A bunch of suggestions

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krippp

Veteran
I thought I should try to make my own tiny contribution to this great game, so I started a new game as a merchant, and decided to write down all the ideas for improvement that I got. The one's I've come up with so far are:


Map mode:

1) Make it possible to drop items. It would indeed be preferable to drop a few barrels of ale to make my party move faster than to get caught by bandits and lose a lot more stuff.

2) Give the freedom to become a real villain and to attack anyone you want. Peasants, allies, the caravans you're escorting, anyone.

3) The Vaegir and Swadian troops should refuse to attack their own kin, unless you pay them some extra for it. Maybe they could become callous over time as they get used to it and develop a bandit/mercenary attitude.

4) If you rob enough caravans, the Vaegir/Swadian merchants should send manhunters after you.

5) I've already seen this being suggested, but I'd like to add something to it: Make (some of) the computer controlled parties be lead by NPCs. Then, in a battle, you could make everyone to follow the leader, with the leader being the only one with the charge mode on. This would make it so that the fighting would seem a bit more organized than what it does now.



Battle mode:

6) When I order my troops to follow me, I want them to actually follow me, not to swarm around me blocking my sight and line of fire. Make them stay behind me until I tell them to charge.

7) Archers should shoot for as long as possible, except if the enemy has more firepower.

8 ) Make it possible to kill riderless horses, to clear your line of fire/sight.

9) Give the ability to sprint. Sprinting could give you temporarily something like +4 to your athletics skill. It could also give a "charge bonus" to your attack. Sprinting would give you more control of the game, for example by allowing you to dodge a horseman's lance or by allowing you to charge at an archer before he can shoot that decisive shot.
Naturally, the more armor you have, the slower and shorter the sprint is, and the more athletics skill you have, the faster and longer it is. You could also be slowed down a little after sprinting, depending on the amount of sprinting, armor you're wearing and the athletics skill.

10) The crossbows should be able to be reloaded while riding a horse. If the current unrealistic inability to reload them while riding is made for gameplay purposes, then maybe you could just make the reloading slower on horseback than when standing on your own feet.

11) Horsemen should attempt to flank you while the foot soldiers are pinning you down, except if you've got more firepower than them.
You can clearly see how much more effective the horsemen are when they appear to the battlefield as reinforcements while you're fighting some foot soldiers. As it is now, they are the first one's to charge you, and unless they're very numerous and well armored, they'll end up being surrounded and chopped to pieces by your forces.

12) Falling off a horse while in full speed should cause you some injury.

13) I think I saw this one being suggested already, but I'll write it here anyway: Make the fighting a bit more controlled, a bit like in the Jedi Knight series. So that when you move right and press attack, you swing your sword from right to left. When you move left, the opposite would happen. When you move backwards and attack, you'd stab, and so on. This system would be better than the current arrow system, which can be quite awkward at times.

14) This one was in one of the threads in the modification forum, but I'll also write it here: make moving backwards slower. As it's now, it's way too easy to kill 40 bandits alone, as all you need to do is to run backwards, go close enough for them to try to hit you, then quickly run further and hit them.

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Edit: added five more suggestions


Battle mode:

15) The strings and backings of medieval bows were made of sinews. When it rained and the sinews got wet, it made the bows less effective as the sinews (temporarily?) lost a part of their strength. So, if it rains during a battle, it could also make the range and damage of bows and crossbows to be slightly lower.

16) Add morale, so that you don't always have to kill the enemy to the last man. It would also be cool to see your peasants scattering in terror after seeing the horde of Dark Knights approaching. With morale you could also add some interesting things to the map mode.


Map mode:

17) Make the size of NPC parties a bit less dependant on the player's level. So that even if you're on level 40, it's still possible to see a party of 10 bandits. This would make it feel more like the game world would live it's own life without the player being the center of everything, and it would also allow the player to play and fight battles without always having a big party accompanying them.

18 ) a. Merchants shouldn't trust you to protect their caravans if you've robbed their faction's caravans before. Maybe they could forget your bad deeds over time or after you've paid them a lot of money.
18 ) b. If morale would be in the game, and if you managed to kill every last one of the caravan's guards and passengers, then there would be no negative consequences of the robbery, as there would be no one to tell the merchants that it was you who robbed the caravan.

19) Make good equipment more expensive, so that you can set some real goals and have a dream of maybe one day acquiring a full black armor set. Now you can have a full set of black armor by only playing for a few hours, and many levels before 20.
Also, to prevent players from becoming filthy rich too soon, you could make broken equipment a lot cheaper than unbroken. I mean, having a quiver full of bent arrows probably isn't going to do you much good, and I doubt anyone would buy them for any other reason than for getting the small amount of metal from the arrowheads.
 
all good ideas, but 13 is already there. more control than just left/right/over/stab would be nice though.
 
Reloading a crossbow on horseback would be a tremendous pain in the ass, do you know what it takes to load one? It isn't just sticking a bolt in a slot, and you have to remember that when a horse is moving this would be infinately more difficult, if they made it possible they would have to make it ridiculously slow or make it impossible to reload while galloping.

Other then that... I like your other suggestions.
 
comfreak, I mean that the player himself could actually decide the direction/type of the blow. Now the game chooses randomly which kind of a blow to make.

Reinhart, I don't know, I've never reloaded a crossbow on horseback. But at least I do know that mounted crossbowmen were used in the medieval times, so it probably isn't THAT hard to do...
 
hmmm you just gave me an idea. Being able to pick up things on the battefield would be nice(weapons of course).

This has proberly been suggested but it would be nice though.
 
You actually have to brace the crossbow against the ground and pull the mechanism back. I'm not sure how they would have done it on horseback, but I do know you are right there were mounted crossbowmen.
 
i recon they would be small crossbows, just small enough to be manageable in loading and quickly putting away when needs be but powerful enough to do damage
 
See, thats what I was thinking but that would mean a sacrifice in killing power. I love crossbows, they were the nuclear weapon of their day, a man with little to no combat experience could pick one up and kill a man decked out in battle armor who had spent his entire life training for battle, they were so effective in fact that at one point crossbows were actually banned in medieval europe.

I would love to able to use a crossbow on horseback but with the sheer amount of damage and accuracy a crossbow has it would need to be limited in some way.
 
Interestingly enough, this very same argument was played out at the Valandil forums. (in case you didn't know, valandil is a multiplayer mediaeval combat game similar to M&B except done on the hl2 engine.)

Here's the argument. Scroll down a bit to find t.

Anyway, i have indeed seen some crossbows that could be reloaded on horseback. They are pump action crossbows, and you can prime it like you would a shotgun. The payoff is, that if you can stretch the string back with a weak pumping action, then the energy stored in the crossbow isn't going to be big at all.
 
guffe333 said:
hmmm you just gave me an idea. Being able to pick up things on the battefield would be nice(weapons of course).

This has proberly been suggested but it would be nice though.

...I don't know if its possible, but picking up spent arrows would be nice...
 
krippp said:
comfreak, I mean that the player himself could actually decide the direction/type of the blow. Now the game chooses randomly which kind of a blow to make.
why does nobody realize what the arrows are for? unless you're using an old version, the attack is determined by the movement of the mouse. look at the white arrows.
 
if you look to the right of someone your attack is a swipe form the right, if you look up rthe attack is a two handed swipe from above your head, you decide what attack you do with the mouse so stop whining about it. yes picking up weapons on the battle field would be sweet, espiecally in the tournament
 
Ok, forgive my ignorance on that compfreak... But, when there's multiple enemies, the arrow system becomes quite hard to control. It also slows you down unless you have a high mouse sensitivity, assuming you want to control the way you hit someone. And while it's not that hard to keep the enemy in the middle of your screen so you can stab him, it's still possible that you won't be able to try to stab your enemy as he keeps moving back and forth horizontally. Also, when in the middle of a fight, I don't want to concentrate on looking whether the yellow arrow is where I want it to be before I hit. So for these reasons I still think that my suggestion for close combat is better than the current system. :wink:

Taal, you should look up the definition of whine ( http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definition/whine ) before making flame-ish comments.

By the way, I added 5 more suggestions to the first post. Number 16 may be a bit too complicated to add before M&B2, but it doesn't do any harm to air the idea anyway...
 
I still think that the controls for slash distance should be like they are in Daggerfall.
 
I've never heard of Daggerfall before, and google search didn't help much, so I've got to ask: what do you mean ? :grin:
 
ah daggerfall...........one of my alltime favorite games!!! it was a game with mouse controled swings... you click and hold the left mouse button down then move the mouse left and right or up and down the direction you moved the mouse determined the type of swing. left or rigt was a slash up and down was a hack and click and release was a stab. and there wer others but this is the short list.

now as far as the crosbow was concerned the horse bowmen had a hook on the side of there saddle that was used to recock the crossbow. the rider just leaned on the crossbow for the force to recock it, the the bolt was added and ready to fire. hope this helps
 
krippp said:
I've never heard of Daggerfall before, and google search didn't help much, so I've got to ask: what do you mean ? :grin:

Elder Scrolls 2. If that doesn't help, Morrowind is Elder Scrolls 3.
 
@ Kripp (and everyone else btw...)
You might want to check out:

http://www.the-underdogs.org

A great site with a lot of free games and accidentaly the way I found out about M&B in the first place..
 
It might not be a bad idea to let the player choose the swing style they prefer -- either have the relative direction of the enemy determine the swing as it is now, or have the movement keys determine it. That way, everyone is happy.
 
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