Recent content by nox

Asuzu said:

Dude, if I would catch you on Diablo 1 open game, I would click you to death before you knew it.
I also played Mortal Kombat 1 duels for money with my classmates, and gosh I was rich.
That was back in 90's though. These days I play turn-based games and occasional M&B with autoblock lol.

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You overestimate your odds.

Combat feels good. Animations are fluid, controls feel crisp. Combat is the right speed, jumping isn't overproductive.

Writing is good.

Loot and prisoner system is good.

But most importantly the advancement and skill system is great.

Singleplayer
BUG: Items given to companion just after recruitment vanish once companion is in party.
Expected: Give items to companion, and companion is equipped with items.
Actual: After leaving town scene, horse and armor given to companion are gone.

It's a lot more fun if you learn to fight skillfully.

I've played Mordhau.  It's about as much of a threat to mount and blade as cRPG was.  I don't see it as any comparison to bannerlord.

Not sure how long DM matches on 6 different maps can hold your interest, but if that is what scratches your itch so easily I envy you.  I require a much deeper experience, and are harder to amuse.

You are whinging.

Yes, I'll buy BL. 

This is a pretty good solution.  I wondered how to get a background system of needs that was consistent for the NPCs.

Hopefully the larger question of "do NPCs use a practical economy" is answered by this post as well.  It wouldn't work to have NPCs bartering values if their own resources were arbitrary, so one can hope that they do.

Anyhow, nice solution.  I appreciate the ramifications.

Alex the Seeker said:

even if the player party size is lower than most lords, it doesn`t feel like stalling the game or anything o.o

because it mostly depends on the quality of your troops than quantity

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You're arguing my point without realizing it.

Yes, if you cheese combat by using units that have outlier stats that can defeat 2-3 times their number, it works...  as I said.
The complete breakdown of that is that

a) the player cannot afford any attrition
b) it eliminates all other game play options other than "use these overpowered units"

...

also the stall in early-game will most likely be because you can`t have large armies (unless only cavalry) because of movement speed, if an amazon party catches your tier 2-3 50sth archers and infantry, well you are gonna be in a world of pain.

plus stacking INT is pretty helpful, because of the healer talents, surgery is a must have in this mod, and waiting for companions on it aint a smart idea.
the prisoners are fine, since it increases exponentially with troops if i recall correctly " and the  let them carry up to 2x their 'soft cap' in prisoners and troops, but at a big cost to movement speed." feels like cheating, since if you already have that many prisoners most likely no party will attack you since you are stronger, plus the trade-off if you are indeed defeated due to low movement speed and can`t escape, well i would rather not give 100some prisoners to my enemies 

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Well, all that being said I respecfully disagree.  The unit size is a very poor game mechanic to hinge balance around because it's a hard and arbitrary limit and doesn't scale (in native) with the rest of the game. 

If a player wishes to run a larger unit of less quality units, that should be their option to do so.  Removing that game play option doesn't enhance the game, it only enforces the narrow success path that was a design problem with Native.

So, take the suggestions for what they are.  For me personally to enjoy this mod that is a change I would have to make.  That's because I've extensively played with that change and it completely changes the headroom in early end game and is really a fairly major improvement to play experience.  Despite the assumptions, it really doesn't make the game easier - it only permits alternative strategies than to have a full stack of heavy cav.

Sarkiss said:

this didnt make any difference for me. there is another similar entry in the script.txt: "lord_find_alternative_faction -1" but with the different values. do I need to delete it by any chance?

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Yes you will need to delete any other entry for lord_find_alternative_faction.  If you don't, it will only use one of them (probably the first one it finds)

Those numbers are actually python pcode.

Vesku said:

I guess we have a bit different opinion on the end game difficulty. For me it's way too easy so I usually don't bother the trot through all the remaining enemy settlements. I play with around 100% difficulty, have double the xp gain to upgrade troops and still it's too easy to gain 500-600 elite and heavy infantry core and run through anything that stands at your way, even 2400 enemy troops. My current game is on day 450 (or close to it), I have 3 000 000 sc in treasury and gain 150 000 each week, if I need troops I can raise several hundred heavy infantry in a week by training alone. I hope that enemy lords would gain more troops faster than the present and the troop composition could be higher tier to keep the game interesting towards the end.

I don't use wagon so I can see your point in running out of food but there's several ways to get around that. One is to always buy all the bread from towns and stash the surplus in your household. That way you can dig into your reserves when towns can't provide you food. An other is to buy cattle and keep it with you, every time you need food slaughter some cows.

For example all my cavalry has 10 riding, just raise Agility to 30 and put enough points in riding. Enemy stats are not out of the sky, my best men are much better than any elite I can find. All my archers have over 400 in achery, heavy axe men too gain that in TH weapons in less than 30 levels.

I hate the village defense too and sneaking into towns, both are things I avoid if possible.

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I don't know that you are describing what I would call 'end game.'  When I say end-game, I am talking like chess 'end game' where the player is coming up with a strategy with limited resources to overcome the AI prevalence.  At 450 days with capped out stats and money, you aren't really seeing the issues I'm describing.

There should probably be a cleanup cycle that looks for nobles / ladies that are in kingdoms in a landless state and reassign them somehow. 

Nobles will stop/replenish at other faction 'centers' with which they are > 0 relations.  The problem here is that they haven't been reassigned to a new faction.

Check in your great hall.  They might be there waiting to ask to join you.

So I've run into an interesting problem in base Brytenwalda that I haven't seen mentioned anywhere.  I figure if I find a fix for it that I can offer you the code for that.

The problem I have is that I took over london, and land was for sale for about 1500, and developing new land was available for about 2500.  I bought some amount of land, and then developed some new land and now I have negative income from the moneylender menu and my status report shows negative income.

The changes I would like to make are :

- it shouldn't be necessary to go to the city itself to collect income from land.  that should be rolled up into the finance report.
- fix negative income

let me know if you have those on your radar. 

Also I'd really like to add an hourly task that would calculate the army cost on an hourly basis rather than do a spot check at midnight of the end of the week to calculate weekly cost.  The sudden calculation creates an exploit (stash armies at midnight) or a grossly unfair situation (player unwisely takes his armies into his stack at midnight, gets charged for the week.)

so I guess the list is actually somewhat longer.  Some of these are things that I have already coded for other mods...

things that are broken :

- executing nobles causes faction drop with own faction.  can cause players to have to siege their own city.  This is silly.  Remember Agincourt?  If you don't, go look it up.  The king of england executed ALL of the nobles who he captured at Agincourt and nobody declared war on England over it.  The french certainly hated him worse, but then again - it's france.
Executing a noble should be a loss of honor, and definitely be impactful with that noble's family, and everyone who had a positive relationship with him - but really, who cares what happens to a guy you hate?  Noone.

- Post battle scene flow after village defense is broken, usually doesn't show proper loot / prisoner screens.

- "Village defense" happens even when fighting units that were not raiding villages, and has a very long range.

- "Village defense" hurts player when player has a strong stack, and village defense substitutes villagers (lv 1 skirm) instead of player troops.  Villagers are not player commanded and should not count against player roster total.

things I'd like to add :

low hanging fruit

- allow the player to interfere with other fights without being at war with one or the other
- allow the player to siege towns that he is not at war with
- do not cost food when player is in a city center he owns
- add beans/hardtack/dried meat barrel objects for feeding armies (food with 1000+)
- allow armies to be fed from supply wagon
- better passive recruitment.  player puts money in a pot, and recruits wander to city-centers to sign up.  works better than recruiters running around on the map dying/ getting stuck on terrain
- execute enemy faction kings.  probably a good code reason for this as I don't quite know what would happen if a faction had no nobles.  might be fun to find out.
- more food production in cities / villages
- higher chance of sneaking into towns with higher charisma / persuasion

high hanging fruit

- have npc troop recovery be linked to income
- normalize npc leader stats
- normalize troop stats (some of them are just dumb.  9 riding...)

let me know if you are interested in any of this

re: upper end unit costs -

One of the things that has always bothered me about M&B and WB was that the game breaks down at end game on several fronts.  First and foremost is that there are numerous unbalanced game mechanics that only affect the player.

The most fundamental one is that the player can't even field an army of the same size that the NPCs do in late game, first because there isn't enough food available close at hand to keep them fed.  If you've ever played end-game and had a stack of 600 guys, you know what it is like to go through more than half of 3 stacks of food every single game-day

The NPCs don't actually have to feed their units, so the broken-ness of that system only affects the player.

NPCs don't use a real income/expense system, they have abnormal/irrational stats (25 str! 10 power strike!, 500-600 reknown) - and combined with level scaling the game quickly gets completely out of hand.

Overpenalizing the player for tiered troops with cost only exacerbates a design problem, especially when the enemy has stacks of 400+ units.  A fight between 300 light infantry and 100 core infantry against the typical random mix of computer units even with high surgery will run the player, fighting even odds, at least 20-30% attrition.

With those numbers, and with how the NPCs spawn troops rather than train them, it becomes impossible to keep up with the amount of troops the enemy armies generate even with enough surgery that half the losses are wounds.

This is a topic that isn't really discussed much, and I am not sure why.  From my perspective, the end game issues are somewhat game-breaking. 

So - complaining about lowering the (rather crazy) end game costs of units to me is a straw man argument.  The fallacy here is that people who want to change the costs of units want to make the game 'easier' at end game.  The ignorance is that the game is practically unplayable at 'end game' where stacks are 500+ in size, because there is no practical way to match 1-1 the armies the AI fields.  The old cost system, a typical AI army weekly pay value averages anywhere from 8-18k for a king, and 6-10k for a typical noble.  The economy in the game does not scale for the player in such a way that this is reasonable to meet.

I do, and I'd guess most M&B players game the system.  I hope this doesn't butthurt anyone but you can keep track of paydays and stick your armies in a place that either a) won't charge you for them (boats/mercs whatever) or b) will charge half (keep/city).  The system has always been broken at end game, and was really only manageable with workarounds. 

The thing not to do is to lash out at an attempt to fix it.

Here's something I always wanted.

A pissant prick lord with his 20 guys is raiding my village. 

I catch him in the act, and defeat him but let him go - except when I do, I tell him :

"If I have to come break your **** off again for trying to mess with my peasants, I'll decorate their scarecrow with your head on a pole."

Then, when he tries his routine again, and I catch him again I get the dialogue option :

"You didn't believe me, so now I'll have to resort to a more practical deterrent. (put his head on a pole in the fields)"

Then again, I believe that negative honor should show as 'dread', and dissuade people from messing with you.