This is a great list! I'm especially impressed with just how much Battania has improved as a viable faction in captain mode, it's refreshing to see that 50% winrate compared to the very low winrate Battania had only a few months ago. I am also very pleased with this data-driven approach to handling balancing issues, overall I would like to compliment your teams work on bringing these factions closer together in terms of balance and winrates. Although Aserai is not yet living up to expectations, however I am confident that if the team continues to make these good decisions, Aserai will soon be a competitive faction as well. Regarding Ai exploits, it will take me some time to upload any demonstration videos as I am currently working with a limited internet data plan until the end of the month, however I will work alongside some community members to get your team a video with a detailed look into the Ai exploits and what causes them as soon as possible.
A note on what I believe to be the root cause of many of these ai exploits: The individual Ai units targeting parameters and "self-preservation" allow the player to abuse the Ai's behavior with actions such as getting an entire group of enemy archers to stop firing by only using a single captain unit to get close enough to draw all of the archers into pulling out their melee weapons rendering them useless in a team fight. It seems to be the case that each individual Ai unit will choose to target and attack the closest unit within their detection range, this is also why you see instances of an entire group of archers shooting all of their arrows into a single shield unit captain who has positioned himself just close enough to the archers to draw their firing aggro, because he or she is the closest enemy unit detected by the archers. Another example of how this targeting system can be abused is: if you have a unit of shields properly lined up in shield wall facing a group of enemy archers blocking their shots, all the enemy has to do is take his single captain unit and position himself just behind the wall of shields and threaten the Ai with just being within striking distance, the Shield unit Ai will try to "self-preserve" and defend itself by turning around and either blocking or attempting to strike the enemy captain unit. This small opening is enough to allow the captains allied Archers to hit the Ai shield units who turn their backs in an attempt to defend themselves from the captain unit and if the captain is persistent this can lead to your shield units being wiped off the map entirely even while being in the correct defensive posture, due to the Ai deciding on its own that defending itself from a single unit is more important than following orders. Another, more subtle but crucial exploit is the Ai's deciding on its own when it should be appropriate to switch weapons during a fight. If a player knows the Ai is programmed to pull its spears out when an enemy cavalry unit is within striking distance, this allows players to exploit the Ai by sending a Cavalry unit to force the enemy into pulling out its spears when it is not exactly ideal for them to do so. For example if my team is about to clash in a melee fight, I can elect to bring in my cavalry units to force the enemy Ai troops to swap to spears, meaning they will not use their stronger anti-infantry weapons during the infantry fight thus causing them to lose the fight. This is a major reason as to why the community has requested the ability to manually command our troops to swap weapons and stay locked to a certain weapon unless we command them to do something different. If you allow the Ai to make these decisions, the player will always find a way to outsmart the Ai as the Ai doesn't have the ability to improvise on strategy like players are able to.
What to do about these issues?: A proposal that has the support of the vast majority of the community is to give the players more options to command our troops and to let us have more control, not delegate the decision making to the Ai, which itself can be outsmarted.
Orders:
1. "Hold your ground!" .... "At ease!" - This would be a single button toggle command that would disable the "Self-preservation" of the Ai, meaning that the Ai does not attempt to defend itself while in formations such as shield wall or any other formation even when a unit is attempting to strike them in the back the units will maintain their formation and not break it for anything. If the player wants to turn this command off and give the Ai its autonomy back, simply press the command button again and it will re-enable the self-defense feature.
2. "Target this Area!" - This would force archers to fire their arrows at a target location indicated by either a flag similar to how the old Face Direction command was displayed, or an Area of Effect indicator that would highlight the ground a different color where the Archers will start shooting their arrows. When given this command ,the archers would not be aiming at individual units, but rather they would attempt to essentially shoot the ground at the specified location, causing their arrows to rain down on any unlucky units that happen to be positioned within the Area of Effect. If you have ever played the game Warcraft 3 it would essentially work in the same way as a Siege unit being ordered to "attack the ground". The siege unit would fire its projectile to the specified location over and over again until ordered not to, and any unlucky units that wander into that area would get blasted by the projectile as it landed. Telling your units to "Hold Fire" would stop your units from firing at the targeted area and when "Fire at will" is toggled back on, they will return to their default untargeted firing style.
3. "Change Weapons!" - This would force your units to switch from their primary weapons to their secondary weapons, and remain locked on that weapon choice until told to "Change Weapons!" again, basically it would be functionally the same as the player using the scroll wheel to change weapons, the units would simply cycle to the next weapon in their inventory, eventually cycling back to their primary weapons if the "Change Weapons!" command was selected enough times. If this process becomes too tedious for the player, it can be toggled back to Automatic Mode by using an additional hotkey.
These commands would do wonders for solving many of the above mentioned issues with Ai exploits by giving the player direct control over their units, and can all be used as optional settings, meaning the player can always switch back to the standard Ai targeting, weapon selection, and self-defense at any time. Giving the player these options would be an incredible step towards making Bannerlord as a whole more strategic, and making Captain Mode a more exciting game mode for new players and old players alike.
Thank you for your time and I truly hope you seriously consider implementing these features as I honestly believe the game would be in a better state if we had these options.
will remain a tool for the developers, players and general competitive BL community to experiment and test game's classes, factions balancing, match formats, equipment and perks in the competitive environment."
) the menavlion is not an a ****ing axe.
