A small change to alleys to give them a massive boost in functionality

[Totalgarbage]

I like the addition of alley ownership which came with patch 1.1, but they don't serve much purpose other than giving a small (but steady) income and roguery experience when we defend them. I will suggest 1 small changes to make them much more functional, and better for the core gameplay loop.

1) When we own an alley in a town, we should be able to sneak in to that town 100% of the time.

2)This is the big one; we should be able to store/garrison as many units as we can rather than a max number of 10. Only the first 10 should be exempt from wages, and the rest should be paid normally or a discounted wage. This would give the alleys a "hideout" functionality. But that's not all, similar to how garrisoned troops increase a town's security, stored/garrisoned troops in an alley should give a malus to security (at a greater rate than regular soldiers if they're bandit troops). This would cause towns to rebel if there's sufficient "criminals", thus making it easier to take over.

Gang leaders with negative relationshipinto the player in player-owned towns should also passively amass troops with a limit in order to rebel, which would give the player something additional to do in peacetime in thenform of garrisoning extra troops (thus higher daily wages) or routine cleanups by the player (but this "criminal build up" should not happen in AI owned towns as this would result in all towns frequently rebelling).

 

[niekdegrijze]

I like it!
But I would suggest a limit to the amount of troops as not to make it to op.
Additionally I would like siege options such as a chance to damage defending siege engines (ambush)and a command you can give during an attack to have them spawn (same spot as defender spawn to make it easier) to attack from behind.

 

[Albastı16]

Also fief owners should be able to execute gang leaders after defeating them at least.

 

[Totalgarbage]

I like it!
But I would suggest a limit to the amount of troops as not to make it to op.

Yeah but I have no idea what the limit would be. I feel like if the limit is too high it is too op but somewhat balanced by extra wages for troops you're not using, but if there is a lower limit (let's say 10 unpaid alley troops + 25 garrisoned), the security malus for the alley garrison would have to be either really high per unit to actually be able to decrease the overall security enough to make the town rebel, or it would be meaningless in most scenarios. There probably is a sweet spot for maximum number of troops, but I have no idea what that would be before we set the individual security malus of a garrisoned alley unit.

Additionally I would like siege options such as a chance to damage defending siege engines (ambush)and a command you can give during an attack to have them spawn (same spot as defender spawn to make it easier) to attack from behind.

I really like the first idea that we are able to get rid of 1 or more enemy siege engine in an offense (or maybe burn down foodstocks or something?), but I think the spawn idea would be really buggy and probably a bit niche.

 

[Dodgy]

I like the idea but the rebellion part sounds like it would be overpowered cause the AI already doesn't do much to take care of the security or loytalty of their fiefs that I am aware of, nor do they try to rid their cities of alley owners just like the player can to gain control of one.

Aside from that I do agree that to make them worth the time investment they should offer more to the table.
The ability to infiltrate a town reliably and transforming them in some sort of hideout would be a start. They could also potentially help with the quest to help prisoners escape by providing assistance, perhaps by being able to infiltrate and take the place of one of the guards inside?

 

[Totalgarbage]

I like the idea but the rebellion part sounds like it would be overpowered cause the AI already doesn't do much to take care of the security or loytalty of their fiefs that I am aware of, nor do they try to rid their cities of alley owners just like the player can to gain control of one.

Aside from that I do agree that to make them worth the time investment they should offer more to the table.
The ability to infiltrate a town reliably and transforming them in some sort of hideout would be a start. They could also potentially help with the quest to help prisoners escape by providing assistance, perhaps by being able to infiltrate and take the place of one of the guards inside?

Rebellion would be OP, true, but I feel like giving the player the ability to become a king through different means; ie. being able to start a kingdom by taking over a rebel town is crucial for the game. I think that it might be better if alleys could help players make towns rebel through decreasing security (with the investment of garrisoning and paying for troops staying in the alley), but not make them rebel always, just in specific conditions. I feel like it already would be balanced so that only towns belonging to a different culture to the owner clan would rebel, as I very rarely see any "native" towns rebel, if ever. These towns are almost always border towns that has changed hands numerous times, and therefore have very low prosperity and barely any buildings. If you otherwise wanted to make a prosperous town with the same culture owner, you would need to pay millions of denars to purchase all the food in the market every day to make it starve enough to rebel (and even then they would likely have enough security to prevent a rebellion).

I feel like the elephant in the room is the fact that kingdoms cannot declare war on clans not part of a kingdom. I think that this can be fixed if the kingdom that owned the town before rebellion automatically offered us a vassalage offer and let us keep that town if we joined that kingdom (even if we somehow conquered a town before reaching clan tier 2) and if we declined, they would declare a war on us which we wouldn't be able to make peace.

I like the other suggestion too, but it might make prison breaks too easy. If we say that there are on average 5 prison guards, "conversion" of 1 guard to our side would make the prison break go from a gauntlet of 1v5 to a 2v4 (3v4 if we let the lord fight as well). So I think that sneaking into towns without any risk (and maybe decreasing the number of prison guards by 1) should be good enough as to not make it too easy.

 

[Dodgy]

I get what you mean, I would be in favour with the idea but it would be hard to balance, that's what I fear.
So far the way TW has balanced the game feels already "forced" to avoid snowballing "artificially".
Rebellions as they are can't be considered very well balanced either, I don't like as you have pointed out how rebellions seem to happen only to border towns where ownership changes, basically the thing that matters the most is only the culture and a couple of specific laws that you can only forcefully pass once you become a king with loads of influence.

If they can improve the system as a whole, than it would be a worthwhile addition.

About the prisoner escape mission, the ally doesn't necessarily need to spawn next to us, making the fights 2vs1 for each guard. They could spawn at the exit, meaning that they may die straight away or be able to kill one guard at most. I think it should actually be our own companion that oversees the alley we control, that way he would be more or less useful depending on the gear/skills they have.
Worst case scenario, we could simply make it lower the guard amount by 1 without making it spawn, possibly only as a pop up message at the exit.

 

[Totalgarbage]

I get what you mean, I would be in favour with the idea but it would be hard to balance, that's what I fear.
So far the way TW has balanced the game feels already "forced" to avoid snowballing "artificially".
Rebellions as they are can't be considered very well balanced either, I don't like as you have pointed out how rebellions seem to happen only to border towns where ownership changes, basically the thing that matters the most is only the culture and a couple of specific laws that you can only forcefully pass once you become a king with loads of influence.

If they can improve the system as a whole, than it would be a worthwhile addition.

The thing is, if rebellions occured in native towns, it would be meaningless bull****. Those rebellions would get suppressed almost immediately and all it would result in is lost prosperity, notable power (I have no idea what it does) and building levels. What we need is civil wars, which will come with claimants, and I hope that the AI is able have its own civil wars without player intervention. I agree with the laws part too. The policies are too one-sided; they are either always good or bad, never situational. They are not mutually exclusive either, so you can always stack the best policies as long as you have the influence, even if 2 policies are mutually exclusive in the game text itself (serfdom & forgiveness of the debts as an example).

As for prison breaks, I think it's best if we could always sneak in + eliminate 1 guard, as otherwise it takes away too much from the challenge.

 

[Dodgy]

Yeah I understand why you would think that (about rebellions in native towns), but to be honest I think that when we talk about "border towns" we inevitably end up talking about only the ones that have been conquered on the losing side.
I think that native towns around the border, that are likely to have been suffering from raids and pillaging, should also be affected by the war and thus more likely to rebel compared to towns sitting deeper in a faction's peaceful territory.
In fact even resolutions such as voting about whether or not to start OR end a war, should have an effect. The people shouldn't like to see their faction wanting a prolonged war and the game world should react accordingly.

This is what I refer to in other topics though about the various systems not being capable to support deeper features though. Currently the voting system is also a mess and would require an overhaul together with the general state of politics.
Unless you are a ruler yourself, and you can overrule any vote (thus making them useless anyway), as a vassal I have found myself capable of tipping the scales for an important vote related to starting or ending a war only a handful of times. For the sake of coming up with a number, I would say perhaps 5% of the times?

Way too low, especially given the fact that we don't know the reasons why a specific lord or king would want a war to start or end in the first place, how their rationale is programmed to think, and we have no way to influence their decisions in any way (despite having in theory a window of 2 days to try and do something about it).

 

[Totalgarbage]

Yeah I understand and agree with what you're saying. True, I feel like native border towns should be more likely to rebel as well, that is a good point.

Yes the voting system is a half baked mess, I agree. I feel like while a broader overhaul to the voting, succession and policy mechanisms is needed, basically all cultures' mechanisms should be made somewhat distinct, and I only assume that this would come with a DLC. What I mean is that the Northern, Southern and Western empires should have voting, succession and influence mechanics different to one another, and some of the other "barbarian" kingdoms should also have different mechanics as well, which they may oy may not share with one imperial faction.

For example, to my limited memory of the in-game lore, Vlandia, Sturgia & the Aserai should have the mechanisms we have now, while Battania & the Northern Empire would have a similar mechanism without a king having the authority to override the general consensus (oligarchy), whereas the ruler has the ultimate power in Southern Empire & Khuzait. And the Western Empire could possibly be similar to SE & Khuzait but the ruler is the clan that controls the largest standing army, and you automatically get to own the fief you conquer without a necessary vote. I don't fully remember to lore though so I might be wrong, and some of these factions' real world counterparts had very interesting succession laws which probably couldn't be implemented sufficiently to the game. For example, the Kievan Rus had the Rota system while the Gokturks (& maybe the Huns, I don't fully remember) had a succession system where the ownership of the kingdom/empire's lands would be divided to the ruler's sons equally upon his death.

 

[CaptainFracas]

I agree that expanding the alley system would be very cool.

All of the actions that are doable by spies in Total War games would be very cool to do through this system in Bannerlord. (Open the gate of the fortress before a siege, make the town rebel, assassinate clan member, etc)