Recent content by Archonsod

If it's just the .exe missing the most likely issue is antivirus silently blacklisting / quarantining the file.

Troubleshooting it is going to depend on the AV, but the easiest way to check would be to disable / deactivate the antivirus, verify the files via Steam so it picks up and redownloads the missing .exe, then try launching it. Assuming that works you probably need to add an exception to the antivirus to avoid it trying to kill the file (assuming the file is safe of course; there's an outside chance Steam might be sending an infected file for some reason, but most of the time it's just the AV's process scanner deciding the telemetry or anti-cheat is doing something it doesn't like and deciding to nuke it)

Seff said:

If you beat about the bush, you can drum up Lost-Lamb and a fair few of the other Finns. Llandy, Archonsod and Pavlov are only accessible by other means.

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I do still visit on occasion

JohannTheFirst said:

These all affect the economy in one way or another.

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Affecting isn't the same as interlinking, and once you've got something stabilised it's easier to tweak the output up or down than rebuilding the entire system. The economy impacts a lot more than caravans, and things outside of the economy impact on caravans too. You pare it down precisely so you can track the ripple effects; If I wait until the game is system complete and then find the player has too much money I'd need to first test every possible source of income for the player to determine where the problem might be (usually by playing around with each in turn), apply what I think will fix it and hope the change doesn't cause issues elsewhere (or indeed, issues elsewhere don't then counter the fix). Conversely if I drill down on something like caravans I can tweak that until I'm happy, future systems (or systems which end up connected) can then be built around the stable system to take into account any knock on effects, at least in theory.

Mabons said:

Shield bash against shield does nothing, kicking is too short a stun to open him up in a meaningful way,

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Generally I'm finding the stun is long enough to get a quick thrust in, and two or three of those tends to put an end to it. Plus you can always kick them to death (or even better, over the nearest wall if playing siege. Yelling 'This is Calradia!' while doing so is entirely optional). Also as the kick doesn't leave you locked quite as long as Warband's did it's possible to kick and move around the side which lets you abuse the directional blocking somewhat (given they'll normally block towards the side you're trying to move around, a swing or overhead usually catches them out; with a relatively quick one hander I've even managed to hit them behind the shield via that method).

SmattlePattle said:

Manage your game holistically. Get all the features you want in, running bug free, and then balance them and ensure the intended challenge/player experience is correct.

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That's not how you balance a game. It's like having a room with fifty boxes, only one of them is ticking and the only way to figure out which one it is would be to start opening boxes. Much easier to fill the room five boxes at a time and sort out any ticking as it comes in. The game consists of various linked systems, it's perfectly possible to tweak an individual system even without all systems being present - how much money a caravan makes doesn't really impact on how fast a bow shoots for example.

When was the last time you saw the AI achieve 150 damage from an attack? Most of the time they don't even remember to couch their lance

Experimenting with the high tier armours it tends to work fine as is - with 50 ish armour on everything I could pretty much stand all day in front of any of the raider troop types without taking more than a handful of damage (pretty much only pierce or blunt was actually capable of getting through the armour). Even against the higher tier faction troops it was taking them a good minute or so to bring me down, even when trying to solo a few hundred of them. The key thing there though is consistent armour on every location; the issue with spending 40k on noble armour isn't that the armour itself isn't useful, it's that unless you also have helmet, gloves, cloak et al of comparable quality it's not going to add to survival a huge amount.

I suspect with a percentage based system you'd actually get the opposite effect. Given every attack would deal some damage it'd shift the utility of weapons to simply that with the highest raw damage, not to mention make looters mysteriously lethal even when you had full plate.

Derped@Warband said:

Best bet for attacker is to stick to cover

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Given the number of arrows in the air, I'm pretty sure that advice would hold even if they removed cavalry entirely

lockefeer said:

I don't believe the weapons are the sole problem here. When attacking, I want to be able to focus on assaulting the walls instead of getting picked by cavalry every 5 seconds. Lance, spear, it doesn't matter. Either restrict defender cavalry from getting out or find another solution but in my experience no attacker enjoys this.

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On the contrary, I love it when half the defending force is running outside the walls on their horses. Means there's less of them actually defending the flags, which is all you really need to worry about in siege

To be fair I've yet to see cavalry achieve much on either side in siege. It's the issue with public pickup games though - in theory it could be useful for the defenders to sally and stall the siege equipment or hit the attackers in the rear while they're trying to force the gate. In theory the attacker cavalry could be useful to break through defenders behind said gate. That would require some level of organisation though - in practice all I've seen is random cavalry tearing around the place, usually chasing each other, and at best proving to be a slight annoyance (more usually their habit of running solo or in ones and two's simply means they're gold fodder for whoever can be bothered to chase them down). It's pretty much at the point these days I only bother attacking them in passing to break up the otherwise monotonous slog to whichever point the actual fighting is happening.

TomaSkTemplar said:

Couching, bracing helps add effective mass behind an attack. For example, a 90 kilo guy running at you with a 1,5-2m long stick, say 4 cm diameter, and you standing there, receiving the stick when said guy has it braced, not lounging, just ramming. Instead of the whole body impacting, the braced stick will transfer the energy from the 90 kilo guy running with minimal loss compared to it being held by 1 hand, or being thrust forward. I would not want to be on the receiving end of the stick.

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Yes, the force exerted is a function of mass and acceleration. That's the problem though - the reason you thrust with the spear, or indeed swing a fist, is to increase acceleration. At a walking pace - which I'd define as slow enough to come to a dead stop without needing to slow down - the force generated is likely to be considerably less than the 1kgf minimum required (momentum would be close to zero). If I were to start running rather than walking it's much more likely I'll penetrate with the spear.
That's also not quite how couching works. Mass is an irrelevance - you hit with the spear tip, not a body slam. For humans it's pointless simply because you'll always (or at least should) be able to propel a few pounds of stick faster than you can propel a few kilo's of human plus stick, thus a swing will always hit with more force than simply walking or indeed running into someone. It works from horseback precisely because the horse can accelerate the spear much faster than a human can (and conversely, grounding the spear against a horse charge works for much the same reason, while instances of people casually strolling to their death on a grounded spear are mysteriously scarce).

Alkix said:

Okay, let's take this step by step. Let's say that you have a spear, and that I am standing 20 feet away from you. You raise the spear toward me (thrust) and you walk (advance). You aim the point the spear at my chest and i don't move or defend myself. You continue to walk (advance) toward me until the point of the spear touches my chest. You keep walking.

What is my current situation?

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That depends. Breaking the skin with a knife (and functionally a spear is simply a knife on a stick) requires between 10 and 20 newtons to be applied, or roughly 1 - 2 kgf against the tip of the spear. If you're simply standing there, the only force you're exerting is against gravity (perpendicular to the spear). So all things being equal, the end result is you being pushed backwards at around the same speed I'm moving. In order to actually break the skin I require that 1 Kgf is generated somehow, either by you pushing against the spear or else accelerating the spear to generate the force against you thanks to inertia (theoretically I could also increase the mass of the spear, but that's somewhat unlikely).
Though even then this would just be piercing bare skin - if my intent was to wound I've been a bit silly aiming for the chest since it pretty quickly requires piercing through bone, which would require much more force than I could generate simply by walking. I'd be much better off lowering the spear to your stomach where I'd only need to worry about soft tissue. It's also implying bare skin, as soon as you start getting dressed the force required starts increasing (and thus the harder you need to push back or the faster/bigger I need to make the spear).

Alkix said:

If you think walking a spear into an opponent won't harm them, I don't know what to tell you.

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It's not me you'd need to worry about, it's Isaac Newton. Though I'm sure NASA would probably also be entertained by you explaining how we've had the basic laws of motion wrong all this time

Archers aren't the problem, it's the AI.

Alfredthegreat said:

Firstly, archers are way too accurate, it's like every AI has aimbot on.

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Not really. There's some significant scatter on the arrow over range even if you max out your bow skill, and the AI archers don't have maximum skill. The problem is the AI has a tendency to bunch up, particularly when it's decided to attack a target and even if ordered into a loose formation. Once the AI adopts it's favoured rugby scrum formation accuracy tends to be irrelevant - you can shoot without letting the crosshairs close and still be guaranteed to hit *something*.

Second, to many unshielded infantry in armies, the vast majority of AI troops are composed of low tier infantry who don't have shields.

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Only partially fixes it. The old M&B trick still works (to great success in captain mode) as the AI will nearly always turn towards the closest threat. Stand a little forward and to the side of your archer line and the AI will obediently open itself up for enfilade as it decides to pursue you. It becomes a huge issue as soon as you introduce cavalry since it'll cheerfully turn to face the horseman running along behind it even while under sustained fire from the front, allowing even shielded infantry to be reduced to pincushions in short order.
The problem is that the AI in M&B has always operated on an individual rather than a group level so when it perceives a close threat it ends up with 95% of the army pursuing it Benny Hill style rather than doing something more sensible like securing a 2:1 advantage against that threat while retaining the majority of it's force against the larger enemy force. This is also what tends to make archers seem overpowered simply because they're usually further away - if you watch the AI what tends to happen is that it'll focus on much closer melee infantry or cavalry even when it would otherwise have the opportunity to break through and pursue the archers, leaving them plenty of time to pull back and continue shooting.

Third thing is that archers are too effective in close range, reaching the archer line doesn't mean much as when you engage one of them, the rest of them easily shoot you with 100% accuracy.

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What precisely are you expecting at point blank range? The problem there is 'engaging one of them'. You'll notice a similar problem even with melee infantry in that when you engage one of them their friends have this annoying habit of stabbing you in the back of the head

GreenLight7 said:

many people tired of using CEMENTISTS WODS in game

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It's because it's overpowered. Nerf CEMENTISTS WODS!

tizuby said:

It already does that. Your EXP rate is much higher the more green there is. As you get closer to the boundary it drops.

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I believe some of that is related to focus point spending though.

Instead of completely nixing the penalty phase (where you go past the boundary far enough till you get 0xp gain) they should cap the total possible attribute amounts like they do focus, and once you hit the maximum attribute level the penalty should never reach 0. Something like 0.5 instead. And that should really only take effect around 250 to 275.

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The problem with the cap goes back to what I was saying about the relative value of the attributes. Vigour, Control and to an extent Endurance are somewhat hampered by the fact that they contain multiple skills you wouldn't ordinarily expect on the one character while Social and Intelligence contain skills you do generally want on the same character. This causes a problem since combat skills in particular tend to be quicker to level, so at some point if you're playing a horse archer for example you end up needing to spend time as a crossbow wielding infantryman to raise the otherwise useless athletics and crossbow skills enough to let you raise the cap on riding and archery. Play a trader on the other hand and since all three of their important skills come under Social and tend to be a little slower to raise you don't really hit the same problem until much later, if at all.
Removing the cap and using attributes as a bonus mitigates this somewhat simply by removing the need to grind redundant skills for more combat oriented playstyles (and relying on the non-combat skills being slower to raise simply due to opportunity to prevent those becoming efficient means of power leveling).

Razorts said:

How fast you want to level up actually? The system is made specificaly so you would specialize. Do you want to have every skill maxed out?

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Yet the design of the system forces you to generalise. One of the big problems with Bannerlord that Skyrim avoided is that not all of the skills are equally useful at all points. Try specialising as an engineer for example and you're immediately confronted with the issue that there's no way of doing so in the early game, and getting to the point it becomes useful is somewhat unlikely due to the cap imposed by low attributes in those skills that are actually useful in the early game.

The problem by and large comes down to the way attributes interact with the skills. Part of it is the setup - Control governing ranged skills makes thematic sense, but it's terrible gameplay wise; it's highly unlikely a player is going to specialise in bows, crossbows and throwing (for one the inventory won't allow it), but you're forced to invest points in Control in order to be able to specialise in one of those skills. Compare that to Intelligence on the other hand, which covers Engineering, Medicine and Steward, all three of which could be (are) useful to the player from the mid-game onwards. Such disparity in the value of attribute points is unlikely to result in a well balanced system at the end of it.

tizuby said:

The soft caps are overly aggressive right now, for sure.

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I suspect they'd be better inverted, i.e. rather than applying a penalty to skill growth once it passes the attribute boundary instead provide a bonus to skill gain up to that boundary. It'd retain it's incentive to specialise without overly punishing players for focusing on the 'wrong' skills at the wrong time.