Hi guys, ladies
Awesome mod. I discovered it by chance in the Steam workshop and it has been one of the best surprises of the last times. Congratulations to the designers and thank you for the great work. I'll give you the bugs I have become aware of and then some feedback about the game:
1. Treasure hunting. Super bugged. I find the spot, but when I try to dig it the only thing that happened is a very weird conversation with myself. No options available. The mission cannot be finished and stays in the mission log.
2. Your lair. First of all you can recruit the captain to your party, and keep him like a companion, but who cannot level up (he can, but you cannot level up statistics, abilities, etc). You cannot "give him back" to the fort, and then the first trooper type garrisoned becomes "sort of" the new captain, and you cannot call them back to your party, which can be very annoying.
Second, you cannot build improvements to the forts: you pay the price, wait the time, and it gets stalled forever on the verge of construction (it never gets constructed, and always is 1 day away from construction).
Third, if you go to the marketplace options there are none, but if you go to the yard you can actually do commerce with the vendors. If there are vendors they should be accessed from the fort main screen like any other.
Fourth, the troops you station in the fort are for free, and the prisoners you keep there never escape. So you can accumulate an indefinite ammount of top tier troops and prisoners for free; which is kind of a cheating, because it allows you to amass a huge top quality army while still making a lot of money.
Fifth you can never access any chest, neither your counselors, in the fort, which make no sense since you can consult them in any other of your land possessions. They should be available here too.
3. Courtship issues. If you start visiting a lady, and you are not a lord of a faction, at a certain point the lady's father wants to set her with another noble and she says you should stop visiting, and there's nothing you can do. You cannot elope with her, cannot convince his father, and cannot challenge the noble. No matter how good is your relation with the characters (45 with the lady, 61 with the father in one of my games). The lady do not ask you to visit her any more, and if you actually do that she always repeat the same text, which does not allow you to elope. Her father and the new suitor do not have any special options whatsoever. After some time she actually gets married to the new suitor. The time and effort invested in the courtship is pretty high (and quite annoying actually), so throwing all out the window because of that is very frustrating.
4. Inventory issues. Sometimes the last items of your inventory will dissapear. Just vanish. Poof. I noticed it only affects the last two or three lines of your equipment. I normally avoid that by keeping all my items as high as possible in the inventory, but can still be an annoying bug.
5. Money lenders. Totally bugged. Even if I do not purchase any land or borrow money there are apparently random debts and revenues at different cities. Check your financial reports and there you will find that you owe money in some cities, but you have money available in some others. For no reason. This situation does not change if you buy some land or borrow some money, I've checked it. Also kind of a cheat to make money out of the blue by checking the money lenders of the cities where you have available funds...
6. Terrain modding issues. Some terrain is not very well defined. For example if I fall in the river passing in the middle of Ligor (or Ayutthaya, I cannot remember which one now) I cannot climb back (the terrain is too steep?). The worst I have found is the fortress of Kota Kuala, which is not a fortress: It is a wall in the side of a mountain, but inside there is nothing but sand dunes and rocky needles. You can find the roof of an almost completely buried house, but you cannot access any door or entrance.
7. Blacksmiths I can build blacksmiths in cities, but my troops and I run out of ammo. I am not sure if this is a bug. Do they really work?
8. Text bugs. There are a lot. I cannot put all of them here. For example some faction leaders say the players name when referring to claimants. Few dialogs are correctly expressed in gender when playing with a female, etc.
Now lets go into my personal feedback. Unless the bugs, which are spotted problems, this is my personal opinion, and is not suppossed to mean nothing else. Just ideas for the developpers consideration.
A. Gunpowder weapons. Gunpowder weapons are dramatically expensive and have huge reliability, range and accuracy. The price is historical, because those weapons were state-of-the-art military technology (european matchlock) or craftsmanship (tanegashima teppo) for the time, and were REAAALLY expensive. But historically there were highly inaccurate at medium ranges (totally useless at long ranges), and quite unreliable. This is why military tactics where conceived around massed volleys at short to medium distances, where the sheer number of bullets will cause moderate casualty rates.
I would nevertheless not change any of this in the mod. Because the price will make it hard for the player to equip companions with top gear, and this is one of the objectives. And the accuracy make the mod very fun to play! And this: THIS, MY FRIENDS, is what all that is about. Having fun playing the game. Besides it helps with the immersion, since it provides the feeling of the superiority of the gunpowder weapons at the time. M&B rules cannot achieve morale impact, that was a HUGE side effect for gunfire at the time, so this helps balancing it all.
B. Portuguese superiority. This is also an historical fact. Portuguese superior technology and military tactics at the time made Portugal a major World Power. And we have to consider that the game strips the portuguese from their bigger assets: naval superior technology and expertise, and overwhelmingly superior artillery firepower. Aside form that, it is absolutely historical that the spanish perfected pike-and-shot tactics dominated the XVI Century battlefields (yeah: it's a ***** to endure portuguese firepower until you face it's plated infantry. Clever tactic, isn't it?). Besides, I found only logical that the portuguese cannot field large numbers of cavalry, since it would have been very complicated and expensive to carry the horses and able riders from different operational theatres. Please consider SE Asia was a God forsaken, far, far away land from a XVI Century european point of view.
What all that mean is that you can "go for the easy way" and play the portuguese, or look for a more challenging game playing with khmer or laotian troops. Depends on what do you want, or are skilled enough, to do. I didn't hear a lot of complaint, but the Ming troops are pretty OP too: well plated, very good abilities and all around possibilities (shooters - infantry - cavalry). And that is historical too.
C. Item availability. I have noticed that a good number of the best items cannot be purchased anywhere. They can, however, be obtained by battlefield spoils of war. I'm talking about the european outdated full plate, the guerrero's superior armet, the black morrion, the european sergeant morrion, the best masked kabutos, some of the best golden plated armors of the game, japanese jinbaori, the best plated horses, etc. This is kind of frustrating, because it gives the impression that there is some stuff in the game that can (and WILL) be used against you, but that you can never acquire. ALL ITEMS should be acquirable from a vendor. The idea of the special vendors in the taverns is a very good one. Why don't give them access to all items? It takes some of the fun out of the game. Give them access to EVERYTHING. Make it very expensive if you want to: but at least the player can, eventually, acquire it. Because the spoils of war are a too random way to acquire those items. And even in case that you actually get them (very rare) the quality is usually poor (cracked, battered, etc).
D. Food. It would be good it food rations where bigger (like 100 bread, 60 cheese, etc), or at least the foraging ability were more useful. Because in late games it is very hard to keep feeding large armies (like 200).
That is all up to this point. I will come back if I stumble upon more issues. In the meantime feel free to comment this.
Thank you for reading this long post so far!
It's not too bad, I just have to unequipped all their stuff before I try to rescue one but It gets a little annoying
