It seems there's no point getting caravans anymore, they're just a huge drain on your economy - ruining caravans ruins the town's economies, therefor also making trading irrelevant. If you can't trade, you can't get enough money for caravans, and if caravans are useless, all you got left is killing looters.
To top it off, even though I win literally every tournament I play, it's even hard to sell the helmets I get because it takes 1/3rd of the town's money, if they have any at all, giving me no economical boost. It's really only good for the renown bonus, and nothing else. So I completely ignore all tournaments.
I do however have better performance and much less crashes, which I like.
And - like everyone else - #BringBackTheBetterAI
+1 To everything. Spent 7 days in a row playing SP for many hours per day and here are some of my thoughts.
Just played 5 hours in a new game on this patch and inmediatly regret the decision, reverting to the previous version. I know TW has good intentions on the patches but this just felt like a downgrade in most aspects out of performance, I don't really enjoy the slow-pace and lack of flexibility both in 'builds/build ups' and gameplay.
Disclaimer: I know this is Early Access, I've been supportive since Alpha, and I'm writing once again with the sake of help Taleworlds improve the game, nothing is written with malicious intention, only constructive criticism to give some insight on how to improve the game in my eyes trying to hold an impartial opinion that favours all kind of players.
My main concerns:
-Cities don't have money to sell your goods, sometimes even 0, does not make any sense, it was already hard finding a place to sell your goods after exploiting your trade routes. I don't really enjoy having to travel the full map on circles to sell 5 horses at once for 2x profit, just to level up trade 1-2 points. Before massive sell outs were too OP and I agree that towns never ran out of money, but perhaps having them on [5k to 15k gold interval] would be better? It would prevent massive sell outs.
-Caravans got too nerfed(or nerfed in the wrong way) & lack perks to improve their stability and protection. Read my thoughts about this
here
-Skills levelling up too slow, Troops upgrading way too slow.
Learn Rate really low - Before the patch I would rush Trade 125, Charm 50, and invest points inmediatly on Two handed(5) and a few on riding, bow and 3-4+ on Steward and Leadership as it would boost my renown, per battle, per caravan and overall speed up a lot the game and the way I can level up my character, as other methods seemed really slow, this seemed like the only 'efficient' build.
The amount of time it takes right now to level up any of those skills is absurdly increased, very high, trade has been thrown to the ground, extremely slow, and specially combat ones and those which are hard to access to like Leadership & Tactics remain being really slow-paced to level up.
We need higher experience for ourselves and troops affecting combat skills and upgrades(or XP boosts more accesible). Alternative methods to level up skills like Leadership, it's not compatible to build up caravans and rushing trade on current conditions while you enter wars to form armies('High morale' is not boosting my leadership at all).
JUST KEEP IN MIND THAT THEY WANT TO 'ENABLE DEATHS' IN THE FUTURE, CURRENT LEARN RATES ARE LAUGHABLE, JUST TRY TO GET TWO HANDED WITH 5-6 ON VIGOR AND 5 FOCUS POINTS TO REACH THE +40% XP BOOST TO NEARBY TROOPS AFTER KILLING ENEMIES AND LET ME KNOW HOW MANY HOURS/EFFORT IT TOOK. <- Summed up to this, remark your progress in other skills or economy, it's 100% destroyed, besides this, consider that in the future, you'll be able to 'die' in battle.
-Simulated battles against looters/low tier bandits now kill your troops -> You nerfed economy drasticly, but summed up to this, now we get sometimes even level 16 or 21 troops slayed by a bunch of outnumbered bandits. Not good, please, if the odds are so favourable and they're 'low tier', allow us to just get knocks, reduce the quantity of gold/renown/influence earned, but keep XP intact for our troop, no deaths and ALSO boost Combat skills for our player.
After spending 2 hours just killing bandits just to get 4-5 troops to level 21(Culture Vlandia for the +20% XP boost btw), it just hurt me to lose every fight against looters a few level 16 units and tons of level 11s. Please revert this, it's just extremely frustrating given the economy, almost giving us no choice, either progress super slow on economy, or lose half of your troops against looters to get 75 on riding and 70 in two handed in 2 hours of manual fights.
We've no way to build up armies quickly(I suggest allowing you to invest gold in massive recruitment or massive companies of mercenaries for mercenaries aswell).
-Perks need to be balanced out: Besides some perks not working as intended or not working at all, the plan out of some of the branch perks is significantly worse than others. With this, I mean that for example there's no point in going for a 1 handed or polearm investment, just compare all their perks to the Two handed ones, just the '+40% XP when killing with 2 handed one' already outmatches all of the 1 handed and polearm ones combined.
I wanna see balance in the perks, hopefully boosting your in game approach, allowing you to have possibilities to go for 1 style or another, or even combine many. Perhaps for Polearms as an example, you could have some perks that go like: 'If you have x polearm users, your party gets 20% more renown in battles or +10% influence in battles', 'Every polearm user in your party gets 5% more XP' or 'Polearm users are 10% Cheaper to recruit and upgrade'. Just stuff like that or Combat bonus ones 'All 1 handed users in your party get +5% Combat speed bonus or damage or whatever'. You get the idea, and this applies to all the perks, not only Combat ones(besides Bows being better than crossbow and throwing weapons). I would like to see Perks from Tactics, Smithy, Roguery, and some others slightly boosted with interesting options, that allows me to consider them alongside many other effective options, in the end, providing many gameplay approaches, combinations and opportunities currently neglected due slow-pace or ineffective/unviable builds.
-Combat AI, glitch, difficulty and pathfinding: Taleworlds is well-aware of these issues, just got confirmed this morning, please, fix them asap. the AI glitch and basic block-attack AI behaviour since Beta Branch came out are high priority compared to other combat AI issues(Massive pile ups, running to walls on sieges, clips through eachother, etc). All of these need work.
-Gameplay is too Restrictive, Lost the 'Freedom' feeling & Character customization, specially, if you wanna progress through the game:
All the reasons combined above, end up providing a static experience through the game. The build up is extremely slow, specially through early game, you are not given effective alternatives and levelling up specially combat and certain skills is extremely slow or requires unviable patterns that extremely affect negatively your other -must attend- part of the games such as economy, diplomacy or army build-up. Considering the game aims to enable death and share some dinamical experience, we need to have quicker methods for certain stuff.
I agree that caravans and trade as an example were too strong, but the nerf has been way too drastic, specially when giving 0 random gold or extremely low to some cities. Adding counterparts to caravans such as lower party speeds + Party size base 30 + max 20 via perks(5 each time or investing money for them) are more than decent alternatives. Many times AI didn't attack caravans not because of how strong the Caravan was, but because their speed was unmatched(Perhaps just add some Caravan map speed negative modifier?).
Overall we need quicker growth, that can be boosted up by many perk possibilities that give players lot to think about to impulse their play-style. More variety with the actions that we can do with gold, followed by effective counterparts and consequences to that quick growth, and specially money(We need to be able to get better units in a quicker way, massive recruitment or massive packs of mercenaries), perhaps if some army is attacking us, demand massive money via barter(not player's choice).
Wars, Morale, and Massified Economies in the end need to have a larger impact for the player as commented.
Hopefully this is not seen as some rage post, but just some suggestions to improve the experience. Thanks for reading
