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I have been having random crashes-and-shutdowns with 1.157.

I can't log in to the bugs report site with my regular forum credentials.

It just reports "Runtime error" "Server Error in '/' Application" when I enter name and password.

Any suggestions?

KaosProphet said:

The only battles where I find I've got about '8 seconds' to put troops in position is against khergits and steppe or desert bandits.  And that's approximately how their real-world analogues operated in the first place, so I don't really mind.

But then, that's an appeal to realism (or pseudo-realism) so you'll probably just dismiss it.

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Agreed. Although a few more seconds would be worthwhile.  No matter how quickly I bark orders my guys are still moving to position by the time they're hit by horsey bandits.

Admittedly, keys are sometimes confusing at the beginning,  but their sequences soon become second  nature for quick orderliness.

If it helps,  keep in mind every battle encounter has three or so battleground scenes.  If the one you spawn on isn't to your liking, you can always tab out  and load up the next one (without penalty, if no one has engaged yet).  I routinely tab through possible scenes, scanning them quickly in turn, before choosing the best one for the army and enemy I have, so when it shows up again, I have some idea already of where I'm going to place people and can issue orders quickly. While some may call this an "exploit", I consider it fair - a limited way of tactically choosing your starting position. 

Where I have a problem with 1.153 is apparently the inability to change your gear & horses between battle scenes.  You used to be able to do that.  Not sure why that was removed.

I have a little time opening up, so I'd like to toss my hat into the ring for the SP, if it is not too late.

I have made one relatively large mod before (the Lombard Leagues) and I am quite familiar with scripting (at least up to 951). Hopefully,  I can be useful.

Orion said:

In fact, it's worse if you go for the small target. If you just aim for the rider, it means your lance will have to travel further than his, because his is aimed at the head of your horse and yours is aimed at him half-way back on his horse.

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Indeed. Cav-on-cav just becomes much more unbalanced in favor of who has the bigger lance.  It makes Swadian cavalry with their big lances pretty much undefeatable - which is exactly what I've been seeing in this patch.  Makes it no point for anyone else to take up cav against them.  I wouldn't call that 'balancing'.

(Not that a Rhodok or Nord cav should be that tremendous against Swadian cav, but at least Vaegirs & Sarranids horse should have a chance, but they're now more outdominated than ever.)

And given that Swadian cav on foot has reasonably good attributes & equipment, it's a godsend to that faction.

(and p.s., just for the record, even if Swadian, I never use great lance, as I find it unsporting.)

This is a risk you get to choose to take on your own and it has its own benefits. Unfortunately, with merged hitboxes you always aim for the horse because once you kill the horse the rider usually "falls" into your lance in a head-on attack. You kill both horse and rider in one go, and that's worse than one dismounted cavalryman for balance.

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Leaving the rider unscathed is that it gives the rider an instant dismount & second life.  That's not 'balance', because it's not you, the cav, that has to deal with the dismounted rider, but some poor sap on foot.  If they're going to be helping the enemy dismount, then I'd rather my own cavalry stay away from me.

I've noticed the disservice is particularly great with respect to Khergit horse archers, because dismounted, they are just as lethal and are now 'conveniently' dismounted in strategic points on the field just outside of the reach of foot, forcing foot to break their formation to chase the buggers.  Again, if my cav is not killing them, then I'd rather NOT have my cav take on their horse archers.

(And again, because dismounted Khergit cav, with their new toy chest of weapons, is actually quite decent on foot, this is even more unbalanced in their favor).

Again, in this patch, I've noticed Khergits are much more powerful relative to other factions than they were before.

okiN said:

I detect someone who's too reliant on couching. That's the only instance where it's now impossible to hit both horse and rider. You want to kill the rider? Aim higher.

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I am a teamplayer who when I am cav, use cav largely in a supportive role. That is, I don't chase after kills, I go after whatever is threatening my foot or archers.  And I've just noticed that I'm now doing my own lads a disservice by going cav.

CryptoCactus said:

I'm with Elthore. Cav should start aiming for the other rider, instead of the horse, if having to circle around and deal with the newly-born pike(lance)man is a problem.

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Except that becomes the problem is created for whomever the footmen are, not the cavalry.  The cav doesn't usually return. They just help their cav dismount instantly and turn into inf.  Quite a disservice to his own team. 

I like to see and use cav supportive of inf, not detrimental to them.  This is a pointless modification that takes the game further away from teamplay.

And, no, in battle you don't aim for rider, you aim for horse.  Read any manual or chronicle.  Only in silly tournament jousts does anyone aim for riders. 

Merlkir said:

The shared hitboxes are moronic, just have the cavalryman suffer some minor damage from the fall..

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Shared hitboxes remain on cav-on-foot encounters.  And it is how M&B has been done, except for one brief patch back in 2005, and it wasn't a hit then either.

I don't see the purpose of separation, other than to make cavalry more useless at helping foot. 

Seawied86 said:

To be honest halcyon, I've never really had that problem with haft lancing. The current hitbox for a couch lance is forgiveningly wide, but I haven't noticed it extending to the haft of the weapon.

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Hm. Happens quite a bit, in my experience.  Sometimes it is mere lag, though.

Shik said:

JoG said:

BTW, any ideas how the middle-eastern faction got bamboo for their spears?

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My guess is that the Sarranids are based on North Africans, considering that the mesh names for the turbans include names such as "Tuareg_helmet." According to Wikipedia, bamboo can be found in Subsaharan Africa, so it's not inconceivable that they might have access to some.

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Actually, no.  Middle Eastern armies did have bamboo spears, imported on a large scale from India.  Bamboo spears were known as 'khatti', after the harbor of al-Khatt (now modern UAE), where the imported bamboo was offloaded.

Seawied86 said:

Honestly, I think in another patch or two, MP will be about done.

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I may be a minority opinion, but I consider the current state of Warband MP to be fundamentally broken.  It needs substantially more work.  This can conceivably be done within a patch or two, and that'd be peachy.  But if all that happens is a mere tweak or two on its current state, I wouldn't buy it.

(well, I would, only to support Taleworlds; but I wouldn't likely play it).

Timothy the Knight said:

Yeah, that could present problems. But I think I've got a good answer.

We'd just have a single texture file that would be in use for every banner. This file would contain blank banners of different colours stacked on top of each other. Those who are familiar with image editing software call these layers. Each charge would apply layer masks to the banner layers to create the shapes and colours of the final banner. Each separate banner would just have different layer mask information, which is a lot more resource efficient. A banner would really only consist of a string of code telling the game what to display and where.

Of course, I'm not exactly an expert in these matters. But if image editing software can pull this sort of thing off, it should be applicable to a game's texture files, right? Correct me if I'm wrong here.

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Oh, I'm not an expert.  All I've ever done is tinker with mods.  Just speaking out loud from of how this might be implemented.

What you are proposing is sort of what I was saying. 

Let me try to explain what I'm thinking.  The editor would do something like the outline on the left.  It has 10 mapping positions - four quadrants (I-IV) and six badge areas.  (A-F).  A heraldic banner editor would simply produce a string for those 10 positions.



The issue is the texture dds.  That's on the right there.  There are four items: two underlying blank quandrants (happen to be white in yellow in my DDS sheet, but that's not necessary as color can be defined in the process of mapping; they just have to be two distinct blank quadrants available on the sheet), a striped quadrant mask (happens to be green, but again color irrelevant, it will be defined via mapping), a fleur-des-lis group mask

So to construct a banner as in middle, here's how you'd go about it:

I - underlying yellow quadrant
II - underlying white quadrant
III - underlying yellow quadrant
IV - underlying white quadrant
A - left empty (no chief badge)
B - stripe mask  (turned green in mapping)
C - fleur-de-lis group mask (turned yellow in mapping)
D - left emtpy (no central badge)
E - stripe mask
F - fleur de lis group

Or something like that.  Does that make sense?

Now you could do anything - have a diagonals, etc.  But all the masks & badges will have to be on a single sheet, AFAIK.

The only issue is user-defined positioning.  I chose ten mapping areas.  You could possibly add a few more positions.  But user-defininition is going to be limited by the 10 positions.  Unless in the string there is some 'adjustment' coordinates that "pushes" each of the badges (A-F) north/south/east/west to the extent the player desires.  That only applies to the badges of course.  It makes it a longer string, but I suppose that's feasible. 

The 10 character banner string (or perhaps longer, if badge-coordinates are included) would then be as simple as the user-defined face.

Timothy the Knight said:

The items would work in a similar manner as the heraldic items (shields, surcoats) we currently have, as in there's a basic item that takes a new form when someone with a banner takes it. but instead of just pasting the banner on them, these would look like what the player designed in the editors.

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It is this that worries me. 

The 'current' mode of implementation, as I understand it, is that the heraldic banner is contained in a texture DDS file, and the application to heraldic items is just a generic mapping from those files to the BRF model.  To do as you propose sounds a bit more performance-intensive - meaning, that every round the computer would have to create and save 'new' dds files on your hard drive, to account for all the new user-defined textures from different players.  This could be a serious memory-and-performance hog.

Thinking out loud...

The only efficient way I see this happening is to overhaul the mapping, so that the textures map not as a whole but into only four quadrants (say) and one overall badge (or maybe several badge mappings).  And rewrite the mapping so that instead of mapping one whole done texture, it'd map, say, 5 or 10 separate texture parts.

This too will be memory intensive, but perhaps not as much.

The problem with this mapping-technique is that it is going to be far more constrained than your proposing.  I simply don't see how badge-placement can be done 'freehand' as you propose.  I can see the possibility of a limited number of mapping positions (e.g. six or ten, say) to place badges, but the possibilities are not likely going to be much more than that.

Now, as a single BRF model can only take mappings from single texture DDS, so ALL possible component 'items' would have to be placed on a single texture file.  This is going to limit your possibilities. On the other hand, since IIRC colors can be adjusted during the mapping process, this is not as terribly consuming as it sounds.

To be frank, I am not quite sure I understand exactly what you're proposing. 

Could you be a little more explicit, maybe with some more examples?

What's a spammer?

Quantum said:

So, the humble infantry no feels much more comfortable wandering across the battlefield on their own. They don't need the company of others to stay alive and reach melee.

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This.

The great thing about the 'unbalanced' earlier patches was precisely necessity.  Nords excepted, you had hardly a chance in hell on your lonesome and were forced to cooperate.  With only a touch of exaggeration, I remember almost every round beginning/ending with a discussion of a plan - not necessarily formations, but just more basic tactics, positions, ideas, etc.  I don't see any such discussions at all now.  It has nothing to do with "quality" of players,  it is that they're simply not needed. 

This I attribute directly to patch-by-patch changes.  Constant whining by duel-minded players ("Khergits need axes!", "Nerf the horses", etc.) has led to nearly all vulnerabilities being closed.  A single player, whatever their nationality, has nothing to fear anymore.  It's all about duelling skills now.

I agree.

And no, it's not players getting better.  It is the manner in which the patches have evolved.  Via weapon choices & weapon balances,  the game has rebalanced again and again in favor of dueling.  It lessens the necessity of teamwork.  And the ultimate absurity of melee ff actually punishes it.

Cavalry still broken.

Long axes still stupid.

Both these things need complete overhauls.

Agnar Trogg said:

Khalid, can you explain this fix a little bit more?

What file do I have to open, and what do I have to change? IT noobs like me are still gonna sit here without Warband

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Hm. If you don't know how to enter the registry, I am a little scared to encourage it.  Be careful.  Messing with the registry is like conducting open heart surgery on the computer. 

But essentially you have to go start -> run -> enter 'regedit', and the registry will open.  You then have to navigate the registry window to  the place I indicated:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER -> Software -> MountAndBladeKeys

(not MountAndBladeWarbandKeys)

right click in the window to create new string value (call it 'serial_key') and then right click modify (not modify binary)  and enter your serial key there.

But again, be careful.  Mucking with the registry is dangerous.

rudelumber said:

I believe so. I uninstalled regular M&B, installed warband, went into regedit and ADDED the serial_key value for m&b and when I started WARBAND it did not ask me to enter the serial.  I haven't checked if the 'incorrect serial' message still appears yet though.

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OK.  I just added the serial key manually and it works - both the load up & server access.

To summarize:

If you're confident enough to play with registry (warnings about messing with registry):

ignore HKEY_CURRENT_USER -> Software -> MountAndBladeWarbandKeys

go instead to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER -> Software -> MountAndBladeKeys

If you have 1.011 previously installed (or updated) there should be a serial key there and it should be working.  But if you have serial problems, chances are it isn't (e.g. if you didn't install 1.011 lately) then right click to add "string value" (enter: serial_key) and then right click "modify" (enter the serial).  It should work now.