Combat and Mounted combat feels clunky and weird

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I am so glad the horses have gotten the treatment they deserve. Riding on them in simulations is super smooth but the mounted melee combat is clunky and extremely frustrating. I've been messing around to determine if its based on skill levels or not and I can say that even with all skills set to 300, its still bad. No matter what weapon i'm using, whether its 1 handed or 2 handed swords, spears, lances whatever, hitting an enemy seems like a 50/50. I could be staring right at them and swing a weapon and it passes right by their head. spears are frustrating because it seems like the lunge time is very limited. Thrust slightly too early and your hit will never reach them. thrust slightly too late and the spear tip passes right by them.
 
I am so glad the horses have gotten the treatment they deserve. Riding on them in simulations is super smooth but the mounted melee combat is clunky and extremely frustrating. I've been messing around to determine if its based on skill levels or not and I can say that even with all skills set to 300, its still bad. No matter what weapon i'm using, whether its 1 handed or 2 handed swords, spears, lances whatever, hitting an enemy seems like a 50/50. I could be staring right at them and swing a weapon and it passes right by their head. spears are frustrating because it seems like the lunge time is very limited. Thrust slightly too early and your hit will never reach them. thrust slightly too late and the spear tip passes right by them.
I use a bow and a polarm usually due to the fact swords are useless on horseback
 
It's really upsetting that this problem has persisted so long. Weapons other then *horizontal swinging polearms* just feel wrong. The AI Cav struggles too and while we can go buy a glaive and khuzmart, they're stuck whiffing 4/5 hits at best.
 
Nope. Don't really agree here. The combat has always felt run and engaging and considering the scale of the game, i.e. up to 1000 units in a battle, I think combat is pretty amazing. It is single player Dark Souls level of combat, no but why would you even apply that standard to a game where hundreds of unit are battling it out simultaneously. It is just a completely different game on a complete different scale. A smaller scale game with maybe no more half dozen to a dozen entities can devote tons of the processing power to adding complexity and polish to the the combat systems and animations making for very deep and immersive combat experience. Scale that up to 1000 and sacrifices have to be made which means a much more simple, less complex combat system has to be used.
 
Nope. Don't really agree here. The combat has always felt run and engaging and considering the scale of the game, i.e. up to 1000 units in a battle, I think combat is pretty amazing. It is single player Dark Souls level of combat, no but why would you even apply that standard to a game where hundreds of unit are battling it out simultaneously. It is just a completely different game on a complete different scale. A smaller scale game with maybe no more half dozen to a dozen entities can devote tons of the processing power to adding complexity and polish to the the combat systems and animations making for very deep and immersive combat experience. Scale that up to 1000 and sacrifices have to be made which means a much more simple, less complex combat system has to be used.
The combat is good and they fixed a huge deal of it since closed beta (it was terrible with the delays back then) but some things feel weird in it compared to warband like mounted melee aim, it was a breeze to strike from horseback in warband but in bannerlord you have to turn the comera way down to hit with most weapons.
 
The combat is good and they fixed a huge deal of it since closed beta (it was terrible with the delays back then) but some things feel weird in it compared to warband like mounted melee aim, it was a breeze to strike from horseback in warband but in bannerlord you have to turn the comera way down to hit with most weapons.

Agreed. You can compensate for it once you get used to it but you shouldn't have to do that. There's no excuse for this to be worse than it was in Warband.
 
The combat is good and they fixed a huge deal of it since closed beta (it was terrible with the delays back then) but some things feel weird in it compared to warband like mounted melee aim, it was a breeze to strike from horseback in warband but in bannerlord you have to turn the comera way down to hit with most weapons.
Oh I will agree about this, the camera angles required to make the strikes are way, way different from Warband and I totally struggled with finding the right angles to get hits with shorter weapons from horseback. Heck to be honest, I still struggle a bit with weapons shorter than 100 length but it really is just a matter of getting the right angles, rather than it not working or working in a clunky manner and I can generally now hit reliably from horses with even relatively short maces.

My bigger issue is the damage difference between a swingable polearm and a sword. It becomes very hard to justify using a Sword that already has a shorter reach, when it take 3-4 hits with a sword to do the same lethal levels of damage as with a Glaive. I understand that the longer handle of the swingable polearm provides leverage and speed to the blow but the game models it as the difference between a 30 damage hit for the Sword and a 230 damage hit for the Glaive. Personally I think that the damage difference should be more like 30 for the sward and 40-45 for the pole arm. Same with two hand axes, they just do too much damage compared to single handed weapon.

As for the camera angles required in order to achieve a hit, personally I wish they would make those angles more easy to achieve. Why I can now pretty easily flip my camera straight down to in a pinch to use a short single handed weapon from a horse, it does still feel a bit awkward. Instead of the 70+ degree angle downward, I wish they would make it more like 45-50 degrees for close strikes instead.
 
Oh I will agree about this, the camera angles required to make the strikes are way, way different from Warband and I totally struggled with finding the right angles to get hits with shorter weapons from horseback. Heck to be honest, I still struggle a bit with weapons shorter than 100 length but it really is just a matter of getting the right angles, rather than it not working or working in a clunky manner and I can generally now hit reliably from horses with even relatively short maces.

My bigger issue is the damage difference between a swingable polearm and a sword. It becomes very hard to justify using a Sword that already has a shorter reach, when it take 3-4 hits with a sword to do the same lethal levels of damage as with a Glaive. I understand that the longer handle of the swingable polearm provides leverage and speed to the blow but the game models it as the difference between a 30 damage hit for the Sword and a 230 damage hit for the Glaive. Personally I think that the damage difference should be more like 30 for the sward and 40-45 for the pole arm. Same with two hand axes, they just do too much damage compared to single handed weapon.

As for the camera angles required in order to achieve a hit, personally I wish they would make those angles more easy to achieve. Why I can now pretty easily flip my camera straight down to in a pinch to use a short single handed weapon from a horse, it does still feel a bit awkward. Instead of the 70+ degree angle downward, I wish they would make it more like 45-50 degrees for close strikes instead.
Agreed in all, the damage difference is too much, combined with armors being weaker than they were in warband makes a huge gap between one handed vs two handed weapons.

I've seen regularly high tier shielded infantry being massacred by two-handers in-game, if you are in shieldwall formation it's even worse cause your guys move slower and try mostly to block while the enemy just rushes and kill them mercilessly.
 
I have to wonder why slashing polearms are even useable on horseback, I'm pretty sure trying a sidelong halberd swipe from the back of a charging horse would be foolish and dangerous. Maybe I'm wrong and cavalry the world over just used sabers and lances for centuries because that's what the cool kids were doing.
 
A couple of days ago, I opened this thread in the MP section trying to provide feedback through video tests.

That said, I agree with the opinion that the mounted combat is lacking to a certain extent. I honestly think the problem lies in three different factors that together don't let the gameplay experience flow naturally, imho.

Camera view (both 3/1view)

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I don't know what you think but in my eyes, in bannerlord the view is too high in third person (feedback about it) and in first person (feedback about it), it gives me the impression of suffocation because all the elements are too close to the foreground. That's why I felt the need to create this little tweak, which imho brings the warband gameplay experience closer to bannerlord.

Swing arcs

In the MP thread to which I refer, I propose a series of changes for the arcs. Among them, the lateral swing ones for polearm and the inclination ones for swings/ wind up for 1h and 2h.

Take a look at these two videos.



In the one on the left (new for this update) I've set up a scenario where the camel is realistically sized. If you notice, you can see a much more open swing angle in Native, so the AI can hit "better" (voilá! a good camel troop on a camel that doesn't look like a donkey :iamamoron:) and the player has more margin of control for that kind of attacks.

In the one on the left (previously shared) you can see that in the modified version, the swing arc with the polearm is much more narrow, penalising the swing, giving this type of action a higher degree of mastery and skill required by the player.

Animations

Not all the animations are bad, far from it. The ones that need an overhaul are the ones concerning the use of polearms. I think that Taleworlds has sinned of being too "ecologist" when it uses the same "wind/swing" animation with polearm for both on foot and mounted. Apart from the fact that the animation needs a much shorter swing arc (see how the waist deforms with that extreme turn in the video above) it also needs to be given a tilt allowance in order to be able to perform wind up "side swings" from back to front like in warband.

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Here I talked about it (+info)

Edit: What about an inverted animation for back to front lateral swing/wind up? see #1
 
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Scale that up to 1000 and sacrifices have to be made which means a much more simple, less complex combat system has to be used.
Compromise which results ridiculous fighting scenes. Especially when you are down in battle and watch the fights of NPCs. Or watch the NPCs fighting in tournaments. I am not sure if this scarify is worth of it after all.
At the end of this video you can see how ridiculous those fights are.



It's been for a while know that I started to reconsider my "pink glassed" opinion on the great fighting system of Bannerlord.
 
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