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Lord Bryggan said:

It is absolutely wonderful for MP though. I'm tired of noob cav charging through infantry knowing their couched lance has an 80% chance of defeating a guy who has to perfectly time his stab.

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My thoughts exactly. Personally I'm mainly concerned with captain mode because even small-scale engagements with a truly reactive foe are more compelling than an AI trying to simulate that.

This is the fundamental risk of playing a game in early access; you run the risk of exhausting it before it's finished.

I've noticed that they'll stay facing forward if you give them a move order of a very small distance, so if I want them to fall back for example I'll just tell them to keep holding a position slightly behind their current one. If the distance is too great or you order them simply to follow then they'll turn their backs to the enemy in order to comply.

Mabons said:

I mean if we didn't have it cover you'd be more ****ed than you currently are when you're outnumbered. Overheads can easily sneak past shields a lot better than in Warband.

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You should be screwed when outnumbered, though. I'd much rather have a shield cover to a fairly realistic degree with a little leeway than have it safeguard something like 170 degrees in front as it just feels cheap, particularly for a game the main focus of which is melee combat.

What really annoys me though is how this applies to melee. The video below shows just how much the shield hitbox actually extends beyond its physical limits and this makes it really hard to take on shielded foes in close combat without everything feeling really stodgy and stilted. I really like that they added directional shield use in the game and it feels like a cool step up from warband, but with things as they are it seems almost pointless. I certainly didn't know it was this extreme.

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Vetkin said:

- Unique look (I'd like commanders / players to be recognizable)

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Personally I like that you can't visually tell the difference between players and their troops because it means you have to hunt them out by observing their behaviour which feels a lot cooler.

Some good points here.

For starters I think it'd be good just to give spears four attack directions when used with two hands and a speed bonus. Additionally I'd give long spears an alternate weapon mode that renders you immobile by bracing the spear on the ground, but any cavalry who run onto it at sufficient speed would receive something equivalent to couched lance damage. These fundamental improvements would go a long way by my reckoning.

mrtats said:

OP said a shieldwall was defensive and gave greek and macedonian phalanx as offensive examples. I am not arguing that it can not be used offensively.

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I'll accept that. As far as including them in the game I'm sure a shieldwall with spear-armed troops could be a good basis at least for the Greek phalanx. As for Macedonian, I wonder if the AI can be made to present a sufficiently dense number of spearpoints to make it suitably threatening rather than just having exploitable gaps all over the place, but it'd be really cool if it could be done.

So at roughly 3 minutes into that video Carl mentions the Persian troops at Cunaxa not standing against the charge of the Greeks because of the power of their formation and later goes on to say that formation makes offensive action very difficult. I won't say the Macedonian phalanx doesn't have a great offensive potential because the length of the sarissa is such that you can have many, many points threatening the enemy at the same time lends itself greatly to this role.

But that doesn't mean a Greek phalanx cannot act offensively. After all, the key to good offence just as well as defence is cohesion, so the fact that it was packed tight doesn't inhibit offensive capability particularly, but makes it more likely to succeed in either role than a less dense force Nor does the prominence of the aspis preclude offensive action. Would you say a Roman legion cannot act offensively because the shield is a prominent aspect? Of course not.

So in summary, yes a Macedonian phalanx has great (or greater) offensive potential, but a Greek phalanx can ALSO act offensively and is not inherently prevented from doing so merely by its nature, density or armament.

Capillati said:

Wrong, it was a spear formation. Equally adept at both offensive and defensive warfare. Defensive or offensive roles were given by commanders, but ultimately, if a row of spears comes at you, trust me there is little defense.

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I agree with you. The notion that a Greek phalanx is inherently either defensive or offensive is a bit silly. As an example let's say the phalanxes of two rival Poleis enter the clash of spears together. Which one is acting offensively, and which defensively? You can't tell without more information, right? Because they are capable of both and it could be either.

mangalore said:

That most likely does not matter because you usually did not fire bows at will either (someone paid and thus counted those arrows, you know).

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Personally I think that's probably untrue except for the initial command to shoot. In movies and things you see the commands given repeatedly ("nock, draw, loose!") but I suspect this is for dramatic visual effect. The priority of archers in battle is to get as many effective arrows in the air as possible as quickly as possible in order to saturate the intended target area. If you limit them to shooting at the speed of given commands then all you do is slow down the more efficient archers to no benefit. No point paying for arrows that don't get used because all your archers got ridden down, after all.

mangalore said:

So within the term crossbow and the term bow you have the difference of pistol calibre to a rifle calibre so their performance was extremely diverse.

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It would be really cool if at some point we got some heavy windlass crossbows added to the game for a really slow but powerful snipey kind of role, maybe even have them capable of dealing reduced damage through a shield at close range or something for a bit of extra spice and variation in weapon choice.

eminmetehan said:

So what we really need isn't buffing nor nerfing things rather a complete armour-arrowhead overhaul..

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That would be really cool actually. Would be great if you could hold x to bring up a radial menu to specify what type of arrow you wanted to use and the damage inflicted would reflect the relationship of that choice against the armour type you hit.

I like the sound of this; it makes sense from both a gameplay and historical viewpoint as you say.

Askorti said:

For an archer irl you seem to not know of a crucial difference between bows and crossbows, namely the draw length. You're completely wrong in thinking that all of the energy stored in the crossbow gets transferred into the bolt. In fact, most of that energy gets completely wasted, because the bolt does not have enough time in the crossbow to get accelerated as much as possible. The string does not press on it for long enough. This is precisely why crossbows have to have much higher draw weight than bows, because they're far less efficient in accelerating the projectile.
Also, this game does not have solid plate armor, only chainmail, scale and lamellar armor, all of which can be defeated by a heavy warbow. A heavy warbow goes through regular mail like hot knife through butter. Not to mention the fact that against solild plate armor crossbows are just as impotent. A good quality tempered steel plate breastplate is completely impervious to both longbows and crossbows. But, again, that's not relevant to this game, because there's no such armor here.

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Agreed. Someone with reason to know his business in this regard once told me that a crossbow with a 250lb draw weight is equivalent to about 70lbs in general longbow terms, so you're actually getting less than a third of the energy stored as draw weight put to any use. All of the crossbows in the game would be pants for armour-penetration purposes (and many of the bows too, to be fair).

So far my principal issue with archery in the game is that it's way too easy to hit the same place twice because you can simply leave the cursor static while you nock an arrow and repeatedly bullseye fortress defenders as a result. It also seems like there isn't enough projectile drop making it pretty easy to hit people at long rages.

Fortunately this is all pretty easy stuff to tweak as patches progress.

I have a few points to make regarding the general improvement of siege games myself.

First, I've seen the point already made that defenders need to have limited respawns but I'll reiterate it as it's a desperate requirement in my view. I loved the sieges in the Napoleonic module for Warband because, while a defender might use one or two of his lives harassing the enemy in reckless fashion, this dropped off markedly as the defenders started to take losses and they began to try not to lose people as the game progressed. At the moment siege games in Bannerlord are an absolute chaotic vortex of consequence-free flailing with the defenders frolicking outside the fortress as much as inside it.

Secondly, it would be really useful if your friends' names appeared above them at all times to allow you to coordinate with them better. Holding alt and trying to pick your squad out from a sea of allies is really inconvenient.

And thirdly, I feel like a lot of the contributions a player can make to the siege go unrewarded. For example, if you take a shield and defend the people pushing the ram to the gate before getting shot down by archers you've done a valuable action for the progress of your team, but because you've not actually killed anyone you don't receive any points and are thus consigned to a feeble peasant troop for your respawn. Perhaps it would be cool if points could be accrued by spending time in proximity to objectives and siege weapons as well as slaying foes.