Recent content by yedrellow

With 7 int, 5 focus and about 200-300 sieges in a campaign I ended a world conquest at only 248 siege skill in 1111. I had maxed out most of the other skills far earlier than that. I personally think siege experience gain should be doubled or tripled, but giving additional sources of exp gain could be good too.

Lord Bryggan said:

I'm sorry, I keep trying, but I can't figure out the multi player combat. I've never been a great gamer, but in Warband I was just twitchy enough to become a mediocre player. Every thing in it seemed intuitive, and the only thing slowing me down was my reactions. Being a bit of an older gent (50) I'm a bit slower compared to the days when I dominated at Space Invaders at the local arcade, but I still did ok.

But everything in multiplayer seems counter intuitive. My guy won't swing when I tell him to, and he won't block when I want him to. I see no real rhyme or reason to it, and just to test to see if its just me I go to Warband multiplayer servers and I just do fine.

I dunno, I try and I fail.

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You're not imagining it. Some of the delays are exceedingly large. For example if you are attacking with a right swing feint, and someone blindly throws a gambled left swing in to you out of desperation, then the transition from right swing to block is so long that it is pretty difficult to manage a block (at least at 55 ping). This makes the defense aspect of the game extremely unreliable as playing close puts you at risk of getting punished by people spamming out of tempo with no rhyme or reason. Most people from what I have seen tend to kite by strafing to try to prevent themselves from even being in measure with their opponent to mitigate this weakness. However in warband, people would largely stick between their weapon range and the kick range of their opponent, as defense was orders of magnitude more reliable.

You can only try to recognise what causes the long animation delays, and prevent yourself from doing them, which requires way different mousework from warband, and of course mitigate with footwork by strafing to safety (using w +a/s). Keep an eye on your weapon rest position / stance and don't rely on your weapon swinging with counter-feints in defense. Attack to parry is just so slow in this game that touching LMB anywhere near a parry can make your time to block extremely large.

Along with time to block delays, there's a a ridiculously large variation in both attacker and defender stun that makes learning how to consistently recognise if you have tempo difficult. The number of variables that effect this is large enough to make both lengths seem random to an extent.

There is a bit of bugginess as well with some blocks being ignored and attacks blatantly passing around them or hitting way earlier at an improper part of the swing arc as well. I am not sure if this is a hitbox issue or related to the desyncronised attacks that you can sometimes see as well (where a held strike turns in to a different strike type at release).

Bring high tier archers and archer companions with noble bows/ noble long bows. Obviously if the player is archer build then it's even easier, but if not, just draw enough attention for your archers to do work. If you fight at long range, even on realism heavily armoured archers can out-tank forest bandits. Don't be afraid of hideouts with 100+ troops in it either, only 50 seem to spawn. It is way easier than what it was on release.

Consul_Kaiser said:

Can I say how extremely disappointing MP has been in the past month. I used to be able to get on siege with the appropriate amount of players but now I can barely even get 20 v 20. Seems that the love for MP has died even though I would say that the MP players love the game to death. We need immediate fixes/updates for the MP side of this game.

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The competitive players already explained why they aren't playing; fundamental combat system issues and lack of private servers. The casual players need a gameplay loop and content to keep them interested, which would be helped by private servers/modding. People outside of East-South East Asia, EU and NA are obviously not playing due to latency and lack of private servers.

At the moment everything that kept people interested in warband multiplayer is annoyingly absent. These issues need to be resolved and the multiplayer 'relaunched' in some capacity.

KSHMR said:

A kind request to all the people making useless complaints here:
Either make a proper complaint and explain what you would like to see changed
Or just don't post and go play Minecraft or whatever game you desire

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Reduce ability to kite by increasing forward relative running speed or reducing relative strafe speed

Tie stance to button press rather than strafe

Reduce time to block massively or make it 0

Reduce strafe-kiting speed while using 2 handed weapons and ranged weapons. This should be an extreme nerf if drawing a javelin or bow.

Nerf activation time of kick

Improve infantry gear and runspeed. Why does an archer get a kaskara, and an infantry get a flyssa? Or an infantry a spatha and a cav a parmarerion? Why can a palatine guard kite with a menavlion faster than a legionary can run forward?

Increase stun time for falling off a horse after it is killed.

Decrease horse hp

Add team horse knockdown

Add horse damage or stun for running in to walls.

Beasthoven said:

It really feels like the weapon speed and the block speed aren't adapted to eachother properly. Like sometimes the weapons swing so ultra fast, that u physically cannot block it. Same goes for feints... if someone feints properly, you really cannot block. Should have just left it with the Warband combat...

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It's hard to test, but with the addition of ~50ms of latency some high balance, high speed weapons when doing long feints against stationary opponents can get an extremely easy, almost free hit if they bait a parry that is released and reinput in response to the feint. If these long feints are combined with a change in direction, then releasing parry and reparrying the new direction is mandatory, but it is still punishable. Obviously in a normal duel people are strafe-kiting away habitually to mitigate this weakness, but if movement is fixed, then the time to block issues will get worse if not addressed.

Caps said:

This just overcomplicates things, so you want for some people to have it super easy against the menavlion (oathsworn) and for some (legionary) its still hard.

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Why would you tune it such that it's still a problem?

The problem I have is that simply changing running speeds of certain classes ignores the fundamental problems in the movement system, which makes kiting trivial compared to other games in the genre (eg. warband, mordhau)

Sure an oathsworn runs faster than a legionary. But why is forward movement while blocking such a slow endeavour compared to strafing-kiting while holding attacks?

That is the issue. You can easily normalise forward movement while blocking across classes such that an oathsworn in that scenario does not have an advantage over a legionary.

If all you're doing to balance is instead cheap changes to individual classes movement speed, then all you're going to do is make kiting dependent on class selection rather than human mechanics. Human mechanics should fundamentally overcome kiting, unless it's against a SP/cheated character with 160 athletics. That's why the solution to movement has to be a complicated one, and can not be fixed by taleworlds changing a few runspeed values.

Coincidentally helping forward movement speed while blocking would help ai infantry fight ai archers, which ironically means that this change would help both the singleplayer and multiplayer balance.

Kicking at the moment either feels useless or brokenly oppressive dependent on run speed differences as well, so I would agree that kicking does need a rework though.

Caps said:

it should be fairly equally punishing for everyone because everyone can pick up stuff from the ground

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I dont mean to tie the penalty to the class, but instead the weapon being used. So if anyone at all is strafing while using a menavlion, it slows them so a forward moving person can catch them, regardless of their class.

Another alternative is have a reduced movement speed penalty for moving forward while blocking.

Caps said:

exactly, but i think kiteing away should be in the game as defense (or something the player should actively try to do on his defense)
i dont think its possible to give every unit this opportunity with the variety of movement speeds, made a post last week aswell in the tech section.

https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php?threads/movement-speed.422631/#post-9435347

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Then maybe kiting should specifically be penalised for ranged/two hand attacks more than 1 hand?

That way regular infantry can still kite while archers/ skirmishers struggle to do it with ranged attacks. Either that or have a long term forward sprint like warband.

Caps said:

depends on the unit

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I would agree, but I'd argue it shouldn't really depend on the unit. Normal infantry shouldn't have problem engaging while someone is abusing strafing movement to kite and attack simultaneously forever. Take for example a matchup between a palatine guard using menavlion and an oathbound. The oathbound can hold w all day, but because of a mixture of the menavlion, strafing speed and time to block the oathbound can't really force a fight. If you take an even worse matchup like legionary vs sturgian berserker or wildling, then a player with enough patience to abuse the combination of time to block and strafe speed can kite to the point of never even needing to parry.

Even if you look at duelling at the moment, most people tend to strafe away from strikes continuously as time to block makes defense unreliable close. Which means people are kiting away from strikes to avoid the weaknesses that time to block forces on the player. Even the stance system works against sensible close range defense, by increasing time to block as a penalty to what in other melee games would be sensible defensive footwork. The resting weapon position for example is on the bad side for a defensive strafe.

Time to block is bad. We already had a time to block after all, called latency.

The footwork is omnidirectional and enables kiting

Kiting has the additional element of punishing the forward movement player by abusing their time to block.

The combination of both means that getting people stuck in actual melee fights is largely impractical for proper infantry classes (i.e one's people would use normally in skirmish), without something like a flag forcing it to happen.



Strafing and attacking away from someone should cause enough of a speed penalty to allow a forward moving player to catch up easily.

Yeah I noticed the war thing. AI factions seem to at some stage of the game avoid warring each other and war-declare the player. Then it is hard to get peace as peace treaties are costing 800k (with new war declarations every 10-20 days). Maybe it's because ai want to settle on a small number of wars, and Northern Empire usually doesn't die properly due to problems with the main quest.

I am not sure, but for whatever reason once you get your kingdom to the ~10 town area, all ai seem to refuse to war each other and just war-declare the player. With the ai army buffs that means the human player has to fight ~5 2000 strength armies simultaneously. I don't think that most humans without savescumming would be able to get their kingdom to have enough armies to fight this back, especially as there is a 10 year time limit to starting a kingdom.

It is still viable with execution obviously, but mass execution shouldnt be the only viable late game strategy.

This was not the case in earlier patches, as ai kingdoms had no problems ganging up on other ai, so the player could engineer positions in which large ai kingdoms couldn't send overwhelming force at the player. Obviously the ai armies seemingly jumping from 1000 size to 2000 size on average (and increasing in quality) didnt really help the player in this regard. Secondly, ai vassals didnt defect from the player at 100 relations continuously like they do now.

I am not saying that the game should be massively easier, but ai seemingly ganging up on the player specifically and ignoring each other does make the kingdom stage a bit annoying. It would be like starting EU4 as a one province minor, with every ai faction declaring war on you every 3 seconds with no method to mitigate it.

The footwork is one of the biggest detriments against infantry. An infantry gets to an archer, and then the archer can escape almost for free and kite forever.

Callum said:

We just opened East Asia and Oceania duel servers. I will change the factions on Monday, what would you prefer next? Sturgia? Battania?

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Aserai for the skirmisher Kaskara duels. Also all their good classes are 100-120 gold anyway.

Jesse | Oasis-Hosting.net said:

That literally only makes the problem worse.

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Routing through East Asia is a mess in general. VPNs are prerty common practice to get good routing. It's not uncommon to get 130 ping to something one day and 250 the next. This is usually fixable by the ISP, if they care enough to do so. It's a bit hard for example to explain to an Australian isp that you have an issue with your latency suddenly jumping from 90 to 250, but it does happen.