Yes, but just changing the pierce damage reduction factor to counter ranged will create other problems, like making spears even more useless.
Did you read my previous post on that page?
They are noticeably more effective, whether that was tweaking the damage, HP value, etc...I can take a few more arrow hits than EA release Fians have been directly nerfed once since EA release early on, but pierce damage to armour has not been changed. I did a test of various armour types...
forums.taleworlds.com
"all that's necessary is to change the pierce damage modifier number;
then increase the damage number on each pierce melee weapon so their damage remains the same as it was before, except spears which can be raised a bit more (which needs to happen anyway)"
The downside is that it makes battles take much longer to play out in a game where you fight dozens or hundreds of battles in every playthrough.
Yes, Bannerlord's quantity and quality of battles can be unfun after a while. For the following reasons:
1 - The same obvious tactics can win almost every battle with great results: spamming Khan's Guard and circling the enemy, or spamming ranged units with a token force of distraction infantry to make the enemy infantry drop their shields, then sitting on a hill and shooting everything to death. This is due to ranged damage being excessive, spears being weak, archer AI being unable to lead targets, and shields having too much HP. The player is never challenged to adapt their tactics, because the same tactic works every time. A fun game is a challenging one, and Bannerlord lacks tactical challenge.
2 - The player is required to fight multiple boring battles with an obvious outcome, eg hunting down a looter party with your high tier troops to fulfil a quest, or using an entire army of 1000 to siege a fief with only 10 defenders who will never surrender. Autocalc is an option to skip a boring battle but many players do not want to do this because it will incur random losses of high tier troops which would never happen in the actual battle.
3 - a lot of time lategame is spent sieging castles and towns, which is slow.
But all of these can be fixed, to increase the quality of battles while reducing the quantity.
1: Nerf archers' damage to armour so ranged spam+distraction is no longer the dominant strat. Nerf shield HP a bit so that archers don't become
too weak and throwing weapons are more viable. Nerf Khan's Guard (either take the glaive, or nerf the glaive, or give worse armour) so they are no longer a cheat code. Buff spears slightly so infantry are more useful. Make archers able to track circling targets better so they can function as a soft counter to horse archers. Finally, make morale more impactful so that it comes into play more often as a tactical consideration. All of this will make the best tactic to win each battle less obvious, which will require more tactical challenge to the player, making battles more thought-provoking and fun.
2: Make
heavily outnumbered lord parties or garrisons surrender, so the player doesn't have to sit through boring battles. Make autocalc results for heavily one-sided battles more representative of real battles, so players feel comfortable to skip boring curbstomps.
3: Make Engineering skill speed up the rate of building siege camps. As the player goes through the lategame, sieges will take less and less time to complete.
Let's say for argument's sake in Bannerlord now, there are 120 fiefs to siege, but once you hit halfway your vassals will take some for you, so let's say 70 sieges to win (each taking about 15min: 1050min). Then let's say 70 army battles (10min on average: 700min), and 300 lord party/looter battles (each 5min on average: 1500min). So, that's
50 hours of battles alone, sounds about right.
If 20% of those battles are curbstomps we can skip by fixing surrender and autocalc, then it becomes 40 hours. If ranged troops make up less than half of all troops but more than half of killing - so let's just say half - and we increase 50% of troops' ttk by 1.7x, then 40 hours with my proposed set of changes becomes
54 hours. But the quality of the battles you do play would also be higher. And also, less time sitting around waiting for siege camps to complete.
and I'm saying that can simply be done making bows/archers weaker directly first (particularly the top tier archers). Not disagreeing that archers aren't OP; just the solution. You want to improve the armor values/effectiveness to make archers weaker; I'd rather just make the archers themselves weaker.
Bow base damage and accuracy is acceptable though so why would you change that instead of the armour calculation? The armour calc is the obviously unrealistic part.
