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Or a slider in the option to set which hours trigger a "night time" battle scene, allowing to keep "sync" with game time, or reduce it towards the middle of the night while expanding the dawn/dust settings down to "no night battle at all".

Antaeus said:

I'd hazard a guess that this is the root cause of some people's dislike for looters - particularly against melee cavalry. They can inadvertently isolate and overwhelm individual units within larger groups leading to the deaths of T5 units and even the player even when a battle is lopsided against the looters.

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yes AI trying to attack a looter (or anyone) next to another looter will ignore the danger of the "other" enemy, ending up being struck.
I sometimes even use "looters" in my army melee formation because they are fast and get "ahead", becoming the threat the enemy focus on and making my "real soldiers" safer through it.

Dejan said:

Hi @Hexnibbler, what are you trying to achieve with your mod? How would the above change help you?

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gain (more) control over individual soldiers within the c# scripts to modify they individual behaviors, specifically who they chose to attack/defend against.

My initial thought was that I would try to maintain a list (-for every soldier-) of all enemy targetting them in melee at the "agent" level.
from there I would be able to modify which enemy should be targetted by other soldier of the formation.
Agent level : list of pointer to enemy soldier targetting him (updated per tick/cb)
Formation level : list of friendly agent sorted so that friendly soldier that have the most enemy on their list (=targetting them) are first.

So that when an agent select a new target
a) he first check his own list of who targets him to decide wheter he should act defensively or not (lots of enemy = he doesn't just try to attack someone as if he had any chance to stay alive.)
b) if he's relatively "free" of threat, he chose to attack someone from the list of enemy of one of his teammate (obtained from the list at the formation level). (because the list at the formation would contain pointer to friendly agent, and those friendly agent would contain a list of pointer to enemy agent, the iteration should be low cost). and take within that list enemies that, themselves, have no one trying to fight them.

so that instead of having lots of soldiers targetting the same target and lots of soldiers being free of threat is reduced towards more "duels" within the melee fight.

for a) the idea was to iterate every tick over the list of enemies in the agent list, unless the current target is releasing a blow (so that he can try to block that blow).
for b) it would be "weighted" by the distance he has with those enemies so that agent don't run on the other side of the formation to help if they can help closer friendly soldiers.

tldr : a system that try to simulate soldiers within a formation taking into account the situation of their teammate through target selection. As if their teammate were shouting for help when overwhelmed.

just to highlight a stat mentioned in the sturgya thread : 44.4% unblocked hits are on the left side vs 55.5% hitting right because shield is on the left hand for those empire dude. [edit to clarify : this is not due to "blocked" by friendlies stats. It comes from stats of overall hits, counting how many hits lands on right should/right arm versus left shoulder/left arm. ]

Dejan said:

Interesting thread @Hexnibbler, awesome to see you dig into our combat AI mechanics from a more statistics-based perspective! Thumbs up on the effort. I've forwarded your thread to the combat team.

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good to know !

the above link point to a thread containing other stuff :
throwing weps stats
stats showing difference of "friendly blocking a hit" between "long" 1H, "short" 1H and 2H making short 1H & 2H better in melee, which is consistent with the unit empiric prowesses (I.E. maces of the legionaries, flax, etc)

and a link to "here" and to "bodypart being hit" stats (explaining the overwhelming effect of body/head armor):
Also had plots measuring the relative effectivness of sturgian shield vs projectiles in shieldwall vs empire shields (was signifcant.)

Did some stats to get an idea of how many hits are blocked by friendlies.

Empire T2 : 1401 hits, 131 Friendly block => 131/1401 = 9.35%
Sturgia T2 : 1185 hits, 112 Friendly block => 9.45%
Legionnaries : 1492 hits, 76 friendly block => 5.09%
Linebreakers : 1131 hits, 28 friendly block => 2.47%
Vlandia Sergeant : 1650 hits, 96 friendly block => 5.8%
Sturgia heavy spearman : 2593 hits, 292 friendly block => 11.26%
Battania picked warrior : 1853 hits, 167 friendly block => 9%
Battania volunteers : 938 hits, 9 friendly block => 0,95% (less than 1%). Note : they have either 2H or a short 1H.
.
Hypothesis :
with short 1H weapons you reduce the risks of losing hits because of friendlies proximity (see legionaries, sergeants battania volunteers)
with 2H weapon the fighters can start to attack while being further from their target, reducing the risk of being close to a friendly. (see linebreakers, battania volunteer)
with medium/long 1H weapons you have the max risks

Sidhwen_Khorest said:

I always thought that snowballing was more of a feature problem rather than a balancing one. There was so much time spent tweaking lord's income, troops, etc. to prevent snowballing. Keyword being prevent, because on a long enough timeline every game develops into a snowball even after all of the changes.

I thought something like a proper rebellion system where cultures could rise from the grave and push back in an organized fashion against their conquerors. Instead we have what is a system that makes you babysit recently conquered castles and towns, nothing that could substantially stop a powerful faction.

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I agree. To add to that : there is a lack of intra faction conflicts.
If clans within a faction could be at war with each other it would open the door for a much deeper diplomacy/political/relational system where bigger faction gain an internal threat (division) everytime they reduce the external threat (other kingdoms).

So that the theme of the empire would be a systemic and organic feature of the whole game.
The criminal system could be a subsystem of that "internal conflicts" system.

R1919 said:

Wow, your name is just like my nickname on this forum, amazing!

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I admit I laughed

It's interresting data. But I think you are mistakenly reducing it to profit.

The caravan XP your companion which in turns allow them to solve issues for you.
Caravans raises scouting, riding and trading.
Positioning in a settlement raise charm, party role raise stewardships/medecine/scouting and engineering.
Leading a party raise leadership & tactics and roguery (aside from martial skills).

The competition between workshop & caravans do not exists : you do not share limited slots for both. You can have both and workshop are useless for developping companions.

The trade skill will only improves a proportion of the potential profit. But that potential profit is totally linked to what good is available and at what price, which is very dependent on which factions own which fiefs, and luck.

So I have to strongly disagree : caravans are not useless.
They turn capital into income that in turns allow you to stay in the green. They stock towns and they level trade,riding,scouting without taking neither a workshop slot, a party slot or a party role slot.

Finally, the survivability issue.

As it is designed, caravans survivability comes from it ability to dodge and outrun. It gets destroyed when it takes a wrong turn and get trapped. If you ever tried to play a raider playstyle attacking caravans, you know their speed is what allows them to get out of tricky situation versus a party that simpl is set to "attack" and doesn't try to out maneuver them.
More men will only turn "borderline" cases into "trapped cases" because they will always be weaker than full parties.
Even IF the caravan survive a fight, it now risks being burdened (they won't throw away their good, and they carry in proportion to their roster in town). And so it is now easier to catch, while not being stronger than what the current caravan are.
I believe that's why developpers said that it was the issue with your suggestion. It's a logical conclusion.

Your comparison of day 150 to day 750 forget one very important factor : bandits growth over time (as well as with player level).
For time only, it maxed out at day 900 (If I'm correct).
So the caravans surviving 87.5% over 150 days can probably be maintained by tuning the way bandits & looters forces grows overtime but that is tied to lots of other mechanics. If that's correct, modifying \modules\sandbox\ModuleData\partyTemplates.xml to get looters & bandits to have min=1 max=1 might show (by comparisons with the normal behavior) how much the survivability loss is impacted by bandits/looters growth compared to warring parties ?

It still will most probably be tuned and the caravan survivability will therefore be tuned as consequence. There is a similar issue with peasants parties being more and more often destroyed by bandits because of that issue. It comes from bandits parties of varying size "ganging up" : a small party runs fast enough to catch a group bigger than his, and the bigger, slower bandit group gets dragged into the fight, making it a win.
So the bigger the "range" of size for the bandits (I.E. instead of 4-> 10 it becomes 4 -> 50), the more those cases occurs. There are ideas how to go about solving that (my favourite : make it so that bandits "merge" parties. It remove their "speed" advantage, while making big bandits parties available for leveling lord's troops.)

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That being said, if you find a modder willing to try :
LordConversationCampaignBehavior class, method conversation_magistrate_form_a_caravan_accept_on_consequence shows the process of upgrading a caravan into a "bigger" caravan, where the property "_selectedCaravanType" is set to 0 for a normal caravan and 1 for a bigger one. Adding code to manage a case where it is set to 2 and dialog to set it to 2 shouldn't be overly complicated rocket science.

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it's good to see someone else trying to pin points complex issues about the simulation

Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James said:

you can tell a dozen people worked on it, and that they didn't coordinate very well, and as a result all their faults as individual developers are amplified. You can tell which devs didn't test their code at all, and which don't care about the game much and are just completing tickets. There are a shocking number of these in the code,

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I counted 5 main programmers and 3 additionals for warband in their credits from the main menu.
and 2 of the mains were 2 out of the 3 game designers.

I cannot seem to reproduce it either (now playing on 1.6.5 beta).
I'll update this with a save if I ever run into it again.

Dejan said:

We're working on it .

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It had to be meme'd.
It had to.

Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James said:

[...]

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1) It wouldn't make sense to make a mod instead of a full game if modders had to "do almost everything themselves". That's the elephant in the room.
Sure some mods are very complex and required lots of work & effort. And it should hint at how complex building from scratch is.
Some modders could, and some do, go on to make their own game. But most won't and many of those who try fails to achieve big projects because that requires more man-hours. It ends up requiring a more productive organizational model which in turns, sadly, filters out some of the creativity at hands.
Given the (relatively) precarious work conditions in the average video game studio, saying developpers "don't care" or are "not creative", etc is wrong. People who chose video game industry could earn more and for much less stress in a different area. They do love their craft and when they don't, they switch away. There exists many instances of small subset of employee forming their own small studio when they feel they have enough experience in the field to regain control over creativity and while it's more rewarding when it works, it also is more risky and can ends up in that small studio asking for help from publishers. There's comfort in modding in the sense that lots of ground work is already done.

It relate to my width & depth argument :
Most developpers are frustated by the need to switch away from a feature because of dead-lines. But for any feature to have value, there needs to be an overall context in which those feature makes sense. I.E. a super genius smithy feature has not the same value within the context of an awesome RPG than it would have on its own.
So the "width" is required as a way to improves the value of every parts and the "depth" has to be cut many times to allocate the work-hours on the rest of the project. In virtually every cases mods are working on the rough edges of an existing project that already possess a sufficient width that enable the features/modification to have value. And that's why people who mods, mods, and don't design from scratch. Because for a given quantity of work and effort the value produced and the satisfaction they get out of it is higher than if they had to include the work for everything else.
And from scratch I include working from engine such as unity/unreal.

2) Quality of code. I agree with your statement for the most part.
But my point was that building a whole project from scratch forces a minimum of quality. You can't build upon crappy noodle code without adding more crappy noodle code to the soup and at some point it becomes insanity.
That's why modders can make crappy noodle code : because it's unlikely anyone will build upon what they did. And it didn't imply modders are unskilled developpers or always do crappy work. They still need to refactor their craft when they want to build more on top of what they did or accept the soup.
Developping game is a specific IT paradigm in which whatever is "expected to be fun" isn't necessarly fun when it's done and may requires so many consecutive rewritings that making crappy noodle code is sometimes the fastest way to find "what should be implemented" based on how "it feels" for the player. Because it's pointless to try to format an idea to high standard if that idea ends up being thrashed.
This constant prototyping plays a big role in the video game code being rough on every edges. Still need solid trunk and branchs if you want something to grow big. It's not aero-spatial engineering but it's still big IT project.

It's also different when you have to deal with dead-lines in a team (average case of game development) than if you are alone on your free time (average case of mod development).

MostBlunted said:

Sure, but still there are more mods that fix the core issues of the game than breaking the game...and if a mod breaks the game just don´t use it, but I have no option to use a working siege AI if I don´t use mods...

I still don´t get how modders are able to improve/fix major issues while TW just "ignores" (yea, I know, they`re working on them yada yada yada) them.

Never forget, modders do this stuff in their free time without receiving anything. And they could stop anyday if they like to, but TW also could do this so...I don´t know...and this game sold millions of copies over a year ago and still we have this state of the game with like 8 months left according to TWs latest statement...

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Either it makes sense for the game designer vision (I.E. after battle, soldiers are free to roam and this frustration has to be accepted)
or it's going to be reverted as a polishing work once features related to battle are all implemented.

It's a matter of accepting what one consider a flaw in someone's work. That said I relate to being triggered by some decision (I wouldn't be a code digger otherwise) but I raise my optimistic gaze up to God and remember that He opted for darwinism as a way to sort those issues through "Essential mods" / "Community Edition". Maybe it can be compared to fans critisizing the cast for a movie or certain scenes they watched 10 times and got angry at because they spotted inconsistencies/mistakes.

IMO early access tends to create those situation where the freshness of what has been done fades away while the expectation of more/better grows, leaving a bitter feeling to hardcore players. The benefits of first impression is diluted and ends up making it looks worse than it would, had it been published later on.

TheWigglyTapeworm said:

Gold is abit useless in the mid game too tbh, you get so much from prisoners and selling loot, so converting influence to gold seems pointless too..
Influence definitely needs more functionality..
Maybe allow voting on where to go/decision making when in an army or something

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or lobby the lords to vote in a specific way for decisions

and there's also the "breadth and depth" thing.
modder can go very deep into a single feature where developpers have to carry the whole width of the project, including the technical "invisible" stuff.

It'easier to go down a very sophisticated "smithing" feature if you don't have to manage the rest of the features and develop it with the same depth.

I would agree that the main issue comes from accountability :
modders can risks breaking the game.
they can risks wasting their time into something that no ones likes.
modders can work "solo" and make crappy noodle code that would instantly burn the eyes of any professional.
modders build upon what developers made.
Devs cannot. they still do mistakes, still have varying quality of works. varying reliability, etc.But they are entilted to perform to a minimum and to take a share of the workload that they do not necessarly choose from.

attempt to explain why it goes the way it goes

ssssnake said:

I enjoy smithing. I like crafting weapons for me and my party to use.

However, the economics of smithing make any other method for making money completely obsolete.

Simply by forging and selling 2 handed swords, I can easily make $200k per day.

The prices of smithed weapons need to be reduced. By a lot. There really should be a 80% trade penalty imposed on the prices for player made weapons. Otherwise, money is pretty much free.

That said, there should also be a reduction in the cost of high tier equipment in general. 200k to 500k for top tier bows and armor seems like a bit much.

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I agree
I strongly believe that the price of equipment is the problem :
- there are ridiculous prices for high tiers equipement,
- the proportion of wealth you gain from "equipement loot" after battles is 90% of income and makes everything else irrelevant (aside from smithing. But that's again the price of equipement)
- the money from smithing is off the scale : "orders" are very low and some items are very high on market.

lowering equipment value tenfolds would solve all of that and bring back the need to balance army wages to the point where you can't roflstomp everything with T6 armies for long.
I try to play without taking the equipement from "loots" and it changes the game in a very good way.

That said, I love smithing.