a (not so small) treatise of suggestions/comments

[Skelly]

OK, I've been playing for a (long) while now and feel I can give some useful feedback to this truly brilliant game... Some of the things below have been brought up before, I know, but I thought it might be useful to put this all in one place...

1. Bugs ? and Misdemeanors

a) Sometimes while not moving, and riding a horse (it may be only when I was forced to a stop after running into something??) I cannot swing my sword until I start moving again...

b) If you have a Leadership of 7 or up all your troop slots are full, when you start a fight, your troops list runs into their troop list.

c) Occationally, I get a texture scramble, where the ground in battle is replaced by the merchants wall texture, or the wall textures are replaced by trees. It clears up if I alt-tab out and back, so it just may be my graphics card (old geforce 3), but I thought I'd mention it.

d) Occational crash to desktop - usually happens when loading a new screen, so may be related to above graphical weirdness...

2. Realism vs Fun - Understanding that these don't perfectly overlap, some questions and comments...

a) You heal really really fast. I suppose this being the middle ages and all, if its a serious wound that takes a while to heal, you are likely dead, but still. I think keeping the game fun may overrule realism on this one. Maybe in this world people just heal fast.

b) Distance - Cities are half a day to a day apart - if the continent is supposed to be about the size of England than that's cool. It would put (invisible) small towns an hour or so apart (on horseback) and cities spaced about right (Liverpool to Manchester to Leeds etc). If it's supposed to be a continent, and there are a bunch of smaller towns that don't appear on the map (not much for sale in smaller towns, no significant lord, no reason to show on map??) then you move way too fast.

c) Number of bandits - the English population in 1300 between 4 and 6 million. In the last hundred days, I figure I've killed about 10,000 bandits (a hundred a day). Figure 2 million fighting age population - 1 million of which are male, and I have personally wiped out 1% of the fighting age males in the land - only counting bandits. And this in a third of a year during a war when huge numbers of the fighting age males are getting killed in warfare (probably another 1% just by me).

d) All of the above could be addressed by increasing time about tenfold...The continent would seem much bigger, healing times would become more sensible - and the rate of population extinction would not be quite as extreme - although you would end up with counts and kidnappers etc. having to have a lot of patience when waiting for their ransom/horses/armour or whatever. Also, it would imply that sight lines are a really long way...

3. Geomorphology (terrain)

a) There are lot of severe small hills. There are places where thats true but it seems a bit exaggerated here. I think you are reusing a handful of maps and spawning into different places at different times (the fact that I'm not sure about this after the hundreds of hours of playing shows that the maps are large and varied enough to keep me guessing - cool).

Maybe as a future extension, make a similar number of maps for several different terrain types (steppe, forest, etc) and keeping the present maps as the mountain maps. The steppe maps would be quite flat and rarely have rivers, the forests heavily treed etc. This would make horseback fighting difficult in forests and powerful in plains, adding variety and forcing different tactics on folks. I'm not sure if the AI would deal well with lots of trees - I can see Dark Knights smashing into them alot, so maybe this wouldn't work...(I expect this will be possible with the mod tools??)

b) On rivers - any leader worth his salt wouldn't pick a fight with sea raiders anywhere near a river (it seems to be the only time I lose large amounts of men anymore...)

c) Also on rivers - they don't cut through the middle of hills...they make canyons, yes, but not in the middle of a small hill...

4. Other stuff

a) Freed captives - they wander around aimlessly, wouldn't they head back home?? - or at least to the nearest friendly city??

b) Unfriendly cities - I have killed 1000's of Swadians/Virger(sp??) and the shopkeepers are still friendly?? My rating is - 100 - I would expect bounty hunters, not open doors!! (I can - and do - roleplay this, so it isn't very important. Maybe the merchants are just unpatriotic and greedy, and I'm a master of disguise...)

c) Friend from foe - depending on you you are fighting, it can be fairly difficult to tell them apart. I now just use Sword sisters cause it's easy to see the white horses, but can we dress are troops up in a given color or something?? (I know it's been brought up before...)

d) Reinforcements - for NPC combat groups. If a (for example) swadian war party has been around for a while and has been whittled down to half strength (and has more captives than fighting men) shouldn't it go home and get reinforced and drop off it's captives??

All right, this is already a book, I'll stop now...

edit
ok three more...

would it work to remove the inventory skill, and have the amount of inventory related to the number of horses you have???

Can we have black hair on the character customisation screen??

Can we change the mouth (width and fullness) on the character customisation screen

 

[Ingolifs]

Small note. The terrain is generated randomly. Armagan said that he'll fix up some of the things in the terrain, like pretty much what you said. Flatter terrain, without small pointless hills, rivers won't look so dumb and there might be some variation depending on where in the game you are.

 

[screwtype]

All of the above could be addressed by increasing time about tenfold...The continent would seem much bigger, healing times would become more sensible - and the rate of population extinction would not be quite as extreme - although you would end up with counts and kidnappers etc. having to have a lot of patience when waiting for their ransom/horses/armour or whatever. Also, it would imply that sight lines are a really long way...

I'd hate to have my party crawling around on the map at a snail's pace, I think it would be very irritating. I think the speed of parties on the campaign map is about right already.

However, your concerns could be addressed in a similar way if the map world was just a lot bigger. Then the towns currently on the map might resemble hamlets rather than cities. So then you could have much longer days, with the average trip from one "hamlet" to another taking an hour of game time instead of half a day or a full day.

I'm rather partial to the idea of a much bigger game world, with a relatively small number of major cities and lots of little hamlets where there isn't so much to do. But if the world was going to be bigger then I think roads might be an idea, maybe even with signposts to help you find your way about.

Maybe as a future extension, make a similar number of maps for several different terrain types (steppe, forest, etc) and keeping the present maps as the mountain maps. The steppe maps would be quite flat and rarely have rivers, the forests heavily treed etc. This would make horseback fighting difficult in forests and powerful in plains, adding variety and forcing different tactics on folks. I'm not sure if the AI would deal well with lots of trees - I can see Dark Knights smashing into them alot, so maybe this wouldn't work...(I expect this will be possible with the mod tools??)

Totally agree. It would be cool to fight in forest where it was hard to use ranged weapons or fight with a lance etc.

As an adjunct to that I'd like to see large areas of the campaign map covered with forest. That's where your bandits would be most likely to hang out and cause trouble. At the moment there are just a few little trees here and there on the campaign map and it's all rather samey. My guess is that armagan intends to work on this aspect of the game anyway, but I thought I'd mention it in passing.

On rivers - any leader worth his salt wouldn't pick a fight with sea raiders anywhere near a river (it seems to be the only time I lose large amounts of men anymore...)

I'm inclined to disagree, soldiers find it harder to dodge when they're in water so it's quite handy to catch them with ranged fire when they're crossing a river.

I'd actually like to see wider rivers. And now that I think of it, it would be cool if some rivers were too deep to wade across so you could have bridges instead and bridge battles.

Oh, and I also agree that the topography is a bit extreme. I'd also like to see battle maps a tad larger, they feel a little cramped as they are.

Friend from foe - depending on you you are fighting, it can be fairly difficult to tell them apart. I now just use Sword sisters cause it's easy to see the white horses, but can we dress are troops up in a given color or something?? (I know it's been brought up before...)

Yeah, there's a green bar above your soldier's heads but it appears and disappears. IMO, it would make more sense to have a RED bar above the heads of enemy soldiers, it would be easier to see against the mostly green terrain.

would it work to remove the inventory skill, and have the amount of inventory related to the number of horses you have?

Makes sense to me. But I'm not sure how it would work in terms of game balance. There'd have to be some sort of penalty to stop you toting huge amounts of stuff around. Perhaps horses could be really expensive or something.

 

[n00854180t]

If names displayed in red are added, can there also be an option to turn off all names? I like the added difficulty of recognizing my troops.

 

[screwtype]

I think a better idea to having colours above troops heads would just be to have your troops appear in a certain livery of your choice so you could identify them. It wouldn't look so unnatural.

 

[Skelly]

screwtype...

on the time thing, I didn't mean that you would move at a snails pace, I meant that everthing would stay the same from a game perspective, except the day night cycle would go ten times faster.

ie. it would still take 20 or 30 seconds of real time to go from Praven to Suno, but it would take 3 or 4 days of game time...

 

[zaleukos]

It doesnt make a whole lot of sense to make Calradia a continent much bigger than England. Travelling such distances was very rare from the breakdown of the Roman Empire until the 19th century or so.

I'd like to have more small hamlets where one could recruit peasants, but with much poorer traders (both in money and equipment).

 

[Ingolifs]

And i'd like to become lord of one of those small hamlets and be able to call up a peasant army of 100.

 

[marly]

"can there also be an option to turn off all names? I like the added difficulty of recognizing my troops."

There already is isnt there??

I think it can be done in options...