Lets just say the expected trajectory of a game given 10 years to improve upon Warband failed miserably. rather than the premiere design objective being anything close to the many many excellent suggestion posts for the past 10 years, seems that just an improved graphics and console accessibility won that debate to the game creators.
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Yes WF&S tried to correct or add some differing playstyles to the WB experience and while BL says it does there is zero depth to those differing playstyles and the incentive to keep doing them isn't there.
I'd say badly done but maybe that's just my opinion.
Hopefully, but given at how bad Taleworlds has been at dealing with bugs in the past (siege ladders anyone). I'm not holding my breath it will be fixed anytime soon.
At some point we need to be able to take out factions. There needs to be finality for a faction. If taking all their possessions away won't do it what will? Does it take killing every last one of them or something else? If I need to kill them all then once they've lost all they're property I shouldn't be penalized for killing them because they're not really lords anymore their just rogue factions.
Yes but there needs to be border skirmishes and conflicts that can occasionally occur so kingdoms have a reason to start wars. The random start of wars in this game is just bonkers because the player has no idea of wtf is going on. A system with casus belli would really go a long way to improving the war declarations in this game. But sadly that was rejected some time ago by Taleworlds for "reasons".
Warband is 10 yo game why tf Taleworlds wasn't looking to eliminate some of the really frustrating mechanics I've never understood. Instead of reducing the grind or making it at least interesting they somehow made it more grindy, like wtf?
I guess everyone has different tastes but there is no rhyme or reason to BL map besides forming artificial choke points that I can see.
Taleworlds loves menus and ffs THE WORST PART of Warband was dealing with menus. Bannerlord is an improvement and that's great but they create all this beautiful scenery and then make it so the player never needs to see them that's just dumb.
Yes it probably is but most players are going to go for the optimum playstyle, so not much you can do about it besides really cutting into recruiting. Which will definitely change the dynamics of how the game is played.
Ok agreed and if Taleworlds actually gave me a reason to play as a trader, or bandit or whatever I'd love it. But it's pretty apparent they were tacked on in the most superficial way to "add content".
Power fantasy is the heart of rpgs going from zero to hero is what they're about.
I was very surprised to find this but this is directly from game code:
C#:
if (clan.MapFaction.Leader == clan.Leader && clan.Kingdom != null)
{
int num2 = (clan.Kingdom.KingdomBudgetWallet < 2000000) ? 1000 : 0;
if ((float)clan.Kingdom.KingdomBudgetWallet < 1000000f && MBRandom.RandomFloat < (((float)clan.Kingdom.KingdomBudgetWallet < 100000f) ? 0.01f : 0.005f))
{
float randomFloat = MBRandom.RandomFloat;
num2 = ((randomFloat < 0.1f) ? 400000 : ((randomFloat < 0.3f) ? 200000 : 100000));
}
clan.Kingdom.KingdomBudgetWallet += num2;
}For those that don't know C#, this code piece gives Kingdoms up to 400k golds with a very small chance. It is executed every in game day.
Ahh, remember those messages you'd get about some border villagers being mistreated by the enemy faction and you knew that a war would be breaking out soon and you had a little time to prepare? Those were good times.Yes but there needs to be border skirmishes and conflicts that can occasionally occur so kingdoms have a reason to start wars. The random start of wars in this game is just bonkers because the player has no idea of wtf is going on. A system with casus belli would really go a long way to improving the war declarations in this game. But sadly that was rejected some time ago by Taleworlds for "reasons".
I agree, but I think we forget that a lot of those menu dialogues were put there in the first place because the loading times for entering towns was so damn long. Nobody wanted to wait 5 minutes just to be able to run in and grab a quest from Scabby Sheila
This explains how a homeless Southern Empire with 4 clans left was able to muster a 1,500 man army to siege my town in my game.
Is there really no way to get rid of these zombie factions other than execution? I never really dealt with that much in older playthroughs because i usually grow bored once I have my kingdom, but in my current run I'm plagued constantly by these dead factions. They're worse than the strong ones. Do they really never go away?
"Players and npcs will play the game by the same rules" TW.
Then where is my 400k worth lottery ticket, Mr. Yavuz.
Player kingdom has the same chance BUT this is a different system called "Kingdom Budget Wallet". Here is the difference though, player clan neither pays nor receives from this hidden budget."Players and npcs will play the game by the same rules" TW.
Then where is my 400k worth lottery ticket, Mr. Yavuz.
Yeah, I remember mexxico said something like that.
Zerosaiko
Knight at Arms
Man, I remembering seeing one of the dev logs (I will be forever grateful that I didn't actually follow them prior to EA) talking about how a lord that just lost their party might have to take actions like raising taxes or dealing in crime if they didn't have the finances to raise more troops.
I can get why stuff like that didn't make it into the game (sounds difficult to balance and the such), but kingdom budgets just magically being boosted sounds disappointing.
I can get why stuff like that didn't make it into the game (sounds difficult to balance and the such), but kingdom budgets just magically being boosted sounds disappointing.
five bucks
Knight at Arms
"Create a kingdom and conquer the whole map" is what the game is almost entirely built around. The alternate playstyles are even more boring, unchallenging, repetitive, and not-fleshed-out.
Trader? The game doesn't actually set any kind of goal for you, unless you want to buy every town, and reaching 300 Trade is even grindier than conquering the map by force. The entire gameplay loop, played optimally, consists of grinding ferrying horses from one place to another.
Bandit? Again, no goal. Really the only thing to do is raid villages (which sucks) and attack caravans. Most of the crime-related gameplay isn't even implemented.
Permanent vassal or Mercenary? This is just the "conquer the whole map" playstyle except with even less content, and even more frustration as all war decisions are totally at the whim of the stupid AI!
Smithing? Isn't even really a playstyle. Consists of clicking a button over and over, going to town to buy more hardwood, and clicking a button over and over.
Yeah, eventually it will be fixed, perhaps in a handful of months, perhaps in multiple years. Keep in mind we are approaching Duke Nukem Forever levels of development time here (that game took 14 years, Bannerlord is reaching 10+).
But whether it will be fixed eventually doesn't change that Bannerlord is a bad game at the moment.
That would have been good, but was rejected unfortunately. So what we're left with is a map which is both unfun and unrealistically mountainous. Excessive choke points serve to make it almost impossible for caravans to avoid bandits on the way to their intended route, while also not making it easier for lord parties to catch bandits because bandits can still outrun lord parties. They also make the map a pain to traverse for the player when they want to go from A to B but there's three mountain ranges in the way.
I am not actually saying the map structure should be changed because it's too late now for that, but it makes the game less fun IMO for no real benefit.
I agree it's a huge flaw.
I think that finding the most powerful troops for a given situation is part of a good strategy/tactics game. But when the imbalance is so massive that there might as well be a neon sign pointing to the best option, the player is robbed of that experience.
Then you have to intentionally gimp yourself by not hiring the gamebreakingly overpowered troops, and counter-intuitively making bad decisions on purpose so you can have a semblance of challenge. Which shatters the immersive experience you were trying to enjoy as an army commander.
Plus, the AI will never restrict themselves and hold back from using OP troops. You WILL eventually run into AI parties using many Khan's Guard that can beat every single troop you have multiple times over. So you can either not hire Khan's Guard/Fians and make the game more unfair and frustrating for yourself; or you can hire Khan's Guard/Fians and make the game less challenging and more repetitive for yourself.
It's a lose-lose scenario which is the fault of the game, not the player.
I think realism should be pursued in video games as far as possible without making the game unfun. A perfectly realistic video game would also make for a terrible one. And there is nothing really wrong with ego trips or power fantasies in an entertainment product. The point of works of fiction is to let people experience feelings they can't in real life... such as defeating 30 men in medieval battle.
In addition, I didn't say soloing armies was desirable; just that the player's skill in battle mattered more, which is desirable, because the core reason games are fun is that they challenge your skill, and you feel rewarded when your skill is good enough to overcome the challenge.
@azakhi Interesting, thanks for the info. I thought the AI just didn't have to pay mercenaries, but maybe the actual problem is this hidden wealth fund.
If the game is balanced around that hidden wealth fund it will make it very difficult to remove, so perhaps the best thing is to make AI factions unable to hire more than 2 mercenary clans at a time. Or make it so that AI factions are simply destroyed after 10 days of holding no territory.
svelok
Sergeant
This has a 0.5% chance of firing, doubled to 1% if the wallet is under 100k. If it does, it adds 400k (10% chance) / 200k (20% chance) / 100k (remaining 70%). You said it's on daily tick, so it's adding an averaged out ~1500/day to poor kingdoms, and half that to others?
By comparison, the kingdom wallet pays out between 500 and 4000 per day (more to poorer clans, less when the wallet is low) to normal clans, and double that to the kingdom leader. And rich clans pay in daily 1% of their wealth above 100k, ex: 1k per day at 200k wealth. So in context it seems like a small additional cashflow under normal circumstances, unless I've misread a decimal by one position somewhere. For kingdoms with no territory left, and only one clan on the map, 1500/d is quite the lifeline however.
I think the kingdom wallet is a very defensible idea, for stabilizing the economy of a realm across its clans. But this feels like it's using the kingdom wallet as a bandaid fix to towns and castles providing kinda poor money, and conversely, the game not having anything for NPCs to burn excess gold on. So lots of landowning clans are broke and, simultaneously, rich clans would otherwise accumulate wealth indefinitely.
Your average calculation is missing the 1k when kingdoms don't hit the lottery. Any kingdom under 2m budget wallet gets a minimum of 1k a day. So really poor clans get 99k for 99 days and 150k for 1 lottery day in average. Making it 2490 gold a day in average.
Poor clans get 199k for 199 days and 150k for 1 lottery day in average. Making it 1745 gold a day in average.
Other than that it seems correct.
I don't like that there is a lottery logic but I am guessing it was implemented this way to prevent only some clans getting paid from the wallet. If kingdoms got 2.5k fixed daily, first clans in the list will get paid always while others would almost never get paid.
Also this provides periods of strong budget so they get a chance to recover while fixed payment would always be barely enough. So yeah, it kinda makes sense there is a lottery logic.
What else can you do in this game? You can try and force a handicap/limit on yourself playing mercenary only or merchant only (or whatever else), but it's heavily counterintuitive with the systems (or lack thereof) they have in the game which is just designed to propagate as quickly and as high# of armies for battles upon battles. Battles that don't have any 'meaning' behind them or, you as a player, has to really struggle to create that narrative on your own.
Even the 'side' playthrough options, you have to grind renown to unlock the features. And they lack any depth or complexity or nuanced difficulty to really be called 'fun' gameplay. Workshops and caravans require no management, mercenary is stuck in the influence/degradation grind, no criminal play, quests are stale, and looters scale with the player level, etc...
Now WB is more than 10+yrs old and is not perfect in any sense; it introduce a new IP and genre which allowed others to try it with For Honor, Chivalry, etc...I've never conquered the map in WB or BL, both for the same reason as you get to a point where it's just take the next n+castle/town.
Us: We're tired of grinding and BS AI respawning cheats
Also us: there's no late game content
TW: Here, have some more grind with medieval Whack-a-Mole with AI cheating respawn
Us:
TW: What? Late game content!
--
jks aside, one of the most infuriating things is trying to flip lords to your side when their king's personality is crap and you have 100 relations, yet they'll still go "Me so happies with kings!" and you are forced to basically destroy that clan's power to be able to even dream of flipping them. There should be a more feasible option, the weirdest part of it is that this silly shielding will trigger even if you have the clan leader imprisoned, shouldn't that skyrocket the chances of flipping them?
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I've given up on trying to understand Taleworlds "logic", it's inscrutable.Us: We're tired of grinding and BS AI respawning cheats
Also us: there's no late game content
TW: Here, have some more grind with medieval Whack-a-Mole with AI cheating respawn
Us:
TW: What? Late game content!
--
jks aside, one of the most infuriating things is trying to flip lords to your side when their king's personality is crap and you have 100 relations, yet they'll still go "Me so happies with kings!" and you are forced to basically destroy that clan's power to be able to even dream of flipping them. There should be a more feasible option, the weirdest part of it is that this silly shielding will trigger even if you have the clan leader imprisoned, shouldn't that skyrocket the chances of flipping them?
Sirael
Recruit
Hey man, i am trying to find all the cheats in the code, could you please tell me what file you screenshoted this from?
nibbler2345432
Recruit
That is from ClanVariablesCampaignBehavior.cs, but good luck finding ALL the cheats, I mean I'm sure there's small ones here and there that won't get much notoriety, the economy is already quite unrealistic in certain ways, mostly in troop upgrades.
Sirael
Recruit
Thank you extremely much, i was looking in the wrong folders all along
Thank you again
imo mountain ranges are fine, forests too, the issue I have is that trading paths and some connected villages and bound villages are ridiculously out of the way in a maze where neither you nor the AI Villager Parties manage to reach it in a feasible time frame. The worst zone's sturgian Varnovapol to it's extremely important fishing village, which was placed on the other side of a mountain range with a single path covered in forests, the village itself sits in a surrounded area of forests. That means Varnovapol's constantly if not permanently suffering from starvation almost every campaign. To add salt to injury, there are 2 bandit spawn fields in that forest + 2 more north of Sibir, making the entire pathway littered with bandits which often destroy NPC caravans, sometimes PC caravans, most AI lord parties that are on recruiting mode, and to finish with a grandeur of absurdity, nearly the entire area's a dead zone with 2 mountain ranges bottlenecks, when leading towards the fishing village and a castle bound village nearing Tyal, and the other passage leads from nowhere to nowhere and only the AI will use it on auto-pathing towards norther Khuzait lands and Tyal. What's so ridiculous about it one might ask, and I'll tell you, that's a simulation of a Taiga forest, Taiga forests were massively chopped for wood and also contained a fair amount of game, Sturgia virtually has no wood production (I think it's one village) when their territory spams in a aburdly massive taiga zone. What should be done? The fishing village should either be moved or a passage-way connecting it directly to Varnovapol should be there. Either way, a castle bounding the current village's spot + an extra village placed in the are for woodcutting - than another one north on the "nothing" zone holding the same, both a fishing village that should be on the northern shore + a woodcutting village in the taiga zone. Such a silly change would drastically change Sturgian economy, would allow for an extra clan + it would strengthen their capabilities of defending Tyal (which's lost 99% of the campaigns to either Khuzaits or, exceptionally rare, to the Northern Empire)
There are numerous dead-zones in the map that arbitrarily buff some factions and hinder others.The most notorious effects are observed on Husn Fulq, Tyal and Uriksala Castle, "forgot the name castle" nearl Husn Fulq that theoretically "belongs" to the Khuzaits, Than we have a horse village from Aserai that is literally on top of desert bandit spawn zones and 3 light years distance from any town or castle.
Meanwhile we get a packed battania which's arguably the best faction zone in the entire map because their economy's safe, their villagers and villages are safe except for 4 of those (as long as the AI patrols every so often), they have 3 advantageous choke points towards all factions except Vlandia where they are basically ripe for the taking. The natural geohraphical balance + the Auto-Calc imbalance comes into play from there and turns Vlandia into a massive power-house from the get go (too easy to invade Battania, Neviansk Castle is delivered to them in a platter by TW, and after pushing into Battania every entry point towards their territory becomes gated by endless chokepoints). That's why Vlandia dominates so often, Battania also will rarely be extinguished by anyone due to their packed layout. Sturgia will often lose 3 thirds of their slums territory to every other faction almost every game (Northern Empire, Western Empire, Battania, Vlandia and Khuzaits have no problem splitting it senseless taking Omor / Varcheg, all their nearby castles, Tyal, Uriksala, the castle behind Tyal, basically leaving them with Ryval (almost impossible to take), Balgard, Sibir, Varnovapol and their respective castles. Even than, if a game runs long enough Sibir will often be captured by someone.
Aserai's another that suffers a lot because it's too easy for them to lose Husn Fulq's entire region to SE, which basically rolls a dice, if Vlandia or WE decide to war them at the same time as SE or right away after they've lost that war, Aserai loses everything west of Sanala leaving the entire faction in shambles while spam generating endless immersion breaking named rebel clans in the process which'll often litter the game after 10 years, if that doesn't happen, they'll recover and eventually push into the castle west of Ortysia (than it's anyone's guess, which's how the game should operate 100% of the time)
Much of these details lie upon the geographical distribution of the map + massive dead-zones that create gaps that allow for bandit AI to destroy AI economy, and also prevents the AI from properly defending zones (I always said that most castle placements both in WB and in BL are ludicrous, they don't make any sense given they should be gating borders or shielding important resources, neither are true). What kills me on this regard's that some bound villages placement + geographical arbitrary shapes make for exceptionally non-viable "boundage". It makes no sense to bind a village behind a mountain range that has no direct pathway for a castle to defend it, you see that with Gersegos, with Varnovapol, the southern villages "outside of battania", etc. Another very bizarre thing are the couple castles that have a single village, never understood nor will understand why. In fact, wtf's Charas even a Town? It has 2 choke points (making for bad trading routes even the AI avoids it) littered with sea-raider spawns + it has 2 villages and a castle with a single village auto-pathed to it. It's the worst town in the game for any viable AI management.
When it comes down to it, I still think the original old map for BL was much better in terms of balancing the territory and actually making sense. Nearly no dead-zones, Sargot was in it's correct place, charas was much more significant in it's positioning (neighboring WE and Aserai). Idk, I don't really like this map, it could've been done better by filling the dead-zones and making more reasonable castle placements, but as is, it's really bad.
Finally, it would all be fine if TW applied actual logic towards why some settlements became towns and others didn't taking as example real life History itself, some basic anthropology and some basic geography. There's no logic at play here when it comes down to that. Some zones would never hold a Town for obvious reasons (like, ppl need to eat, otherwise it won't populate enough to form an actual town) and "handicapped" towns also make no sense as in therea aren't enough resources to justify why and how ppl would've amassed in said settlement.
Lesson time: How did Towns formed during the Middle Ages (and before that)
- They had plentiful access to natural resources
- They were geographically advantageous for safety from both Weather and life-risks like wild animals and "bandits", but only if the are offered enough food
- They had precious natural resources like metals, wood or stone - cheapening construction and making them paramount to any realm. As a consequence, virtual food placement would be made through the use of agrarian means, like pastures for anything that could survive the climate - be it farms with wheat or types of cattle, or both - They'd also inflate food production by introducing chickens.
- The settlement was geographically positioned turning it into a trading hub
anyway, got carried away on that subject. Fact is that there are too many ludicrous decisions in the game design itself, countless counter-intuitive decisions that can't be explained by any logical pattern. That ranges from armor values, to weapons dmg, to settlements, to faction balancing, troop trees, etc... There's always this looming feeling that some blatant arbitrary favoritism was placed towards the balancing whenever you try to make sense of it.
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Nothing but truth here.
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