Big Armies... too big

[Ramidel]

Aye there. So:

Hitting caravans and farmers and such should damage city economies, and lords should have to raise troops similar to the PC?

(I draw the line at making lords obey money rules directly, Lyx...but that's because collecting cash is trivial at the moment, as any good cattle thief will tell you.)

 

[Shik]

Not just that - in previous versions, the giant armies may have been the most obvious effect of the AI being "unrestricted"..... but it is not t he only one. In short, it is about actions having consequences. When i raid a caravan, then i expect the economy of the city to be hurt, which in turn means that the lord which owns this city will be hurt, which means that part of the faction gets hurt.... get the idea? Same if i beat a lord-army..... I do not expect it to magically reappear just 3 HOURS after i completely anninilated it. If an AI-player is not affected by the "system", then this means, that whatever you do, it DOES NOT MATTER!

Another issue with this, is a general feeling of unfairness. How would you feel, if you'd play chess with another player, who can move his units however he wants, and if you actually beat one of his units, he will just place it on the field again two turns later? And how would you feel, if someone else tries to justify that, by saying that you are simply too good at the game, and that therefore, the other player should be able to do whatever he wants.... well, i certainly would reply "Then get me a better opponent, damnit - or apply some kind of handicap to me... but stop this crap."

Actually - I'd love to see forumites stop throwing around false info as well. Lords parties do respawn, but not at full strength after a loss. Their strength will be much lower, their size and quality of troops diminished. Right after a lord respawns, he will often only have a strength of 8 recruits, and his army takes days of resting in a castle to restore his full strength. Common misunderstanding.

 

[Sulibres]

Actually - I'd love to see forumites stop throwing around false info as well. Lords parties do respawn, but not at full strength after a loss. Their strength will be much lower, their size and quality of troops diminished. Right after a lord respawns, he will often only have a strength of 8 recruits, and his army takes days of resting in a castle to restore his full strength. Common misunderstanding.

Really? In my experience the Lord usually respawns with only himself, only to earn a few recruits a sort amount of time later and gradually build up a force that is supported by his renown.

 

[Saber Cherry]

I remember sieging a castle in .903.  Every day, the owner would run up to me with around 30 men (not recruits, but a mixed force of various levels of Nords) and attack me, lose, and vanish.  Or maybe it was more like every 12 hours - I'm not really sure.

I have no idea where they came from, or what he was doing when I couldn't see him.  But he did not require any resting-up, and he certainly did not show up with 8 recruits.

I have seen weak parties of ~8 in .95x, but I have no reason to believe they don't magically mushroom to epic proportions of veteran troops within 1 day of disappearing from my sight.

 

[killer-blead]

I don't think they are too big, since I whoop these armies any day.

(high tactics is needed to do it)

do you mind sharing us your tactic? cas i've gotten curious

 

[Nordmann]

Indeed, considering those parties were nearly 200 strong in places, and as far as I can tell it would take a damned long time to get anywhere near the same party size. The thing is, even with high tactics it's still going to be one hell of a hard fight, you'll end up having to fight 5 or 10 mini battles to defeat their party, and by then you're probably starting to pick up wounded yourself.

Personally I'm much happier with the party sizes in .952, much more manageable and still challenging.

 

[killer-blead]

Indeed, considering those parties were nearly 200 strong in places, and as far as I can tell it would take a damned long time to get anywhere near the same party size. The thing is, even with high tactics it's still going to be one hell of a hard fight, you'll end up having to fight 5 or 10 mini battles to defeat their party, and by then you're probably starting to pick up wounded yourself.

Personally I'm much happier with the party sizes in .952, much more manageable and still challenging.

try downloading a party sizer, but remember to put him low when you start up a new game otherwise your chachter might end up fighting more then he can handle.. like i had
1 puny little me vs 115 deserted swadian malitia... the horror..

 

[David Derde]

That's how I warm up before I fight the entire Nord army at once.
You all need to man up, or just tweak the difficulty down a bit.

 

[Packrat]

Hell, even in the new version I have seen kings running around with ~180 troops, throw in a couple of powerful lords with ~80 soldiers each and you potentially still have one of those hundreds a side battles, but such groups CAN be whittled down or disperse unlike in the last version where if you got unlucky some lord would win a battle against 'the guy with five hundred prisoners' and then have a Doom Army that crushed cities underfoot.

 

[allthesedamnnamesaretaken]

It was definately way too big in .950. When I was wiping out the nords, they'd have lords showing up with 300-600 troops evey few days. It was very frustrating. These parties didn't even have any prisoners, so they spawned at that size. Luckily, I had a couple of 300-500 troop parties following me around as well. I had a measly 80 troops myself, and considering my renown was like 5x most of these lords, i was really crying foul. Even at 10 leadership it'd only be a +70 men bonus.

I think being king should give a bonus of +200 troop cap. Marshall should have a +100. It's silly to have a marshal zipping around with 20 men

 

[Lyx]

Hell, even in the new version I have seen kings running around with ~180 troops, throw in a couple of powerful lords with ~80 soldiers each and you potentially still have one of those hundreds a side battles, but such groups CAN be whittled down or disperse unlike in the last version where if you got unlucky some lord would win a battle against 'the guy with five hundred prisoners' and then have a Doom Army that crushed cities underfoot.

Actually, WHEN such battles happen in 952 and one attacks head-on, they are MORE difficult than before, because from my observations, AI-armies now consist of more quality troops, instead of consisting almost exclusively out of pawns. However, as since as you said such massive sizes are now the result of a team of lord-armies, additional tactics are possible.

 

[Jericho]

As I feared with this latest update, the game is truly unbalanced now. I would have preferred that
Armagan provided us with a means to scale the AI army size than to just nerf it. The AI is just not
robust enough to offer much of a challenge when the odds are 1:1 or even up to 3:1 and combined
with the archers/crossbows being nerfed so severely with build .950 those odds could go even higher
than 3:1, even though the AI has steadily improved over the past year it is still essentially limited both
in strategy and tactics.

IMO it seriously hinders the challenge for players who would like to develop their first character
(without cheats or hacks) up to the level cap before starting a new one. The current build no longer
offers the “layering” in the level of challenge it once did for ALL game players of varying experience
levels.

I hope that Armagan will at least offer a scaling option for the size limitation of the AI armies on the
next build. 

 

[Syrdar]

Syrdar, those of us who want the AI to play by the rules are generally the ones who don't want to need a Lord to assist us in a damn 1v1 battle.

I liked .950 party sizes instead the new .952 sizes. Now you can take any enemy army alone when you start (I saw most of the enemy lords have 50~60 troops). In .950 I had to wait until I was powerful enough to take enemy Lords (before my savegame was corrupted I had an army of 160 soldiers - 3 hurrahs for Armagan for the new "Save As" option). Also when you defeat a Lord in .950 they respawn with few troops not the 600 they had. In my current .952 game I supported the Nord Claimant and I defeated the Nord king (and all lords that not supported my cause) in 20 game days.
Also, I think a Lord that have been in charge of a city for 10 years must have a huge army, when you start you can command 10 soldiers and after a year you can command ~150 soldiers. So I think that is fair to give a lord a huge army (like someone said: a lord with a flief and army of 50~70 troops, a lord with a castle 100~200, a lord with a city 200~300 and the King 400~600). In .052 you can see lords armies with 30~50 troops and deserters parties with 60~80 soldiers, and thats unfair.
The main problem that I found with huge armies was the issue of the time it takes to end the battle, let’s say that I'm fighting with 160 troops against 600. First round -1~-3 advantage, this means I will kill like 70~80 enemy troops, second round between 50~60 troops, and from the 3rd round I will kill 30 enemies... this means like 15~16 more fights. I spent like 1/2~1 hour fighting each of those "epic" battles (AutoCalc needs to be redone, really sucks).

 

[mishamael]

indeed their armies are too big, it´s pretty much the biggest game balance issue to date in M&B :/

 

[TheMageLord]

All of you complaining about the party sizes being too small now, you might be able to edit the scripts. party_get_ideal_size has been around since .903, and has numbers for renown, leadership, and base size, with a extra 50 bonus to faction leader parties. This seems to control the initial size (kings spawning in day 1 with 260 instead of 100ish), but it apparently isn't the only script controlling things. The parties constantly lose members a few at a time as the days pass until they're back down to a lower number.

I assume theres a second script, which is new to .952, that cuts down the parties as the days pass. If someone really wanted to scour the scripts file they could probably find the offending script and change the limits set there to a higher number, and thus allow larger parties again.
It could be something in the hire_men_to_kingdom_hero_party script, since it's much larger in .952, but I haven't really taken the time to test it, and I don't really have the motivation since I don't mind the smaller party sizes.

 

[Jericho]

I thought your earlier hack was more than sufficient recourse to the big armies, but
no real matter with this build. I suspect Armagan will tweak the army size a bit more
by next build. Though it would be sweet to have a scaleable choice in our
options screen or even as a multiple choice at the start of a new game...

Maybe something like this:
Option One: Small Armies
Option Two: Large Armies
Option Three: AI Spawns like cockroaches! 

 

[allthesedamnnamesaretaken]

this is why the old system is broken. This army SPAWNED at this size 

 

[Nordmann]

Is that .952? I haven't seen armies of this size at all in my game, I'm over 100 days in and so far the largest single party I've encountered was around 90. That was one lord and his troops. The largest I've faced is around 350, that was quite a few lords, had to pull out of that one eventually, whittled them down to around 190 though.

Overall .952's army sizes are a big improvement over those of .951, as far as I've been able to tell, I couldn't really take on any before this version.

 

[digitalstk]

Smaller armies with better troops is a huge improvement over large armies consisting of new recruits and militia. Another problem that needs to be fixed (which im sure has been mentioned) is ai parties having prisoners. They have no prisoner cap, an d when mousing over their party, the prisoner listing even goes off-screen. This could easily be fixed by just giving them a prisoner cap, or better yet having them dump prisoners off at cities/castles frequently. Of course there's also the problem when certain cities/castles also have too many prisoners.

 

[italiano]

or better yet having them dump prisoners off at cities/castles frequently

I'm pretty sure they're scripted to do that, just not nearly as frequently as they should. Ideally they woud use the same system as the player:

1. Pay for the troops themselves, and obviously only able to recruit what they can afford. Garrisoned troops obviously cost less.
2. Recruit just like the player; npcs recruit from their own fiefs but start with very high relations so they can recruit quickly.
3. Prisoners - they should be restricted by their prisoner skill, dump the prisoners at the first city they visit and be paid for it. This prisoner collecting would help bolster the coffers of the lords as they need it more than the player since the player can choose their party size.
4. More complicated to implement, but I'd like to see the lords cut their party size down dramatically in times of peace. A good money saver if they're paying for the troops themselves.

5. I'd like to see party limits removed completely and for party size to be governed by political climate, wealth and morale. I've modded this in myself (wealth and morale anyway) and it's by no means balanced, but it just feels right to be restricted by expense rather than party limits.