Looters are fine, yay or nay?

[black_bulldog]

I did. My point is that people are talking about looters, and those are just the first few results that a search brings up. Clearly what OP brought up is relevant. There are waaaay less relevant threads on this forum for you to bash upon before you criticize this one.



Precisely, one elite tier unit should be able to mop a party of twenty looters without breaking a sweat.. Perhaps Warband had that taken to the extreme where you could kill 100 peasants on your own once you had good gear, but I would rather go with that than with what we have now myself.

I'm not bashing anything but the idea that the worst mob in the game might need a nerf is silly. If the topic was forest bandits are op, or raiders are op or especially steppe bandits are op I could understand but looters are not. If you have T1 troops and they out number you then you're going to lose people. Butt as soon as you farm 2-3 mobs and get archers they have no chance.
At the start of a game I typically don't get troops just go get a bit of better gear a helmet, shield, s horse and maybe armor (depending on what I start with) and go farm them especially if I have a spear or bow. You just kite them till they run out of stones they kill them off easily.
The biggest issue with them is that armor does crap so it makes it seem like they're powerful. But you have a horse if you're worried about losing troops kite them till the run out of stones then send your troops in.

 

[froggyluv]

Id like to see huge groups of them with more of looted equipment to give them some personality - and where they dont flee so easily.

 

[Silfir]

Looters are dangerous only if they can zerg you. Anyone who plays Starcraft knows that in the Zergling vs. Zealot matchup, the Zealots start winning once there are enough of them that they can't easily be surrounded and all attacked at the same time. One zealot costs as much as four zerglings. If they literally fight one against four on open ground, the zerglings win. Once there are more zealots, or there is a bottleneck that prevents more than two zerglings from hitting the zealot at the same time, it's the zerglings that lose.

If you send in one elite foot soldier against even five or ten looters, it's not reasonable to expect that he'll win. He'll get poked at, swung at, thrown at from every direction. He might get some kills with a long reach weapon and rout the rest from the morale penalty, but it wouldn't be a clean mop-up. An elite horse archer could and should win, though they might run out of arrows before the looters run out of hit points.

Ideally there should be regional looters, with equipment and weaponry similar to the peasants of the local area in addition to the sackcloth tunics they have at the moment, and the appearance generation algorithms to match. Every culture has some basic foot soldiers for them to upgrade into.

 

[Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James]

Even more fundamentally than just armour values, there needs to be a serious look at what difficulty and challenge even means in bannerlord, and what mechanics should get the chop for the sake of the game as a whole.

For example the slow healing doesn't really make the game much harder, since you can just run away from most people after a defeat, so all it amounts to is not being allowed to join fights for about a day ingame. Punishing the player for getting into the fight rather than just cheesing every engagment is just ridiculous and is the main reason I can't bear to play without ctrl + H, especially in sieges. In warband this was a problem too, but it's amplified in bannerlord and at this rate I just wish the game had better design overall rather than better balancing.
Similarly the looter grind is the same every single time, and the "difficulty" is just your own patience. The earlygame horses are so slow, and arrows so weak, that you have do these 300m passes on them, often just lancing them in the face as their idiotic AI follows you like a heat seeking missile. I would rather this entire portion of the game was cut out and you could start at a level of semi-competence like in warband.

 

[elcapo29]

I think we can mostly agree that we want variety amongst the looters and bandits more than anything. Maybe a hunting bow here and there some shields, you know make them look like a band of looters instead of a band of beggars.

 

[Hans 77]

For example the slow healing doesn't really make the game much harder, since you can just run away from most people after a defeat, so all it amounts to is not being allowed to join fights for about a day ingame. Punishing the player for getting into the fight rather than just cheesing every engagment is just ridiculous and is the main reason I can't bear to play without ctrl + H, especially in sieges. In warband this was a problem too, but it's amplified in bannerlord and at this rate I just wish the game had better design overall rather than better balancing.

A system that actively discourages the player from participating in the gameplay is nothing short of baffling.

I'd understand if it only applied to a character who was just starting out alone with no medical skills -yeah, recovery takes a while. But even with companions who are skilled healers it takes forever to regain health.

I get that Taleworlds wants to strike a balance between gameplay and realism, but there is a tipping point where adherence to realism starts taking away from the fun. Healing and recovery in Warband wasn't an ideal utopia either, but with the proper skill points invested into wound treatment and first aid the issue could be somewhat mitigated -allowing the player to get back in the action sooner rather than later.

The recovery rate in Bannerlord needs to be re-evaluated.

 

[LavaLampMaster]

I think looters themselves are fine bit I wish there was more bandit variety. There should be a few levels of looters like the base looter that then levels up to a couple branches, maybe a light infantry and a crappy archer.

I also hope that deserters show up as wandering mobs, made up of a mixture of faction troops, looters, and maybe a couple levels of dedicated faction deserters?

 

[Louis Cyphre]

Looters shouldn't randomly kill an elite unit in my army when auto-resolving.
Otherwise I think they're fine.

 

[eddiemccandless]

If you send in one elite foot soldier against even five or ten looters, it's not reasonable to expect that he'll win.

I honestly disagree with this. I won't argue whether it is realistic or not, imo the main point is that it doesn't make for fun gameplay. If five trash units can kill a unit that is worth so much more in terms of money, training and equipment, what is even the point? Lords should just fill their cities with 10k looters and call it a day. And honestly if they could do that it would work really well for them in Bannerlord.

To me stuff like that is completely immersion breaking and kills the sense of progression. I don't recall a single successful Warband mod that flattened the difference between different tiers of troops (in fact, I can't think of any mod that did that at all). All of them amplified that even more, and honestly it's more fun that way. At least to me, I understand that there can be some degree of subjectivity into what one considers fun.

Ideally there should be regional looters, with equipment and weaponry similar to the peasants of the local area in addition to the sackcloth tunics they have at the moment, and the appearance generation algorithms to match. Every culture has some basic foot soldiers for them to upgrade into.

Now this would definitely make them more interesting and would make for some added flavor to the game at least.

 

[Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James]

I honestly disagree with this. I won't argue whether it is realistic or not, imo the main point is that it doesn't make for fun gameplay. If five trash units can kill a unit that is worth so much more in terms of money, training and equipment, what is even the point? Lords should just fill their cities with 10k looters and call it a day. And honestly if they could do that it would work really well for them in Bannerlord.

I see where you're coming from here but I definitely think there should be situations where elite troops get beaten by guys who "cost" way less, otherwise it's just a boring numbers game. If you get literally surrounded by looters you should lose a lot more compared to a choke point. I much prefer games where you can use trash troops in an intelligent way to win against the odds. Games where you completely outmanoeuvre, outflank and outsmart your enemy but just grind away and still lose usually make me want to alt+F4.

 

[Sigaretovic]

They need to be more cautious. I mean here i am with my larger group of trained warriors. Who on earth would take his smaller group of sucky looters and attack me head on? If i were them i would let the attacking force attack and charge later.

Other then that i wouldn't change anything else about them. No nerfs.

 

[eddiemccandless]

I see where you're coming from here but I definitely think there should be situations where elite troops get beaten by guys who "cost" way less, otherwise it's just a boring numbers game. If you get literally surrounded by looters you should lose a lot more compared to a choke point. I much prefer games where you can use trash troops in an intelligent way to win against the odds. Games where you completely outmanoeuvre, outflank and outsmart your enemy but just grind away and still lose usually make me want to alt+F4.

Well, yes. There needs to be a balance to the balance, if you will excuse my pun . I could see for example a couple of T2/3 spearmen beating an elite cavalry unit. Not even necessarily spearmen, the good old Fierdsvain Light Infantry from PoP comes to mind. But I don't think one should really be in any danger when going after the weakest unit in the game clad in the best gear the game can offer.

To me it honestly looks like TW hasn't paid much thought to these things. They just kind of put this new physic based combat together, created troop trees loosely based on the previous game and called it a day. At least that's what the current state of the game comes across as.

 

[Apocal]

I don't recall a single successful Warband mod that flattened the difference between different tiers of troops (in fact, I can't think of any mod that did that at all). All of them amplified that even more, and honestly it's more fun that way. At least to me, I understand that there can be some degree of subjectivity into what one considers fun.

It wasn't a complete flattening, but in Silverstag circa 2016 (I stopped playing around that time), the curve between low to upper-medium tier was a bit flattened to make room for a few disgustingly overpowered top-tier special units. They also changed troop wages to make it so you almost never wanted very many of the top-tier units while making sure that the the good enough troops were just that -- good enough.

It isn't a perfect example of a mod flattening the difference (there was certainly a huge difference between the bottom and the top) but there was definitely encouragement to just stop upgrading your troops past a certain point. And I'm not sure if it counts as "successful" either.

 

[Silfir]

I honestly disagree with this. I won't argue whether it is realistic or not, imo the main point is that it doesn't make for fun gameplay. If five trash units can kill a unit that is worth so much more in terms of money, training and equipment, what is even the point?

At the risk of point out the obvious: Party size. You can get stronger faster by hiring more men, but once you've hit the party size limit, the only way to get stronger is by training the men you have into higher level troops. Food is also a limited resource.

To me fun gameplay is in commanding an army in a tactical and strategically sound manner. If you can literally send elite troops into a horde of looters because they're invincible, it's neither realistic nor interesting. But you may be able to utilize terrain to force the looters to attack you head-on, without the ability to utilize their superior numbers properly, and then win the battle. Your army does have to be of a certain size to be able to do that, however. If you expect a single super soldier to be able to take on mooks by the dozens and emerge unscathed, you might look into games like Dynasty Warriors.

I do agree that leather armor and metal helmets should be sufficient protection against thrown rocks and if they're not, there's an issue with the way armor is handled by the game.

 

[Lord Bryggan]

For that i'd like an other fix.
Its called patrols.
You and your companions only can cover so much and its feels lile a waste of time to chase 20 looters around while you could command 300.

There were mods in Warband where you could hire groups of Manhunters to patrol your villages. And i especially liked the one where you could join a group of manhunters, which was a safe easy way to level up.

 

[HalfMetalJacket]

After reading all this, I think what we really need are roaming deserters. I actually miss them myself.

 

[archaicwarrior]

Looters are suppose ? to represent the unwashed masses, with no money to buy metal weapons. Thus Rock throwing / rock slinging / large wooden clubs etc was their default weapons. If they could "loot" metal weapons then some would have such.

 

[Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James]

Why are the "unwashed masses" running around attacking anyone who confronts them? Why are they evenly distributed throughout the world? Where do they come from, and why are they so poorly equipped in a world where war is constant and discarded weapons are all over the place?
I would much, much prefer looters if they actually did something other than running around. E.g. having basically armies of looters converge on a battlefield after a big battle, or show up in the hundreds after a village gets looted, but be more or less absent otherwise.

I mean hell you could even have it so that in the early game you ARE a looter and have to fight off or avoid other looters to get to battlefields which might have loads of actual loot on them.

 

[Noudelle]

I mean hell you could even have it so that in the early game you ARE a looter and have to fight off or avoid other looters to get to battlefields which might have loads of actual loot on them.

A genuinely great idea.

 

[Herr_Tankred]

Looters?

CHARGE!

(1.5.0. they are free xp running around.)