Add weapon and armor decay on hardest difficulty

[saittam]

We all end up there. High medicin and just higher tier units. Not even armies is an opponent longer. Take a fief with only your party. No problem.
And we all sit there with a fortune and nothing to spend it on.
How about a weapon and armor decay. They do need maintenance. Leather needs fat, sword needs to sharpen, bow strings needs to replace, arrows are just there and so on.
So how about giving the steward more work. One can chose so the steward deals with automaticly for a heavy fee. Or the party leaders deals with it. If one forgets about it for a year it should cost like a milion or more to get the troops new equipment, given you are tier 5 or 6 and have party of 200+.
It should also give affect on moral. Because it´s no problem roam around with 100 in moral. The more decay the less moral.
Also affect fighting performance. So that a very high decay on tier 5/6 soldier makes him/her equal to a tier 3.
Loot should be able to be used to keep decay away. But the tier should match. Not like now that a tier 2 helmet creates a tier 6 soldier (how is that possible?).
Maybe merc soldiers should be exluded. Increase their salery insteed. So that if one is low on cash one avoids them. But then they need to marked so it works with mods.

Only for player then. Something like this would kill the ai.

 

[Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James]

Only for player then. Something like this would kill the ai.

So more tedious grind and micromanagement, but only for the player. Great

 

[saittam]

So more tedious grind and micromanagement, but only for the player. Great

No more then sending out a caravan

 

[Allias]

Most tedious mechanic hated on every single game that has it. You want to make the game more fun? Instead of this boring mechanic add an objective selection when creating a character, so instead of ignoring the Destroy Empire/Barbarians you can choose to have a town of 10k prosperity, have x amount of workshops with over x amount of profit, have a criminal enterprise in x amount of cities, basically anything that is considered a "small victory" so you can go into the next objective. But this is too much work for now so lets just stick with fixing the currently broken mechanics.

 

[saittam]

Most tedious mechanic hated on every single game that has it.

It can never be worse then the smithing.
If you read what i wrote you would realise it would be done automatically. Or in the loot screen there would be a button. Check for match in decay.

As the game is made there is nothing to spend money on. Medicine is too buffed so one hardly loose troops, no need to recruit, Even if needed they are way too cheap. Buying items. Rougery is also very buffed. One get plenty of loot to never buy anything but food and a war horse now then.
And given how the game is designed. This is the best i could come up with to spend some money on.

 

[Allias]

You're missing the point though, the objective of the game is not to have something to spend money on, for my playthroughs its something like this:
Early game:
1. Find tournaments, I've noticed they give horses while you are clan tier 0-1, which sell for around 8-14k each.
2. After getting around 150-300k denars, gear up, meaning get recruits, companions and equipment.
3. Look for a clan to become mercenary, reason not being money but having somewhere to level up skills.
Mid game:
1. After some mercenary work, upgrade gear, upgrade units, level up myself and companions.
2. At around clan tier 4-5 , join a kingdom, deny all castles given until you are given a town.
3. Make an untouchable bastion out of said fief with the leveled up brother, that is usually done by doing certain quests which give prosperity after finishing them and leveling governors engineering skill.
4. Last bit of gear upgrade, tickle in whatever last bit of experience/trait I'm missing.
Late game:
1. Paint the map your color.
Now as you can see these are objectives throughout the gameplay loop, and it gets tedious because its repetitive and pointless doing the same thing over and over. Now you might say there is criminal enterprise you can do, or be a merchant with caravans and workshops, etc. The thing is whatever else idea/objective you might have, it is either broken, half implemented or pointless. For example criminal alleys are half implemented as they are nothing more than a prosperity based income, which we all know towns starve themselves to death day 1, workshops don't have upgrades, income is low due to the economy logic there is, also traits that improve workshops actually make them worse, caravans are pointless, no traits to improve them (carry weight in Trade skill tree did nothing for the profits), no way of upgrading them with better mules, or units, I know there is an option to pay for better units but its just 29 "better" geared dudes who still die no matter what, what if I wanted to upgrade to 50 or 80 people in one caravan.
TL;DR
In a RPG/Sandbox style of a game the objective is not linear, it progresses with the story. Linear type games: Cookie clicker, the point being just click to get cookies and spend cookies to make even more cookies so you can spend those again!
So in Bannerlord you will get flooded on denars, influence, war bands running around to help/fight you and they become irrelevant, so you don't need a reason to go back to spending money, you need a reason to look forward to a new objective.

 

[saittam]

So in Bannerlord you will get flooded on denars, influence, war bands running around to help/fight you and they become irrelevant, so you don't need a reason to go back to spending money, you need a reason to look forward to a new objective.

And one way to give the game a new objective is lack of money. Influence i understand when it can cost 2000 to declare war or keep war going.
But money in that time. No way. War is the most expencive thing a country can do.
So pay to keep onces troops in shape is a smal step on the way. And realistic.

Personally i don´t follow your steps. I never do tournements as i find them not fun and to linear.
Always first on the agenda is a wife to get as many low level kids as posible. They removed that posibility in the latest patch however. Because now one can´t control that.

But in the end its up to us players to come with suggestions. Maybe not to the devs. But ideas to modders. Most i read is people just complaining on how bad things are in the patch tread. While they never add suggestions where suggestions should be added. And if it they did it was 5 years ago.

 

[Earth Dragon]

The intro in the OP indicates it might also be a problem that medicine is overtuned.

But a general system on the game where weapons and armor can go bad and need to be replaced would be nice, but before that, I’d prefer they fix how obnoxious it all is in the first place.

You’re Sitting on a large pile of money in the first place because of how expensive everything is. Weapons and armor should be a trade commodity like many other things. Wooden shields, bows, and spears should be cheaper in towns with wood stocks, and they should be absorbed everyday according to the amount of militia being trained and units upgraded in the recruitment pool. If there are piles of weapons, the prices should go down, just like any other good.

Higher tier weapons should be locked behind different barriers, the same as recruitment, when going to purchase them. If you aren’t in the faction, have a low clan tier, don’t have a good reputation with the lord, and have neutral or worse reputation with the Merchants, then they are only willing to sell you tier 0 and 1 gear. As those factors all improve, higher tiers for sale start to unlock. So if you have a good relation with the lord and the merchants, that’s how you get access to tier 6 gear, or maybe you’re of a high clan tier and you are the lord over the town (this it’s part of your faction)


In short, I sympathize with the OP, but this is such a multilayered issue, there is just no simple answer in the current system.

 

[saittam]

The intro in the OP indicates it might also be a problem that medicine is overtuned.

Yes i think so. When it´s high enough one hardly loose troops. And it feels recruits die easier then high tier troops. And thats just weird. We all die as easy. Understandable that "heros" are more resilient othervise the game would end too quick.
Medicine is a good trait in the game. But in end game it makes it too easy. One can walk around with that 300 party and take on everything. Troops just get wounded.

 

[Crisagon]

We all end up there. High medicin and just higher tier units. Not even armies is an opponent longer. Take a fief with only your party. No problem.
And we all sit there with a fortune and nothing to spend it on.
How about a weapon and armor decay. They do need maintenance. Leather needs fat, sword needs to sharpen, bow strings needs to replace, arrows are just there and so on.
So how about giving the steward more work. One can chose so the steward deals with automaticly for a heavy fee. Or the party leaders deals with it. If one forgets about it for a year it should cost like a milion or more to get the troops new equipment, given you are tier 5 or 6 and have party of 200+.
It should also give affect on moral. Because it´s no problem roam around with 100 in moral. The more decay the less moral.
Also affect fighting performance. So that a very high decay on tier 5/6 soldier makes him/her equal to a tier 3.
Loot should be able to be used to keep decay away. But the tier should match. Not like now that a tier 2 helmet creates a tier 6 soldier (how is that possible?).
Maybe merc soldiers should be exluded. Increase their salery insteed. So that if one is low on cash one avoids them. But then they need to marked so it works with mods.

Only for player then. Something like this would kill the ai.

I think it´s a good idea but it should be automatic, that in addition to the salary of your soldiers there is a maintenance cost for weapons and armor, for higher level troops there is more maintenance cost.

 

[saittam]

I think it´s a good idea but it should be automatic, that in addition to the salary of your soldiers there is a maintenance cost for weapons and armor, for higher level troops there is more maintenance cost.

My back thought is that some fights would be harder due do dull blades, bow strings go off. A dude falling of his horse with sadle and everything because the leather wasent maintained. Adding some humor in the game.