That's exactly it. That and back when I was playing, it was hard to track your progress on removing/gaining traits except through a mod that showed the information for you to see. Perhaps this is a system the developers intentionally want people to -not- understand so that they can't game it. But y'know...save scumming is a thing. I just saw ZiggyD uploaded a video of Bannerlord and has made me come back to see if this has been addressed. I might just log in and play with how it is now.
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Been gone for 4 months. How's the player traits system doing? (Honor, mercy, valor, etc)
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Yeah Destiny 2 and Warframe are basically the same thing.
Joking aside, I am a very casual D2 player. Like all I do is run forward and shoot. I've relied a lot on other people to help with the stuff that requires more thinking.
Yeah I'm 99% sure that the personality system hasn't been touched since EA release except for integrating the bugfix for personality reset from game start.
Somebody coded the basics for a personality system and it hasn't been touched since, probably because the devs didn't think it was important. It appears that personality has no effect on NPC AI, regardless. Honestly, given the jank in the dynamic system, it'd probably work better if they just made it static and added more personality +1/-1's in character creation, followed up by hard changes in response to specific actions like raiding villages or executing lords.
I sincerely doubt that anyone intentionally made it so the only way you can get to Calculating 1 is literally persuading 50 clans to join your faction (just rechecked the math: 20 Calculating per persuasion and 1000 threshold for Calculating 1).
They've gone back and done things to it.
It used to have more influence over NPC AI but that's been watered down in general as people expressed dissatisfaction with how AI parties/armies acted (or failed to act) in certain situations. The examples that come to mind were Cautious commanders who would almost never launch a siege assault without having a ram and a tower at minimum. But there were other AI issues that (in the course of fixing them) meant that all the commanders started acting pretty much the same.
The effect their personalities had on decision-making was never easy to see but most of the fixes push them towards acting mostly the same in most situations.
They don't seem to have done much else. Generosity might be working slightly now in that if you start the game with it but lose it immediately because you start the game WITHOUT FOOD (thereby starving your brother for a couple hours), you might be able to get it back if you constantly feed your troops filet mignon for a couple years straight.
Pro-tip: anyone in the forums who claims to have gotten Valor 1 is playing on mega-super-easy-mode and their opinions should be tactically disregarded from orbit. Since all battles inevitably devolve into 1:1 K/D grindfests, it's impossible to level Valor by taking on superior armies without being chewed up and spat out repeatedly forever. You also do NOT get valor for dueling bandit chiefs.
You have three days before you lose any trait score due to starving.
You can get it by winning smallish fights against bandits as long as the odds are against you. Other people manage to consistently win big fights with the strength bar against them.
If you're having problems beating an equal power bar AI without taking equal losses, that's on you.
Is that in 1.5.10? Because I just started a couple different playthroughs on 1.5.9 and both times I lost Generous immediately after leaving the training field because of starvation.
It's "on me" to the extent that grinding looters/bandits is boring AF and I don't like doing it. It's also difficult to keep parties of size low enough to be outclassed by bandits. At least difficult for me because I don't like arbitrary metagaming to grind a stat that hardly does anything anyway.
Why would I buy a game called Bannerlord to play a dude with a dozen or so half-naked peasants to kill a slightly larger group of half-naked peasants?
Unless your definition of strategy is just "having lots of cavalry", I'm gonna go with X for Doubt here.
It has been that way since 1.5.1 at latest.
I mean, sure, it is grindy and in the end having the Valor trait really isn't worth it. But it doesn't mean people are playing the game on easy if they have it. If anything, they are playing the game closer to hard mode because a player party can trivially avoid almost every single close fight, so any fight where the power bar is against you is probably by player choice.
Cav is absolute ****; playing with them is basically punching yourself in the nuts. At any rate, the no-cheese (edit: well, a little cheese) strategy:
- Infantry line stretched as wide as possible, in Loose formation (I call it "a ribbon"). This gives some buffer against routing units, provides protection from arrows because of the deadspace between troops, allows them full freedom to use their weapons and since the AI is too dumb to understand what you're doing, the flanks will get many-on-few fights that snowball your way.
- Archers approximately 25-50 behind them, on higher ground. If you can get a nice steep incline, you want them in a "deep" formation. If the higher ground is just a slight bump, you want the archers in a ribbon too. The former is preferable because the archers can hit the rear ranks of shieldless men but the latter can still contribute almost as well by hitting guys from the flanks when they get close -- as long as they can see over their infantry's heads.
- Cavalry sucks but if you have some (numbers don't really matter past about eight to twelve or so), you can ride around and draw off the enemy cavalry, distract their archers and maybe engage in some bothering of the infantry if you sit kinda close to a flank. The one exception is javelin cavalry, who you can ride around the rear of the enemy infantry on hold fire and at slow speed, then tell them to throw at around 30-60 (any closer and the AI will try to melee instead). If they have their shields forward, you'll probably kill one guy for every javelineer you have. If they turn around, your arrows will reave them instead.
- Once you defeat the initial enemy push, just sit there, let them flee, regroup, whatever. Don't charge. Don't even advance. Sit right next to your respawn point (where you start the battle) and just let them feed in again.
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Bro... with respect... that list is exactly why we can't have nice things.
I refuse to play the game like that because defies all reason. Any medieval combat simulator where the first step of a winning strategy is setting your frontline infantry to loose formation and then camping at your own spawn is cancer incarnate.
I literally got the idea to do that from Polybius...
I said medieval, not mid-Roman-Republic. Also I'm pretty sure that BL's "loose formation" does not comport with the arm's-length plus-maybe-a-bit-more distance between legionaries in Republican maniples.
In general, I could see how hit-and-run tactics with loose formations to flank and wear down enemies would be useful against phalanxes (especially those with bronze weaponry). There are probably decent arguments for Zerg-rushing tightly-packed hoplites with a flanking advantage and stabbing them in the neck with gladii before they could draw sidearms, then following that up with fresh waves after the enemy have already dropped their spear hedge... but I sincerely doubt that BL's buggy animation/collision issues are a simulation of that.
Regardless, unless I'm massively failing at history, these tactics were almost certainly not used against hordes of Germanic tribesmen across the Alps - nor were they used at any point in history from the Imperial era onwards. The Zerg-rush strategy may have been innovative for its time but I'm guessing it was fairly wasteful in terms of manpower.
I know that Spartacus used a vertical line formation - kind of like the Norse boar snout - against Roman legionaries to brutal effect, but for most of history shieldwalls were the most effective tactic and not the worst one.
Another quick note: I'm fairly certain Republican manipular loose formation was offense-only and not a defensive standard.
I'm not debating the history, I'm saying it wasn't something ridiculous I just pulled out of my ass. If you don't want to do it for whatever reason, that's fine but it isn't like something a person would only do as tryhard strategy in a game. It is a perfectly reasonable solution to the problem of out-killing the enemy, which you said you had problems with.
Maybe the shieldwall is more effective, I just haven't ever done it so I can't tell you first-hand. Maybe like Dr. Shinobi would know, if he were still around.
There've been tests that I can't link off the top of my head. Spent a couple mins trying to find them on the forums but gave up.
Because of the collision/animation/physics issues AND the hardcoded "silly-on-purpose" infantry AI issues, shieldwalls and pike squares are the worst-performing formations - especially for spears. The reason why infantry performs better defensively in loose formation - even spears against cavalry charges - is because their weapons don't clip into their fellow units that way.
There are plenty of examples on YouTube. The one I remember pitted 50 cav vs 100 spears. IIRC spears beat the cav on loose formation, hit a stalemate on line formation, but got wrecked on shieldwall or square formation.
Here's a video that shows how shieldwall is effectively bugged and useless against evenly-matched infantry.
That's the opposite of how it worked IRL. There is no sensible reason for line infantry to be standing in loose formation defensively pretty much ever - except maybe while under heavy ranged fire. The only example I can think of that's similar is huscarls with greataxes who needed room to swing - and they would plug holes in the line rather than replace the shieldwall as frontliners.
It might be the case that heavily-armored men-at-arms might have held ground in loose formation in the later Middle Ages, but I doubt it. I'm pretty sure pike squares were the replacement for shieldwalls and I understand that many pike squares were actually protected by lines of sword+board on the front and back. I need to do more research because this isn't my nerd specialty.
The loose formation thing is basically an exploit. It only makes sense because of BL's jank.
That video is from over a year ago, before they changed around one of the files because it was stopping units from attacking at all (collisions happened at the beginning of a swing rather than the end).
Anyway, that just circles back to what I said before: if you don't want to do it for whatever reason, fine. But it is on you. Nobody else is having trouble beating the AI with a lopsided K
ratio and you can't assume someone is playing on easy just because they went through the Valor grind. It is grindy and not really a fun thing to do, or even effective unless you really want to recruit bandits en masse but it isn't difficult or exploity.
