A Shield Lying on the Water -- Moved to MBX

[Colt]

We've got the problem solved. We have a lot of problems solved actually, but for obvious reasons we want to wait until the commercial release of 1066 to hand them out. That, and more importantly but less cool, is that if there's some feature-killing bug down the road we don't want to look like idiots. 

 

[ex_ottoyuhr]

We've got the problem solved.

Really! I'm quite impressed -- I didn't know it *was* solvable.

We have a lot of problems solved actually, but for obvious reasons we want to wait until the commercial release of 1066 to hand them out. That, and more importantly but less cool, is that if there's some feature-killing bug down the road we don't want to look like idiots. 

Even if that weren't the case, I don't know that I'd want a solution "handed out" -- not unless it were something outright ridiculously difficult, and/or counter-intuitive. However, now that I know it can be done, I might try to investigate it myself -- but this gets into the realm of M&B-internals behavior, which is decidedly not my forte... 

And deadly bugs are certainly likely. I think we have a common experience there...

 

[Pinetor]

More grats --- this is an exceedingly evil mod that is sucking me in until all else goes undone... shower anyone?


Now for my whining:

I need my chest back.. not the one on the wife.. My Zendar chest for storing food and other lovlies!
( but now that I think about it, that dancing dress is too victorian.. how about some veils.. and little else? ( jk)
Why cant I choose another city to have my town atack.. its always Tolvolo. Could we have sliders for how agreesive, it would reduce the scrolling the screen for the list.( sliders for who to help also)
Ack you took out the fourways Inn? But I use it as map refernce!
Earlier you mentioned attacking tax collectors as easy prey. Will that deprive a town of money?
If I hire youth and then garrison them will they continue gain exp and level up? Would they ever be used by the town (sent out)?
Does it matter if I take from the garrison? Does that reduce the towns attack/defend abilty?
If I go to a freindly town, hire an army, and then garrison at my town or another town, would that town benefit?
Does hiring a solider reduce the towns abilty to have them? Does it draw them from the garrison? Can you ever hire them all?
Can we starve a town? It might have been nice to keep caravans but now they are used as input for food to merchants.
It would be nice if I could just ride about and join any friendly army then lead them to battle then hop out, to help the next.
how come we start as enemies to some many and so many aliies have only a few or none? Must be that secret thing.

next day


Up till nearly 2 again last night... I took Tolvolo....
The city I dont think, is ready for prime time NPC use. There is a bad clipping area that NCPs get stuck in just as you enter the gate one building over on the right. Other NPC's got stuck in other areas, but I could not get to them.

While I am enjoying the mod, I think the game play needs more tweaking. Basically you cant really play the game without cheating ( IMHO). I think that NPC partyies need to be nerfed yet again. To me, a town should only be able to generate just a few Knights or higher level parites. ( idea: require that for every knight that there be 3 squires)Every party I saw had knights, Paladin, Generals or other high dollar/  hurtful toons. I could only approach Tolvolv by turning on True Vision and using Teleport. Then I had to give my self extra money to buy effective troops.  I would also add something function to allow the player to get money without takig it from the town till ( if there is any to take). how about ole dad doling out an allowance? Maybe Tax collectors give up thier collections? Or friendly towns make "donations to the cause" when you attack or kill an enemy of thiers. I also think the towns could use more player input so they dont keep spending all thier money. Maybe an option to not attack nor defend anyone ( other than your self).

 

[ex_ottoyuhr]

More grats --- this is an exceedingly evil mod that is sucking me in until all else goes undone... shower anyone?

You look like a poster after my own heart. Thanks.

Now for my whining:

I need my chest back.. not the one on the wife.. My Zendar chest for storing food and other lovlies!

Quite true. I'm trying to figure out how to get the chest running -- it's proving a large bit of a problem here...

( but now that I think about it, that dancing dress is too victorian.. how about some veils.. and little else? ( jk)

Heartily, heartily agreed -- and you can leave out the just-kidding. My concept for a dancer's outfit is primarily a leotard, albiet with medievalish technology -- the placeholders there are *hideously* bad.

(Chalin's placeholder face is also not where it should be... Nor much of anything else about her.)

Why cant I choose another city to have my town atack.. its always Tolvolo.

As of the current implementation -- which is the largest weakness in my current codebase -- a city has a list of only up to eight other cities that it can target. These other cities can only be targetted as hostile if they're currently enemies of the city in question; declare war on Lun or even Ajaria and you should see a few more options. (This also means that a city can potentially end up rear of the battle lines altogether, in which case it's basically a cash-generator.)

Could we have sliders for how agreesive, it would reduce the scrolling the screen for the list.( sliders for who to help also)

I'm not sure that's possible with the current form of the Official Module System, but it would be a better way to do it if it could be done.

Ack you took out the fourways Inn? But I use it as map refernce!

Sorry about that. I intend to have a full-fledged map of the interior of Baheisir castle, and for that to be your Four Ways counterpart for where to send unneeded allies -- a sort of high-medieval Ebon Hawk.

Putting the Four Ways Inn back in might not be a completely bad idea, though...

Earlier you mentioned attacking tax collectors as easy prey. Will that deprive a town of money?

Eventually. Towns start with a substantial reserve of cash (in fact, an entirely-too-large one -- income generation is still in need of major tweaking); a tax collector produces new revenue, but only if he survives his deployment and returns to the city. Wiping out tax collectors will thus, eventually, strangle the city in question, weakening at least its military abilities and its rate of party deployment.

If I hire youth and then garrison them will they continue gain exp and level up?

Unfortunately, no. That would be a nice feature to add -- and I believe it's been suggested for the main game -- but it's not in as yet...

Would they ever be used by the town (sent out)?
Does it matter if I take from the garrison? Does that reduce the towns attack/defend abilty?

The answer to both of these is, unfortunately, no. Garrison troops aren't deployed by the town -- instead, whole army parties are purchased at once. (I'm not completely happy about this, either.) The only benefit of garrison troops is greater strength in repulsing invasion forces -- but at present, only the player can attack towns, so friendly garrisions are mostly decoration...

Up until yesterday, I had assumed that attacking towns was outright impossible in the current version of M&B. However, Colt revealed that 1066 has managed to do it -- though not saying more than that, for obvious reasons -- and it would be interesting to try to figure out how he did. That said, though, I'm currently trying to make it possible for the PC to be ambushed in taverns by hostile factions, and that's proving *more* than enough work itself...

If I go to a freindly town, hire an army, and then garrison at my town or another town, would that town benefit?

No, at least not yet.

Does hiring a solider reduce the towns abilty to have them? Does it draw them from the garrison? Can you ever hire them all?

No; you can hire an unlimited number of troops from a given town, and the money involved disappears into a black hole. This is a misfeature if not a bug, though -- it would certainly be better if the player hiring thirty paladins reduced the subsequent fighting ability of the city, and I think I know how I might do this...

Can we starve a town? It might have been nice to keep caravans but now they are used as input for food to merchants.

No. Raiding caravans would actually fit the current version of the game decently well; I removed them back when this was meant to be based on one of the Fire Emblem games, where I felt that attacking merchants would be an activity unworthy of that setting's noblemen. Here, it would be much more possible; I may want to put them back in.

However, that said, remember that my grand objective is a CRPG of sorts. The current engine is a preview, as it were -- think of a Final Fantasy minus the storyline -- and my main efforts will be going in that direction...

It would be nice if I could just ride about and join any friendly army then lead them to battle then hop out, to help the next.
how come we start as enemies to some many and so many aliies have only a few or none? Must be that secret thing.

As to generalling armies, I'm planning on doing something like that in the story -- there will be a few times where the PC borrows an army from somebody.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean with the second question here, though; the current conflict system is placeholder-ish, though, if that's any reassurance. Now that I'm thinking more about the story, the PC -- and Ajaria -- will probably start out hostile to Lun rather than Sivas...

next day


Up till nearly 2 again last night...

Yikes! You're keeping my sort of hours -- I sincerely apologize!

I took Tolvolo....
The city I dont think, is ready for prime time NPC use. There is a bad clipping area that NCPs get stuck in just as you enter the gate one building over on the right. Other NPC's got stuck in other areas, but I could not get to them.

This is heartily agreed. The "attack town" functionality was a mistake -- a matter of "because I can and 1066 already did"; it's certainly not ready for prime-time, and I think I'll dummy it back out next version...

While I am enjoying the mod, I think the game play needs more tweaking. Basically you cant really play the game without cheating ( IMHO). I think that NPC partyies need to be nerfed yet again. To me, a town should only be able to generate just a few Knights or higher level parites. ( idea: require that for every knight that there be 3 squires)Every party I saw had knights, Paladin, Generals or other high dollar/  hurtful toons. I could only approach Tolvolv by turning on True Vision and using Teleport. Then I had to give my self extra money to buy effective troops.   I would also add something function to allow the player to get money without takig it from the town till ( if there is any to take). how about ole dad doling out an allowance? Maybe Tax collectors give up thier collections? Or friendly towns make "donations to the cause" when you attack or kill an enemy of thiers. I also think the towns could use more player input so they dont keep spending all thier money. Maybe an option to not attack nor defend anyone ( other than your self).

This is a *very* good set of suggestions -- I've been hoping for this sort of gameplay advice for a while. I had intended to try to avoid Last Days-style 'over-levelled stack' problems, but I think you're right in saying that I've done an extremely bad job of it. Remember that there are "knights" who are level 10-15 -- the counterparts to Vanilla's Vaegir and Swadian Knights tend to be "paladins" in this mod -- but even so, there are indeed some seriously overpowered stacks here. I had chosen to do a constant number of troops in each stack rather than the 'auto-dynamic' levels of Vanilla, to allow for more consistency regarding town attacks, but now that I think about it, that was a pretty terrible decision (and, among other things, town invasions should indeed be more common in the late game, when the player's better equipped to deal with them), and I'll revert from it next release...

Thanks a lot for your suggestions. Keep them coming, and may fewer be needed next version...

 

[Quanta]

Now for my whining:

I need my chest back.. not the one on the wife.. My Zendar chest for storing food and other lovlies!

Quite true. I'm trying to figure out how to get the chest running -- it's proving a large bit of a problem here...

Really? I noticed that there was no functional chest in the Baheisir castle (despite the needed troop entry already in the troops file), so I entered edit mode and popped one in - took all of two seconds, and viola! I now have storage space in my castle.
There are different chests, some are simply props, and the others are functional. The one already in the castle is just a prop ("spr_chest_gothic"). The one you want is "spr_chest_a".

 

[Neural Eclipse]

This mod is absolutely nuts, just look at these screenshots.  I've never seen such a ridiculous amount of simultaneous battles in M&B before.  I rotated the south one so that I could fit all the battles from there, so hence no collation via photoshop~

North side of the map:


South side of the map:


What Pinetor said about cheating I have to agree with, as there is no way to battle hordes of paladins and veteran knights with 50-60 in weapon proficiencies and a squad of "youths."  The first time I played this mod, I gave up going into battle myself, as I guess I was too used to high level characters from other mods and as such could not really effectively control a sloth against guys who seemed to be whipping their swords about (relative to my guy's speed).  So I started using autocalc.  This ends up in a lot of dead young men and women, who are promptly replaced from the taverns for what is essentially a meat grinder.  After I did this for a good hour or two with no major progress (I started joining only already occuring battles after some time, because it really just wasn't working for me), I decided to quit and go to sleep.

I came back today after reading something in this topic about the player's defensive garrison being there just for show ... soooo, I took advantage of that to the fullest extent.  Tons of either decent or high quality troops, heck even not so decent, all free!  This made my life much easier, as now I would have my own horde of paladins to fight the enemy horde of paladins, while I duel one or two guys at a time to increase weapon skill.  Seems to work well so far, but the whole bit about going after tax collectors at first, because they are easy?  I would rather go one against an army than that and die, because that is exactly what happens, but multiple times, while I hunt for the tax collectors like a pirate without a treasure map stuck on an island, which he knows has treasure, but is filled with a crapload of hungry natives.

Plus, using the youth horde makes it that much worse, as they are all on foot.  This makes the army slower than any other army in the game, which means that the moment that 41-man attack stack sees me, I'm doomed unless I can get to a city and stay at the tavern before they reach me, or just use auto calc and keep doing that, losing half my men by the time I get to the damn tavern.  So I end up throwing money at the problem by making tons of mothers and fathers cry for their poor butchered children.

This didn't really happen when I picked out only mounted units from the garrison (well, I had a bunch of foot archers too.. didn't decrease the speed too much though), which, again, only shows that those high level units are required from the start in order to do anything at all (which can make sense, since you're a prince.. and there is war.. and your kingdom has a professional army.. why would you go recruit a bunch of clueless kids?)  Otherwise, I just felt like walking bait.. like cattle.. stupid and slow, as everybody in my party moved slowly like a retard, since everyone, including my level 1 or 2 character had 50-60 in weapon proficiencies.

In native, river pirates, also with zero skill, are provided to train the player character up to a point where player skill takes over character skill.  After that it's smooth sailing as long as you are at least decent in combat, or good if you are trying to take on knights.  ASLOW doesn't have that, it just throws those knights right at you.  So that really should be ameliorated, as starting as of now without cheating is not possible, but since this is in beta, that actually sorta is fitting, since it's all supposed to be for testing, which usually involves cheating up to a certain point in order to test easier

Also, the enemy party size scaling with player's level in native is also what makes the skill progression smooth there.  If it wasn't a 41 stack of paladins/veteran knights, but a 10 stack, then it would be acceptable, but then it wouldn't be an army.  If you could somehow make the actual composition of battle groups scale with player's level, then you could get that smooth skill progression rolling again... just in a more complicated manner.

Dammit, it's almost 01:00 already, ex_ottoyuhr, you made me stay up late too... you bastard!!  (I didn't sleep last night, in case 01:00 doesn't seem late to some of you)

I really want to see this developed as a mini-addon to the game so that mods start using it as base, if they have kingdom warfare.  It has a lot of promise and heck, if the 1066 guys want to share their deepest secrets or  ex_ottoyuhr, you figure the kinks out yourself, this could really be fleshed out as a good solid thing to build a lot of mods on.

Now speaking of ASLOW, the mod, not just the city simulation 'engine,' I noticed that Fire Emblem was mentioned... When I first started playing M&B, about two days in, I had a thought that an FE mod would be great for this.  Apparently somebody else out there agrees, but what is up with legal issues?  What actually happened?  I would still love to see ASLOW be heavily inspired by FE.  I already see it in the troop selection, so that's great.  The day I get to see a general in uber-armor on foot, barely able to move, but wielding a polearm like a monster from hell, while being untouchable except by a couched lance or magic... or God's divine wrath, I will knock down the walls of my apartment with my smile as it shoots off beyond the normally available area for it on my face.  Hm.. if the general has a polearm, then the couched lance becomes a tricky proposition possibly.  Sounds like a fun guy to have in your army.  Good at holding defensive positions.  Everything outmaneuvers the guy in a really bad way, but if he can't be hurt except for a couple weapons, then it would be kinda neat, IMHO anyway.

Oh yeah, great job so far, ex_ottoyuhr... bastard... ! *collapses* 

 

[fisheye]

If I could suggest, instead of starting in a massive castle with buttloads of dinars and mighty paladins just sitting on the battlements, perhaps start in a small township or village with some other neutral small townships or villages within easy conquering distance. From these you can build up enough troops to conquer your first neutral castle, which would be a major victory and only then allow you to start gaining the higher tier troops. Make the process tough enough such that by the time the castle is conquered, the player should be maybe level 15 or more.

This would tie in well with the "general tutorial". It would be great if you had an "advisor" NPC who could give comments on the strategic position of your forces.

 

[Giuseppe]

I think fisheye idea is great. That should ease the shock of first-time players, and it could add a lot to the gameplay. It would be interesting, for example, if survival and expansion in the early stages of the game depended on a strategical outlook on potential alliances. By the way, the "advisor" NPC may well be the character`s wife, I think.

 

[Pinetor]

Well your reply was so gracious that ok.. here I go...

now remember this is like a toddler telling Davinci how to Piant Mona Lisa....


Ideas for this Mod:

Currently the Mod seems to be thus:
Garrison:
Each town has a Garrison which is added too (daily)?.
It has no limits.
Enemy: Defense pool.
Player held town: Free pool.
Friendly town: No purpose.
Troops do not level up.
Troops do not heal.
You can place prisoners here.
You can place troops here.
Castle:
The player can buy any amount of troops of any type from any friendly castle.
Money spent does not benefit the town.
Unlimited available troops.
Tavern:
Pretty much native M&B with special troops.
Town:
Attacking Parties:
Algorithm uses attack needs and money.
Unlimited available troops.
Defending Parties:
Algorithm uses defense needs and money.
Unlimited available troops.













OK my overall idea is to have all of this brought under one pool of troops, that being the garrison. Not all the ideas have to be put in for some parts to work. But the overall effect could be interesting.



New way

Garrison:
Each town has a Garrison which is added too daily.
>> Add only lower/middle level troops.
>> Thus it is cheaper for the town.
It has no limits.
>> Daily limits.
>>Overall hard cap on Garrison size.
Garrison function -Enemy: Defense pool.
Garrison function -Player held town: Free pool.
Garrison function -Friendly town: No purpose.
>> Garrison function -Serves as the only pool through which the town gets its troops.
>> Garrison function -It serves as a limit to parities sent out from town.
Troops do not level up.
>>Troops level up **
Troops do not heal.
>> Troops heal.
You can place prisoners here.
>>Prisoners are converted to Troops.
>>>>Converted troops loose one tree-branch level.
You can place troops here.
>> Troops placed here benefit the towns Attack/defense pool.
Castle:
The player can buy any amount of troops of any type from any friendly castle.
Money spent does not benefit the town.
>>Money goes to town.
Unlimited available troops.
>> Troop limited to 50% of total of garrison per type per week (pay period).
>> Remove the player buying troops from his own towns (redundant).
Tavern:
Pretty much native M&B with special troops.
Town:
>>Per above the towns parties would be limited to numbers and hopefully ranks represented in the Garrison. Thus a player that rapes the Garrison of all Paladins will have a town sending out Squires and youth!  On the flip side, a player that levels up bought troops and places them in the garrison improves the available forces of the town.
Attacking Parties:
Algorithm uses attack-needs and money.
Unlimited available troops.
>> Limited troops and limited troop types by garrison content
Defending Parties:
Algorithm uses defense-needs and money.
Unlimited available troops.
>> Limited troops and limited troop types by garrison content





**Leveling troops:
I guess one way to do this would be to use a tick mark. Each troop (not each troop type, each troop) would get a tick mark each day. Any troop with three tick marks would level up one level and have the ticks reset.



So how would this play out? At the start each town would get a “super garrison” full of high level troops. These would be placed out in the first few days. Then the garrison would revert to mostly lower to mid level troops. The towns would be sending out these types of troops.
If the parties live then they are not replaced. If they are not replaced then the troops stay in the garrison. If the troops stay in the garrison they will level up. Higher level troops in the garrison means higher level troops can be placed in parties, which means they have a higher likelihood to survive. Towns with no/few enemy will grow strong. Fighting towns will grow weak. If on the other hand parties are lost, then the town will pull from the garrison. If they pull too quickly then the parties will be weaker, as the troops have not had a chance to level up. Hopefully this will populate the world with lots of troops of various strengths but those parties will not be random at all. Instead they will reflect the towns abilty to produce troops. 
The player now has to figure out what he wants to do. If he draws against the garrison the town suffers but he can be a power to reduce the enemy quickly. He can go to a friendly town and buy troops there(some). Or he can buy troops at the taverns and level them up. Or he can capture prisoners and convert them.


Another Idea
As the son of the King I want to be able to ride out, find an Empire Party and commandeer it. When I am done with the party I want to send them home for a well earned rest.

How it works. This will use the old M&B code that lets you “rescue” friendly party members. The condition is that the party be smaller than the sum of your current party and thiers as compared to your total available slots (M&B native). Thus I have 30 slots but am riding around with 5 Paladins. I come across a party of 12 knights and other support troops. 12 + 5 + 1 (me) = 18 so I can get them. I enter dialogue and in that I “rescue” them. Run over to defeat and enemy Foragers. Now my party is down to 12, so I go to Party and select a troop to disband. Under the DISBAND button is a SEND HOME button. The troops one by one are sent home to the garrison to be recycled for later use. 

This does a few things. First if my CHAR/Leadership is big enough, I can move troops that the town sent out to better locations, by simple taking them over and going where I need them. Once I am done I can send them home for the town to re-issue, or I can go back to town and organize a new party. The fun part is; when riding around with a tiny troop so I have enough slots to be open to take in an entire party. The send home button is nice in that I can level a troop up and send them home without having to travel back my self to swap out for new low troops.


whew... ok that, a chest in each town.. and a pretty dress for my wife ( the armor chaffs) and I am all good!

 

[Merentha]

By the way, the "advisor" NPC may well be the character`s wife, I think.

The character doesn't necessarily have a wife.

 

[ex_ottoyuhr]

Let me see... A lot of responses to make, here...


Neural Eclipse:

To start with, there are indeed *way* too many battles in this release. Next version will have much more reasonably-strengthed units, and significantly fewer of them.

On Fire Emblem... Basically, I had written to Nintendo, asking for permission to make an FE4-based mod, but I never heard back from them; I figured, thinking further about it, that it would be much less of a legal headache in the future if I did this in a setting of my own rather than one of Nintendo's. I'm not completely happy about that, though -- you're very right in seeing a huge Fire Emblem 4 influence in the unit trees, and I had had some pretty interesting plans for the storyline...

On the need for a tutorial:

I agree -- there most certainly *is* a need for such! My current plan is to start the game out in a 'learning to walk' manner not unlike that -- it'll open with the PC escaping assassination during a coup attempt in Baheisir, then making his way across a map with significantly fewer super-units (but still a good bit of random opposition etc.) to some suitable ally (and he will get suggestions about where to find one, don't worry) in order to get an army and take his city back. Once this has been accomplished, having discovered that his father's dead (surprise, surprise, I believe this is on the RPG cliche list... ), he'll find himself thrust into the role of new duke of Baheisir -- which is a subject that I'd been wondering how to handle, but your suggestions, uh, suggest that this could be made the big main-game conceptual tutorial. Past that, it will be a little before the (currently very incompletely planned) story begins in earnest...

Pinetor:

The main focus of the game isn't going to be the engine, and I'm pretty content with it as it currently stands, once the numbers involved can be made to behave in a reasonable manner -- parties should be vastly more expensive than they currently are, for one thing.

The game's meant to reflect a somewhat 'noble' if not 'Fire Emblemy' philosophy -- from the PC's perspective, raising troops and counting populations and mobilizing armies is something those bourgoise dullard 'stewards' do. Stewards are vital people -- where else would you get money and taxes? -- but they're not the sort you invite to banquets, and, like sausage-makers, you're better off not knowing the details of what they do.

Of course, their abstracted activities still need to reflect reality, which at the moment they basically don't...

However, it is within my plans to release an adaptation of the ASLOW engine to the original game -- in which it may be well worth it to extend it in these sorts of directions.

Commandeering parties would be interesting, but I think the opprotunity cost is too high for now. Converting prisoners seems like something worth investigating -- you can already try to convert prisoners from the main dialogues (although it has a failure rate of approximately 110% until you have unrealistically high charisma -- let's just say it needs work), but a more certain way, even at the cost of abilities, might be useful...

And purchasing troops within a city is indeed screwed up. I modelled it on the Last Days high-level-troop-recruitment system, but without the faction influence requirement -- from my own experience, I had felt that a non-fiscal balancing factor was unnecessary. However, with town treasuries holding stupifyingly large sums of money in this one, I think that that's decidedly not the case...

(And I also think that I had a way of playing Last Days that involved a whole lot of truesight, control-clicking, and hyper-caffinated quest completion -- meaning that I never gave influence enough time to build up to the point of usefulness...)

All this being said, I also suspect that many of your concerns will be solved when NPC parties can finally attack towns. I'm sure it will happen eventually -- if nothing else, shortly after I've bought my copy of 1066...

On my timing and other things:

I apologize for the delays in my next release. My plans had been to spend this week implementing Harsenyi caravans wandering between towns, the player being attacked in taverns, and the beginning of the story; as it is, I've managed to complete... well... *some* of the attack-in-taverns business, and none of the rest -- I'm trying to re-balance the game's parties at the present, going off mathematically-derived analogies with the original game's, and it's *extremely* slow, tedious, turning-brain-to-spaghetti work, which requires frequent breaks to ensure that I can still do arithmetic correctly.

I'm not asking for help (though if I can get some help with graphics and scene-modelling for the castle of Baheisir and the opening scenes in general, I'd appreciate it), nor for condolences -- just letting everyone know that my next release, which will *hopefully* be today or tomorrow, has been delayed with good reason and may be less spectacular than some of you may have expected...

Again, I apologize.

 

[BulletproofTurban]

Hi, I like your mod but I have a couple of questions...

Whenever I Talk to my captured prisoners and ask them to join them, they always say "No, I am grateful but I have other obligations." Is this feature not fully implemented yet? Is there any way to get captured prisoners to join me?

Also, every day or so I get messages on the left side of my screen that say stuff like "Warning:Weapons merchant in (insert name of town here) is uninitialized!"

What does this mean and does it affect gameplay?

 

[ex_ottoyuhr]

Hi, I like your mod but I have a couple of questions...

Whenever I Talk to my captured prisoners and ask them to join them, they always say "No, I am grateful but I have other obligations." Is this feature not fully implemented yet? Is there any way to get captured prisoners to join me?

Yes, it is implemented, but it requires a pretty high charisma to work. Basically, to successfully recruit a prisoner, (Your Charisma + 1d6) must be greater than (2*Enemy's Charisma + 1d6) -- which means that you first have to have charisma 14 or 15 to have a realistic chance.

Don't worry, I plan to seriously reconsider this functionality in the not-so-distant future; the roll will be made easier, and it'll take not the PC's charisma but that of the highest-charisma troop in his party.

Also, every day or so I get messages on the left side of my screen that say stuff like "Warning:Weapons merchant in (insert name of town here) is uninitialized!"

What does this mean and does it affect gameplay?

It's a bug, a small one, which is fixed in the latest version (0.1.4). Basically, when the program considered increasing a given merchant's 'purse' -- his money available to purchase items -- it would accidentally drop to the alert about a non-initialized merchant if his purse was already at the maximum. If you've used the Official Module System, the problem was the need for an extra try-block, and it wasn't affecting gameplay too much; if you've not, the above probably went over your head -- don't worry about it, it wasn't too big of an issue.

(*Now*, however, any further such messages probably *are* an issue...)

 

[Quanta]

Is 0.1.4 savegame compatible with 0.1.35?

 

[BulletproofTurban]

"It's a bug, a small one, which is fixed in the latest version (0.1.4). Basically, when the program considered increasing a given merchant's 'purse' -- his money available to purchase items -- it would accidentally drop to the alert about a non-initialized merchant if his purse was already at the maximum. If you've used the Official Module System, the problem was the need for an extra try-block, and it wasn't affecting gameplay too much; if you've not, the above probably went over your head -- don't worry about it, it wasn't too big of an issue.

(*Now*, however, any further such messages probably *are* an issue...)"

I see. I keep getting this bug, every merchant for every town reports as being "uninitialized" every ingame day. Are you sure this will not affect merchants restocking? I wouldnt want them all to have the same stock for the entire game.

 

[Patrick Blackbird]

The amount of high-level troops is a problem, they are immensly frightening to encounter, but they're just not.. "special." Here's my suggestion for how to deal with the troop problems.

You said that you made the troops so that their numbers don't change (there will always be 10 knights for example). I don't see anything wrong with that, but I believe it would add more depth, and playability if you made the troops more realisticly numbered.

In an army, there are tiers, there has been throughout history, and they still exist today:

1st tier - The first tier is at the top, these are the men who make the command decisions, lead the troops, and are most likely to be well equipped, with, not only weapons and armor, but their own entourage of squires and servants. They are the healthiest men, they are the strongest men, but they are the rarest, paladins and generals should be in this catagory.

2nd tier - The second tier is still able to make command decisions, and in smaller groups are likely to be the only commanders. They should be the type that have good weapons and armor, and servants of their own, not quite as much as the first tier however, these men are landholders, they would control their own manor, and thus have the ability to raise a rather small group of gaurds, and several peasants. These men would be of the level of knights. Knights are not necesarrily rare, there is plenty of room on the map for manors, but there would not be many in the same group.

3rd tier - The third tier would comprimise of gaurds, they are trusted warriors, respected, and by the hand of the noble they gaurd, well equipped for battle, and personal experience to show that they are worth it, or even the possibility of formal training. They would gaurd the generals, and the other leaders, and their position, being so important to a noble, might even give their voice some sway in command decisions. Their numbers would depend on the leadership.

4th tier - The fourth tier would be veterans, these man have earned the respect of the other tiers, and have proven themselves vital in battle, they would be likely to be regular soldiers, mediocre weapons and armor, but more experience, making them stronger, despite having equal weapons. They would be followed by the recruits, out of honest respect.

5th tier - The fifth tier should be comprimised of army regulars, and mercenaries. Regulars make the backbone of an army, without them the army would fold, they make up a great number, and probably around 45-50% of the army. Mercenaries are strong, dependable warriors, but they are not likely to be well respected due to their being so mistrusted, they would indeed be unsavory fellows, but in battle they can provide a powerful blow to the enemy. They might be garbed with armors not that much better than a regular's but maybe something like a chain shirt, their current state as unbeatable full-plated horsemen doesn't make sense... They'd probably be on foot with a pole-arm or a powerful weapon, like an axe (they're either in it for the money, or they're in it for the fun of it).

6th tier - The sixth tier should exist in a real army, they would however be like a peasant horde, only useful to a man very learned in the ways of tactics, because if they have weak leadership then they simply become meat for the grinder, regular soldiers are a leap above them, peasants likely don't have armor, and their weapons might be farm tools.

I'd like to note that mercenaries should be on par with veterans, but I put them in the 5th tier because they aren't liked very much.

for numbers:
1st tier - 1-5%
2nd tier - 10-15%
3rd tier - 5-10%
4th tier - 20%
      mercs- 10%
5th tier
      regulars- 40-50%
6th tier - 60% (they shouldn't appear often, but when they do they should appear in mass)

That's my suggestion on how to solve the troop problem.


***Edit: those percentages probably don't add up.. but that's a kind of ball park figure..

 

[ex_ottoyuhr]

The amount of high-level troops is a problem, they are immensly frightening to encounter, but they're just not.. "special." Here's my suggestion for how to deal with the troop problems.

You said that you made the troops so that their numbers don't change (there will always be 10 knights for example). I don't see anything wrong with that, but I believe it would add more depth, and playability if you made the troops more realisticly numbered.

(Incidentally, everyone *has* noticed that a new version 0.1.4 is up, right? I uploaded it at 10:45 Central Daylight Time last night, thinking I'd do a favor to the night owls, but I begin to wonder whether or not that was a good idea...)

I think that making unchanging numbers of troops was a mistake all around, actually. My original reasoning was in three parts: a dislike for autodynamic difficulty, a desire to ensure that the player had a greater sense of accomplishment, and a more balanced system for town combats; all of these were mistakes.

Autodynamic difficulty -- the difficulty of the game increasing as the player demonstrates greater skill (and, properly speaking, also decreasing if he demonstrates less) -- is, from what I've been able to gather, a pretty controversial question in game design. There are games that go completely over the top with this sort of thing, a few that avoid it altogether, and a majority that simply ramp up difficulty levels with the player's advancement in the game. M&B is an example of the third, and it should've been a hint to me that if 95% of games do a thing, there just might be some merit to it...

As to a greater sense of accomplishment -- being able to plow like a hot knife through butter through stacks that were originally a nightmare for the player to even face is indeed a rewarding experience, but it comes just as well without constant stacks -- and constant stacks also give the player a more workable beginning-game.

Town combats, though, will be genuinely unbalanced under this system, once NPC stacks can finally attack towns: it will be *much* easier for a town to fall in the late than in the early game. However, in the late game, the PC will be better equipped to deal with the results of a town being stormed, and will be much better able to do so himself -- so that the easier conquest of towns won't be as great an issue as I'd feared.

In an army, there are tiers, there has been throughout history, and they still exist today:

I'm not sure how well these 'tiers' hold up, actually. They seem to start unravelling when applied to late-early-modern (i.e. 18th-century) armies, and I certainly didn't see President Bush leading the charge into Fallujah -- though the world might be a better place if he had.

The idea of generals as their armies' best fighters is certainly a poetic one, and has a certain amount of precedent in the time-periods/tech-levels of Vanilla and ASLOW (the Chevalier Bayard instantly springs to mind), but the contradictory sort of leader also appeared, and really first began to develop in earnest, in the late Middle Ages and early modernity -- the Maurice of Orange or Albrecht von Wallenstein type. There were such even in the high Middle Ages, particularly in eastern Europe and among, say, the Mongols, and they made better generals than the Western variety...

The other tiers are not all consistently present at any time I can think of. Medieval armies essentially went from the second tier to the fifth to the sixth -- knights, then their auxiliaries (if you haven't read Hans von Delbrueck's history of warfare, do so, not just for the sake of knowledge but because it'll make you a better human being ), then levies and militia of no better than American Revolution quality. Modern armies don't seem to have combatant tiers above the third...

And as for ASLOW, as you probably guessed from some of the unit types, I'm not going for an entirely credible re-creation of Teorine warfare of the early-middle Chanurin period. M&B is very stylized already, and very constrained in what sort of things it can do or depict; I'm trying to 'play by the rules', and have gone for a Fire Emblem-ish sort of approach rather than trying for realism in an engine where fifty men are an army...

(I also think that strategy games often get bogged down in elements and subjects that would just not be of much interest to the player's implicit in-game counterpart. Shogun: Total War taught me a valuable lesson, that a highly abstracted game can still be engaging, and I'm going for something like that in the strategic side of ASLOW...)

Of course, it may be that I've misjudged/misread your post and its import completely, in which case I apologize. The overpowered and too-numerous stacks of 0.1.35 and earlier were a problem crying to Heaven for a solution, but I think they've been more or less solved. I greatly appreciate your suggestions on troop re-balancing, and all those made in this thread, and believe me, I feel pretty bad for not taking them after the sheer amount of brainstorming and writing that you and others must have done...

(Incidentally, here I'll include a semi-justification for the female troops -- a justification which I really expected to be making a lot sooner, in the face of active complaint... 'Mainstream' Honseli, as mentioned elsewhere, are polygamous -- with powerful rulers building up positively Ottoman-level harems -- but a major prophet of their past specified rather extreme punishments for making or trading in eunuchs, penalties which a given ruler's rivals can be counted on to be eager to enforce. Thus, the guards and attendants of a ruler's household had to be women -- think of European servants of the pre-20th-century, writ extremely large, with similar patterns of employment, dowry build-up, and so on. This mentality stuck around among the Teorines even though polygamy fell away; thus, the presence of small female honor guards, some of which groups are actually employed in combat -- something that would be scandalous to the Honseli mainstream or to other civilizations of this era, even though it occurs on a *much* smaller scale than the mod would seem to suggest at times.

And yes, this will become a plot point.)

 

[Quanta]

(Incidentally, everyone *has* noticed that a new version 0.1.4 is up, right? I uploaded it at 10:45 Central Daylight Time last night, thinking I'd do a favor to the night owls, but I begin to wonder whether or not that was a good idea...)

I haven't installed 0.1.4 yet because I was waiting for you to answer my question about it, is it savegame compatible with 0.1.35?
Also, does 0.1.4 include the Baheisir castle chest fix I described earlier?

 

[ex_ottoyuhr]

(Incidentally, everyone *has* noticed that a new version 0.1.4 is up, right? I uploaded it at 10:45 Central Daylight Time last night, thinking I'd do a favor to the night owls, but I begin to wonder whether or not that was a good idea...)

I haven't installed 0.1.4 yet because I was waiting for you to answer my question about it, is it savegame compatible with 0.1.35?
Also, does 0.1.4 include the Baheisir castle chest fix I described earlier?

I'm sorry; I must have missed those questions in your post -- my most recent large reply was very badly done, more a reply to an impression made than to specific posts. (I was in the midst of party re-balancings at the moment, and had reached the point where I could no longer do basic addition consistently -- not a good time to post on a forum, as I should've realized...)

Thus, no, I don't have the chest fix yet -- but I'll be sure to find it on the thread and include it, and I thank you immensely for it as well. I don't know about savegame compatibility, but I think that the two versions should be compatible -- the main change in 0.1.4 is the new strength of army stacks.

I'm also rather flattered that people are worrying about savegame compatibility already -- and, again, I apologize for having missed your fix previously.

Oh, wait, it was the formatting on BulletproofTurban's post that threw me -- I thought that that was one of my posts, just skimming through them, and missed yours entirely as a result... Speaking of which:

BulletproofTurban:

Are you getting the "merchant uninitialized" bugs in 0.1.4, and for a significant number of merchants? If so, there's something wrong, and I'll investigate it -- I *hope* that it doesn't adversely affect restocking, but I'm not certain...

 

[Quanta]

Thus, no, I don't have the chest fix yet -- but I'll be sure to find it on the thread and include it, and I thank you immensely for it as well.

You're welcome.

I don't know about savegame compatibility, but I think that the two versions should be compatible -- the main change in 0.1.4 is the new strength of army stacks.

Yeah, I didn't know if that would make it incompatible or not. I'm going to try it anyway.

BulletproofTurban:

Are you getting the "merchant uninitialized" bugs in 0.1.4, and for a significant number of merchants? If so, there's something wrong, and I'll investigate it -- I *hope* that it doesn't adversely affect restocking, but I'm not certain...

I'm going to go ahead and install 0.1.4, I'll let you know if those keep popping up.