Are there any plans to improve fief management, or will it always suck?

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Is this really the final state for fief management? Does this seem finished to anybody?



This is my castle. It was doing just fine before the last war. +10-15 food surplus with 250 garrison troops, good loyalty and growing prosperity. It got raided last spring. Now its winter and it's still starving with 0 food. I cleared out the garrison except for the bare minimum to maintain security and its still can't grow above 0 food almost a year later. As far as I know, there is nothing else I can do to help it. The gardens are at max level. I managed to get Hunting Rights policy passed. I've got a decent governor. I've even been clearing bandits from the area, but nothing helps. The only thing left to do is wait until the prosperity drops enough for there to be a surplus again.

How is this a good system? Who approved this f**kng godawful design? And why isn't fixing this s**t system a higher priority?


An easy thing they can do right away is simply double all the building effects. There's no reason the bonuses should all be so low. But what they really need to do is go back to the drawing board and rethink the entire system because this current one is horsesh*t
 
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Yes, TW doens´t care, maybe with paid DLC. Or free mods. I don´t know.
 
It saddens me, but as far as most of us can tell, Cullam is right in this one. Just as TW have no plans on improving current vanilla Diplomacy (as in - "we think this is perfectly fine, what are you complaining about" no plans - thus we all depend on the Diplomacy Mod), they likely don't plan (not even a smidge of thinking about) changing current fief management.
 
It saddens me, but as far as most of us can tell, Cullam is right in this one. Just as TW have no plans on improving current vanilla Diplomacy (as in - "we think this is perfectly fine, what are you complaining about" no plans - thus we all depend on the Diplomacy Mod), they likely don't plan (not even a smidge of thinking about) changing current fief management.
Exactly.

They have become a truly terrible company over time. Conceited and arrogant.
 
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I think they just don't actually play their own game. At least not in the same way players play the game. They run simulations and make spreadsheets and think that makes the game balanced.
 
So its now well over a full in-game year since my village was raided, and the Castle is still sitting at -2 food per day, 0 reserves, with only 56 troops in the garrison. Both villages have fully recovered from the war, one with 414 hearths and the other with 320, both growing at 2 hearths a day and yet they still can't manage to produce enough food to feed the castle. Due to governor's perks, Prosperity remains stable at 0 expected change, so I can't even rely on a shrinking population lowering food consumption. If I replace the governor, loyalty and security will quickly plummet. There is, at this point, exactly nothing I can do to reverse the situation. I can only helplessly watch as my castle starves and I can't do anything about it.

Someone tell me how this is not a broken system.
 
I think they just don't actually play their own game. At least not in the same way players play the game. They run simulations and make spreadsheets and think that makes the game balanced.
We all paid them money to QA test their game why would they play the game? They are maintaining the game with a skeleton crew is my guess. I wish I knew their intention was to create a "ultimate battle simulator" contender and not a proper rpg/sandbox early on before buying the game. Shame, what a visionless dev team you must be to butcher one of the best sandbox game formulae. Screenshots from 2016 show how in depth the management was going to be, then for some reason whole game became what we have today, soulless empty battle sim with stupid AI.
 
There aren't even any good governor perks that increase food production. The best you can get is one engineering perk that increases granary size, but that doesn't help if you have nothing to put in it, and a couple that increase village production, but that's a really slow and indirect way to deal with the issue. There are a couple that reduce food consumption, but only during sieges.

Fief management doesn't just suck by accident. It was designed this way on purpose. That's what really blows my mind
 
So its now well over a full in-game year since my village was raided, and the Castle is still sitting at -2 food per day, 0 reserves, with only 56 troops in the garrison. Both villages have fully recovered from the war, one with 414 hearths and the other with 320, both growing at 2 hearths a day and yet they still can't manage to produce enough food to feed the castle.
This is my castle. It was doing just fine before the last war. +10-15 food surplus with 250 garrison troops, good loyalty and growing prosperity. It got raided last spring. Now its winter and it's still starving with 0 food. I cleared out the garrison except for the bare minimum to maintain security and its still can't grow above 0 food almost a year later. As far as I know, there is nothing else I can do to help it. The gardens are at max level. I managed to get Hunting Rights policy passed. I've got a decent governor. I've even been clearing bandits from the area, but nothing helps. The only thing left to do is wait until the prosperity drops enough for there to be a surplus again.
Full food production comes at over 600 hearths. That's shown in your screenshot as well: the two villages are missing +6 food production each.

edit: As an aside, 1800 prosperity is very high for a castle, since they don't have a market to draw food from and their villages (mostly) deliver production to the nearest available tradebound town instead. That's why it is difficult to sustain it.
How is this a good system? Who approved this f**kng godawful design?
Fief management doesn't just suck by accident. It was designed this way on purpose. That's what really blows my mind
Mexxico designed and balanced it originally. At a quick glance, they haven't done much to change it since he left.
 
I think it's more apathy but in the end it's still the same. They put out a bland game and act like it's the greatest things since slice bread.
Yes maybe.

I think acting like a bland game is great... well, I think that's just pure arrogance. Plus mostly ignoring the wishes of the community. But that's another topic.
 
Full food production comes at over 600 hearths. That's shown in your screenshot as well: the two villages are missing +6 food production each.
600 hearths is quite a lot, especially when the typical growth rate is around 0.2 – 0.5 and a village loses like 200 hearths when it gets looted. Just scanning through the Battanian fiefs and the majority of the villages are well below 600.

edit: As an aside, 1800 prosperity is very high for a castle, since they don't have a market to draw food from and their villages (mostly) deliver production to the nearest available tradebound town instead.
Maybe so, but there's nothing you can even do to control it. My governor has only one prosperity perk that gives +0.5 which is balanced out by the -0.5 starving penalty. If I could kick half the people out of the castle I'd do it.

Mexxico designed and balanced it originally. At a quick glance, they haven't done much to change it since he left.
If it's Mexxico who's responsible for this mess, then I'm glad he left the company because he deserved to be fired and banned from the industry for designing this garbage system. I always thought he was a better forum user than developer, tbh. He's exactly who I had in mind when I said they relied too much on simulations and spreadsheets instead of human judgement and just playing the damn game. But I guess if your only goal is stopping "snowballing", this is the crap you get. Well done, Taleworlds.
 
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600 hearths is quite a lot, especially when the typical growth rate is around 0.2 – 0.5 and a village loses like 200 hearths when it gets looted. Just scanning through the Battanian fiefs and the majority of the villages are well below 600.
Yes, it is. The hearth threshold for full (+18 food, 1.5x production) village production was adjusted upwards for some reason, I can't remember why.
If it's Mexxico who's responsible for this mess, then I'm glad he left the company because he deserved to be fired and banned from the industry for designing this garbage system. I always thought he was a better forum user than developer, tbh. He's exactly who I had in mind when I said they relied too much on simulations and spreadsheets instead of human judgement and just playing the damn game. But I guess if your only goal is stopping "snowballing", this is the crap you get. Well done, Taleworlds.
He did work on Warband's and WFaS' prosperity systems too. I'm not actually sure the interaction between prosperity and hearths is all that different in BL compared to those two, except for being transparent.

But at any rate, castles are pretty terrible in BL. Even a bad town will reach higher than 1800 prosperity without needing double 600 hearth villages plus you get the income from tariffs as well.
 
He did work on Warband's and WFaS' prosperity systems too. I'm not actually sure the interaction between prosperity and hearths is all that different in BL compared to those two, except for being transparent.
Warband fiefs you could just throw troops in the garrison and forget about them, so if there were any problems with how prosperity and production worked, you didn't have to think about it. It only affected your income.
But at any rate, castles are pretty terrible in BL. Even a bad town will reach higher than 1800 prosperity without needing double 600 hearth villages plus you get the income from tariffs as well.
Yeah, I know the meta in this game is to not even bother with castles, but that really sucks. If they're going to be in the game, they need to be viable.
 
I liked the original concept shown years ago where player could decide what to do in the village. There were like 4 development "land areas" for the village to place either field, cattle, industry/mining or horses and if player wanted, he could sacrifice one area to build a castle.
+ taxes should be under players control. So when village is struggling, you can lower the taxes or even give them exemption not to pay.
Castles should be as originally proposed a living/functional part of developed village. Castles as of now are just money eaters and it often feels like punishment or bad joke when getting one as fief 🤷🏻‍♂️
 
I liked the original concept shown years ago where player could decide what to do in the village. There were like 4 development "land areas" for the village to place either field, cattle, industry/mining or horses and if player wanted, he could sacrifice one area to build a castle.
+ taxes should be under players control. So when village is struggling, you can lower the taxes or even give them exemption not to pay.
Castles should be as originally proposed a living/functional part of developed village. Castles as of now are just money eaters and it often feels like punishment or bad joke when getting one as fief 🤷🏻‍♂️
Had forgottten the castles were optional in the original design. It seems like castles are still balanced based in those concepts (that didnt work, unfortunately, that could earn them an innovative award...). So they feel like an afterthought, a money drain... not gonna lie, real castles were pretty much like that and still are often, but they provided security and siege-resistant structures, so it was an investment. In current BL, castles are sometimes harder to defend than towns, provide no actual bonus to villages, if at all. And at best, they provide nobleish recruits. Sometimes. A pity, really.

At least with improved garrisons mod, they feel worthy, so much i dont even quite remember how vanilla was, except it was... meh.
 
Had forgottten the castles were optional in the original design. It seems like castles are still balanced based in those concepts (that didnt work, unfortunately, that could earn them an innovative award...). So they feel like an afterthought, a money drain... not gonna lie, real castles were pretty much like that and still are often, but they provided security and siege-resistant structures, so it was an investment. In current BL, castles are sometimes harder to defend than towns, provide no actual bonus to villages, if at all. And at best, they provide nobleish recruits. Sometimes. A pity, really.

At least with improved garrisons mod, they feel worthy, so much i dont even quite remember how vanilla was, except it was... meh.
You know, I don't even really mind that castles are money-sinks and are difficult to manage. What kills me is that there's nothing you can do about it. Everything about managing them is passive and indirect. All the possible interactions are completely missing.
 
You know, I don't even really mind that castles are money-sinks and are difficult to manage. What kills me is that there's nothing you can do about it. Everything about managing them is passive and indirect. All the possible interactions are completely missing.
Yes.

My next game will be as an Imperial character to maximise the number of fiefs that don't come with a crippling -3 loyalty penalty (and if you manage to limp along with that, the game throws in a loyalty-reducing policy for no particular reason and with no way to stop it). I like the idea of culture penalties, but there should be more player agency.

Feeling pushed toward a starting faction for this reason, as opposed to the perks and drawbacks listed when you create the character, suggests a balance problem to me.
 
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