Posting here for visibility:
The "Escort Merchant Caravan" quest is fairly easy to break, I explain below how and what the devs can do to fix it:
So, to begin, how is the Quest structured?
The player is supposed to escort the Caravan to two towns, at which point he receives a gold reward. Sounds simple enough. But what happens when the player doesn't stick to the caravan?
The moment the player loses sight of the caravan, he receives this message:
This is followed by a garanteed attack on the caravan within a day. I tested this a lot of times and this attack happened every time, about a day afterwards. I assume this is a scripted encounter, because the group attacking the caravan isn't "looters" or "mountain bandits", just "bandits". The player is specifically informed about this attack on the world map too:
If the caravan is wiped, the player loses standing with the questgiver, nothing special yet.
I don't particularely care that this seems scripted either, I'm not expecting every aspect of Bannerlord to be a perfectly emergent sandbox. This is where the issues I have with the Quest start though:
The caravan is not garanteed to be wiped. There is a good chance that the caravan survives and just keeps wandering around the world map independent of the player.
At this point,
the quest runs endlessly until the player finds the caravan again, which is hilariously tedious. Not only that, but since the player can't accept any other mission of the same type he is literally LOCKED OUT from other caravan quests, until completing this one. It doesn't seem like any of the normal roaming bandit groups stand a chance at killing the caravan on their own either. Issues such as this are made even worse without the ability to cancel quests.
To sum up the issues with the Quest up to this point:
The caravan can survive the scripted attack
The quest now runs endlessly in the background
The player needs to find this specific caravan again to accept any other caravan escort quests
Things don't get better here though.
In the case that the player loses the caravan and it survives the scripted attack (which happens very often in my experience so far. This happening the very first time to me is why I playtested this further) the best course of action is to just camp the origin town. The mission scripting seems to only check whether the player is in proximity to the caravan when entering any town. just staying at the origin town is the best course of action to work around this, but a new player might not think of this when it happens to them. Besides, just resting at the origin town obviously has little to do with escorting the caravan
My impression is that the design intention here is that the scripted first attack isn't survived, and thus these problems with the quest design wouldn't happen or show themselves in the first place.
What should the dev do?
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A simple fix would be to
make the quest failstate NOT dependent on the caravan being wiped, but the player not assisting in the fight, similair to the deserter extortion village quest. The player shouldn't have to dedicate the next few ingame months tosearching or camping trade routes just to continue taking quests. This would fix the issue of the quest endlessly running, and thus the situation where the player can also camp the origin town wouldn't arise in the first place. (Obviously, should the caravan be wiped during the fight the quest should also fail)
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On an unrelated note: it seems like quests cancel when a town is captured by a different faction:
BUT THIS ALSO LOCKS YOU OUT of taking the same mission type again, pretty gamebreaking aswell