SP - Player, NPCs & Troops Broad Suggestions for Immersion

[Dusklight]

Some suggestions mostly for NPC and specifically NPC lord behaviors.

As your Renown and Influence grows, it would be neat if you started attracting lords, and even minor factions to your banner. Everything has to be started by the player, which can get a bit tedious - as it feels like you're the only one capable of getting anything done; and you can't be everywhere at once.

I think it would be a nice quality of life change if your reputation could affect and trigger events regarding nobles. They seek you out to join your clan if your relation is high enough with them, or they may say they are interested - and give you a quest to help them make up their mind.

Once you're renown, influence, and clan tier is above a certain threshold, clans could seek you or eligible members of your clan for diplomatic marriage - hoping to secure their place among your elite. Instead of marriages being completely player driven, your influence and power should affect the clans of the realm - spurring them to ally with you to ensure they come out on top. If a kingdom is on the verge of collapse, maybe their ruling lord is dead, and they are the sole remaining clan - when you engage them in battle and convince them to surrender - if your relation with them is somehow in good standing, and you're honorable - they would offer to join you on the spot. There's many things I think that renown, influence, and how powerful your kingdom is could affect lord behavior.

The ability to summon nobles, lords, and companions to you. Add in the ability to send a rider with a message to call a lord to you, instead of having to hunt them down. This could even be done in the early game for finding specific characters, but if your clan tier and renown is low - they would send back a message telling you that you aren't important enough to demand their attention.

RTS Camera - this mod is a game changer, and it would be a great idea (in my opinion) to code this into the base game.

Allow your clan members and companions more autonomy - with the ability to give them preset instructions that they will carry out to the best of their ability. Are you waging war and want one of your stronger nobles with good tactics, leadership, and battle bonuses to be your de facto general? Summon them with the before mentioned feature, then select the option that you want them to form an army, and they could ask whom their primary enemy is - directing them to focus on border towns of a specific kingdom.

Continuing the above, you could preset certain behaviors to all nobles in your kingdom. Have one noble focus on reinforcing the front lines. They will patrol near the heaviest conflicts, looking for allies who need help in outnumbered battles - then periodically return to towns under your kingdoms control for fresh soldiers to share with those fighting the front line. This behavior would fit the times, as it was common for a noble to be tasked with training new recruits, and then sending them to the front lines when they were battle ready.

This function could be applied to many aspects of the game to take pressure off of the player - allowing them to focus their attention on activities that require more finesse. Set a noble to patrol a certain section of your kingdom - reinforcing garrisons or protecting villages from raiding. Set companions to travel and complete quests, gaining slightly less relation with villagers. Task a companion with recruiting only a certain type of soldier, training them in battle with looters, bandits, and maybe weaker lords - then bring them to your character. A lot of these functions would just allow for a much better quality of life.

Allow the conversion of villages, castles, and cities to your chosen culture. As you conquer kingdoms - people from your culture would eventually move their for new opportunities, and your customs would slowly bleed into the native population. They would be trained by soldiers from your culture - changing their troop types to match yours. This could be a policy that you can enact in the Kingdom tab, or not enact if you want them to keep their soldier types.

Last suggestion for now - allow you to designate companions as a certain troop type. When I added my high crossbow skill companion to my archer regiment (2) - it changes the picture to ? and your character calls them 'infantry' - this is just knit picky on my part. Designate companions as either Infantry, Ranged, Cavalry, Horse Archer, Heavy Cavalry, body guard (they follow you at all times in battle, ignore troop commands, and defend you to the best of their ability if set this way) - also allow you to designate second in command in the event you are injured/down/killed in battle. If their tactics skill is the highest amongst companions in your army - they assume command - and any body guards still standing will automatically protect them instead.

 

[Tryvenyal]

+1 for all but:

Allow the conversion of villages, castles, and cities to your chosen culture. As you conquer kingdoms - people from your culture would eventually move their for new opportunities, and your customs would slowly bleed into the native population. They would be trained by soldiers from your culture - changing their troop types to match yours. This could be a policy that you can enact in the Kingdom tab, or not enact if you want them to keep their soldier types.

Do you know what is the only quick ways of cultureswitch a settlement? It´s exchanging each/most inhabitant(s) for 1 of your culture. This implies genocide of the current population. I don't think player should be allowed to engage in such horrible deeds.

Even an harch assimilation-program takes dacades, so ok, by fifth generation your first settlement could be assimilated enough to provide your cultural units. Untill then, your settlement would produce no soldiers but potential revolters...

But ofc there can be ways added! I had an interesting discussion in this thread.

In the bottom of this thread, there is an alternative suggestion, to recruit auxillary troops from conquered cultures.

 

[Dusklight]

+1 for all but:



Do you know what is the only quick ways of cultureswitch a settlement? It´s exchanging each/most inhabitant(s) for 1 of your culture. This implies genocide of the current population. I don't think player should be allowed to engage in such horrible deeds.

Even an harch assimilation-program takes dacades, so ok, by fifth generation your first settlement could be assimilated enough to provide your cultural units. Untill then, your settlement would produce no soldiers but potential revolters...

But ofc there can be ways added! I had an interesting discussion in this thread.

In the bottom of this thread, there is an alternative suggestion, to recruit auxillary troops from conquered cultures.

I wouldn't say it as quite 'genocide'. It's more of the fact that as they are conquered - I am sure that like the Romans - they left behind trust worthy captains to train up new recruits. Which means they would have been equipped and trained in the conquering cultures style. Does this result in the slow erosion of a conquered peoples culture and traditions? Yes - but this is what is always going to happen when new cultural and societal pressures from a conquering nation is going to cause.

 

[Tryvenyal]

It's more of the fact that as they are conquered - I am sure that like the Romans - they left behind trust worthy captains to train up new recruits. Which means they would have been equipped and trained in the conquering cultures style. Does this result in the slow erosion of a conquered peoples culture and traditions? Yes - but this is what is always going to happen when new cultural and societal pressures from a conquering nation is going to cause.

In the bottom of this thread, there is an alternative suggestion, to recruit auxillary troops from conquered cultures.

This is exactly about that. To train conquerer-styled advanced milita/Auxillery troops.

To train you troops is not the same as culture-shift the settlement BTW

I wouldn't say it as quite 'genocide'.

Look at other games - culture-shifting a province is very tedious, it can take 30-100 years to do, depending on the game and target province. And that's the Assimilation path, more or less drastic. Bannerlord is too short-pased to to full out culture shifts without getting rid of current inhabitants and replace them with new ones - implying genocide or not. An advanced, semi-humane settlement policy that the player´s grandchildren will see the result of is not worth it really

Culture-shifting is often very abstact in games, rarely implying what is done behind the scenes. You culture shift your province and suddenly it starts to generate charachters of your etnicity. Where would you say they went? No trace of them in neightboring provinces etc... Radical simplification or ... Genocide.