Recent content by Duskmare

redphoenix596 said:

It is not too hard, just posted about this in another thread. Difficulty is a matter of perspective and player ability / playstyle. I personally would prefer the game to be still harder than it is, especially peacedeals need to be more expensive and there needs to be a longer gap between recruitment of AI mercenary factions as these are way too strong a boost to your power.

Also we need new lords for AI factions if you cheese and execute all their heroes they are just defenseless.

I play with a set of houserules my self to make the game harder so it stays interesting for me.

if you feel its too hard, decrease difficulty? though I think they should add more options to customize the difficulty level.

was super great that 1.3 made the game more difficult though, would have propably quit playing out of boredom already otherwise. Great changes and great update!

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How do you avoid the issues that I rose above? Do you play on easier difficulties with less unit and player damage or something, so that you can take on armies of 1200 with just 700?
Do you manage to rush and become the snowballing faction like I suggested?

The issues I raised are non-negotiable issues with the game. It's not simply 'difficulty' when the AI wants an impossible number of resources for you to recruit them. The only way you could find it easy is if you managed to avoid these issues. Otherwise you'd be having 2-3 armies of 1200 soldiers sent at you repeatedly while you can only have a max of 700 units.
Perhaps you're just getting lucky and none of your factions are snowballing?

Also, I've heard people say that peace deals can be super expensive too. I think that depends on how many battles you win or how many enemy units you destroy compared to how many of yours they destroy. So if you play well then peace is cheap but if you're getting beaten down by the AI then you won't be able to stop them from beating you down. Another issue, also based on the absurd numbers the barter system can come up with as "reasonable requirements".

I mean, I could reduce the damage that everyone takes and have fairly balanced battles with those armies of 1200, but I like the risk of units actually being vulnerable. The issue isn't that I'm not good at the game. I have destroyed a couple of those 1200 strong armies. It's the fact that the game is unbalanced and puts you in a position where it's nearly impossible to win. Even though I can defeat those 1200 strong armies, it's inevitable that it would cost me at least half my own army and that another 1200 strong army will roll up in a couple of minutes. As I said earlier, I literally had two of them sandwich me earlier because they're everywhere.

So yeah. It's great that you're finding the game harder and enjoying that but I don't think we're talking about the same thing here.

aG3NTo said:

I agree they should rework the whole "Upgrade Bandit" thing.

Vlandian Champ is most sought Cavalry and being able to get those guys from the Leadership 125 perk is massively OP.

Warhorses are some kind of issue but not the biggest here. Imperial Chargers you can buy for 400-500 around in villages with the Midlands Palfrey or their Cities.

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Nah, it takes about 3 years (real time) to get to that level of leadership. I honestly think it should be a level 50 perk or something instead. Or maybe a roguery perk since that's supposed to increase from training bandit units.
Would be even better if they made bandit units as interesting and fleshed out as actual faction units and then a roguery level allowed you to train normal recruits into bandit units.

Has anyone found a mod that fixes this? Honestly, a mod that just sets their barter to always accept would do because bartering is useless at the moment and having it as a necessary step to recruit lords that want the world and more is downright stupid.

I think the crazy prices are based on how well the faction they're a part of is doing. So if the faction owns half the map, thanks to snowballing, they'll snowball harder because their lords will become unrecruitable and enemy lords will want to defect to them more. Apparently the devs tried to fix this but it seems like it was a really bad 'fix' that just decreased their willingness to swap sides. Meaning big factions are less likely to poach lords from small factions but also that big factions will NEVER have lords poached, simply because no-one has the 20,000,000 (Probably more actually) they're demanding.

Saboteur163 said:

When you raid a village to starve the castle/city, obviously the relation goes down with that village. Once it's yours, I'm trying to increase that relation with the villagers but it's difficult because you can't accept any of their quests due to them not trusting you. Just wondering if maybe you could implement a system where the relation with characters will go towards 0 by like a point every 2-3 days or something. This would let people mad at you sort of "cool off" and become neutral. This would also mean people that you're friends with you continuously have to assist to maintain that relationship or they become neutral.

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I think it's supposed to do that but doesn't. It's got the notification for "your relation has increased with notables due to security" which I took to mean there were no bandits in the area and my relation would slowly rise with the notables in the surrounding villages. At the moment however it seems like there's just no way to raise reputation with village notables if you go too far into the negatives.

Other than maybe a very situational bonus for saving a band of villagers from an enemy... I've only done that once ever through and I can't remember if it increased rep with notables or with the faction lord that owned that area... Maybe both. I guess maybe it's better to let bandits overrun your areas so that they might attack villagers you can save, hahaha.

Vrenn said:

I'm torn on this issue. On the one hand, I do think engagements with looters should carry the risk of death. Absolutely anything could happen. Your tier 5 infantry can get separated from the line and be beaten to death by 4 ppl. Or he could trip and headbutt the sharp edge of his own weapon. Any scenario involving lots of angry ppl with sharp and pointy objects carries risks.

On the other hand, replacing these losses is a mammoth chore (and utterly ruins the flow of gameplay when you start engaging armies and besieging). If raising relations with notables allowed you access to higher quality troops, instead of just more choices of recruits (I really wished I'd taken a screenshot, a city had nothing but recruits on offer in every single slot) it might alleviate the problem.

With the new lord recruitment this issue is made even worse, with parties hoovering up everything available leaving no time for troops to 'mature' to higher tiers. Outside of those that offer noble lines of troops, or recruiting so far from the front line a village hasn't been recruited from for years, players have very little choice, and very little reason to raise reputation.

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1) No, not anything can happen. It's a game and if you do the fights manually then no-one 'falls on their own sword by accident' or gets separated from the line.

2) The type of units available from notables depends on both the prosperity of the city and how long the units have been sitting there. If they're being grabbed every 2 seconds then they're only going to be restocking with recruits and sometimes Tier 2 if it's a prosperous city. After sitting for a while they seem to upgrade the troops.

3) I've just realised that you said exactly what I said in point 2 in your third paragraph... So yeah, ignore that I guess.
I do agree that there's a lot of issues with Lords at the moment. The way they donate troops to a garrison even if they've only got 30 themselves, how they can recruit from raided villages, the fact they hire mercenary clans when they've only got a single castle left further diluting the tiny amount of recruitable units. Lord AI is just a mess. They need to make some sort of proportion rule where clans leave a kingdom if there's not enough fiefs for them all to restock troops.

Ruler of Calradia said:

It definetly would be great if auto resolve, at bare minimum, would give same results as F1 F3. Ideally it should first target lowest tier troops before it starts damaging higher tiers. Altough it could sometimes happen, it makes little sense if i loose 3 veterans but no tier 2 infantry. Once i no longer have to change it every single time i open the game, there is no way i would send my best troops in first wave. I might if i can just overpower enemy and suffer no casualties, but besides that i would be far more careful with them.

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What I dislike most is that it just doesn't take into account what kind of units you have. It seems to just assign your army a power value and that determines who wins, but it also seems to have some sort of loser bonus where the losing army will often kill twice as many as they have. So 7 bandits end up killing 14 units.

If the majority of your army is made of archers then a few foot soldiers without shields would never even reach them. If the majority of your army is horsemen then enemy archers would get flattened. They should pair up strengths and weaknesses in their calculation.
(Infantry are just bad against everything. They're just a buffer to keep your archers safe. Horse archers are just good against everything because they're so hard to kill and so accurate, but that's a different balance issue.)

Honestly, even if they replaced whatever power level crap they have with a blow for blow calculation it would work far better. With attackers hitting first, since that would make sense.

For example, your rank 6 infantry hits a looter, looter almost dies, a looter hits your rank 6 infantry, your infantry takes very little damage due to armour, then repeat until one dies.
Infantry could have a 20% chance to block melee attacks, upped to 40% if they have a shield. Similarly, if they have a shield their ranged block chance could be set to 80%.

With archers you could make it use ranged attacks vs ranged attacks, or give archers 2 free attacks to account for infantry having to approach and then they play it out like an infantry unit using melee attacks. Archers should also have a basic 20% chance to miss.

For horses it could be that all attacks do double damage, accounting for horse speed bonus (both when attacking and getting hit), but they can't be targeted twice in a row (like, they take the enemy's hit but instead of repeating the round until one dies it rerolls which member of your army is fighting, replacing the horseman, maybe with another horseman specifically to ensure horses take a bit of damage. This would reflect how a charge will take them into and out of range quickly), other than by spear-men (who automatically get the first hit regardless of attacker of defender and negate the double damage bonus and horseman swap after their first hit to a horse). Every hit should have a 50%, or maybe higher, chance to hit their horse instead and if their horse dies the enemy gets 1 free hit on the rider and then they're treated as an infantry unit. They would also have a bonus chance to evade archers, maybe 20%, with up to 40% chance to block if they have a shield. These should be rolled separately so that it can't stack to 100%, though miss chances should be stacked.

For horse archers you could have ranged attack vs ranged attack, like with archers, but with a -40% chance to hit for both sides due to their movement. If we're trying to emulate real battles then just give them infinite attacks against foot soldiers until they run out of ammo since they could skirt and shoot. Otherwise maybe they get 3 hits per enemy hit (though that's still overpowered). Against horsemen they maybe get 1 free ranged attack. Similarly, their horses have a chance to be hit instead and if it dies then the enemy should get a free hit and they should now be considered normal archer units (without the bonus 2 free hits if against infantry).
(Yes this is sorta unbalanced for horse archers... but that's because horse archers are unbalanced...)

Finally, after a unit is killed it should randomly pick the next two combatants from your entire army. This means that you wouldn't necessarily lose high ranking units just because they were picked first and accumulated damage from 10 enemy looters, for example.

That might seem a bit complicated at first glance but any system that accurately reflects your army and gives appropriate results for auto-resolving is going to be a bit complicated.

Stuntman Bob said:

Yeah and then realize that with fast aging and character death you will have to do it all over again to continue your game.

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Yeah, didn't touch that tick box. Figured that'd be about as fun as Ironman mode on a game like Xcom. It's all great and you feel the rush of the risk... until your units get killed by a lucky crit from across the map and then it's just rage and pain, haha.

But yeah, a game with slow progression and mandatory resets just sounds awful. Slow, steady progression over a long time is great. That's what Warband had. Fast progression with resets is also pretty good. That's basically your average roguelike. Fast progression and no reset gets boring fast because you end up overpowered, while slow progression with resets gets boring fast because of a feeling of futility.

So the devs really should be aiming for slow BUT STEADY progression over a long time. ("but steady" is in capitols there because they've got the 'slow' part they just need to dial it back to the point where players feel like they're progressing.)
As for the "long time" part, fixing the faction expansion so that they never fully take each other over would help a lot. Otherwise perhaps a character export, or even a clan export, much like the system in Warband.

iskar said:

Yeah, they should definitely stop nerfing things and making the game ever more grindy and get to implementing all the missing and broken stuff.

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Completely agree. Why the heck are they even trying to make it so grindy? It's not going to keep a playerbase just because there's a long playtime to get skills levelled up. The best way to keep a good playerbase is to make a game that feels good to play.

At this point I'd almost suggest firing their whole balance team and just asking a handful of randoms to do it instead. They couldn't possibly be worse at it...

Yep they totally ruined looters. Now they're just not worth fighting. It's too much of a bother to go through a loading screen and have your army of 100-400 units just charge them, but it's also just not worth the losses of auto-resolving.

They should have left them only being able to wound units instead of killing them. It was the only reason why players would bother to engage looters later into the game.

Honestly, I hope they just fix the damn auto-resolve and have it learn how good a player you are and then replicate your average results. Like, if I'm constantly winning 100 vs 20 battles with 0 losses then it should 'learn' and whenever I hit auto-resolve for a 100 vs 20 battle it should win it with 0 losses. Auto-resolve should be an option to speed up gameplay and allow you to skip through easy fights that just aren't worth your time to fight manually.

They could also probably fix it by having simulated damage split between every member of an army. So looters might do enough damage to kill 7 units but split between 100 that's not going to make much of a dent in their health.
Honestly, even if they just made it impossible for troops higher than tier 2 to be killed by looters in auto-resolve it'd be worth it again. It's just stupid when you lose a few high level units against a band of almost naked men with sticks and stones.

I agree with Keimpe. If the mission is to destroy a single large party of bandits then just make that the mission... If it's escorting a caravan then you're already starting by setting aside a lot of time to do that, then there should be small bandit groups attacking frequently, rather than one large bandit group attacking just at the end. It would make the missions far less boring (since you're just following a caravan for ages...), far more unique and less forced.

Honestly there seems to be some core balance issues with bandits and caravans in the first place. Caravans move way too fast to be caught by most parties, including bandit parties. Caravans have about 50 decent soldiers, way more than any group of bandits can deal with. Bandits usually only have groups of about 10 so they're just not a threat to most people and not worth fighting either. (Yet they also don't give up. Even against an army of 400...)
Side note: I hate the change they made to looters so that they can kill your guys now... Like, auto-resolve was the only thing making it worth fighting random groups of looters, but now you'll just lose a good number of experienced troops for no reason. So it's not worth the time to fight them and it's not worth the losses to auto-resolve. So they're just not worth it...
The only function they serve right now is to kick lords when they're down. Yesterday I saw Caladog (king of the Brittanians) get captured by looters. It was pretty hilarious since he's literally the king of a faction, but his faction had maybe a single castle left at that point.

Kakuna Rattata said:

That's one of the most grating things I've encountered with the roles system. Furthermore, the fact that many perks don't apply unless you have a certain role assigned means that only 4 companions can ever, ever, benefit from these, and only some of them, and only after extreme leveling. It would be different if you had more control over what sort of perks you choose between. Right now it just feels bad skipping past those governor only perks as the character etc.

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I thought if you had none assigned it just used your own character's stats. Like, I've not got a surgeon assigned but I can still see a surgeon bonus in the health recovery popup.

vota dc said:

Triple XP for weapon skills means you can get 30 for a single arrow headshot early game if you begin with 0. Even with 0 focus points is leveling up decently when the skill is very low.
I think they should reduce the penalty for character level and reduce the xp required for higher level skills. But then there is the problem with lords that will reach 500 skills when you will reach 200.
For skills like medicine and engineering X2 is enough at lowest level, then they should reduce xp for higher levels too while steward at lowest level is leveling up very fast.

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Are we playing the same game? Have you got an XP mod installed that you've forgotten about? Almost everything you've said is wrong, according to my own experience.
I've got 1 focus point in bows and have been using them fairly often over my 2 day play through but am only level 40. There's no way that triple XP would magically jump you to level 30 with no focus points, headshot or not.

Lords levelling? What the heck kind of system do they use? Because they certainly can't be levelling if they use the same system as our companions. Otherwise they'd gain a stat every 300 years. Do they perhaps already have a 10x XP multiplier or something? To be honest, even that would be negligible for companions in just about every skill other than stewardship.

The whole "reduce XP at higher levels" is a terrible idea. The whole system is conflicted with that because you gain overall levels by levelling individual skills. So it looks like being a jack of all trades will get you the most levels, which means higher levels because of the focus point caps. However, with an XP reduction at higher levels the devs are kneecapping their own levelling system. There's already increased XP requirements as you get into the 'higher' levels (I say 'higher' because it's only like level 50-100 that most skills settle at, out of more than 300).

And no, X2 for medicine and engineering is not nearly enough. Do remember that double XP doesn't mean double the level rate since there are diminishing returns within each skill anyway. So that might take 50 levels earned normally and turn them into about 70 levels. Medic is also self-defeating because if you play well then you don't level up medicine, since there are less units to heal. You also get very few chances to level up engineering since you have to siege castles to do that and you're often going to be interrupted by a huge enemy army that comes to defend it. Either way, it levels up super slowly. I've got barely 30 after taking 3 towns and 2 castles. At that rate I'll conquer the map with less than 50 engineering...