After playing vanilla m&b for about a week straight and screwing around with text mods, this is the first big package mod I've tried out. Been hitting it hard for a couple days/nights now. So far I really like the diversity of troops and mercs... the entire game balance has shifted in a lot ways, some good and some... well when you get a chance to work on this again, I have a few suggestions. (:
I'm guessing I got the latest version from filefactory. Item_kinds was last edited 10-19 in the archive.
Although you mentioned above you'd fixed weapon damages, I think they're still way overpowered on a lot of the specials since they seem to be popping up on regular troops instead of staying on specific characters. I recently took out a group of Thane deserters and looted about a dozen Royal Swadian swords with uber stats and selling for 6k each. Um.
The Golden Company heroes are way way out of line. Lvl 60? Yeah, the weekly on them is also pretty high, but it's too easy to afford them with the tons of loot dropping on everything. They tend to rob kill xp from everyone else since you'll never get another lvl or or additional skill points out of them. The chick is really nice to have as an uber medic early on. But all three of them can be hired for 500, strip their armor and omg swords, then send them off naked while you develop other heroes with more specific valuable skills. Even in plate they still get taken out by crossbows in seiges or mobbed out in the open. For the price, a few more recruited knights are worth more. It also doesn't matter that they don't like each other if your charisma/leadership is decent and you keep food around. So I would suggest making them lvl 20 or so and narrow their skill sets - medic, warrior/trainer, ranger.
Lords spend most of their time patrolling or just sitting there holed up since the map has so many bandits/deserters/mercs spawning. When they do go raiding it's with a big king/marshall war party with a bunch of lords and then half their kingdom gets polluted with unsavory characters. While this is sort of realistic, there's not a lot of action between warring factions. The number and quality of defenders in towns and castles is so high that only huge combined armies would even think of trying them. So as soon as you sign up with a faction you have to deal with these omg lord gangs, or join up with them, or skulk around looking for retreating lords that got stomped in a massive battle or maybe, if you're lucky, find a castle/town that was being sieged and the attackers ran off somewhere else leaving it weakened enough for you to have a shot. I'm not saying these are necessarily bad things, it's just far more difficult to claim more than your first crappy little village. And If you do manage to get a castle, you may or may not be able to afford a garrison that can stand up to said huge roving bands of lord/king armies. (: Dunno, I havent played through a really long game yet but so far it's been really difficult to get anywhere even in pansy mode.
Other minor bugs/probs:
- Regular hero hiring dialogs are screwed up (in the version I have). Instead of the normal text it says npc_dialog_response_3_blahblah or something like that. You can still guess and click a response so it's not a game breaker. Probably something in scripts.txt got pushed in the wrong place with the golden company heroes. I'll try to track it down.
- References to the Queen of Swadia still say 'his' ans 'he'
- Nord warhorses/chargers are hopelessly slow and have no skill requirement. I fixed that with the item editor and put them somewhat in line with the vanilla versions, stronger and slower.
- 457 itm_warhammer_talak has some weird skin, does insane blunt damage (twice as much as the oem 2h warhammer) and pops up in shops. If you put these on a bunch of lv 10+ heroes with sufficient str and 2h skill, you can go tear-assing around and every 'kill' they get is a prisoner. Entire battles can end with every enemy being wounded and taken hostage, plus you get their tons of loot. (: Not a huge exploit since you could do the same with regular blunt weps, but the damage is still out of proportion.
I don't mean to sound too critical, it's a good mod that changes the game significantly but it's a little rough around the edges and the game balance is all weird. Just trying to help. I'll keep messing with it and post more later if you decide to pick this up again.