10% was really ridiculous I agree, that's why I always put the death chance at half back then. When it was 5% I remember 3-4 companions/family members dying at most during my campaigns (although I usually quit after being an influential lord or a king with a stable-ish kingdom rather than full map conquest), and this made the role playing much better and gave motivation to the player character. It also made you give a damn about enemy lords responsible for the death.
I like the idea of being Grim reaper of Calradia. Just another playstyle
5% is based on Science (do you play Fallout?). Currently in the real world about 10% of soldiers hit by bullets die if the best and most modern medic system is available. In Calaradia, as in most video games even without magic hp drinks, there are obviously much better doctors around than in our world, despite living in a dark medieval surrounding. They are surely about twice as good, so you get 5% death chance when wounded.
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and just throwing it out there we could still have deadly combat as while still having living nobles just allow them to leave some units and run to safety while your disorganized from fighting the sacrifice. If there completely cornered the ability for them to just surrender knowing its safer to ride out the war in a cell with the chance of ransom than take there chances of dyeing here. and mercenaries who are more business oriented might be willing to take a bribe to let them go. and with minor tweaks like that we could probably even have a 5-12 percent mortality rate and have combat be deadly but with nobles doing there best to escape consequences. You could even mix in there traits here characters without mercy never surrender (as they're willing to kill there units just to some damage) valorous nobles never sacrifice there men for themselves and calculating lords will try to bribe anyone to get out of a fight and honorable nobles never take or make bribes.
I'm not sure if that will really change much. Once you get better gear and higher medicine skill, the chance will still quick drop below 1%. Do you think it would be better to have the minimum possible percentage 5%?
Well, I'm not exactly sure how the death chance in combat changed over time, but from what I remember, during EA, the devs first added a universal death chance that was way too high that caused the game to become depopulated over time, and then they changed it to roughly 10% death chance only in battles the player participated in (but I'm not sure if this rate was affected by other factors like armor and medicine), only for the devs to later on implement the current universal death chance which they said was around 2% by default (that you then later identified as 2,39% default).
Actual stakes. When I feel like an unkillable juggernaut I find myself just riding around killing 30 guys with no care in the world when I eventually get knocked out. I don't worry about my companions because I've lost 2 in my last 3 playthroughs combined. I'm currently playing with the mod that greatly increases the death chance for lords and it's a lot of fun. While you obviously can't have 3 lords die in every battle in the base game, I find myself a lot more interested in battles where I can't over extend because I could actually die.
I use a mod called un landed clans this adds loads of minor clans and a mod that increase the wanders and allows lords the hire there own wanders ( this through as at time left me with on to hire) i also added a heal on hit and made troops heal 1% and wanders,lords,player heal 5% this made the fight like lions. The other mod i tried was ,I don't know if i will get attacked for this but gender-inequality the reason was to keeps the ncps being born. But its no longer up to date. It sort of worked on a long campaign. But that requires a lots of sitting in cities letting time pass. I am trying to make to clan system work and have life and death a big part of my play throughs. A sort of game of thrones no one is safe.
