Battania musings

[diehold]

Trying to pin down exact cultural references will just make you nuts. They pick and choose ideas. The longbow and Celtic parts are like 11th C Welsh, otherwise Battanians seem pre-Norman Welsh/Irish/Scot. The falx comes from Roman era Balkans. It's all mixed up.

Agreed they are all composites of different civilizations.

 

[HalfMetalJacket]

Trying to pin down exact cultural references will just make you nuts. They pick and choose ideas. The longbow and Celtic parts are like 11th C Welsh, otherwise Battanians seem pre-Norman Welsh/Irish/Scot. The falx comes from Roman era Balkans. It's all mixed up.

Their chainmail and recent helmets are all wacky Gallic Celtic too.

Just a mess, don't see why they couldn't have just gone with VC Celts and called it that.

 

[Bluko88]

Why is Battania the only faction in Bannerlord that never plays to it's strength in battle? Every other faction does. Vlandia always fields lots of cavalry. Khuzait's always masses with horse archers. Battania is an archer faction and yet they never mass many archers always mass infantry. It never made any sense to me. To have some of the best archers and never use them in any meaningful way. And considering that they are surrounded on all sides it would make sense for them to rely on their strengths to survive but alas they do. Just goes to show this game is more about massing numbers than any particular unit type. For good or bad.

The A.I. doesn't know how to skirmish, which is pretty critical to maximizing the Wildling's potential, which will generally beat any T5 shield infantry 1v1. Actually just about every Battanian unit is meant to skirmish

I guess they do alright in defense controlled by A.I. due to the amount they can lob before you crash into them.

A big problem with Battania is their troop trees have been ignored for a while (they got some really crappy helmets). Tier 5 units should definitely have more then 25 Head Armor LOL:

The other larger problem with Battania is their lousy map position, they are just kind of doomed to fail being literally in the middle of everything. Also as Ananda said Fians have poor AutoResolve weight, so Battania ends up losing a lot of battles it would generally win due to how good Fians are though. (Though it seems Crossbowmen have gotten a lot stronger, Vlandian Sharpshooters decimate Fian Champions.)

Basically my revised Battania tree looks like this for now, contemplating giving all infantry units a throwing weapon so you can skirmish reasonably with a big infantry blob, though this gets harder the more units you have present. So I have doubts if it's truly worthwhile. Still working on cavalry, hard to find a happy balance since cavalry battles get lop sided very easily.

 

[Bluko88]

Their chainmail and recent helmets are all wacky Gallic Celtic too.

Just a mess, don't see why they couldn't have just gone with VC Celts and called it that.

Yeah it's way too many things, and it just feels weird.

Basically like if you asked the ancient Romans what they thought all European Barbarians were like you'd get Battania.

 

[diehold]

The A.I. doesn't know how to skirmish, which is pretty critical to maximizing the Wildling's potential, which will generally beat any T5 shield infantry 1v1. Actually just about every Battanian unit is meant to skirmish

I guess they do alright in defense controlled by A.I. due to the amount they can lob before you crash into them.

A big problem with Battania is their troop trees have been ignored for a while (they got some really crappy helmets). Tier 5 units should definitely have more then 25 Head Armor LOL:

The other larger problem with Battania is their lousy map position, they are just kind of doomed to fail being literally in the middle of everything. Also as Ananda said Fians have poor AutoResolve weight, so Battania ends up losing a lot of battles it would generally win due to how good Fians are though. (Though it seems Crossbowmen have gotten a lot stronger, Vlandian Sharpshooters decimate Fian Champions.)

Basically my revised Battania tree looks like this for now, contemplating giving all infantry units a throwing weapon so you can skirmish reasonably with a big infantry blob, though this gets harder the more units you have present. So I have doubts if it's truly worthwhile. Still working on cavalry, hard to find a happy balance since cavalry battles get lop sided very easily.

First of all I think there are no weak factions in bannerlord. They are all strong in there own ways. The reason certain factions loose has nothing to do with poor units or map location. It seems to me that the AI will randomly handicap certain factions at the beginning of each playthrough/beta patches and they will be doomed to fail unless the player intervenes.

Agreed the AI uses terrible strategies in general. In this game units don't matter for the AI it's all a numbers game.

The armor for battania is god awful! Especially the head armor. They really need some love. If they ever nerf fians they need to boost other units armor.

I don't think their map position is what hinders them. It's actually great and efficient for recruiting units. I think the AI just neuters battania in a lot of playthroughs by not massing armies in the right way.

Vlandia also amasses far more sharpshooters than battania does fian champions. That needs to be taken into account too. Battania rarely fields many upgraded archers.

 

[geala]

The armor does not count in autocalc battles, just tier and wether cavalry or not. Armor is not the problem, archers are not the problem. I removed most armor from my more-like-Irish Battanians (only T4, my highest normal troop line tier, have mediocre body armor and helmets) and there is only one T4 cavalry (a bad one), the noble line has T2 and T3 with javelins and then split into a T4 medium armored rider and a T5 heavily armored Galloglass-kind twohanded axeman. In my current campaign they fared very well in the AI vs. AI battles, conquered Sargot and Jaculan for example, before I joined as vassal.

It's partly random what happens in playthroughs. Sturgia trumps Northern Empire currently and lost nothing till now, not seen often in campaigns.

 

[diehold]

The armor does not count in autocalc battles, just tier and wether cavalry or not. Armor is not the problem, archers are not the problem. I removed most armor from my more-like-Irish Battanians (only T4, my highest normal troop line tier, have mediocre body armor and helmets) and there is only one T4 cavalry (a bad one), the noble line has T2 and T3 with javelins and then split into a T4 medium armored rider and a T5 heavily armored Galloglass-kind twohanded axeman. In my current campaign they fared very well in the AI vs. AI battles, conquered Sargot and Jaculan for example, before I joined as vassal.

It's partly random what happens in playthroughs. Sturgia trumps Northern Empire currently and lost nothing till now, not seen often in campaigns.

That is true which is why I despise how tactics/auto-calc is setup. It makes what should be important aspects completely arbitrary.

 

[Brano]

If it was up to me as dev, I would make them first real minor faction. No castles, no towns, just villages. One could take different stance towards them:
1. Be friendly, trade with them, hire their soldiers.
2. Be a psycho genocide about them.
3. Bring them into your faction ...now hold your hat...by doing finally smtg CREATIVE in the game => establishing a military fort to stamp your presence on their foreheads and slowly start turning them on your side with carrot/stick method while upgrading your fort to emporium (fortified trading settlement)