Recent content by shikaka

Currently I enjoys modded Warband more than Bannerlord.

Favorite mods:
1: The Last Days. Pretty much my favorite mod. Unique, plays well, runs well, very good optimization.
2: Gekokujo. The basic version. Pretty much the best optimized mod in Warband's history. I also like pike&shot warfare.
3: Deeds of Arms and Chivalry. Very nice historical mod (100 years war). Some scenes are buggy, but no big deal. Looks lovely and plays well.
4: Crusaders of Might and MAgic. Unfinished, unbalanced. Crazy fun. Not suited for a serious long term campaign, but this is the mod I start up when I have a spare 20 minutes only, and want to get into some fun fights.

Also liked:
1: Prophesy of Pendor. Not really for me. The setup phase is very-very long, seems neverending. But I have to admit that it is very polished, and a win is very satisfying, so I understand why it is popular.
2: Suvarnabhumi Mahayuth. Hm. Very unrealistic guns (you will be often instakilled by arquebus fire from 200m, while wearing a breastplate. LoL ), but this south-east Asia setting is unique, the countries are different in both presentation and gameplay.
3: Viking Conquest. I loved my first playthrough, and the expansion is good quality. However it is realistic but grindy, similar to Brytenwalda.
4: 457 AD: Last Years of the Western Roman Empire. I would call this "Brytenwalda light". I really like this, because it feels similarly realistic, but you can actually play as a horse archer. The walking animations are horrendous though, so you want to fight on horseback.
5: Honor & Glory. This is rather a mod with very good potential. Similar to With Fire and Sword expansion, but the region is bigger. (ie. there are ottomans and Habsburgs). I really like this, because the feel is similar to WFaS, but with the quality of life improvements of Warband. There are some smaller bugs here or there (eg. Habsburg/Ottoman place names in Hungary, but understandable since the devs are not from the region). Developers are open to suggestions.

Some tips (I played the base version).
The mod has a few specifics which make standard Warband tactics obsolete.
1: there are no shields. This means bowmen and musketeers rule the battlefield
2: cavalry is not cost effective. You _can_ make a cavalry charge work if you want though (the Takeda AI faction sometimes does this). In general I usually go with 20% pikeman (non samurai, the cheap guys). The rest is an equal split between bows and muskets.
3: there are more companions than in vanilla, they are better quality, and it is easier to train them up (again, no shields on enemies, so companions can be death machines with better bows). They usually stay on foot.
4: I found the northest part of the map easier to start in. The bandits in the region have good-ish loot, and give good XP.
5: I would advise winning a few tournements, saving up some money, getting some companions, and avoiding recruitment for some time. Until about eveyone is level 10.
6: while the troops are mostly footmen, you (and maybe some select companions) should be horse archers. Simply do some shooting from the flank of the enemy, or get behind their back. You are not really in for the killing (but if you have a high level character, why not?), you are trying to interrupt the AI when they are reloading muskets, which gives your muskets some free shots on the long run.
7: never go into melee with a katana. Really, you will get murdered by polearms. If you want to go to melee, use the longer reach swords (tachi I think?), of even better, use polearms yourself.
8: as always, equip your companions with weapons which don't have a thrust attack, only swings. Martial characters get a bow, supports get a musket (teppo?). Best armor possible. I found that the european breastplates have very good weight/armor ratio.

39 at the time of posting.

How much you love the game?
Bannerlord: not at all, time will tell. Possibly re-check in a year or so. To be fair, I wasn't impressed by Warband either when it came out.
Warband: I have grown to like it, mostly because of mods. Still hate horseback melee though.
Classic: this was love at first sight. I never understood why TW changed the horse combat mechanics during the Warband engine upgrade. To be honest I would still play Classic, if I could make it work with windows 10. There are some very good mods which never made it to Warband.


Classic+warband is among the games I spent the most times with. Probably top 3, with Panzer General 2 (+mods) and the Europa Universalis/Crusader Kings/Victoria series.
It seems my favorites have only one thing common, that is no fixed story. Even though I like good stories (such as Planescape or Witcher 3), but after a few playthroughs there are no more surprises left, so I let them rest for a while. This is not the case with Warband or EU.

Fate said:

TaleWorlds has job openings for a new game (previously listed as SciFi but that has been removed)

How do you guys feel about this? Would you get it or support another EA by TaleWorlds?

I personally think with the state Bannerlord is in (bugs, delays, cut features, lack of depth, dead multiplayer etc.), I don't think resources obtained from it's EA should be going into anything else.

What do you think?

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About the sci-fi game
I think the game engine would be brilliant in planetary romance - science fantasy - maybe dying earth dressing. Thinking of things like the Dying Earth series (duh), John Carter, He-Man, Thundarr, Stargate and the likes. It would work well, and I would also be inteterested, as this area was always neglected by modders for some reason.


About resource allocation
What I would like to add here is that it is very likely that TW has employees who worked on Bannerlord, but cannot contribute at the beta stage. They either let these people go, or allocate them to a new project. These folks are probably not those who are currently fixing bugs or adding new features to Bannerlord.

beanywalrus said:

Voice acting would go a long way in making the characters alive. And no, not generic garbage either - we have enough generic companions. Every family head should be voice acted with a unique voice, and unique personality. I barely recall any lords names in all my time playing this. They're all bland and generic NPCs with expensive armor that take longer to die than the other NPCs.

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Good voice acting helps, but to be honest it does become tiring after a while. For example if you go to a merchant, and have to listen to his introductory dialog all the time. Fun first, tiring from 3rd and on.

That said, I know two games where dialog was used very well. Witcher 3 and Dragon's Dogma. Both are related to the generic extra NPCs (town drunks, merchants, town patrol, etc.).

Witcher
The game has a few lines of unique dialog per each NPC type/location/faction. Not too many, as they are extras after all. For example the smithy in the Black one's (invaders) camp has the intro "are you here to spy on us or haggle?" or similar. In a backwater village, the trader says "Corpse teeth and kidney stones...tried remedies, for trying times". It took them some time to write this, as there are probably around 100 merchants in the game, but most of them have a unique intro (after that it is general "show me your wares")
This is the same with generic peasants, town militia, etc. They all have a few lines each (5-6?), but it fits the faction very well. Eg. witch hunters comment on you being a freak, celtic-norse pirates say things like "looks you were wasted last night too"
Additional stuff: banter is a very good tool to refer to the player's achievements, and Witcher does this all the time. (eg. when you kill the ice giant, a rare random line is added about the giant wasn't even that big)


Dragon's Dogma
This is a very good solution for giving personality to otherwise generic characters. You can create two characters, your PC, and a bit later a follower (pawn). You can choose looks, occupation and sound files for the latter too, but while doing so, you only choose the sound itself (female, male, old, young, raspy, etc.), not the things it will actually tell you.
Actually, at first it is very annoying, because it always repeats a few lanes (5-6). Not as annoying as "patrolling the Mojave always makes you wish for a nuclear winter" or "arrow to the knee", but quite irritating.

But it does change rapidly:
- new dialogs are added to the "banter pool" based on shared experience (if you use a piercing weapon against armor the follower will remember, and this is added to their banter)
- new dialogs are added based on skills learned (you choose the skill, this means you also choose it's dialogs. This means archers, mages and close combat types have different banter pools)
- finally, you can have a "chat" with it in taverns, where you can add dialog options using a "fake interview" method. Eg. "you seem to me like a bloodthirsty berserker" (not these words, but similar) will add bloodthirsty lines to the banter options.


Obviously neither is as detailed as having only unique NPCs with unique dialog options. But it is still better, than having all NPCs use the same lines.

sobaloda said:

Hello! I just recently got this game just because of this mod, and im having issues with battle sizes. It seems as if even in a siege only about maybe 30? units is spawning in at a time, and then "reinforcments" arrive when some troops die. ive tried setting different sizes in the slider menu and i even downloaded another mod that can increase the battle sizes from 150 to 1000 and set different numbers but nothing changes the outcomes.

Ive also run into another problem that if i choose to assist in other battles my allys units never show and i have to fight the whole battle with only my own units versus the enemies. Any help is appreciated!

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Hm, I didn't have any problems with battlesizes.

How it should work:
- in general Warband is an old game engine, which is not using modern PCs efficiently. Very big battles can be very laggy.
- there is a slider accessible from the main menu, where you can select the battle size between 30 and 150 (if I remember correctly)

Never used the battlesizer mod, 150-200 is ideal for me. I prefer action packed battles, and having 800+ troops at the same time makes my contribution less important. (I tried 800 in the viking conquest DLC, where is is possible by default. It was much less enjoyable for me than expected)

Count Roland said:

There should be some kind of attrition, to at least make the difference in faction size visible. During one of my games, I defended one of my towns about 7 times in a row and exterminated hundreds of germanic nobles, yet within a week they just came back.

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This is the main reason I dropped the mod until (if) this is fixed.

The reason behind this is the so called advanced campaign AI script, which decreases the time for regenerating AI lord armies. (to a lesser extent this problem also exists in vanilla Warband)
Theoretically this could be turned off, which is what I always do this in mods where this submod is installed. But for some reason in Bellum imperii the turn off method resets. The setting campaign ai: off simply doesn't save.

I already reported this in the bugs forum, but didn't get a reply, so I doubt it will be fixed.

Count Roland said:

I also noticed that most swords can't be used to block. Not really sure why. I used such swords myself and blocking has never really been a problem with them.
I really enjoy playing this mod, but a bit more balance in wars and armies would make it a lot more enjoyable.

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This is simply a bad setting by the developers, I am quite certain that it is unintended.
Unfortunately this means that some troops are useless, and that you might end up with a no-block-sword and no shield in tournaments...
I didn't find this specific bug gamebreaking.
(the bandit infested, no go regions and the advanced campaign AI bug is gamebraking for me tho)

xdj1nn said:

Only really asking because I do not feel like downloading anything just to get frustrated for I suspect the game isn't any better than when last I've tried it out.
Thanks in advance.

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I think the battles need further work. Horses, armor, archery, troops, even shields.

Most likely TW will not do anything great on other areas until this is done. I would wait for at least the battles balancing to be done before downloading again.

Askorti said:

I think the answer to that is extremely simple. It's probably not the only reason, but I can only assume to be the main one.
Horse training. The Polish-Lithiuanian Commonwealth was at the time of its height renowned for its military horses, which were well-bred extensively trained.
I can only assume that at the time of the Napoleonic Wars, when the importance of cavalry already diminished significantly, horses were no longer trained to the same standard as before. Especially since their primary role changed from the breakthrough force into more of a support screening one.

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I agree with this point, but there are some other factors too:

- less common cavalry tradition. By the time of the Napoleonic wars, relatively few countries had considerable horsemen population. It is quite easy to point out that Poland, parts of the Habsburg empire (Hungary, Croatia), former Horde territries and Russia still had this, but it was much less common than in the middle ages
- different battlefield usage. With the arrival of guns, and more importantly artillery, frontal horse charges were much more costly. The easy way out was to use your own artillery to win the day, which meant that cavalry was not the main arm anymore, but rather relegated to watch over the artillery, and defend them from enemy cavalry
- because of the difference in doctrine, the equipment was also different. Cuirassers and hussars were not equipped with lances, and hussars didn't get armor either. The only cavalry units which still had some kind of lances were the uhlans, which still had a shorter cavalry spear than medieval knight lances.

It is not really surprising that napoleonic cavalry was less successful in frontal charges than medieval knights. (especially if you factor in grapeshots from artillery and grenades/bullets from infantry. These had a much bigger impact than infantry bayonets)

sifis172 said:

that's really impolite. you want to appear smart? attack the argument not me. i don't think it will
take you anywhere. i won't discuss this topic because of biased(?) viewpoints(?).

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I don't think I attacked you at all. you wrote this:
"now we go to historic sources. it's a huge topic. who wrote them, why, was something he needed
to report or something he wanted to report."


I interpreted this that you don't trust medieval (pre-Nappy) sources because they are biased.
I don't see what can be considered an "attack" in my post.

sifis172 said:

@Askorti napoleonic war, is the first war that has the priviledge to be documented so well,
from multiple and different sources, that most of the academic community has found itself
unable to contribute much more, after the original plethora of original texts.
the fact that the cavalry force was unable to break a square, is documented so many
times that you have to instead search the times a square was broken, you have to dig up the times a cavalry square
was indeed broke.
in my reading of napoleonic warfare i have yet to find more than 5 to (max) 10, 'squares'
being destroyed while beinging tp form square.

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Napoleonic cavalry and square is not a good comparison.
- guns (much more important than the bayonet)
- difference in the role of cavalry (hussars/light cavalry was not armed with lances and armor)
- difference in the origins of cavalrymen (conscripts vs. nobility)
- difference in the equipment of cavalry (which limits their use)



If you don't want to accept pre-Nappy written sources, because of biased viewpoints, it will be difficult to discuss this topic

sifis172 said:

i think that the whole issue of cavalry charging has to be
re-adressed in the historical community.
f.e(1), a medieval horse would charge a shieldwall of spearmen,
and it is said and re-said by historians, that they actualy were.
but on a 2nd example it is well dommented that in the napoleonic era,
no horse no matter what, would never charge a square of infantry with bayonnets.
that is well researched and confirmed by historians.

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There are a few things worth commenting on:
- "no horses charged a napoleonic infantry square" is not true
- Napoleonic cavalry as an umbrella term is not very useful. Hussars, cuirassrers and uhlans had different tasks on and off the battlefield
- Napoleonic infantry were not armed with 1,5m sticks. The bullets (and the lack of body armor because of it) makes a big difference
- medieval (pre-baroque) infantry blocks in general were not made up of drilled soldiers like in the 1800's. (there are a few exceptions, like hussites, brabancon, etc.)
- heavy cavalry charges usually worked, even against spearmen. The best defense against cavalry was not the spear, but terrain (hill, swamp, mud), and digging a trench or two.
- even the best early medieval infantry army, with good training, discipline, battlefield experience AND leadership (Charles Martel's franks) struggled with arab heavy cavalry. They struggled with this so much, that based on this experience, Charles started to organize a heavy cavalry force himself.
- cavalry charges were popular for an other reason too: the nobility had the best chances of survival on horseback, in armor. Even if this meant charging infantry sometimes, it was still a better option than to be the guy holding the spear on foot.

shar_N said:

Just tried ACOK 8.0. To no surprise it's even worse than previous patches. Most of the bandits are removed and the map is just a boring, empty wasteland. Anyways, since this mod seems dead I will give my final two cents on it. I think AWOIAF has surpassed this mod in almost every way, and there really isn't any reason to play it sadly. The few features that ACOK has over mods such as quests are superficial when it comes to the longevity of gameplay. As an example, the quest to go to the east and go to Mereen was redone and revamped completely with every patch. But to what end? A quest like that will not take up 1/10 of a playthrough. It adds nothing in the long run, yet such an absurd amount of work was put into it with each patch. Amazing that ACOK 2.0 is still the pinnacle of this mod, all Cozur had to do was build on it, make it better, and stop removing then reimplementing content. But she couldn't listen to criticism. She lashed out, threw tantrums and ignored everyone, insisting that 'her vision' is what mattered. Well, if her 'vision' is a lifeless, boring mod then she got it. I just hope she doesn't carry this behavior of refusing to listen to constructive criticism into real life.

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I found this mod after all the developer drama happened, so I cannot comment on that part.

My feeling when playing this was that I admire the work what went into this, but unfortunately this is not for me.

pros:
- the textures are very nice (but most have a brown-ish tint for some reason)
- the custom scenes are very nice, and I didn't find bugs related to them
- the big thing for me were the sieges: it is really a hard thing to implement, but having a possibility to actually conquer custom cities, not just having a ladder and wall scene is awesome

cons:
- the biggest problem is the weapon balance. This is the single reason I stopped playing the mod: everyone and their brother is well-armored, but than the troops are mostly given cutting weapons. This means that you have to hit a bot in the head 3-4 times before he falls (a good example of this is the tutorial fight, where the enemy doesn't even have a helmet, but requires 3-4 head hits to defeat)
- the weapon balance of course reaches further: there are complete troop trees which are 100% unusable in field battles, because they cannot defeat armored units _at all_*
- the map is off balance. It is difficult for me the phrase it correctly. I mean the settlement density and placement make it very hard for the AI
- trading is not working in this mod at all
- the majority of the one-time fetch quests are very boring, BUT they usually give an insane reward

undecided:
- I don't know if that it intended or not, but the mod is very funny in a Monthy Python-Warhammer 40k kind of way. Everything is twisted-gnarled-ancient, and the crapsack world stuff is so overdone, it becomes funny.



This mod was a heroic effort, but unfortunately it's not for me. Because of the weapon problems, and the resulting unsatisfying melees, I cannot play it even if I don't care about the trade (and cheat myself 5-6 enterprises), and not doing the custom quests at all.
This would work much better in a game which is less about emergent gameplay, and more about story.



* I am not certain about this, but I have a feeling that the weapon and armor stats were imported from 1257AD (or one of it's derivatives). But when doing that, the increased power strike to troops was _not_ added. The latter part is actually crucial in the balance of 1257. This is only theory-crafting of course.

My main concern currently is faction flavor.
Kuzait is OK, and maybe Battania has a unique flavor, the rest of the factions play very similar to each other. This is actually a step back compared to Warband.

Thanks a lot for the reply, it is good to know that you found some useful info