Recent content by Vahkn

The problem is that if you charge even $1 for something you're held to a vastly higher standard than if it's free. People who rave about a free mod/product will instead complain about every tiny imperfection if it's a paid product. Meanwhile as soon as you start charging money everyone involved, and many not-yet involved (eg distributor, credit card merchant etc) all want a cut, and typically based on percentages. It's easy to sell lots of units and make a net loss. With that said, it would probably be fairly easy to do a kickstarter campaign and use the goodwill generated by POP to fund a new project. That would effectively allow people to pay the devs for POP, without raising expectations of support etc for it, and perhaps accelerate whatever plans exist for the new product. Looks like a win:win.

The best use of pikemen and halberds is to protect your infantry from mounted units. They're weak against ranged opponents and strong against cavalry. Some people mix and match the best troop type from each faction and some like to use all troops from the same faction in a game. Which approach you use will affect which units are easy vs hard to train. If you're using all sarleon troops halberds become easy to train as they come from men at arms, which will be the bulk of your infantry.

Your sniper in xcom's nickname is Queen of Pendor?

Meanwhile, great work on the story!

I'd imagine the point of this thread is that there are several hundred visitors who read this forum for each person who registers and posts. How many of those would now be posting if the environment was less hostile to new members?

I know personally I've visited many times over the recent years and each time concluded it's not worth the hassle of trying to answer questions amongst all the hand slapping. I doubt I'm the first or last to have reached that conclusion.  These are people who could be supporting this mod but aren't.

While the OP could have worked a little on his delivery he did make an interesting point before we got sidetracked by the focus on delivery.

The problem with the qq/qa thread is that it encourages trolls to offend newcomers with impunity. The most vocal poster at the start of this thread was PoisonCourtesan so I'll use his post history as an example;  I can't see a single post in there which discusses anything about POP. I can't see a single post that answered a question for anyone. Just hundreds of snide and off topic comments mixed with petty bickering when someone takes the bait. Why does this person care so much about new visitors using the qq thread? Because it provides reliable moral high ground to justify being unkind to other posters.

Please move this question to the quick question and answer post stickied above. The goal of this forum is to have just one thread.

Also, please use the search function to see if any of the words in your post have been used in any prior posts. If they have please lock or delete your post.

*Sarcasm. Actually, you make a valid point. Don't let the fuggers get you down. All forums have meanies.

You're more than ready to go independent, so the sooner the better.

It's a coin toss whether a lord brings any fiefs with him. Frankly it's more fun when they don't, so no big deal either way.

Persuasion skill is a waste of time. It only works on the fickle lords, who are the ones you don't want. Its far more efficient to just defeat the lords you want in battle, capture them and then talk to them to recruit them. No persuasion needed that route. On the topic of lords, you don't want powerful ones, you want loyal ones. Using sarleon as the example, Brennus has knights of the lion, but is hardcoded to argumentative. You'll lose relations constantly with him once he's a vassal. You're better off with regular lords (only honorable or marshal personalities) who will follow your instructions reliably.

Put about 400 decent troops (armored longbows and men at arms for sarleon) in any fiefs you want to keep for yourself, then add 600 or so cheap low tier troops (sarleon militia). 1k total garrison is enough to deter most attacks, give you a pool of troops to train from in an emergency and keep the numbers fairly balanced if you get sieged by 2-5k of enemies later, all while being easily affordable. Meanwhile, i'd suggest taking a hard to siege fief (mobray castle works great for sarleon) to use solely as bait. Keep a very small garrison of say 50 men at arms and 50 longbows in it and you'll find most enemy attacks pick it as the first target. Join the defense when it gets sieged and you can hold it comfortably at 10:1 odds.

If you like a challenge I'd suggest avoiding the use of knighthood orders. If you get 2-300 members of a powerful order (shadow legion or knights of the ebony giblet for example) you can faceroll everything on the map so easily that all the challenge will be gone before you know it.

The M&B boards have always been notorious for people being offensive to folks asking questions. The same questions have been asked a thousand times now, but in fairness they had been asked fifty times within the first week of release, and nothing has changed since.

On a side note, the qq/qa thread is self defeating. No one is going to read through 600+ pages looking for an answer to a "quick" question. Forums are divided into topics with titles for a reason.

The answer comes down to information and logistics.
1. Are there any minor faction spawns nearby? Sylas Ulaz, dread legion, noldor - lure any of them towards Ethos and they will scare off or crush most attacking armies for you.
2. Of the 20 empire lords how many are at full strength vs captured/crippled from their current war? Where is the empire marshal and how many lords are with him?
3. Do you have good relations with any nearby villages? how soon can you recruit 3-400 new troops?
4. What are the jatu up to? If Sarleon and Ravenstern have been at war recently you'll sometimes find small jatu parties with hundreds of prisoners. Can be a very fast way to raise an instant high level garrison in the early-mid game.

I'm fairly sure that lords buy troops and receive income to do so. They receive some income regardless of fiefs but it's painfully slow to rely on that. To get a decent size army in a reasonable amount of time they need fiefs. 2-3 fiefs appears enough for a 250'ish army. 5-6 fiefs seems to give them a 4-500 army (which moves too slowly to be very effective, therefore 2-3 fiefs appears to be better usually)

To give an example with numbers:

I have one lord, godric previously of sarleon. My relations with him are 72 (fond) he has 2 castles and 1 village. My kingdom is following the pendor culture. He currently has 201 sarleon troops and has never left his castle.

I'm at war with sarleon (and the empire and ravenstern) and acting as marshal. I have 3k renoun and 51 controversy, -51 morale penalty for sarleon troops. Godric has a leadership skill of 4 and renoun of 979. I'm wondering if his leadership is too low to offset the morale penalty for him using sarleon troops while i'm in an extended war with Sarleon?

I've noticed this phenomenon also. When you are marshal for an existing faction many lords will follow you on campaign when they have very few (20-30) troops. When you start your own kingdom and recruit them (and give them fiefs) they start sitting in their castles doing nothing even when they have 60-200 troops.

I wonder if AI Lords are affected by the morale penalty for fighting troops of the same faction? eg if you have ex-dshar lords and you're now fighting the dshar kingdom are they getting a massive morale penalty from their troops? Could be a bug or could be a feature. Even with multiple castles and villages some lords just don't seem to leave their fiefs now.

Sounds like you're trying to get married way too early. I've only bothered with marriage in two games, but the last time I waited till I was king then walked up to the daughter of a vassal, confessed my admiration and got an instant 25+/- relations with her. Asked the father for permission and paid the dowry. The whole process took maybe 15 seconds start to finish. Way easier than learning poems or building reputation points with her.

Faction depends on how easy or hard you want to make the game. For a decent challenge I'd go with Sarleon. A solid troop tree but low renoun lords who mostly dislike each other. Would probably make for a more entertaining game than say Feirds who have lots of high renoun lords who like each other. Unless you're masochistic I wouldn't go with a minor faction as most of the game will focus on recruiting if you do that. A good challenge but probably way too boring to want to document it.

This is a really odd debate. You need to look at the balance of a factions troops and how well they work together. You aren't going to get many battles which are decided by a blog of zerkers fighting a blob of gladiators. I'd imagine that most people feel that abusing autocalc odds via zerker heavy or gladiator heavy armies is cheating either way.

Also, when would you honestly need to produce 1200 zerkers a week?! This mod isn't remotely hard enough to need that level of logistical advantage to win. Do it for the fun of it sure, but it's a long way from being necessary.