Search results for query: *

Grank said:

Was it a continuous 3,262 hours or did you take like, say, two months breaks every once in a while? Because it's the break that's important. That's what I meant by "relatively daily". You will get sick of something if you play it non-stop. You need breaks or a change every once in a while. I'd normally get invested in a Total War campaign and play just that game for weeks, and then switch to another game like Mount&Blade and the cycle continues. I'd get sick of Total War not because it's a bad game, but because once I've played it too long, everything will eventually become a blur and feel like a chore.

Like you said, once you've played a game long enough you will know every nook and cranny of the game. Your gaming session will become very uninteresting as there's nothing "fresh" for your recent memory, and that's boring. A break would cleanse that dirtied mindset and make the game look fresh again when you come back to it.

What the "actual quality" of the game does, is make you return after that break. If the game is utter crap, you won't return, which will translate to less total playtime. The argument was, if someone really thinks Bannerlord is crap, they wouldn't return to it.

Click to expand...

I played Warband pretty much every day for quite a long while. I never got sick of it as there was always fresh content with new mods, but I did eventually just switch interests, but there was never entering a period of disgust with the state of things, especially as I could just tweak MCM values or use Morgh's editor to fix minor grievances on the fly. Said breaks later on could last a while, but there was a point where I was playing it more or less every day for the better part of like, 3-4 years. Although I didn't play vanilla itself all that much, Floris for a while, but I moved on to more incredible pastures like 1257ad, la Guerre de Cent Ans, Warsword Conquest, etc.

xdj1nn said:

wtf are you on about? I said I'm testing the GAME itself, it's boundaries and limits, it's mechanics, etc... You sound like I've said I'm trying to use games as sources of sience or knowledge (!??!) You may dislike me but giving such a "under shroom" reply was a stretch too far
Easy on the droogs mate

You forgot the fact that we can completely wipe enemies with arrows only and don't even need infantry or cavalry at all. But as I've said, I don't like BL - mods mitigate most issues but not everything nor fixes them entirely... RBM really increases the quality of the game - Warbandlord can approximate the experience to what we used to get with WB - without either of those mods the game crumbles, that means at some point we'll get combat overhauls that will probably fix everything, which do not excuse TWs flawed vision and original design.

wholeheartedly agree - I still come back to really old titles from time to time and have a second wave of a blast whenever I do that. Of course, since I know every crack in these games I grow tired faster and move on to not touch them for long periods, but they are really rich - With BL that doesn't happen, I've stayed away from it for a really long time and came back recently, only to find the exact same experience - Underwhelming, incomplete, excessively grindy and poorly balanced. - the minor improvements made gave the game new novelty (which's what's keeping me going for now) but novelties wear off and they can never make a game good, the core gameplay loop's the key for that...

Click to expand...

While it's possible to wipe armies with just arrows, I don't actually regard that as being incredibly reliable in either vanilla or RBM and thus prefer to opt for infantry and cavalry with rudimentary hammer and anvil tactics. It prevents you from ever getting overrun, ensures the enemy gets enveloped and the lords are taken out, and works in any terrain feature such as LOS blocking hills.

Frankly I consider Bannerlord to be early access garbage with either an expressly manipulative dev cycle as is now the norm to dupe people into buying No Man's Feudalism (but without the support cycle yet that made NMS make a comeback), or internal communication is so horrendously incompetent that the current mess is an unintentional and unfortunate conclusion. Either way the game is completely vapid and devoid of even the minor depth of Warband when it comes to non combat features, and the combat of Bannerlord itself is atrocious unless you play like a blinkered moron and thus never realize how fast the jenga tower falls apart if you lightly poke it.

Everything outside of combat basically doesn't exist, there really is not even gameplay to be had for a character if you don't endlessly play battles, but the issue falls that the battles themselves play like utter garbage that blend together in same-ness so regardless of what I do, regardless of what mods I use, every single battle turns into the exact same affair of utterly decisive victories with no risk unless I'm hideously outnumbered. Because yet again we have another medieval game where the AI has the general intelligence of a catatonic stroke victim and cannot cope or defeat a foe that enters a basic infantry square, and troop quality has been largely thrown out to die with the removal of the old stat system so elite troops can be pretty easily mulched by infantry or cavalry in a good spot.

My disappointment is immeasurable because I foolishly thought that despite being early access, this game would be enjoyable, that at the least it would have modding potential, and that it would be a worthy successor to Warband. Instead what I ended up buying was nothing short of an infuriating, miserable mistake of a purchase that served as yet another lesson of why anything labelled early access is probably going to turn out to be hot garbage.

And I have no intention to mince words in this because I actually cared about this game being good, but from the perspective of a medievalist and enjoyment found in Warband, Bannerlord's 'development' cycle has been nothing more than watching a trainwreck where you watch your childhood stuffed toy get ripped asunder. Because not only is combat in this game atrocious compared to Warband, but the move to more complex coding and removal of such things as MCM .ini files for modules means you have zero hope of trying to tweak things on your own end to achieve a realistic feeling end where armor isn't ****ing paper or even behaves in a realistic manner. And it's not like mods fix this either, as either it's a hardcoded part of the game where armor doesn't soak damage like it used to, or mods like Realistic Battle just have zero actual intention of being a realistic battle mod, leaving you on your own without the means to engage in high skill coding to try to tweak the game to a point where you find it actually respectable. It is safe to say that I will never recommend Bannerlord to anyone unless there's some radical shifts in development or modding down the line, because all I see now is 448 hours I wasted trying to have fun.

Also on the topic of modding, I may have tried to take a crack at banging my head against a wall to learn c to make some basic attempt to mod literally anything, even just changing the values of armor in bannerlord, but the documentation from talesworld did not pay to update the domain!

Regarding the nature of battles when talking about sameness as well, where all the rest of the game has nothing in the way of meaningful development, combat thus becomes the sole focus of the game. But in every battle I play it's the same song and dance every time. Terrain in Bannerlord means little to nothing like it did in Warband for one, altitude seriously improves the performance of ranged units but it doesn't mean much in bannerlord because ranged is already hideously deadly in vanilla. Forests likewise don't hurt cav as much as they do in warband, I don't see cavalry impacting trees much and getting stopped, thus they don't offer nearly as much protection against cavalry charges, and nor does water either. In warband water slows any unit to a crawl, thus anchoring infantry on the riverbank is hyper-effective when facing overwhelming amounts of horsemen. Warband also in some regions will toss obscene amounts of hills at you, such as in Rhodok territory, which throws another wrench in the idea that one tactic solves all problems.

But this isn't the case with Bannerlord, where one playstyle resolves all problems and situations. Every battle I fight for the course of a hundred hours is the exact same song and dance, over and over again, with the same results unless the enemy completely outnumbers me. Said tactic? Stick infantry into square/shieldwall, aggro AI into a suicide charge, then loop around and lead a cavalry lance to utterly smash the bots, and to only use units with the 'follow me' command so they stick together, because the AI has its units fly apart at the seams when it charges so you have individual horsemen zipping across the battlefield erratically. Meanwhile you, the player, are not an idiot, so you just personally lead your cavalry to delete the enemy with 60+ heavy cav smashing clean into their flanks with maximum concentration of mass to bowl them over. Then you do this again. And again. And again. And again. For hundreds of hours because it's really the only part of the 'game' that has gameplay, and it all turns into a monotonous chore that never changes, never sees unexpected curveballs, and always wins, forever. You can't have combat be the sole focus of a game and then have personal combat which is trash because of ridiculously bad armor/lack of realistic armor soaking, and bad field tactics because the AI is hideously stupid and environmental factors do little to screw up your battle plan.

Grank said:

He was specifically talking about the thumbs down, which is fair. If the game is really bad and deserves a thumbs down, why is that person still playing or played a lot of it?

The thing about a game/movie/whatever is that you will get sick of it if you play it too much. Play any game for a thousand hours in a relatively daily manner. You will get sick of it, no matter how good the game actually is. Then it becomes "This guy hates the game only because he's played way too much."

Click to expand...

Also this isn't true. I have played Warband for 3,262 hours and I am far from sick of it, with mods like Warsword Conquest it continues to shine where so many modern videogames are nothing more than exploitative garbage. I have played Warframe, Skyrim, Vermintide 2, Battlefront 2, and Dawn of War 2 for hundreds of hours each as well. None of them I would say are at all bad, and most I thoroughly enjoy. I could and one day likely will, end up spending literal thousands of hours on most of their number because they are good and close enough to perfection that I hardly develop a hatred of them.

The issue rather is that if you play for something long enough you will learn every flaw, every exploit, and every defect no different than if you spend hundreds to thousands of hours with a singular person. If that person is actually good you don't get sick of them, the problem is rather if the product in the same line, isn't good at all. And Bannerlord is frankly atrocious in its current state and its entire state since it was put up on the steam store, as hundreds of hours gave me in depth look to all of its problems. It's the same issue I have with total war, the game series is actually made like hot garbage if you play long enough to learn the game rather than merely playing an immersive experience for 100 hours and then forget about it for the rest of your life. There is a serious difference between testing the temperature of a pool with your toes and leaping in for a swim.

Y'all also seem to be forgetting the other major change that screws over elite troops in Bannerlord something fierce - strength and iron skin are gone, weapon skill itself is really only half-in. The difference between even garbage infantry an the best cataphract in bannerlord is purely that of their weapon skill, and on that matter I'm not even convinced there's much of a meaningful difference. The separation of strength and hp is gone so it just becomes a matter of who gets to whallop who first. What this means is that when Bannerlord cav gets bogged down, even if they're in a good position to smack heads - they aren't hitting harder or have more HP than the troops that are poking them to death. In warband if your elite cavalry get stuck in melee, they're still good at that even if the positioning is less than ideal, and especially with maces will absolutely punish even well armored infantry. Bannerlord? The elite cav are only better because of slightly better weapons and better armor (while armor of course does jack ****).

Abandoning warband's stat system and its consequences have been a disaster for bannerlord.

geala said:

You have high expectations, I can understand, but in a game with unrealistic conditions on all fronts it's too much to expect a realistic armor behavior. Realistic in the sense that you take isolated tests (ofter of the strongest parts of the armor) and see it as proof of proof armor. The game f.e. does not simulate disadvantages of armor (except weight), it does not know gaps in the armor, and in reality there is no hp to chip down while being fully functional before it reaches zero. I recently saw a source cited about a guy proud of the aketons made by him, testing them bravely by stabbing himself in the chest with a dagger, receiving a small wound (allegedly under 2 cm deep) and dying shortly thereafter. In BL it would have taken away perhaps 2 hp from our hero.

In my opinion there is also no plate armor in the game in the sense of wearing carbonized hardened steel. Armor before the later 14th c. AD was seldomly hardened; Calradia is fantasy but it seems to loosely resemble our 11th century. It has already a huge amount of too much armor on the units and cannot make armor invincible by fantasising plate armor. Helmets come closest to plate, but most helmets should not stop 100% cut damage because they have open faces. Only seldomly in warfare closed helmets were used because they diminish combat abilities a lot, which is not simulated in the game. And if a closed helmet has a mail face protection, blunt damage is justified.

So we needed a stong damage random factor which many video game players don't like, or an unrealistic "some damage goes through" mechanic. With Modifiable Armor Modifier I had a reduction of 70 cut damage by 60 armor to 3.5 damage. I could live with it, the damage was perhaps too low but I wanted to battle the glaive people.

Click to expand...

Shockingly the bulk of people in historical battles are not seriously injured or killed on the losing side of battle, so evidently somebody's thoughts on historical warfare are wrong and it's not mine. All armor of any age provides excellent protection against contemporary threats - it is merely a matter of how much coverage is conceivably worn and the quality the wearer is able to afford. The era of plate is more lethal, not less, than that of the early and high medieval period warfare where maille, lamellar, leather, and quilted or felted textiles serve as the predominant forms of armor.
Maille doesn't have some horrible concussive force blast through that causes serious injury and that myth needs to die. Late-Early and Early-High Knightly cavalry wore hauberks, typically over just a stern wool shirt or a very thin aketon at most as padding under maille was not substantial outside of outliers such as Kataphraktos (although that's another can of worms). Somebody taking a swing at you with a sword, or even a typical mace of the era against your hauberk clad body is going to achieve fundamentally nothing in most situations unless they strike an area of hard bone - shoulders, hands, or the elbow. Otherwise against soft tissue, or even ribs, the blow should simply not be substantial enough to deal much if any serious harm. Even being battered upon an iron helmet isn't much of a bother unless it's a very high energy strike that pierces through.

Now looking at how actual battles played out, even in the ancient era with the era of Roman and Macedonian warfare, combat was fundamentally nonlethal for both sides outside of the casualties sustained in the rout. Death was not terribly common in the course of battle itself, and from this obvious, overriding factor in all combat up to the increased complexity of warfare and introduction of artillery we can infer that melee and muscle powered missiles are fundamentally garbage at killing men. Your average, one-handed, muscle powered melee weapon is only in the range of 100 joules. This can become a lot more notable for the recipient of the blow if the weapon in question is a solid iron bar-mace as comes up in mentions of elite cavalry warfare between Romans and Arabs - but the typical small brass/iron socket maces of the early/high period aren't achieving similar results with excessive application of blunt force. And even in period anecdotes emphasis is placed upon striking where armor isn't rather than where it is, as short of a true and high energy strike, it's achieving nothing while leaving you open to return hits. You don't get through a hauberk by chipping through it with some incremental blunt damage, you do absolutely nothing of note until you're able to land a sudden and devastating strike sliding a spear up past the hem of the shirt and drive it into their pelvis, as Saint Olaf died. All combat should be a vicious grinding push of formation on formation where casualties are infrequently sustained and death is a shocking twist that routs an entire army when 5-30% of their number are wormfood.

Philozoraptor said:

Players would kill us if we did this (I can do this in 1 minute if I want to - just change blunt fuctor in the config to 0 or something silly low on weapons which you think should cause less blunt trauma).

Click to expand...

I've actually tried this myself, but unfortunately dropping the blunt damage factor to just 0 causes a CTD on launch, so I don't even know if it's the mod's fault or the game has something finicky going on. It's been my issue toying with the settings, because it seems impossible to remove blunt trauma chipping, which turns all combat at the end of the day into a game of numbers of chipping people down even with poor attacks instead of armor behaving like armor, which is more an all-or-nothing affair.

Philozoraptor said:

If we did this oficially, we would have to add some other historically plausible mechanic to balance this out since we dont like half assing stuff - for example armor damagaging model, even more reliance on stamina/posture etc. We also have to take into consideration length of battles in game, large battles (1K+ vs 1K+) generally take 30+ minutes if you have largest battles possible enabled, however some players probably cannot play with max settings so for them the battle might be already super long. Prolonging large battles to 60-120 minutes would be very off putting for majority of people - we would be getting to the point of mod being unplayable. Which means we would have to rely more on morale system - which might be very interesting for very niche audience but again of putting for majority.

Click to expand...

IMO though that just makes the historical aspects just a veneer of any historicity and using Williams' numbers not really a 'real' matter in the first place and more a facsimile of realism. I also doubt it would actually see a bleed of players in the first place since when it comes to grueling combat, that seems to be more what people would opt for over the Shouen fest that is vanilla combat of worthless armor, provided that something mitigates the combat time (I don't think morale would be impossible given there's perks which supposedly increase melee 'damage' anyway, although I don't know if those actually work knowing TW lol). Considering that actual deaths in battle on the loser's side were more on the range of 10-30% outside of the peak of later period violence, more durable enemies should equate to more impactful death on army morale and add up nicely. The poise system also has exceptional potential to be capitalized on - I know in warband it was possible to add coup de grace style damage based upon hitting an enemy in the back - is it possible for whatever flagged state of being knocked down to enable a damage bonus?

Philozoraptor said:

We are at the point of being unofficial patch / fix for the game. Adding something radical like this (assuming it is doable, there might be some issue on code level which would make this impossible anyway) would have to be toggle-able which would mean two separate ways of balancing the mod etc.... There is good reason for drop of customization options in Drastic Battle mod, its pain in the ass to balance and you are sacraficing lot of your own vision to apease mostly ungrateful whiny brats that are foten too lazy to even read mod description because wall of text

Click to expand...

Balancing outside of egregious factors shouldn't really be a concern in the first place for any videogame that isn't focused on PVP symmetrical warfare in the first place though. So long as everything is more or less in the vague 'place it should be', if something is 'overpowered' but accurate, well that's just war and it's a videogame about early medieval tactical play from a first person perspective. I wouldn't call the current state terribly 'balanced' in a gameplay sense in the first place, so any way that the pendulum swings is a fairly mild thing. I can casually just stock up on a bunch of Cataphracts and absolutely bulldoze the enemy with barely any losses, over and over again, along with keeping troops in formation with the follow me command while the AI has no grasp of formations leading to perpetual defeats. Actually making armor work proper instead of blunt trauma 'chipping' might if anything, improve AI performance against the player as their heavy cav flying across the horizon in total disorder won't get pulled apart from a couple errant jabs by archers it fights in melee.

Philozoraptor said:

Our bow balance: I will quote from our article here:
"The core of the armor penetration calculation comes from The Knight and the Blast Furnace: A History of the Metallurgy by Alan Williams. However there are some gaps in it since it primarely focuses on plate armor. So gaps were filled with Youtube experimental evidence and historical sources. For example we are assuming arrows / bolts are not greased in RBM (greased arrows seem to have "effectively 20 more joules" in comparison to non greased ones when we take into consideration results from Knight and the Blast Furnace). However the videos about loss of energy of arrows at range or penetration of light-medium shields are very educational in my opinion. Also videos with speed meter and bows used with multiple arrows and multiple weights (specifically Joe Gibs videos) are pretty good sample for reverse engineering the results and developing general formula for arrow missile speed calculation. Similiar thing was done for crossbows with videos by Mediaval Crossbows channel, especially the crusades era crossbow (270 lb I think). Also Tods videos are best information I was able to find about reload techniques of crossbows, given that he mentions max draw weight with these techniques and does demonstrations. Also other videos regarding melee fighting can give us some basic idea of how likely is it to cut / penetrate mail and gambeson. For example I came to the conclussion that deep penetration with polearm or sword is very unlikely against mail because they failed to break through more than one ring in all of the experiments I saw so far."

Of course we consider only tests done with proper (at least relativelly) riveted mail (Tod, Skallagrim, Theng and Thrand and few others). My conclussion is that 15th century mail supported by gambeson could stop bodkin arrow with up to 100 joules of energy (gambeson underneath armor in our mod = 16 layers of linen = 10 armor or 20 joules, gambeson worn alone can go up to 36 layers or some 25 armor), steel in that era was reletivelly similiar to modern mild steel (as far as I know). However majority of steel in BL has only 83% of this strength (low carbon 10-12th century steel) and wrought iron or brass has only 57% of this thoughness - so best single layer mail with padding is 45 (35+10) armor or 90 joules / damage absorbed by arrows, majority of good mails are more likely 40 (80 joules) armor, there are some that are 30+ (60 joules). And funny thing is that with this formula / logic / balance (not intended though, just coincidence) entry level war longbow can at least little bit penetrate entry level mail at short distance - which kind of explains what war bows were - bows capable of penetrating decent armor, funny what you can learn when you put together simulation from data and then watch it go.

Click to expand...

The issue with William's tests is that some of his results seem to simply be off or not even exemplifying the best potentials of maille judging by the couched lance test by Arne not to long ago against an aventail made by Augusto using specifically round links (densely woven too), which in spite of using both a broad leafed and pointed cornel failed to achieve any penetration (although nothing to be said how your throat would be doing from that kind of blunt force trauma ). The other concern is king's maille double maille (of which there is surprisingly one east roman example of I never knew of) which per period documentation is supposed to protect you excellently against contemporary crossbow poundages or couched lance strikes. Main issue is sheer performance variance of any age due to matters of thickness of the ring, the setting of the rivet, and the density of the weave wildly influencing performance in either direction.

geala said:

I'm a bit baffled that you find Warband combat and damage "realistic", but to each his/her own. Does speed really play no role in BL? I have different experiences but maybe I'm tricking myself. If you are still on 1.7.2, did you try this mod to give you at least a bit control about BL damage?:

Modifiable Armor modifiers

This mod makes it possible to change the effectivness of armor on the three base damage types.Simply open the JSON file and make armor as strong or weak as you think it should be.

www.nexusmods.com

I prefer it greatly to RBM combat module (blunt for example is blocked for about 50% in my settings), sadly not updated to 1.8.0.


To say something to the topic:
I'm playing because there are some interesting and fun moments, despite the often brain dead AI. I never expected a deep medieval simulation from BL and was already bored by Warband late game, so I avoid it here too. By and large I'm wasting more time to mod the units to my pleasure using several mods than actually playing intensively, I fear. And I'm trying this and that. Currently I'm testing RBM combat module in 1.8.0 and tinkered the troops trees for this setting.

Click to expand...

I've used that, it also doesn't allow you to fully invalidate damage types unless you were to also completely overhaul armor types and increase armor ratings, or nerf every single weapon damage into the ground. In warband meanwhile if you adjust damage types for cut for soak and reduction to say, 1.4, it will often result in good armors completely stopping all damage from cutting weapons short of a 50c axe with strong velocity. In Bannerlord I have never found any means or mods to achieve similar results outside of the Drastic Battle Mod, which completely overhauled everything and allowed you to also key how much damage was done depending on armor composition (textile, leather, mail, and plate are all differentiated), depending on the body part, and the ability to manually increase all armor values across the board. Unfortunately he cut all of such features from his mod and rendered it pointless to use.

Native warband damage values are certainly not realistic, but it's relatively easy to tweak things to a realistic point where plate especially, or mail for that matter, stops all cutting damage coming at it, and unlike bannerlord Warband does not seem to have this asinine, persistent feature of blunt damage coming through blows.It's also my issue with RBM as while it goes to a point that Modifiable Armor Values doesn't seem capable, it still has blunt damage coming through regardless of how high your armor value is because of "blunt trauma".

Bratok said:

The RBM cavalry being OP issue has been discussed in several threads lately.

So, I've been thinking. Apart from the strong armor and high skills, it's a mount that makes cavalry so OP in Bannerlord.

In reality, I guess, falling from a horse in the middle of a melee was an almost 100% death sentence to even the most heavily armored cavalrymen.

I know that a lying plate armored knight unable to stand up (like a turtle) is a popular misconception, but there could be a plethora of other deadly factors - e.g. your own horse (~600 kg) falling upon you, enemy infantry stomping you or poking their rondel daggers into your eyeslits, deep mud/water, which doesn't help to breath naturally (especially if you are crumpled under a horse or other dead/wounded people) etc.
At Agincourt many French knights (who were probably still combat capable) fell in thick mud and suffocated, when English longbowen shot their horses, and French allies kept advancing, stepping on their own fallen.

Also, in reality concussion and shock is a thing. Even without brain damage, falling prone from a saddle height will get you incapacitated at least for several seconds (which is still enough to kill you in a thousands of ways). If there is a hard ground underneath (with rocks and bumps), you may also get a broken neck, bone fracture, dislocated joint or some other heavy blunt trauma (even in full plate). Falling down at a gallop speed? Multiply all trauma factors at least 10 times.

But even in non-combat situations falling from a horse was often lethal. Drunk nobles cosplaying a Wild Hunt on their way to rape some peasant wenches? Bam!!! Count Geoffrey falls down from his horse at a 45 km/h! Bam!!! Broken neck, broken spine, broken ****ing everything! Look at that list for example:

List of horse accidents - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

What do we have in BL? Imperial Cataphract/Vlandian Banner Knight lost his horse/fell of a saddle at a full gallop? Nah, he'll be fine. Probably will even **** some infantry up right after he gets up almost unscathed.

So, my opinion is that instead of nerfing body armor and weapon damage/penetration values, we should make all dismounted (either by melee hits or by killing the mount) NPCs dead/knocked out, regardless of how many HP are left or what armor is currently equipped. Is that even technically possible, I wonder?

Click to expand...

Cavalry is extremely easy to counter, the issue is the AI just doesn't. The easy way to cripple any cav spam engaging in melee is to just bring a buttload of pikes and stick them in square formation. The cav will be eaten alive and will lose momentum penetrating the square so they just get casually poked to death with extreme ease.

xdj1nn said:

I understand and can respect that. But the cav vs inf ratio wasn't really due to equipment or being mounted, it was more to do with lack of professional infantry for the most of it. Cavalry was mostly used as a skirmish unit with hit&run tactics, and they were devastating because most of the infantry were levies, not knights. Say, if you had a Roman Legionary unit in 1200ad properly equipped and tried to pull-off the mounted advantage you'd likely lose, most of the cavalry efficiency came from those factors combined. If you change the rules (which the game already does) by introducing extra efficient infantry, the whole of the statistics change. Isolated examples of specialized infantry units that crushed cavalry centric forces were Scandinavian Huscarls during the HRE invasion of Denmark, and much later down the line the Picchieri in Italy, the Scottish Sheltrons and the Swiss Guard were no joke, cavalry wouldn't do anything to these. Bannerlord mixes eras and cultures, it simulates hybridized versions of said units to some extent, like the Empire's menavilon and the Sturgian shock infantry shouldn't be in trouble against cavalry as long as they were using the appropriate tactics (positioning and formations), that's not what happens.

Anyway, just gave tips to make the mod into a better Game, and highlighted some minor misconceptions that it carried with it, but I'm fine. As for bowmen and other stuff I'll link you some videos and you might be able to start researching from there:

Lars mostly uses light draw weight bows, but some guys proved it's possible to do everything except the acrobacies he shows there even with Longbows, for the mod that translates into faster shooting for most bows and more precision/accuracy:

Spoiler

Armor tests show how strong the impact of longbow arrows were and how loud they were (would cause massive panic overtime, I kid you not, they'd also instantly drop anyone hit on gaps due to the depth of penetration)

Spoiler

Notice 13:48 shot, that'd instantly disable, fatally wounded outright.

Three dimensional Bow Precision:

Spoiler

More armor tests (chainmail):

Spoiler

Javelin / Pilum:

Spoiler

Roman Pilum (THROWING SPEAR) vs ARMOR! Testing against shield, chainmail & plate

Install Raid for Free â IOS/ANDROID/PC: https://clcr.me/WsuNvC and get a special starter pack ð¥ Available only for the next 30 days. Subscribe to the guide ...

www.youtube.com

and I think that's enough for now xD
I didn't include plate armor on melee testing because that's an obvious, they wouldn't be affected by cutting or piercing unless it managed to find gaps between plates or through blunt force trauma. In fact a massive 2h axe to the head would instantly knock-out most helmet designs that we see in the game except for the high tier tall helmets (all cultures have those, so it's not up for debate much, basically the design of the armor must have gaps or cushions to reduce blunt force trauma, just mentioning as an indicator).

Click to expand...

Youtube tests are a rather poor thing to go for with maille on account of virtually nobody actually using properly made maille for historical testing in the first place (it is prohibitively expensive to get authentic maille vs Indian made sub par hauberks). Tod does good work, but the thing to keep in mind is that longbows are for the bulk of time, not contemporary to Early Medieval warfare in the first place. Javelins are extremely dangerous, potentially at least, but my main grief with RBM is that the mod is simply too lethal due to the blunt trauma mechanic. What I'd want the most is for any future updates to remove damage thresholds, because a low pound bow hitting a cataphract shouldn't deal -1 damage to health, but simply do no damage as it did in warband.

Lars FYI is also a terrible thing to do use for anything as a guideline because the poundages he uses for his bows are for children/varmint shooting. Warbows start at 80+ pounds, and heavy longbows go up to 110 or so pounds on average, and the heaviest composite bows went as high as 235. You cannot do rapid trick shooting while also pulling 100-pounds that can potentially dislocate a joint if done improperly (or snap a tendon).

Also historically there was specifically the armor known as King's Maille/Double Maille/etc by various names which was specifically taken up to deal with lances, high power missiles (crossbows or bows), and was supposed to mitigate the threat entirely. We don't have any surviving examples thus nobody knows what or how it was constructed, but we do have the contemporary anecdotes of its function/tactical use. Possibly would stop some of the lighter longbows, hard to figure how it worked given no knowledge of construction.

But on the topic of damage, please, on my hands and knees, in some future version add the ability to mitigate damage entirely with no blunt damage persistence. It is frankly infuriating, un-immersive, and unrealistic to have the chipping of health still present, where you can be 100% immune to a certain form of damage, yet it still does a minimum of -1 damage to your health. Drastic battle was able to eliminate it, i don't know how, but it made things feel far more realistic until he unfortunately removed his config panel. Health is supposed to be damaged by injuries, and there's nothing injuring about being struck by weak arrows while wearing 3mm ablative thickness of iron. Or the swing of an arming sword against a hauberk.

xdj1nn said:

I'm starting to suspect that Armageddon was a one-hit wonder with M&B, I mean, plenty of funding + much bigger team, if they aren't holding some secret alpha build under their sleeve, well, he managed to do worse than he did without funding and without a team. I think they gave too much focus on "Popularizing" the game through superficials like graphics, it never works well.

Click to expand...

I find it a crying shame considering the oppertunity provided should have enabled an instant slam dunk of improvement, I suspect the engine change is what ultimately did them in (although I can certainly understand why they opted for a new engine lol, better than using the same engine for 20 years like Bethesda). The only place I would say that Bannerlord seriously improves is the city scenes, which don't even have much to do in them thus you don't even appreciate them much, and the sieges when the AI doesn't bug out. Outside of those two things though all that got shifted was a higher model count in field battles which is nice... but not exactly worth the price tag, shoddy performance, and simplified combat. Or how the switch to C+ means you must be a coder to mod at all.

xdj1nn said:

you do understand that the game has barely evolved since EA release in 2020 right? The only thing they've done was fix a few things, resolve crashes (game's theoretically stable now, but anyone who mods it thoroughly knows it really isn't even enough) and add some questionable balancing. Some of the features at outrageously bad, like the crafting. Releasing like this could mean they won't ever "fix" bad implementations, and that's very concerning.


with no major plans to change some things in it, than the "what it is" is crap. The game's too disjointed and missing basic stuff that Warband had, that's unacceptable because Warband wasn't the best at anything, and yet managed to be better than BL, still is to this date.

Click to expand...

The combat also hasn't improved from Warband, as I'm fairly certain they cut velocity simulation with the damage calculation being a flat weapon calc + blunt damage factored in to arrive at the end state. Meanwhile warband simulates the velocity of the weapon, which is also why 'drags' in warband are often a bad idea as it cuts or eliminates the damage in your swing. Bannerlord also feels extremely sluggish in combat response, ie when I swing, get parried, and then have a lag at times before I can ready up a swing again. Or the swings themselves have a poor response to them. It all feels very poorly polished compared to warband.

The problem is that the AI doesn't know how to use cavalry in the first place. I can use mods that buff the snot out of cavalry and makes them as close to unkillable as this game permits. It doesn't fix that the AI still desintergrates when you hit "charge" and runs around as errant individuals. The primary focus for AI should be to fight as units with no deviation from these cohesive groups unless they are disrupted in the first place. The player can roughly do this by assembling a cavalry formation (or any other) and commanding them to follow, but the AI does not do this, and loses all cohesion as the unit flies apart into 100 horsemen zipping around in every direction like a squirrel on crack.

My main desire out of any future version of this game, especially with releasing this game officially, is that the devs return to module folders for native/other game modes like sandbox having damage values for combat that can be edited on the fly by anyone with no coding knowledge, as was the case with Warband. Nobody cares about multiplayer in the first place, so there is no reason to cut this or not add it for fear of multiplayer hacking - people only primarily play this for customizable singleplayer experiences in the first place considering that the devs are releasing the game anyway with the knowledge that modders will pick up the slack. Bring this back.

I don't really play it. I frankly am pissed off with the state of Bannerlord and the state of its modding in that nothing gives me the same control as I have in Warband when it comes to accessibility for adjusting item values with morgh's in warband, or MCM values to tweak damage to my heart's delight in warband. Meanwhile in Bannerlord I am at the mercy of the absolute, godawful, piece of ****, rage inducing vanilla combat which is ahistorical, unrealistic, and even more arcadey than native warband at its worst, because for some reason, somebody at Talesworld decided velocity behind melee weapons wasn't needed so it's all flat for damage calculation, along with making everything have such a piss poor armor value that the only thing a hauberk does is make a 1-hit-kill turn into a 2-hit-kill because that's totally how maille works.

I'm specifically trawling this forum at this point as I've been playing bannerlord 1.72 with Realistic Battle Mod for the past week once again, but even with the tweaks I've done to their damage stats I still find it comprehensively unrealistic, silly, and annoying in a way that just sticks as I can't make armor perform like how warband enables, where a high enough rating just stops damage outright and you need a lot of oomph to get through, such as a couched lance, a swing with extreme momentum, etc. Because as good as it is, RBM's blunt damage allows you to tap a guy with no movement, no momentum, notta and still deal persistent blunt damage to chip down their health quickly and take out a fully armored Cataphract with just 6 or 7 pokes from a spear or pike on foot. I don't meant to talk bad of Raptor at all, his work is a godsend amongst the sorry state of Bannerlord, but god I wish there was some way to just have warband style control of damage values. Where the hell are my MCM values in module files?



See this? This is good game design and accessibility that allows anyone to rapidly shift the performance of their game's combat with just a .txt file allowing editing on the fly. And it's not impossible for the devs to still do this with C+ coding, I *can't* code, but as a multitude of modders have demonstrated including Raptor himself, you can stick .xml's into mydocuments or the game files itself for direct control. And I've just about had it with silly arcade damage with cleave through multiple people over something aspiring for a faint degree of realism like Warband, which can be cranked up to the next level if you put some love into the animations and damage values in Warband.

Bratok said:

I am also playing on realistic damage settings. Looters with blunt weapons (clubs and hammers) still do considerable damage (10-20 pts) to lightly and medium armored characters (i.e. gambesons, leather, hide, light mail armor), especially if they manage to surround their adversaries. BTW the AI still prefers overhead strikes, so you usually get knocked down from a head trauma in the early-mid game, when good helmets are still not affordable.

Besides, if you have a body part that is less armored than the rest, you will get lots of DMG on this body part. Especially in crowded melee. Sometimes It may seem that enemies are targeting the least protected part ON PURPOSE. However, I think that the AI is not so good. So, it is a stupid idea to ride into combat with no leg protection or with unprotected head. It almost guarantees a one-hit kill even from the weakest foes.

What really bothers me is stun locking when being hit with an anti-shield weapon (while blocking with a shield). Since enemies don't get tired and just spam attacks, there is little I can do, even with high skills and good equipment. And even cheap tier 1 hatchets are considered an anti-shield weapon.
Duels with bandit leaders are almost impossible to win, since almost all of them are armed with axes or slashing polearms (mid and top tier slashing polearms are still too OP IMHO).

Click to expand...

Simply removing a lot of two handers would be an interesting consideration for a future modding choice as there is frankly zero justification for their presence in the general historical vibes bannerlord goes for, the Swabian anecdote being trumped up nonsense with no metallurgical or archeological evidence to back it up on Talesworld's part. Really should just exclusively be dane axe as the only form of two handers, with all else using any variety of one handed weapons and shields, pikes, some crude bills, etc.

Part of it is certainly with the issue that Tales devs are just obsessed with trying to differentiate playstyles of factions too much, when for realism's sake everyone is going to use more or less the same loadout. It makes trying to strike a balance in faction strengths a headache and results in such things as the "big axe faction" or "big sword faction" dominating the melee. One of the other issues too is that Bannerlord gutted the far greater utility of the old stat system, so now there is actually not much differentiating a knight from a peasant in terms of combat ability. So just anyone with a two hander, even in **** armor, is a pretty serious threat while in Warband a two hander with only 100 weapon skill in two handed is chump change that'll get cut down in no short order by players or high WS bots. I really, really prefer the old system because of this, and Bannerlord just feels like a significant improvement in only 1-3 zones of gameplay while being woefully inferior to the prior iterations in all other regards, especially in actual combat.

Philozoraptor said:

First of all, make sure you are configuring the config in the documents folder not in the mod folder (that does nothing once config in documents is created). Secondly, I think there is specific blunt modifier in the config that affect only maces (or other blunt damage sources like rocks). Armor modifier will affect the guaranteed blunt trauma damage - higher modifier less damage. Thresholds affect how much damage is needed to fully penetrate the armor - higher threshold = more damage needed to penetrate. Blunt factor modifies what percentage of the damage is turned into blunt trauma when it is fully blocked by armor (so again affects guaranteed blunt trauma damage).

Also MCM is probably in conflict with RBM combat module, try to disable it and test the game without it to find out.

Click to expand...

I was talking MCM values as in Warband. In any Warband module you can just pop open module.ini and change the armor soak/armor reduction values to say, armor_soak_factor_against_cut = 1.5, and suddenly those pesky silly arming swords doing so much damage goes right out the window and turns melee into a grind with good armor. Trying to find that same kind of balance of armor effectiveness with the config settings is proving difficult to strike, as I don't even feel that good returns when cranking armorthreshholdmodifier up to say, 2, and not feeling that drastic of a change.

Philozoraptor said:

You mean that you have combat module installed and activated? Looters will do very little damage to you if you have 100 armor, unless you are wearing no gloves or something like that (because they can cut of your hand with no armor on it). Are you sure that you dont have mod conflict? In general its good to keep your distance from enemy if it outnumbers you but you should be able to trade blows with looters since you are gonna 1-2 hit kill them and they are gonna deal like 3-7 damage.

Click to expand...

Here's my load order, I don't think it has a conflict considering that the shields, weapon length, etc all seem to work (the new stance system too which feels like it needs a retooling but is pretty good as a base to work off, reminds me of Kingdom Come). If I have damage set to only 25% to player it's obviously not very hard, but with realistic, full damage set a bunch of bandits rip me to pieces and leave me with very little health unless I just shield up. Could try to delete and have the mod generate a new config file and see if that changes things. But just a hit to the head with a sickle takes out a solid chunk of health even with an 88 armor helmet.

Part of the issue is also that while initial damage may be small, the stunlocking when getting hit means that even more hits follow up and cancel attacks which is certainly annoying in dealing with them. I've been playing warband a fair bit (warsword conquest) and it's jarring to hop back into bannerlord in many ways.

EDIT

looking at it the config file was working fine I think, issue is just that while it doesn't look like much, 6 damage is actually quite a lot and swiftly adds up when getting stunlocked from damage flinching resulting in you getting ground down. Things are tolerable at 75% damage reduction settings, but that doesn't equate to damage for everyone wish is my issue as I don't like to play as a superhuman exclusively. Scratching my head as to how to adjust the damage settings to make it so that low tier weapons basically do squat to good armor and force grinding fights in melee to achieve anything realistically. MCM values work pretty nicely in that if you set damage soak/damage mitigation to both 1.3 for say, cutting, this renders a lot of damage very much moot and can be cranked up from there as well. Trying to get these results feels difficult or impossible though. Turning armorthreshold for example to 1.9 still results in pretty consistent 4-7 damage per hit with a looter hammer, potentially as much as 13 from what seemed a lucky strike, not sure what it hit though (something torso, arm armor is a bit less but it's still quite high). Can you push it past 2 and/or is armor multipliers a better thing to adjust?

I just want to ask as I already inquired on the mod itself but also just wished to ask here for greater ease of accessing messages, what's the best way to deal with damage values for this mod to try to bring things to a realistic point. IE, I have 101 body armor of maille but I get torn apart in melee in seconds by just 3 looters with realistic player damage. These are the settings I'm using in the mod but I'm scratching my head on what to adjust to get to the point where maille or lamellar should be able to mostly just ignore low tier weapon damage, as part of the issue is that bannerlord has this exceptionally annoying and stupid flinch on damage mechanic instead of allowing you to tank hits you know you can tank and clobber the guy with the opening which is the entire point of good body protection, reducing the times you actually need to parry. Although I don't think this mod has anything to do with flinch responses, but hey, if that's ever added int he future that'd be great too.

five bucks said:

Taleworlds justified their inclusion by talking about Swabian mercenaries at the Battle of Civitate in 1053 who were said to wield "very long and keen" swords, which some historians have interpreted as two-handed swords, though this may be incorrect.

By the way are you active in the Mordhau community under the same name? Your name is familiar.

I don't think this is an accurate statement at all. Warband MP was very popular in three forms: vanilla, Persistent Roleplay, and Napoleonic Wars (highly selling MP-only DLC)

But yes I would agree singleplayer is the main drawcard.

Click to expand...

Yeah the idea of the Swabians wielding greatswords is almost assuredly BS considering metallurgy of the time is well, crap, and the only kind of great 'sword' you might see from the early/high period is one of those hafted War-Scythes that show up in the Morgan Bible, of which half of their length is just the tang/hilt of the blade. Early historians are also pretty crap when it comes to translations, especially if it's English translating any other language. Just to look at the text referenced itself and it's pretty easy to tell it's a bad translation/hyperbolic on part of the original author.

>These swords were very long and keen, and they were often capable of cutting someone vertically in two!

That kind of description turns up all the time in the Nibelungenlied, and always in fantastical nature because anyone sane knows a sword cannot bisect a man from the top down. That and formations of men with greatswords literally never existed at all, and the pop fixation on greatsword is bad history much of the time as they were either specialist weapons augmenting formations in the late middle ages, or purely civil defense weapons for retainers in public, not even being used in pitched combat. Even if you wound the clock forwards to say, a 1500 circa era, the amount of greatswords that should be present on the battlefield should only be about maybe 10% or even less of combatants. Probably far fewer.

As for warband multiplayer I don't think it was terribly successful in course of numbers. According to Steam IB the estimated buyers of Napoleonic Wars was in the hundred thousand to three hundred thousand, but this is compared to Warband which sold in the millions. Certainly in terms of server population I don't recall it ever being that much of a behemoth. Compared to the sales of the game itself, things like Persistent Roleplay are basically a single drop of water in an ocean. Hundreds of players or even thousands is an OOM or two behind the level of sales of WB which we can only assume the glut of was singeplayer buyers. The horrific lag when accessing servers across continents doesn't help either, so if the local multiplayer scene dies out in your area, you're kind of screwed in getting games that don't involve you rubber banding like a squirrel on crack from latency.

Madijeis said:

For 5 years now I've met with the same group of friends who barely engaged with SP and just bought Mount & Blade for the Napoleonic Wars DLC. Some have gotten tired of it, some moved to Holdfast (a game I now passionately hate) waiting for another Mount & Musket. There is no grind in competitive clan fights, there's just getting better at it with the help of your veteran comrades, with the very tangible results of winning rounds and defeating other clans in field battle: I don't know if you've ever experienced it, but being able to outmanuveur another regiment and decimate them with a single volley is quite the satisfaction as an officer and as a private.

Granted, I prefer Singleplayer as well (it's the reason I'm here), but to say "nobody cares about MP" is very, very wrong.

Click to expand...

The issue is that all of these experiences are anecdotes and don't speak to the level of sales of WB where even Nappy Wars is basically just a fraction of the greater whole. The multiplayer scene and its rather light population always gave me the impression of just being a vestigial limb of Warband that was there, but not terribly populated either. You meeting with a close group of friends is the point - the Mount and Blade multiplayer scene is basically just a small but dedicated group with occasional bursts of denser populations upon the release of mods that stir up a lot of popularity or new DLC. With this in mind it's also kind of silly to market the base game at all to the multiplayer crowd if the glut of the population isn't going to seriously touch it, better to direct resources elsewhere and simply bolt on more multiplayer focused concepts afterwards as DLC. The rather ****ed state of combat certainly seems to me to be spawned by the Devs having multiplayer pros provide input on development, considering the interests of PVP is often a low TTK which armor would get in the way of.

Nogand said:

Speaking of which, fatigue should be in the game. If there was in-battle fatigue like in Total War games then the AI constantly seeking the high ground would make a little more sense & horse archers kiting melee cav would be a little more viable, though if it was tracked on a per-character level it would probably lag the game some.

Also fatigue in the campaign sense should also exist. Right now you can casually run through enemy territory as long as you're slightly faster than most lord parties and have a good stock of food. Of course the AI can do this too, meaning that there aren't really fronts in a war, just a combination of village raider whack-a-mole and sieges. If parties had to rest, then having good scouting and control of nearby castles would matter a lot more, because a fresh enemy party who was waiting in a castle could sally out and attack you while you're recovering from a long day's march. Bandits would also be more of a threat to trade, now they can't catch caravans unless they're from the Steppe or get super lucky with terrain. It seems like clearing out bandits doesn't actually benefit anyone except the player's inventory and XP in their current implementation.

Click to expand...

Fronts really shouldn't exist inside any medieval focused game, the concept of fronts is born out of modern combat, even post dating the Napoleonic Era really as they still didn't have the number of warm bodies to create 'fronts' of combat. Rather it's just small garrisons that can run sorties to savage a baggage train here and there as a massive force moves through enemy territory until either the defender's army can intercept and destroy it, or runs out of supplies and needs to run back. The issue is more that you can simply have an ungodly amount of food with a baggage train that must be absolutely massive, along with no food spoiling mechanic when you probably shouldn't be able to eat meat you've had in your inventory for like... five years lol.

One thing the game really needs though is the idea of subdivided realms, where houses can and do start their own wars without dragging their overlord into it automatically. So a clan can start a war with another clan, either in the same realm or another one, and they can try to annex another's territory. And having multiple obligations as well, so if a house conquers three cities each belonging to a different culture, but the overlord did not annex them as part of a kingdom-on-kingdom war, now that house has three overlords.

Philozoraptor said:

How do you mod it. If you for example open it in excel and then save it some original parts of the file will be lost (or wont be displayed to begin with) so thats guaranteed crash.

Click to expand...

I use Notepad++ when editing XMl files and it tends to work for all other games where you can readily tweak XML files. The thing is that it used to work fine, back when this game had spitems as part of one giant XML file. But when the devs released an update that split it up into individual bits, suddenly any edit to any of those files is a hard crash immediately until files are verified/redownloaded.

geala said:

You said this before in another post which baffles me a bit. I change xml files all the day in native folders and it seems to work. For example I always edit the bows and crossbows, some armor, change some troop items and so on. In my current 1.7.0 campaign I changed the basic recruits of one culture to my custom troops and put the new units into spnpccharacters.xml in the SandBoxCore folder, and it works.

Click to expand...

I have no idea what's going on with my game then as if I change my files I just get a straight CTD followed by a need to verify files to replace the modified ones. Specifically sp_items, I've never tried to modify the other set of XML's so I don't know if those work, but the spitems folder will immediately cause crashing with any modification.

Philozoraptor said:

I think Total War actually went away from it, these kind of features will not sell the game to normies, half naked demons will. However they still could do half naked demons and terrain at the same time.

Click to expand...

Total War did go away from it, beginning with the retooling of the engine in Attila. It used to be that things like rain would greatly effect the speed of cavalry in Medieval 2, but all of that has been boiled away since then. Warhammer especially void of it and 3K/Troy barely even scratches the topic outside of very arcade-y mechanics.

Philozoraptor said:

You can actually set this up in the config file. Go to users/"user"/Documents/Mount and Blade II Bannerlord/Configs/RBMCombatModule and edit the config there, blunt factor of each weapon represents the percentage of damage absorbed by armor that is transferred into blunt trauma (trauma is further reduced depending on armor).

Click to expand...

I guess the mod has changed since I last used it which was back in 1.4 or earlier. I remember it being pretty barebones + bannerlord removing the ability to manually edit xml files in native modules leading to me to uninstall until a friend pointed out Drastic.

Antaeus said:

Now that's a wall of text....

Click to expand...

Wall of text is the only way to even engage in a topic as complex as the mechanics of armor performance. This is something that has literal research papers written on it and the principle book on Eurocentric medieval armors has over 900 pages and before it went out of print would run you up by several hundred bucks, nowdays going for 500 unless you just pirate (Knight and the Blast Furnace). The mechanical performance of plate or plate-lets armor is already a complex subject, but diving into maille or leather will drive a man to insanity with the sheer breadth of variables that could radically shift performance.

Ted Striker said:

I suspect the devs consider the Warband system as wrong and are "correcting" it with armor that doesn't do much. We all know it's wrong but I fear they think the opposite.

People also seem to be ignoring another problem with Bannerlord: some ridiculously overpowered weapons. Two-handed glaive on horseback? What nonsense is that? A falx that can mow down opponents like a scythe through wheat regardless of armor? If these kinds of long-reach, heavy and slow cutting weapons were so damned good we would see them used historically all the time instead of pikes, spears, blunt weapons etc.

In the time Bannerlord is supposed to take place armor was not as advanced, but neither were these crazy weapons. Long weapons like polearms only really became popular in the later middle ages. In the dark ages (Bannerlord's general time) it was simpler weapons. Horsemen did not ride around swinging heavy glaives like they were Superman, footmen did not run around swinging falx with no regard for personal defense. No, you saw swords, spears, maces, simple clubs. The stuff we see in game is pure fantasy and exacerbates the issue.

Let me ask: who here uses a mace and shield vs a heavily armored opponent instead of a two-handed weapon?

Click to expand...

There really shouldn't even be great weapons at all in this game. Polearms would exist on some infantry but the glut being cutting spears or thick bladed spears like the menavlion (which is nothing like it is in game). "Dane Axes" would exist as two handed axes certainly were a thing, but the greatswords are ridiculous. Somehow in a world bereft of complex steel forging so people often are humbugging about like it's AD 700-1150, people are swinging around massive steel greatswords that nobody should even be able to manufacture without crippling weaknesses that should see those blades snap. The only exceptions would be China or India who were ahead of their time. Although granted Bannerlord is fantasy and has little historically accurate armor for the most part anyway.

Also I think the main issue is that for some reason Talesworld got it into their head that multiplayer literally matters at all to the financial success of Mount and Blade. This game survives based on its single player based community, nobody has ever really given a damn about multiplayer and they sure aren't going to start now. Having tournament/competitive PVP players provide "insight" on development is also a terrible idea since they are the last people you should be marketing to given you can't financially support a product on a tiny minority.