Recent content by HalfMetalJacket

I don't think TW really knows what they're doing at times. Feels like they just end up putting out the wrong stuff half the time and go woops.

Either that or they have their own notions about what's good and why. Just like when they removed throwing on pilums.

FallGeneral said:

Bruh it's medieval times.

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The middle ages were not this lawless and savage time. Back then, there were expectations and codes that dudes followed.

Among them generally being that nobles were not generally executed when captured.

Tangentially related to what I posted earlier, but here's something I've been doing.


Basically my way of having a more realistic distribution of levies, professionals and nobles, using the ATC spawn mod.

Basically, different types of 'basic' troops will spawn, all with their own separate troop trees. Stronger troops will be less common and more expensive to upgrade while cheaper ones will be more plentiful and cost effective.

five bucks said:

If you look at the current game state, in that video again, even with the weak armour in its current state, half of the 250 shock troops survive the run across the field to the 100 archers.

So, if TW doubles the average HTK of armour (including head armour- not only chest HTK would be buffed), and it were 100 shock troops against 100 archers, I think that would be close to an even fight despite the lack of shields. Or perhaps the archers will have a slight advantage, which I'm fine with.

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Well I like to think that with an increase on armour, they will fix the accuracy of archers too. I could be wrong, but they did nerf archers by making them stupider. Even if they become weaker in the end, I want them to feel like experts dammit.

five bucks said:

It really takes the feeling of eliteness from them when every second village provides a greater number of them than normal troops.

Could genuinely be a good idea if armour gets fixed and good troops are dying less often, so that replacing them when they do die isn't as easy.

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And if there's one issue with RBM, its that once you get a good army of top of the heap heavy infantry, it starts getting a bit too easy to overwhelm all the other armies. So yeah, make elites elite again(?)

five bucks said:

I said 2.4m, because that is the minimum length a kontarion was in order to be called a kontarion; the weapon ranged from 2.4 to 4m. "Shorter version", to me, means "on the smaller end of the range". So in essence, their spear/pike would be at least 2.4m, if not even a bit more. Otherwise I think it would just be called a spear.

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Guess its down to interpretation then. But I think mine is betterer than your's, so take that L buddeh.

five bucks said:

Thanks, I'm very glad we agree overall, and you have made my idea more appropriate to the current state of the game, and less reachy.

The way I see it, hybrid troops would be classified as whatever their primary is (eg: Faris are ranged cavalry because their primary is their javelin, with a side of melee cavalry,) and they would have counter relationships with more troop types, but the counters would be even softer - smaller advantages and disadvantages.

In the Faris' case, smaller advantages than most ranged cav - maybe even none- against pike infantry since they have fewer javs to throw before being forced to engage in melee against a pike wall; smaller disadvantage against ranged infantry as they can ride them down with their lances.

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Hmm, this is unimportant but I would not call Faris ranged infantry. You might as well call Heavy Axemen ranged infantry considering the amount of handaxes they run around with. Last I checked, they pack more ammo than the afforementioned Faris. And I can't help but think you would not pigeonhole them into being ranged infantry.

five bucks said:

Agincourt is a fantastic example of the effectiveness of armour (at least, plate). The French knights' plate let them run a kilometre under heavy arrow fire to reach the English lines, and a lot of them had to be killed "using hatchets, swords and the mallets they had used to drive their stakes in"! The English bowmen were simply putting out such a massive amount of arrows that eyeholes eventually got hit by chance.

Agincourt showed that you could fire a huge amount of arrows at an armoured man and have to get lucky in order to actually kill him. Of course, plate was more effective against arrows than mail, so I'm not asking to be that arrow-proof.

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There has to be something said about the fact that longbow men were able to basically execute fully armoured knights after all those shots though. Being able to drain your enemy's stamina with arrows and force them to be on an exhausting defensive illustrates a good deal of how strong they can be. I know the muddy fields were what really slowed and sapped the french to the point of losing that badly, but still.

Seeing as there is no stamina system in BL, its hard to replicate that sort of effect. Seeing as a lot of real fighters often believe stamina- health, archers should be hurting armoured troops. But I don't think anyone is advocating for armour to absolutely invincible to arrows, yeah.

Now whether we ought to have a stamina system is a different question... I mean if we wanted to give lighter troops some sort of advantage, yeah.

CrazyElf said:

This is inaccurate. Massed archers and crossbows would very effective against horse archers, assuming they outnumber the horse archers. Lanchester squared would favor the foot archers.

https://www.mindef.gov.sg/oms/safti/pointer/documents/pdf/Vol42No2_5%20Lanchester%20Square%20Law.pdf

https://www.sealionpress.co.uk/post/the-nitpicker-s-guide-to-ancient-warfare-horse-archers








Is be normally reluctant to cite Quora, but the answers here are well written.

How did Mongol mounted archers, as big targets with small bows, beat standing archers with longer bows who can hit the horse further away?

Hans Widjaja's answer: By not getting into an archery fight with them, thats how. And preferably, by not fighting them at all, unless the odds were absolutely in their favor. You are absolutely right that foot archers were the absolute bane of mounted ones, IF the mounted fellows were foolish en...

www.quora.com

How were horse archer armies defeated?

Susanna Viljanen's answer: There are three ways to defeat them: 1. Ignore them 2. Outshoot them 3. Practice area denial ‘Horse archer armies’, i.e. horse nomad armies, are basically skirmishers. Their intention is not to cause actual casualties but to irritate, harass an infuriate the enemy into...

www.quora.com

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Well, the more you know. Now all we need is for archers to be more effective at actually hitting horse archers, in exchange for losing their fighting power against everything.

five bucks said:

Right, I see. In that instance, the actual face was quite a small target. You could be hit on the top of your head on the helmet, or on the side of your head on the coif. Bannerlord deals with this by abstraction, counting the protected and unprotected areas of the head as the same and giving armour bonus for head area but also giving a damage bonus for headshots. Most shots land on the body, I'd say about 1 in 6 shots (that don't miss entirely) are headshots at T5-T6 accuracy.

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Its the further away you are, but when you start getting closer and closer the odds get worse. And well, I'd be pretty damn sad if an arrow punched right through my mouth. So yeah it probably won't happen as much as you'd think, but I don't think anyone is going to be happy to run into volleys without a shield or visor. All in all, a bad time for your given early medieval warrior without their shield.

five bucks said:

I'd be happy enough reducing the number of elite recruit-giving notables in castle villages.

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Yeah, too many damn noble troops around, its stupid. Never understood the complaints about not having enough of them. Now they're everywhere and they end up becoming mainstay troops as opposed to an elite reserve.

But to me that's not even enough. I want to go as far as to make Imperial Legionaries rare. If I had my way, the majority of the average player's army would be T3, and they will weep at the loss of even a single T5.

five bucks said:

It was a real thing - Byzantine peltasts carried a spear of over 2.4m length, as well as javelins. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peltast#Medieval_Byzantine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_army_(Komnenian_era)#Peltasts

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Reading your sources and they do mention that 'peltasts' did run around with shorter versions of 2.4m kontarion spears. Emphasis on shorter though, so I'm not seeing pikemen but rather your dime in a dozen javelineer. Longer spears than usual maybe, but not pikes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_army_(Komnenian_era)#Peltasts

five bucks said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_of_pike Pikemen were used offensively to great effect. They could charge enemy infantry with pikes leveled. And kill them. Even in very close quarters one could use one's sidearm, which Bannerlord pikemen have. William Wallace used the pike schiltron offensively, sometimes to great effect against English cavalry.

Particularly notable was the Swiss pike square, which defeated competent combined arms forces in an offensive role, despite being only made up of pikemen who were only armed with pikes, with no archer support.

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Well there are exceptions of course, the majority of the time, pikes did not really operate that way. But I'll tell you what, I would be amused to see charging pikemen be a thing for troops with enough athletics now lol. Especially for Battania.

five bucks said:

In addition, you can look at Alexander the Great's army, who had no gunners or arbalests. Although they were supported by cavalry and peltasts, the main fighting unit was the phalangite, who used the long sarissa pike in phalanx formation, definitely for killing and attacking.

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Not the way I understood it. Phalanx guys can kill dudes, but that wasn't their job at all. Their job was to pin the enemy formation down and keep them in place for Alexander's cavalry, the real killers. Hence the 'hammer and anvil' expression. Pikes were the anvil, cavalry the hammer.

five bucks said:

Even if you aren't convinced by all this, at the very least it should be reasonable to say that pikemen should have better armour and melee fighting skills than ranged infantry, and so have a good advantage there.

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I'll admit this much yes, unless the archers are uniquely capable of melee combat due to shields, skills or armour.

five bucks said:

Well, after this productive discussion and thinking about it more, you're beginning to change my mind. It takes a lot to justify archers not dying when charged by cav without someone to defend them, if we work under the assumption that Taleworlds fixes cavalry AI, and makes the speed bonus not defy physics. I guess melee cavalry could be a soft counter to ranged infantry in addition to shock infantry, and ranged cavalry could be a soft counter to shock infantry in addition to pike infantry.

After all, both types of cavalry are rarer and more expensive than other troop types, which means that ranged/pike/shock infantry will not face them *too* often, so being countered twice is not as bad; and their higher cost justifies countering two different things where other troop types only counter one.

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I'll be content with this much, so long as its not absolute (which tbf you don't want it to be). Again, shock/pikes will not have much fun going after archers, melee cav can absolutely get splattered if they get tied up in one place and hit by shock troops and etc etc. Good chart though otherwise.

I suppose more troop types can be fitted in. Not too sure which. And it gets messier when you talk about hybrid troops too.

I think you guys sorely misunderstood @Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James in regards to their 'upgrade' system thing.

The trouble with Bannerlord and much of M&B is that building armies basically boils down to turning recruits into knights out of seemingly nowhere, then just spamming that. There's no variety, and utterly no use for lighter troops. And having those sorts of armies are just ridiculous.

What they seem to be suggesting is more about having a realistic army of mostly light levy troops with a few well armoured professionals. So it would be more like some padded spear levies with an elite element of knights in the back. But never just pure knights.

I like this for one, and I'm actually trying to make a mod according to that logic. Not exactly upgrades only improve skills, but basically a levy spearman will never just turn into a knight, or even a mailed man-at-arms. They will however always be around to recruit and good enough to fill the roles you need them to fill.

five bucks said:

Both sources are pretty unambiguous. The men involved have multiple arrows sticking out of their padded mail hauberks, without serious injury. This means they were hit on the body repeatedly.

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Again, I'm more worried about how they protected their faces. In that era, visored helmets were not all that common, shields were. Shieldless troops running around without visors are in a lot of trouble. Their mailed bodies will be relatively unharmed, but their face will look like a dart board.

five bucks said:

You are correct. But in that instance it's just a question of distribution of tiers (there should be more T2/T3 and less T6), as opposed to what the tiers are equipped with. It's fine that high tier troops wear quality mail, the only issue is that there's a lot of high tier troops.

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The only way to really solve this is to go the VC route of making troops REALLY hard to actually upgrade. Either that, or De Ri Militari styled troops.

five bucks said:

But with the horse armour it's wrong on both counts. There are both too many high tier troops and in addition, those high tier troops shouldn't even have full horse armour. What I mean by this is that if you look at the Bayeux Tapestry, you'll see lots of unarmoured horses, even for Odo and William. But in Bannerlord, full horse mail shows up at around T4.

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Sure. I could be wrong though, but I can't help but think that horses aren't so fragile, and they aren't entirely easy to hit. And by the time they are, archers are usually ****ed.

five bucks said:

https://forums.taleworlds.com/index...roop-trees-and-solutions.448355/#post-9768096 well here you can see how I'd do it, I would make a distinction between "proper" shield infantry (large strong shield) and other infantry with smaller backup shields. So shields would still be very common, as accurate to time period, but *good, well protective* shields would be rarer.

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Maybe, but I really can't help but think that the predominant style of shield of this era were pretty much big protective ones. That's ignoring

five bucks said:

One example is the Empire troop tree. Their main infantry unit would change to a pikeman with javelins and a small backup shield (representing the Byzantines' use of the Peltast, who comprised a large part of their armies, and the Kontarion pike). The peltast would diverge to a "proper" shield infantry unit at T3. So still representative of the time period, but less *good* shields.

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Pike and javelin really doesn't work with me at all, they both come across as weapons at odds with one another. A pike is for tight, relatively static formations while javelins are more of a thing for skirmishers and shock troops. But that's nitpicking, and I still can't jive with the idea of reducing the overall amount of shields in the game for something that looks really wrong in my eyes.

five bucks said:

You're right. I've complained about this before. It's due to the fact that AI is bugged attacking with spears/pikes to hit people behind them in their formation interrupting their attack, and also tends to use their ****ty sidearm to fight infantry. Just two of the many things that needs to be fixed. Though their recent armour buffs to Vlandian Pikeman have at least helped a little.

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I mean there's all sorts of things going into it, but I don't recall pike infantry were necessarily good at actually killing other infantry. Their main tool is defence and being really hard to budge or kill, not actually doing any killing. In pike and shot warfare, they had gunners and arbalests for that. What usually happened otherwise was pikemen were just one element of a combined arms affair.

And pikes are not as dominant as spears in a duelling stand point. Nowhere near as quick or nimble, and its not nearly as easy to shorten the point. They reach for sure... but so do archers.

five bucks said:

I think it makes logical sense for shield infantry to be the counter to ranged infantry, because out of all troop types they're the best protected, can reach archers almost without injury, and then beat them in melee - unlike every other troop type, who has to take injury on the approach. Shieldwalls are slow, but it's not like field battles have a timer ticking down or anything, so if the archers are unable to injure you on your inoxerable approach to kill them, the speed isn't a big issue.

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Gonna have to agree to disagree then. I'm never ever worried about shield troops for my archers. Cavalry are the always the biggest threat to them.

five bucks said:

Yep, but the source does actually specify that it was the hauberk that was taking arrows without injury. "I saw some with from one to ten arrows sticking in them, and still advancing at their ordinary pace without leaving the ranks."

Also refer to another account from the same source for more confirmation: "...and whilst the Turks were fleeing before him, they (who shoot as well backwards as forwards) would cover him with darts. When he had driven them out of the village, he would pick out the darts that were sticking all over him; and put on his coat-of-arms again..."

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Again, I imagine that would be because that mailed man's first priority was to hide his head behind a shield.

five bucks said:

For melee cavalry, horse armour should be weaker/less common, to give the archers an opportunity to shoot down the horses while they cycle charge around, as was a major role of theirs in real life. It isn't realistic for the time period to have so much common heavy horse armour anyway. In addition, the way speed bonus works in Bannerlord gives archers a damage bonus against cavalry that are charging directly at them. I'm not a huge fan of this due to its violation of physics, but it does help balance things out as it stands.

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Look, it isn't realistic to have as many mailed troops as you do in BL, but here we are. And we're talking about changing the game's thing up. No reason to keep the physics nonsense.

five bucks said:

For shield infantry, them countering ranged infantry is obviously good. I do think that it would be worth making shields a tiny bit more vulnerable to arrows, to make shield infantry less of a hard counter and be more realistic- I think I've said this in the past. I have also previously suggested reducing the amount of shielded troops in the troop trees and increasing the number of pikemen, to give archers more unshielded targets to shoot at.

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Can't say I like the idea of reducing the amount of shield infantry around at all, since that's entirely inauthentic to the period Bannerlord is trying to go for. If I were to take liberties with 'realism', I would rather let archers do decent hurting than to just reduce shielded infantry. That being said I like making shields weaker and actually break, even if it makes them less of a counter.

five bucks said:

For shock infantry and pike infantry, the idea is that armour is balanced so that it is roughly twice as effective as it is now - see my earlier posts in this thread and other threads. The current situation is that a T5 bow takes 4 chest hits to kill T5 armour, which is enough to murder a shieldless troop before he can charge across a field to reach an archer. My proposed change is to roughly double the chest hits to kill, so that a T5 bow would take 7-9 chest hits to kill T5 armour.

This means that by the time shieldless shock/pike infantry reach the archers, depending on how accurate the archers were, they should be still alive, but injured. Somewhere between 25-75% health.

So then you have a fight between a good melee fighter who is injured (shock/pike infantry), and a bad melee fighter who is at full health (archer). Archers would thus neither counter, nor be countered by shieldless troops.

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Pike infantry suck in actual melee though.

five bucks said:

They do not counter/be countered by melee cavalry. They only counter horse archers and get countered by shield infantry.

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I really don't see the sense in that. Shielded troops should be relatively safe from archers, but they shouldn't be all that good at actually killing them unless they do happen to get into chopping range... which again is easier said than done since a shieldwall formation makes them slow as molasses.

Melee cavalry on the other hand have speed, impact and whole of killing power. They're practically perfect for running down archers and outright annihilating them. How aren't these guys a hard counter to archers is beyond me.

five bucks said:

The solution here is make ranged cavalry less stupid. Currently they are prone to directly charging into melee-based threats they can avoid, unless you tell them to follow you, and circle around the enemy, which makes them get much better results.

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I had good success with just throwing melee cavalry against enemy horse archers even when they were crazy smart. Again, they couldn't exactly fight well, but melee cavalry do enough to straight up nullify horse archers while the rest of the army is freer to fight back. Not a hard counter at all, and I do lose the ability to use heavy cavalry, but then they don't get horse archers.

five bucks said:

In real life padded mail allows you to survive a run across a field under arrow fire, so if armour is changed to work correctly, the shock troop will be able to reach the archer with only minor/medium wounds, and fight him in melee, and have a good chance of winning. If he can do this, he isn't countered.

That's why armour is relevant to the discussion of counters.

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Don't the guys in your padded mail source usually have shields and maybe a few visored helmets? If so then yeah, I see why they don't necessarily struggle. I imagine without that sort of protection, you'd get more Harold Godwinsson type scenarios than not.

Still, isn't your little paradigm just going to result in archers being countered by almost everything? Melee cavalry, shield infantry, your shock infantry and pike infantry will more or less have comparable levels of armour. All of them will just straight up run up to an archer and end up killing them with ease more or less.

And then your horse archers aren't really doing much damage either, considering smaller numbers, weaker bows and less accuracy. And considering melee cavalry tends to end up doing quite enough to contend with horse archers, they're just going to be even less useful. So why even bother with a counter to something that's that weak?

I'm all for knocking ranged combat down a notch, but not to the point of uselessness.

five bucks said:

Because archers also counter horse archers in real life. Being on foot allows you to use more powerful bows, nock, aim and draw faster, and fire much more accurately when you're not firing from the back of a galloping horse. All these things combined - half of which Bannerlord already simulates - make crossbowmen and archers the real-life counter to horse archers, and the Bannerlord counter as well. If you match 50 Khan's Guard against 50 Fian Champions, the Fians win.

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Well in fairness, I don't really consider foot archers to be an actual counter to horse archers, so much as a necessity to stand a fighting chance against them. From what I know in real life, the only truly effective counter for horse archers was more horse archers. Otherwise its having a lot spearmen and archers capable of holding ground and keeping it.

Then again, I don't really see spearmen as a hard counter to cavalry- again, I consider them the bare minimum to fighting them off. Pikemen are the guys you want for that- either that or having your own cavalry.

five bucks said:

So if we want to take a realistic perspective, archers should not be countering shock troops and pikemen in a normal situation (charge on open ground), unless they are doing something stupid like standing still and waiting for the archers to shoot them to death.

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Its pretty bold of you to assume that shock troops and pikemen will always be heavily armoured. And even if they are... well that's not because being a shock troop or pikeman makes you a non counter. Its the armour, and really armour just counters a lot of ****, so its not even relevant to this discussion of counters.

five bucks said:

You're not wrong - from a realism perspective, it's not exactly that simple; but from a game perspective I think we want all troops to have a purpose as you said, and counter systems that are an abstraction of real life "counters" can do that well. They also introduce tactical depth/skill by creating right and wrong decisions for players to make.

I do want to clarify that I'm not exactly advocating rock paper scissors. I want to see soft counters rather than hard counters. With soft counters, a cavalryman can still defeat a pikeman (his intended counter) if he is a couple of tiers higher (representing better training/equipment), or hits him from the flank, or uses terrain to his advantage, etc.

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No, I want hard counters too. Only difference is no clean rock paper scissors- I want **** going all sorts of directions.

I mean if the Bretwalda team came out with Viking Conquest, I don't see why the CA Eagle Rising lads can do their own version of that.

five bucks said:

This.

I don't think archers should counter shock troops, I think melee cavalry should.
Melee cav > shock troops > shield troops > archers > horse archers > pike troops > melee cav.
A sensible counter cycle that represents real life, where every troop type has a role to fill.

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I get what you're going for, but I think its way too simplistic to boil it down to that.

I don't see why archers can't counter shock troops and pikemen both. You don't think melee cavalry end up being their hardest counter? That would mean shield troops and melee cavalry counter archers, which evens it out.

Still, I don't think that sort of rock paper scissors represents combat best. But I do agree that every soldier should have a purpose.

After going through the latest RBM ****, I must say that I have f*cking blast, holy sh*t its fun once you get used to it.

Still not feeling the wacky looking javelins, but otherwise damn. They made swords feel hilarious. Feels like a real weapon of finesse now and you just butcher peasants- and you can eventually chop down a mailed knight eventually too.

Archers don't feel great anymore sure, but its not like they do nothing. Being able to cut down less armoured/shieldless troops is useful, and since shields will actually more it makes quite an impact to soften them up.

Love the cavalry most of all though, they feel strong in a good way and not in the stupid way of vanilla.

Glad I donated to those guys in the first place.

世界知名伟人 said:

High tier troop have so many other benefits that I don't think they should be any cheaper. Rich players can use them as a way to increase their strength, even if seems not worthy enough. They take less food and capacity, they are less likely to die. A party of 100 tier5 troops can be a lord hunter in campaign map, while 600 recruits can do nothing except being garrison(very slow movement, or you can't bring them all out) So many benifits that it's enough to make people to prefer to use them. I think it's ok to make it expensive, so that the player would try to explore some low tier troops instead of only use the most elite ones no matter how rich or poor he is.


Warband is not a well-balanced game, If some troop can take on 10 recuits(20 denars) alone in melee, I think it should take 40 denars. Expensive though, player would still be likely to use them for their competence as long as they can afford it, but not fill them all in castle as garrison, instead, some cheap and useful middle tier troops come into play. If it only takes 20 or 25 denars, player would surely only use the most elite troops if possible.

But the armor and damage calculation are the same I guess? So it might be solved in a similar way?



I doubt if it's that serious, ranged troops may struggle in some terrain where infantry would never. Infantry can take advantage of terrain easily to hide from enemy archers safely, when defend of course. I had some playthrough not using archers, not bad, though not as powerful as fian

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I mean, most M&B games are all about getting the best possible troops to fill up your slots in the end, lower tier troops don't factor into **** more often than not. Only game I can think of where they did was Viking Conquest, and that's because it takes forever to train troops.

Seriously, no one gives a **** about the Swadian Man-at-arms. Its about them Swadian Knights. Same thing for Nord Veteran Warriors and etc.

Also RBM has a rebalance for troops too, so you don't have to worry about them being weaker. They all get different setups to make them work in the RBM paradigm.