Recent content by Mikal Manfriedson

I concur, looters and bandits should not spawn at random and scale up with player level.

However, I could see the spawning tied to certain situations:
- Province has food shortages -> spawn looters
- Villages were looted -> spawn looters
- low Securitiy -> spawn bandits
- large army defeated -> spawn deserters
- there is a hideout in the province -> spawn parties but do not tie them to player level. Upgrade troops if parties are successful and hideout 'wealth' rises
- high prosperity -> spawn Bandits (are attracted by wealth to steal), but remove looter parties (finding work is better to losing life while forcing breadcrumbs out of traders) EDIT: and vice versa so low wealth removes bandits and spawns looters.

Player interaction could also influence this a bit
- visit a hideout and give the bandits money and gear -> spawn units but have truce with this hideout and its parties. Train roguery skill
- have city crimelord give task 'create hideout' -> gather some equipment and men to found a new hideout in province. Result: train roguery, have truce with their bandits, get % of loot. While mission is open you have additional talk option when encountering bandit/looter parties "recruit for hideout". Merchants may not like you for this, if they get wind of it.
- with the right roguery skill you may found hideouts yourself - like a small castle to manage. You are a bandit king after all, aren't you?
- Negotiate truce with bandit parties (Bribe with money to be 'protected' instead).

I always wondered, why the hideout leaders are so generic. Why not have rogue NPCs that could be recruited after defeating them or tie the number of hideouts to number of NPCs doing roguery. Looters and Bandits should be a meaningful part of the game and not just XP-fodder that becomes annoying in the long run. Bring back the Manhunters if there are many looters/bandits in a region.

Sadly, I would tell you to use them to skirmish - but alas, this is not quite possible due to current meta.

A skirmisher - in my book:
- should be using hit and run tactics thus being a bit more fleet-footed than other infantry.
- weed out lightly armored troops using missile weapons or counter enemy skirmishers
- wound and/or encumber heavy troops by inflicting wounds and destroying shields (javelins SHOULD be able to disable shields or one-shot an enemy on a critical hit like they would in reality but they do not)
- assist heavier troops when it comes to melee by flanking other infantry - this one you could still do but I guess you team would be better off with another unit of dedicated melee infantry.

Unless they change something about the way armor, shields and missile weapons work they seem like a waste of time.

I wonder, whether the steppe raider hideout entrance has been fixed. If you approach it in the down left area there is some graphical bug. Anybody else experiencing this?

Uhm....while NOT at war? Is that even possible once you enter a faction? Sorry to say so, but I am stuck with the whack-a-mole game of crushing 50-size raiding parties around my castle and sitting out the doom-stack before my liege comes to the rescue. There is no such thing as peacetime in my game although I crave for it. I would trade, quest and whatnot, maybe woe a lady.

Contrary: This is quite a good one. I would even go that far that you lose troops after a battle because they were too wounded to fulfill the profession of soldier any more (broken bones, passing away, amputations with medic skills rising chance of recovery). You have only a certain number of men ready at arms at a given time and they can only die once for you. So one should pick meaningful fights and right now we do not have these. Wars emerge on a whim and usually you are given a fief at the border - maybe only a recently conquered one. What happens? Every enemy lord and his little brother starts raiding your already weak villages and sieges your castle unless a doom-stack deters them while you play the whack-a-mole game with those 50-men raiding parties in your fief. Oh yes, and they grow on trees, literally because they flee and spawn again almost in no time. While doing so, you neglect your quests, your trade or any other goal you have put for yourself. You are bogged in never-ending war of attrition. This is, what awaits you when joining a faction. If you stay neutral, your caravans will eventually get eaten by growing numbers of bandits, scaling with your level ruining a merchant's game for you. And still we get the thing with those minor factions. Once we engage them for whatever reason, we cannot peace out with them - yay. And they hit random parties of yours - preferably caravans. Whoopee-dee-do!

If you want to play only never-ending war, then maybe the Warhammer 40k franchise is more to your palate. Again: With that what you wish for, the work of the devs in the last months is meaningless. What do we need scenes, quests and what not for, if we just go engage foe, F1, F3, wait, rinse and repeat? I do not get it?!

Stromming said:

So if we take one Nobel prize winner, an expert in his or her field, and pit them against 10 random strangers off the street that believe the same thing, people with no education in the subject. Would they be more correct or have a better opinion than the expert? Of course not.

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Sadly, this is true nowadays. It is sufficient to be loud enough or sometimes many enough to be correct - or people like to think so. You basically nailed it. Btw: I would add that democracy works best, if all persons voting on a matter are somewhat equally educated, interested in the topic and have the same information so they can make a good decision. Most - or at least many times - this is not given.

If I may add my five cents:
Is making a game a diplomatic process? In the end we can all talk about greeks, politics and what not - the devs decide where the game goes even over a 'majority' on a sales platform, so...what is the point?
I have not tested CK3 but played CK1 and 2 and I daresay, a litttle more diplomacy in BL is a good thing. If it were only to plunge from battle into another battle...what do we have a map for? Characters? Trade? Consequently done, we could eliminate those and just have another battle after we finished the last one. Maybe someone will mod a 'Blood for the Blood God' where you can exactly do that. For vanilla BL...well, it should offer as many ways of interaction with the world as possible not limited to constant warfare but also offer ways of using charms, cunning and skullduggery.
Also, calling the need for a deeper diplomacy 'wanting a CK3-style diplomacy' is utter exaggregation and flame-bait in my book.

I was under the (maybe wrong) conception that free men living in a fief had to go to war or buy themselves out. Therefore, a bow might have been a weapon of choice for a free peasant/farmer. Serfs were forbidden to carry arms but also were by law exempt from war duty.
The point boils down to: ranged weapons were common with the peasantry be it either a sling, a bow of any kind or a hunting crossbow and I believe, the people using them were also adept at using them. So I can imagine lords draft free people being able to use a bow. But then I guess we are talking about those semi-professionals: Peasant in peace-times and soldier at war. I was not talking about unarmored mobs with reforged agricultural tools like flails and scythes with the odd club or hatchet. I was just thinking: the mass of the people were neither noble nor professional. If you raise armies nevertheless you might expect to get troops like the archer or any kind of skirmishing ranged units as best compromise in battleworthyness between a unit having an effect or rabble that is more a danger to your army's morale than to the enemy. And you probably might have them in bigger numbers than your semi-professional men-at-arms.

When they started to use the hunting crossbow I do not know. If we are in the early medieval ages, the bow might be correct while in the latter the crossbow is.

I wonder, whether the historical incorrectness still invalidates the gameplay quirks I pointed out.

I think Emax has a point. The bow is an ancient weapon and people of all social standings - at least the country-dwellers used it often and were probably adept at it. Even said peasants IF free men. He pointed out correctly the game they were allowed to hunt: rabbits, fowl, foxes to protect their chicken, squirrels and what not. Noble game like deer, boars and stuff are restricted to nobles by law, right. So unless they are un-free, people usually used bows to supplement their dishes, got food in winter and similar stuff. I remember from somewhere that there even were laws upon what fur commoners were allowed to wear. Do you really think those furs grew on trees (well, squirrel: yes, they do) or that there were specialized huntsmen everywhere who shot animals for fur for the masses?
About 95% were peasants and worked the fields but it ignorant to believe that plowing and sowing was all those people were able to do. They did carpenter's work when building structures and yes, they went on the hunt if they had spare time to shoot some meat for the cauldron over their fires.
Given that those people usually worked from dawn to dusk, did much work on foot and with manual tools and I believe while uneducated, they at least were generally stronger than nowadays city-dwellers. And they trained their skills from childhood on - maybe because there was not much else to do and had to grow up fast.
Lastly, I cannot believe, that nobles would disencourage their peasants from using bows. If they were free men, they were oblieged to serve in the army in their Lord's wars and I guess a nobleman is pragmatic enough to think his peasant is better alive than dead because who will pay his taxes otherwise. Contributing to the fight with less danger is either way a good thing and was frowned upon by nobility who could not accept that this kind of warfare was indeed more effective. Nobility was originally based on martial prowess. By not accepting archery as martial prowess you can keep your definition of nobility but I guess no noble but the most foolish was neglecting the power projection of archers.

From what I see is that we MIGHT need an encumberance system so units attacking or running or performing actions should lose stamina. I guess firing a bow once is not so much a big deal, if you are used to it. But doing so after forced march repeatedly? You cannot tell me, that cadence, accuracy and power of an archer would not suffer over time in a prolonged engagement. Same with exhausted melee fighters. 3 Javelins in the shield, plate armor and still running like Usain Bolt is very much as ridiculous as complaining about archers are powerful. Of course they are when you run straigth towards them. That is, why there are skirmishers to whittle down their numbers, flanking light cavalry or heavy infantry moving with a shield wall active (which requires discipline and shields large enough). Worked for the Romans.

Most armies have reserves for a reason to pull out men who are tired or wounded and keep fighting. In the game a wounded guy hits as hard as a healthy guy, runs as fast and swinging weapons does not encumber him. And armor works weird. Might we maybe see the root of the problem? If everybody behaves like Superman or Asterix on magic potion then of course ranged beats foot every time.

The problem is not that a bow is a good weapon per se - the game simply treats behavior of cobattants wrong. At least in campaign mode. In Multiplayer buff or nerf at your leisure - this is E-sports. But if you want to immerse into what it feels like fighting in and against medieval-style armies and troops, the game should behave 'realistically' with no need for balance at all.

Mexxico-san: Domo arigatou gozaimasu! *bow*

HalfMetalJacket said:

I find just increasing armour values does the trick well enough. Solves a lot of other problems too.

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I am with you on that. Make armor more protective (especially vs. thrown rocks). Have some ranged dedicated AP capabilities like javelins or heavy crossbows - that's what they are made for. A storm of arrows still should hurt badly armored troops and for the Khuzait...well...it is the way they fight: horseback and archery. It is effective, yes. See reality with golden horde. But eventually they were stopped - with ways we could have implemented in the game: internal squabbling, bad recruitment far from the homelands, fickle economy. Could prevent snowballing. But what do you expect as result when you have infantry and the enemy is riding around you on horseback peppering you with arrows?! Fair? No. But reason to call for a general nerf? I do not see that either. The answer must lie elsewhere. Either in efficient counter-tactics or gameplay-mechanisms that make Khuzait play a lot more different from other factions both allowing stuff no one can do but also preventing stuff everybody else can.

Well, in that case I would like a moderator to move this into the suggestions forum and change the title to
'Suggestion: change the way the perks 'giving hands' and 'paid in promise' work

@Apocal: I see the problem that those XP-giving things are mostly located in the stewardship tree already and making this tree even more useful than others.

Well...consider me at least content with a major update like this after lots of minor hotfixes. There are things addressed, where I was looking forward to them being fixed.
- Level impact on learning rate is such a thing and it makes me happy someone listened to the community
- fixing bugs in EA is bread and butter and bugs crashing the game have priority, correct. It is a complex game so I expect bugs to happen and as we see, they are squashed one by one. Takes time but better done late than never done leaving the game in a Gothic 3 state
- Optical improvements (scenes) have been made. I am ambivalent about this. Sure this is nice, but as pointed out very often by the community, villige scenes are mostly moot when you have a shortcut button. I must admit, that I am not encouraged by the game to enter a town or village if I totally do not need to. So currently this is invested time wasted unless there will be improvements on the importance of those scenes later. I give them credit on that matter for now.
- I see an improvement in terms of diplomacy as now map assets can be traded during truce talks if I understand the patch right
- UI changes look reasonable and seem to improve QoL
- Siege behavior seems to be improved. There are some subtle things added like grant "safe passage" to leave a lost siege at a cost.
- The changes done in character development department look reasonable with the best thing that the level influence is gone now. Finally not feeling cheated when levelling up! Still, progress there is slow as we still lack some playstyles like robber baron
- Changes done to the clan management are important as well as it seems to eliminate some exploits and adds some direly requested features like setting a cap for party wages or setting stance for parties. Small improvement, but important. Hoping to see more.
- Economy still is a bit lackluster but improvments have been made, albeit smaller ones
- Kingdom and Diplomacy have gotten some work as well. Cannot say much about this as I never am a king in my games. but I acknowledge that work has been done (and appreciate it)
- Quest fixes seem reasonable. Some still are meaningful, some..meh. I think I would now abandon Inn and Out quest as I do not like the minigames (yet)
- The other stuff is a random assortment of fixes and balances and corrections - bread and butter work during EA as well.

I will not talk about multiplayer as this is something I only sometimes do - besides the kick player option. I will watch closely where this is heading. If it leads to being trolled out of the game because you are not l33t enough for the ones playing 24/7 because they do not have many other things to do, then it is a terrible thing. Lesser skilled players still should be able to play and learn together with veterans and the latter ones not hogging the game for themselves. I hope this does not happen. Also I fear as archer you will be auto-kicked often if friendlies run into your targets and catch the arrows with their backs. I am ambivalent about that. Throwing weapon nerfs are terrible in my book...but this is only my opinion.

Conclusion: Happy to see movement. Still going too slow for my taste but then I am not sitting and working at Taleworlds and do not know how fast they work, who does what and what are the internal priorities. I still want to believe that the devs work on the game because they want it to happen. We are condemned to watch but still should refrain from toxicity. Read enough toxicity the last days (see EU4 DLC launch, HoI4 DLC announcement). Sometimes I think some of us gamers just are spoiled, entitled, immature brats who fling around words without caring to hurt someone. My grandma - god rest her soul - once said: "Cannot say something good about someone? Then better shut yer trap and stay silent!" - Words of wisdom. Concerns can be voiced reasonably and civil and we should keep it like this instead of ranting and memeing. Frankly? I could understand that in the devs position I would loath visiting the forum because I would need to read a lot of nasty things. And this is maybe one reason why good suggestions are overlooked. Can't find a pearl in a proverbial dungheap, right? So I feel empathy as a human. That does not say that I am content with the project's pace as a customer - indeed I am not as I paid a good chunk of money for a game still under development and lacking in some core areas. But at least I can be that fair and acknowledge progress and be a bit happy about it.

Mikal over and out

Its a hotfix. Captain AI improved and 2 bugs squashed, if I read correctly.