So, here's the problem. I'm 400+ days into my campaign and banditry is absolutely wrecking Calradia. The more the game progresses, the harder it is for villagers, caravans and lords to live. Why? Apparently, there is a mechanic that scales bandit parties according to the player level. Essentially, this means that the entire world has to suffer more simply because some random player guy is leveling up. I can elaborate on a few issues that this mechanic brings up and why it's bad design:
1. Bandits are cheating units, while the rest of the parties have to work their way to power in more natural manners. Let's take lord parties as an example: notables produce units, and it takes time to train them, all that WHILE the numbers of notables/settlement depends on prosperity; thus, the number of units produced per settlement is reasonably dynamic. In order for lord parties to grow, they have to recruit directly from these settlements, and then take time to train their units in battles. Now, if you ask, how bandit parties evolve? They just puke units out of nowhere, and the more you level up, the harder it is for the AI lords to deal with it. Lord parties will always tend to be very weak mid to late game because they expend their precious troops (which have been produced dynamically) on cheated bandit parties.
2. The mechanic was (supposedly) designed to pose a challenge to you, but it does not achieve its goal. By mid-game you'll be running around with 100+ elite troops around the map, and nothing the bandits can cheat at you will be a challenge.
3. If you intend to police the world in order to make the roads safer for caravans, you're hopeless. That's because:
a. It gets boring and repetitive really fast;
b. Your actions don't matter at all. You can destroy as many parties as you want, but they will cheat more, stronger and bigger parties as you level up. At some point, you just give up and ignore bandits altogether.
4. Only the player can destroy hideouts, and that's horrible. I genuinely tried to reduce the bandit spawns by destroying as many hideouts I can, but I quickly understood that it's like playing whack-a-mole. More and more hideouts will pop around the world, and you alone cannot do anything to stop it from happening. Like in the previous case, it also gets repetitive and boring. The world map will eventually be filled with hideouts and the AI won't do anything about them.
5. Villager parties are hopeless. In the early stages of the game, you're used to seeing 30-40 big villager parties. In mid-game, these parties are down to ~15 in size, and it will only get worse. While villagers take time to recover and grow their parties, bandits don't care, because they're cheated.
6. Owning caravans gets too unfeasible. Early game, they're able to defend themselves reasonably well, but from mid-game, it starts to feel like the wheel of luck, because banditry is out of control.
All these point to bad or lazy design, but I thought about some changes that could be made to the system. The goal is to spawn bandits dynamically and make them play by the same rules, just as the other AI. In short: no cheating units.
- The player level will not matter anymore in bandit spawn behavior;
- Bandits will spawn dynamically, based on settlement prosperity. The idea is simple. Low settlement prosperity = higher chance to spawn a bandit party from that settlement. The lower the prosperity, the more and bigger parties are spawned. Higher prosperity settlements would still spawn bandits but at lower rates and smaller in size. This means that wars, and not cheating, will influence the security of a kingdom. If kingdom X has not been able to defend its settlements from kingdom Y village raids, then kingdom X will end up with more bandits on the roads. This is simple, dynamic and makes all the sense.
- Bandits will have to level up their troops in battle.
- AI lords will also clean up hideouts.
Optionally:
- Add the option to enlist settlement patrols for the AI, and the player;
- Bring back the manhunters, and allow them to raid hideouts. The manhunters would also spawn from settlements with low prosperity, but at lower rates than bandits.
@mexxico Sorry for the ping, but I feel that this cannot be left as it is. Please bring up the issue if you have the possibility.
