wears the Reinforced Mail Shoulders in set 1, and Reinforced Ornate Pauldrons over Scale in set 3.
  • Vlandian Sergeant now wears the Scale Shoulderguards in set 1, and Heavy Cloak in set 3.
  • Aserai Vanguard Faris now wears Brass Southern Closed Helmet.

Other

• Rain visual effects are now enabled.
• New balding male haircut option. @Gnjus

Multiplayer

• Added official multiplayer servers for continents which have no official servers.
• Fixed constant server crashes.

---

This is, of course, NOT the real patch notes. But it COULD be! @Dejan @MArdA TaleWorlds I think these changes would make Bannerlord much more fun and interesting, and much less frustrating.

Other forumites: Do you like this idea? What other changes would you like to see in 1.0.4?

Dude wtf, I almost reinstalled. FFS

 

[Lord Grindelvald]

*snip*

Other forumites: Do you like this idea? What other changes would you like to see in 1.0.4?

The crazy thing is, all these changes seem very plausible. You're not talking about adding crazy mechanics or game altering adjustments.

Just finetuning what is already there (or well, not even finetuning, just tuning). It would add so much value.

 

[Maelstrom8]

I wonder if they read your thread and were like, "Nah, next patch's version gonna be called v1.1.0 now"

 

[five bucks]

Dude wtf, I almost reinstalled. FFS

Gotcha!

the vast majority of 82 speed shields should have more varied speeds between ~80 and 100.

Most cavalry kite shields should be faster and lighter in virtue of relatively smaller size - currently a few are, but many aren't. Targes, for example, being fairly small should be faster as well. Some of the larger Sturgia round shields are faster than smaller ones and should be swapped/adjusted.

Right now there's just no rhyme or reason to it at all, really.

Alright, I've started going through every single shield in a .txt, arranging them by price, separating them by tier. I'm looking at them and attaching prefixes next to them based on their appearance, such as "small" or "metallic" or "flimsy in class" where visually obvious. For example, weight should be determined by whether the shield is large/small, how much metal is in it, and the tier (a better constructed shield with better materials should shave off a few decimal points of weight, is my logic). I've made up some proposed stat changes already - for example, making the Wicker Square Shield a T1 item because a literally better version of it with metal reinforcements (merely called Wicker Shield) already exists in T2; and significantly dropping its HP and weight and buffing its speed a little. Will update when I get time to finish it.

Draw speed increase would help with the issue of not having time to use throwing axes without making their damage too high against troops themselves rather than shields. It should be on the table, but I'd try incremental changes based on results.

In that case, since incremental balancing usually works well, I'll just leave it as the damage increase.

For spears you'd want a reasonable balance between damage, speed, and reach at the end. I'm not against speed buffs, but hitting all spears with the same % speed increase could give some spears too much of a boost. For example, if we buffed speed by 50% for all spears, well 50% of 50 is +25 while 50% of 100 is +50 - so already faster spears would get much higher speed and benefit much more from it. Universally hitting weapons that have very different baselines with the same percentage boostsfor this reason is generally too imbalanced a method.

Which particular spears do you think would be over-boosted? I can't remember running into any spears that didn't feel too slow to use.

 

[five bucks]

I wonder if they read your thread and were like, "Nah, next patch's version gonna be called v1.1.0 now"

TW can pull that trick on me as many times as they want as long as there's a good patch behind it.

 

[anoddhermit]

Which particular spears do you think would be over-boosted? I can't remember running into any spears that didn't feel too slow to use.

There are short spears with speeds in the 80s and 90s that would end up having 120+ speeds. Pilum is 93, Jagged Spear 89, Weighted Steppe Spear is 85, Fine Steel Leaf Spear is 84, etc. I'd agree currently almost all spears feel too slow to use, but that doesn't mean they need to be as much as 50% faster - you're looking at spears that are thrusting faster than dagger swings and thrusts after such a change.

 

[mujadaddy]

Kingdoms and Diplomacy

• Kingdoms now correctly determine their strength in tribute calculation, and offer to pay tribute for peace if they have taken much heavier losses.

Look, I know how this is gonna sound, but f*cking GET GOOD.

There is a way to not ever pay any tribute to any kingdom that has a fief left. @Ananda_The_Destroyer

Stop whining and start actually winning your wars. Not *thinking you should be winning*, but winning the way the game financially tells you is a win.

Granted: the War Score is misleading, and there are a thousand AI errors in the logical pursuit of the war, but,

if you're paying the AI, it's a choice.

• AI vote choices are now influenced by their Personality Traits.
• Siege artillery is now automatically placed in reserve once constructed, with a UI notification that it is ready to deploy.
  • AI will wait to deploy artillery until they have 3 engines ready.
• Minor faction clan parties now replace the troops in their party with unique troops of their own culture. Eg: if a Company of the Boar party picks up a Vlandian Billman, it will convert into a Boar Champion.
• Throwing axes' base damage have been increased across the board by 15%.
• Rain visual effects are now enabled.

No possible arguments against these, though.

Alright, I've started going through every single shield in a .txt,

Prepare for the heat death of the universe before you finish. WHYYY are there so many trash shields ffffffff

 

[mujadaddy]

Just implementing one single section would be great by itself, implementing all of them (maybe also fog, thunderstorm and sandstorm weather as well) would make the game improve by a significant margin.

That Realistic Weather mod makes it so fun to do battles.

 

[mujadaddy]

Tribute's usual definition (or at least that which I just looked up, I'm not exactly a history buff) is related to a subordinate relationship in which a lesser state pays a greater one

No, the Romans paid tribute to the Huns to avoid being attacked. It's not a subordinate empire relationship.

 

[Mad Vader]

No, the Romans paid tribute to the Huns to avoid being attacked. It's not a subordinate empire relationship.

Spoiler: History repeats itself

WHYYY are there so many trash shields ffffffff

Every intern needed to make a shield as an exercise and they put them all into the game.

 

[Zerosaiko]

No, the Romans paid tribute to the Huns to avoid being attacked. It's not a subordinate empire relationship.

Ah, I stand corrected on the tribute part then.

Look, I know how this is gonna sound, but f*cking GET GOOD.

There is a way to not ever pay any tribute to any kingdom that has a fief left. @Ananda_The_Destroyer

Stop whining and start actually winning your wars. Not *thinking you should be winning*, but winning the way the game financially tells you is a win.

Granted: the War Score is misleading, and there are a thousand AI errors in the logical pursuit of the war, but,

if you're paying the AI, it's a choice.

It's not like the game goes out of its way to tell you how to win wars. Like you said yourself, the war score is misleading. Honestly, I think it'd probably be better off without the bars in the diplomacy screen, for one. It's not like they really tell you anything useful.

Sure, players can and have explored the system or learned about it from others, but even those who did "GET GOOD" and delved into it the most (ex. Ananda) don't turn around and say "Oh yeah, I get it now, the way that tribute is decided is genius!" It's still not a particularly satisfying system even when you do beat it.

(Edit: https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php?threads/war-score-continues-to-feel-bad-man.455506/)

 

[mujadaddy]

It's still not a particularly satisfying system even when you do beat it.

I can sympathise, but I cannot agree that imprisoning those smug sons of dogs isn't actually a fun loop.

But people don't in general want to change their behaviour; they want to be able to win THEIR way instead of TW's way, and ... it's not that kind of game.

 

[Ananda_The_Destroyer]

There is a way to not ever pay any tribute to any kingdom that has a fief left. @Ananda_The_Destroyer

The way I avoid tribute is to walk up and attack them. Also if it's a mostly in-tact faction, if you just defeat their armies without taking fiefs and check diplomacy often, you can often get a payment for peace, but you must get it before the re-make parties.

 

[Zerosaiko]

I can sympathise, but I cannot agree that imprisoning those smug sons of dogs isn't actually a fun loop.

The loop seems to essentially be:
1. Take a bunch of prisoners with the Riding/Scouting perks that make it impossible for them to escape, or build a governor who can almost make it impossible for them to escape.
2. Wait until you can make the enemy lose a bunch of strength at once and then force a peace before they have time to put out more parties and/or hire mercs to replace what you just got rid of.

1 is pretty much doing what you always do, beating lord parties, except you need a specific build on you or compfam to avoid leaking like a sieve. The lords/ladies tend to blend together anyway, meh.
For 2, if they have the ability to just set up more parties or hire mercs the next day, why should they give up then and there? It just feels arbitrary.

But people don't in general want to change their behaviour; they want to be able to win THEIR way instead of TW's way, and ... it's not that kind of game.

I'm not sure what you mean by either of these sentences. By this logic, there's no point in suggesting any changes to the game at all because TW designed it the way it is and you should either take it as it is or mod it if you're on PC. Would armor have been buffed in 1.8.0 Beta if people hadn't hounded TW about it? Would TW have improved OoB and let us decide what formations we wanted our companions with in 1.1.0 Beta if people hadn't complained?

I don't actually know what it would take to make war decisions better (more intuitive, satisfying, etc), but it's definitely not by shrugging and saying "TW doesn't need my input, I'd have to be a spoiled brat to want anything anyway."

Not that I don't have my own reservations about Five Buck's war score suggestion, but what makes it any different from this one?

• AI vote choices are now influenced by their Personality Traits.

Look, I know how this is gonna sound, but f*cking GET GOOD.

There is a way to not ever let the AI interfere with the policies you want.

Stop whining and start actually influencing the AI's votes. Not *thinking the AI should vote in their own interests or at least be swayable*, but winning the way the game politically tells you is a win.

Granted: the traits are misleading, and there are a thousand AI errors in the way they vote especially since they all trend toward Tier 6 eventually, but,

if you're letting the AI vote against your policies or vote for foolish ones, it's a choice.

But people don't in general want to change their behaviour; they want to be able to vote for policies THEIR way instead of TW's way, and ... it's not that kind of game.

 

[mujadaddy]

The loop seems to essentially be:
1. Take a bunch of prisoners with the Riding/Scouting perks that make it impossible for them to escape, or build a governor who can almost make it impossible for them to escape.
2. Wait until you can make the enemy lose a bunch of strength at once and then force a peace before they have time to put out more parties and/or hire mercs to replace what you just got rid of.

1 is pretty much doing what you always do, beating lord parties, except you need a specific build on you or compfam to avoid leaking like a sieve. The lords/ladies tend to blend together anyway, meh.
For 2, if they have the ability to just set up more parties or hire mercs the next day, why should they give up then and there? It just feels arbitrary.
.

No, the loop is *capture their lords so they cannot form parties*. That's it. Most people stop at 30, 40 lords and that is why they fail. Get ALL of them. Get cash payments.

Regarding your facetious example: The latter change adds stuff to the game. The thing I dismissed is something which I do not consider a problem.

 

[Zerosaiko]

No, the loop is *capture their lords so they cannot form parties*. That's it. Most people stop at 30, 40 lords and that is why they fail. Get ALL of them. Get cash payments.

Ah, I disregarded that idea entirely because I remembered something about Ananda doing something similar without much luck, though I guess things have changed since then.

Changes needed to war diplomacy!!!

I'm just getting annoyed with how war operates in this game- You capture lords, put them in a keep and they escape 2 days later, execute them? people hate you! I had a castle full of enemy lords with captured castles put I still have to pay ridiculous amounts of tribute to make peace, and then...

forums.taleworlds.com

Though with that said, it's still basically down to hoovering up the enemy with prisoner perks (which tend to require specific builds), while all the enemy has to do to get tribute is to lie down and be slaughtered until someone else jumps in against the player. Though at that point, why not just siege them down entirely?

Regarding your facetious example: The latter change adds stuff to the game. The thing I dismissed is something which I do not consider a problem.

Feels like the same kind of problem to me. The system (war / voting) is built for the AI, and the player has to play around it by (imprisoning everyone / influence draining), and playing around it just sounds annoying and grindy.

 

[mujadaddy]

Feels like the same kind of problem to me. The system (war / voting) is built for the AI, and the player has to play around it by (imprisoning everyone / influence draining), and playing around it just sounds annoying and grindy.

I have come to the conclusion that I like how difficult it is, how absolutely hard it is to get anything done.

The system is built to produce a certain result. You are playing one game that is balanced to oppose you at all times ("Your faction"? No, you are one person, and you are not everywhere at once), and the AI is playing a different game. The game is built for the AI to be a *functional* structure to string together small unit battles, not to make it easy for you to conquer their pet-project world.

 

[Ananda_The_Destroyer]

Ah, I disregarded that idea entirely because I remembered something about Ananda doing something similar without much luck, though I guess things have changed since then.

What I'm talking about there is that the game world doesn't change at all if you capture an entire faction, their fiefs don't start having problems, other factions don't all notice and start carving them up, even you own vassals only look at fief power with no consideration of "nobody will be able to stop us", the faction won't run out of money or anything else. Any peace will be from you own vassals voting for it... which of course is a bad deal when they could just gobble up thier fiefs with no resistance, but they don't know that.

But yeah, you need over 40 before it even matters at all because they all have extra members to send out in replacement parties, so until you start cutting into those their amount of parties won't even change in a useful way. Even then they will pile on mercs and you have to catch them too. Of course you don't have to, I don't even have keen sight until I'm 1/2 done with the map these days, you can just doze them anyways and be annoyed with the conga of armies.

 

[mujadaddy]

Of course you don't have to, I don't even have keen sight until I'm 1/2 done with the map these days, you can just doze them anyways and be annoyed with the conga of armies.

Right, the game doesn't care about you wanting to win, you can knock other empires down to recruits for eternity if you want, or you can get serious and take over. Your choice == Good.