SP Native BattleStamina - A Total War-inspired battle mechanics mod

[Jerezereh]

If you've ever played a Total War game, you know that you can't keep your troops in the front lines forever and expect them to be as able as fresh reserves. This mod takes that idea of stamina and adds it into Bannerlord, making combats more difficult and tactical!

Do you keep your best infantry in the front line even though they're exhausted, or do you swap in a unit of inexperienced troops you've been holding in reserve?

A new wave of reinforcements has just arrived for both sides, and with BattleStamina, these fresh bodies will have an large impact on the ongoing battle.

In an effort to give the player more strategic and tactical decisions, I have created a mod that will add a stamina value to each character. This value decreases when the character attacks, blocks, receives damage, and so on. As stamina decreases, the character will attack slower (and eventually move slower), making them much less able in combat than a fresh unit.

If taken out of combat, a unit can slowly replenish stamina over time, allowing an observant commander to micro-manage his soldiers and reap the benefits.

The mod is currently in its early stages, but there are many features planned, including:

• Stamina reduces ranged weapon speed (draw/reload/throwing speed)
• User config for personalized Stamina calculation (XML/in-game) Implemented!
• Stamina reduces movement speed
• Stamina regenerates through rest (during combat, not moving/attacking) (Sorta) Implemented!
• Lose stamina from blocking Implemented!
• Lost stamina from moving/running
• Stamina damage lingers and recovers over time, like health
• Custom UI elements to track player's stamina
• UI indicator over allied troops models that show their relative stamina level (shown when giving orders)

If any of the above sounds fun to you, come download the mod at: BattleStamina.

 

[mr.master]

Been waiting for something like this for Mount & Blade for ages. Amazing!

 

[barthez4]

Really happy to see this, I'll check it out.

I posted about something similar a few weeks ago so if you want to pull any ideas from it, feel free! https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php?threads/endurance-reworked.404693/

 

[Chompy_Nibblers]

Hey, I've been testing your mod and active in Nexusmods, you pointed me here.

Re the persistent stamina, my suggestion for stamina would be to slowly reduce a unit's max stamina they can regenerate to over time. This would recover by spending time outside of battles. One interesting result of this would be that it prevents retreat spam with a large archer comp to be less effective as archers would take stamina damage over time, becoming less effective, even at the start of battles

Here's a first shot at what the logic might look like:

CurrentMaxStamina = ActualMaxStamina - StaminaDamage

StaminaDamage would accumulate at a rate of (TBD: ~1%) of expended stamina any time stamina is expended.

The total possible stamina damage would be (TBD: 33% of max stamina)

StaminaDamage can be reduced over time while not fighting:
- 0.2% of max stamina /hr: player is moving on map
- 0.5% of max stamina/hr: player is waiting on map
- 1% of max stamina/hr: player is waiting in city/settlement

Also would tracking stamina damage be possible at a unit level for your army?

 

[Jerezereh]

I was considering adding a stamina debuff for retreating, because it's definitely an overpowered strategy currently.

Tracking stamina damage is an interesting idea. There definitely might be some value in adding that in. I was planning on tracking stamina per unit, but that may be too resource hungry and I might have to make a party stamina sum or something like that. We'll see.

If you've read the post from Barthez, he talks about lots of possible uses for stamina to be tracked throughout the game, and I think some of those might be worth implementing. Maybe BattleStamina could be a sub-section of a larger "fatigue" mod that tracks pretty much any action the player takes.

 

[Chompy_Nibblers]

Makes sense - one idea for tracking stamina damage per group of units to save that would save space would be to split the units into quartiles/deciles or something.

Example:

1) at end of battle average each quartile of units stamina damage (sort-ordering units by their stamina damage)
2) save that as the stamina damage metric, for example:

Imperial infantry: 10, 15, 18, 25

- the game would read this as indicating that 25% of imperial infantry had an average of 10 stamina damage, the next 25% had an average of 15 damage, etc..

3) when spawning units into maps you would just select 25% of them to have 10 stamina damage at random, etc...
4) TBD: considerations on wounded tracking (maybe tracked sep, so 2x variables for each unit group)

 

[Solomani]

Does the AI understand this, or does it only affect the player?

 

[Jerezereh]

Currently this mod has no AI changes, but I plan on adding that at a later date when the mod and game are more stable.

 

[Raoh]

I like the idea, but is it really viable if the "Time to Kill" is so short? Most battles end very quickly... Maybe you should also quadruple hitpoints on all troops so that battles last longer and stamina might play a role?

 

[Jerezereh]

I like the idea, but is it really viable if the "Time to Kill" is so short? Most battles end very quickly... Maybe you should also quadruple hitpoints on all troops so that battles last longer and stamina might play a role?

I won't include increasing hitpoints in this mod, but I do recommend grabbing a couple more mods that extend battles, such as Realistic Battles and Health Rebalance. Between those and this one, battles should feel a lot longer and more strategic.