Defeating 100 Knights

[JohnathanStrange]

Defeating 50 or 100 knights in solo combat.

Doesn't sound realistic or fun to me.

Defeat fifty knights by one's self? In a fair fight? Not realistic.

Defeat one hundred knights by one's self? By exploiting the A.I.? Not fun.

It's amusing perhaps, like when shooting hapless Dark Knights from the safety of an unclimbable cliff or riding a tireless spirited charger while effortlessly swinging a war axe as the enemy politely takes turns to get their heads chopped off.

This is a brilliant, fun game but I'm not favorably impressed anymore when someone (at any level, with any set of equipment) posts they can defeat so many high level enemies. For me, at that point, it becomes too much like an arcade game.

C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre

 

[Cataphract]

I hear you, and agree with you, we need better ai or harder enemies with armor that swords and arrows are almost useless against, stuff that needs warhammers to be efficient against. Horses that can charge your horse, dismounted knights that swing theyre sword so quickly that you need to be very careful and skilled to block theyre blows.

 

[Quietus]

Defeating 50 or 100 knights in solo combat.

Doesn't sound realistic or fun to me.

Defeat fifty knights by one's self? In a fair fight? Not realistic.

Defeat one hundred knights by one's self? By exploiting the A.I.? Not fun.

It's amusing perhaps, like when shooting hapless Dark Knights from the safety of an unclimbable cliff or riding a tireless spirited charger effortlessly swinging a war axe as the enemy politely takes turns to get their heads chopped off.

This is a brilliant, fun game but I'm not favorably impressed anymore when someone (at any level, with any set of equipment) posts they can defeat so many high level enemies. For me, at that point, it becomes too much like an arcade game.

C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre

Uh, a couple of house rules:

- Don't use crossbows and hide in the mountain. Crossbows are very unbalanced.
- Don't ever buy any equipment, just loot. Equipment is very cheap as well as the horses.

I don't know how you beat 50 Dark knights though. They come in packs whether you are on foot or horse. Two hits is all you need and you are knocked out . Ten Dark Knights on warhorses barreling down upon your will get you hit at least twice.

What's your difficulty level?

 

[Kniggit]

i got my difficulty level at 107% i think......last time i checked, well, im trying all these beserker ideas. It is kind of stupid to spwn on an unscalable cliff. kinda of like a spike that shoots up from the land, with a flat top.

I got no clothin at all, except the tattered wrapping boots and some tattered shirt, ehich give you no protection. I have a hunting bow, and about 28 spaces in my inventory full of bodkin arrows. So, considering my great stock of arrws, i can spend the whole time up there, while they run around like a headless chicken. That happened like 2 weeks ago.

just yesterday i got into the same kind of deal, excpet not as many arrows and i had refugess helping me. i pulled out my hammer (not warhammer just an ordinary hammer) and i stuck with the 10 refugees. We won surprisingly. Because its just so easy to dodge a pack horse and kick the crap out of a dark knight at the same time.

M&B for me is starting to lose its zest. i think its because ive defeated every enemy there is known to man, with very little, on hard difficulty on 3 different charachters. Sure, its challenging in the beginning, but i would like a story line than just, do this and i will pay you handsomely

Ian

 

[Mangudai]

Mount and Blade is good fun for what it is, but I hope the designers consider it more of a starting point for something bigger and deeper.

 

[ETM]

First of all, i know this is not the place, but hi, i'm new!

On topic: i can't get that amount of dark knights, as i am still running the full-version-until-you-hit-that-stupid-level-6, but i now managed to slay off the dak knight parties that come my way. Unfortenatly i get the lvl 6 as soon as i defeat them, so i keep running from them, but it is really easy to kill them especially if you have some meat like farmers to distract them, so that they don't charge you all at once.

Anyway, i don't think you need anything more than a bow, fair amount of arrows and, preferably, a good horse. Even with the limit of 6 levels i can get my skills high enough for good headshooting with the bow that i can get my hands on.

Well, i hope getting rid of the 6th level "dear player.." message is worth the money.

 

[GhostThaxian]

o.0

True it is a big too easy to run our there and kill them, especially if your do that bezerker thing, and replace the spear with an axe. A really, long, heavy axe.

 

[Invictus]

Defeating 50 or 100 knights in solo combat.

Doesn't sound realistic or fun to me.

Maybe the result of battle must depend on your troops.Than even if you are 50 lvl and hire large army of peasants you won't be able to beat war party or dark hunters.

 

[Ingolifs]

I think it's the AI that's generally the problem with the cavalry. They seem to mis-time their swings. I see a knight charging towards a farmer, and i'll imagine for a second that this is real life. The farmer should be dead as soon as the knight swings his axe, but he mis-times it and just rams the farmer to the ground for 4 damage, the horse rears up and loses all momentum.

I think part of the reason why you can solo against a troop of charging horsemen with just a great axe, is because they tend to mis-time their swings, leaving them open.

 

[Arcozelo]

Also, whenever I'm on horseback charging an AI on foot, they tend to swing their sword/axe/whatever too soon, so they miss me and I can get a clean hit on them without breaking any sweat. I don't know if the AI is programmed that way so that infantry with polearms can stop charging horses a la braveheart (as I already did), which would require that they start swinging when the charging horse is still quite a bit away.
If so, maybe the AI could be more adapted to the weapon they are wielding, swinging early when they have polearms and later when they have smaller weapons.

The AI on the battlefield is quite exploitable, true, you can get the AI on horses making large circles around you and getting hit periodically without ever changing tactics, in such a way that you can kill any number of knights if you have the patience. I don't know just how possible it is to make a smarter AI, though. AI's are a tough thing to program, I think.

On the other hand, swordplay AI is just amazing. When you fight the tougher guys in the tournament on foot, blade against blade, they will feint you with such skill you'll be crying out "foul!" a lot.

It's just when you get movement into the equation that things get out of hand. Usually when I start going against the AI and the AI backing away, I just have to swing the sword repeatedly and score hit after hit, and the AI just won't defend itself. Also, when it has a shield, it usually blocks the first attack, and then always tries to strike back. You can exploit it easily, especially if you do an overhead attack, get blocked, and quickly strike overhead again. It almost always gets in. Maybe just putting a random factor would do the trick. I don't know.

At first, the game AI is quite challenging and fun to fight, but after a while you figure it out and it's easy to beat. But that happens in every single player computer game. That's the limitation of fighting AI's, I suppose.

If the developing team wants to go into the AI, I would recomend setting up a sticky where people post their AI exploits, so that the exploits can be countered, perhaps making a stronger AI (and hopefully no new exploits).

 

[EppuTheHeppu]

Yep, I agree too...

AI has easy-to-learn tactics, when one-on-one.

M&B's AI needs some more intelligence (sort of). They way: you decide...

Bit too easy in most games. (and they can cheat in some games when player is not seeing them (could be wrong on this one))

That's the reason why I like to play various games online, different players, different tactics.

 

[eatgreencrayons]

Little off topic but bleh, anyone played forza motorsport? You know the feature where you train a driver to run courses for you by driving through a few tracks... then the comp calculates how well you take turns and at what speed you do so and then factors that into summat and after a bunch of calculations it gets a score out of 100 as to how well you perform any given task, then that ai performs in that particular manner?
Wouldn't it just kick ass if you could train soldiers and heroes to fight better with a system like that? dueling, fighting multiple opponents, horseback fighting...

Hell, if it's possible, maybe the ai could learn in a similar way, I've noticed that whenever something changes 1 mob of a particular type, it affects -every- other mob of that type, so perhaps, then, fighting against the same type of foe repeatedly would cause them to learn how to fight against you, or at least gradually improve their skill...

 

[Ilex]

AI needs to me more random to break those "sure stradegies".

 

[Maksha]

A really, long, heavy axe.

You mean like my b-e-a-utiful Heavy Great Axe? Yup, thought so

But to make it harder for myself I normally dismount and fight for a horse these days.

 

[Velik]

I can do as good unmounted dismounted as I do mounted.

My usual tactic is to tell my troops to stay where they spawn, I'll go up on a high ridge/cliff and pepper them with my crossbow or bow. They tend to go for my troops, and 1-2 Horsemen charge my mound.


I think maybe in the future of M&B it would be awesome to have organized formations, like the British did..

Your footmen raise shields and charge the enemy while your archers pepper the enemy with fire.

 

[Mithfindel]

Well, the AI is a tricky part, but depending on how the battlefield is programmed, the following things could, perhaps, be done - some of them are doable on the simple commands the player has, so I imagine they could be done by the AI (would require a simple waypoint system):
- Sweep/skirmish: AI is programmed to targets single enemies, instead of the closest enemy, and then continues x meters off the direction of the tangent before turning back.
- Hammer and anvil: half of the force run left, half right (as determined by random factor) and then both charge on the enemy
- Surround: as infantry advances, the cavalry goes around to attack on the rear of the enemy
- Protect archers: Melee infantry stays with the archers
- High ground: Depending on a formula, the AI seeks a hill / river bank and holds there, if applicable

Additionally, these would likely need a function that analyzes whether the NPC are mounted melee, mounted ranged, melee, or ranged troops, and in what ratios.

 

[JohnathanStrange]

Increasing the AI's ability is an extremely challenging task. We all have played games that we sooner or later are able to exploit because of the AI's inflexibility.

I was wondering if instead of suicidally fighting to the last man or fighting despite being greatly outnumbered or outmatched, if having MORALE added into the AI's calculations would help it. For example:

If the AI has lost x percentage of its starting force it might decide to head for the hills and thus stop us from wiping them out with ease. Or to simulate the ebb and flow of morale, say that for every friendly fighter killed a warparty's morale declines and for every enemy fighter slain, a warparty's morale rises. Too many unanswered losses could break morale even when the warparty itself has plenty of troops left. This would stop the tactic of climbing an unreachable slope and shooting the hapless Dark Knights with impunity: they'd just break and run after three unanswered kills.

Or if FATIGUE were modeled, then the tireless heavily armored knight on his equally armored warhorse would not be so easily able to ride circles around enemy Dark Knights killing them one by one, as they arrive in successive waves.

I'm not talking TOTAL REALISM, I like the Hollywood-style combat: however, I also like a challenge that goes beyond fighting larger numbers and requires us to try new tactics.

Maybe MORALE and FATIGUE would totally unbalance the game in the AI's favor, I don't know.

What do you think? (I realize I'm repeating ideas I made some time ago, but those suggestions were made quite some time ago with almost NO response. I promise I'll drop it after this, and we'll all go kill 100 Knights before lunch).

 

[katank]

Actually, since your AI allies are so incompetent, adding in fatigue would doom you to failure against a huge horde.

As for the morale thing. I agree. However, black knights should almost never run. Peasants should run at the drop of a hat.

 

[BobG]

Morale aside, you would think that at some point, a warband leader would say to himself, "Huh... we were 50 heavily armored knights, and this one guy with a bow on a hill has knocked out half of us. Something's not working here." That's the point -- actually, well past the point -- where a competent war leader would pull his troops out of bow range, and either decide to leave the guy alone, or break out some crossbows and start shooting back.

The needed logic behind the AI is simple: if we cannot get close to the player, pull back and use ranged weapons. The actual coding of that AI may be really complex, especially if you want to keep the behavior realistic, stable and unexploitable. But it's obvious that some kind of enhancement to the AI is needed.

 

[kroc]

i dont know how you guys manage to kill 50-100 knights... i barely manage to kill them in the tournament with 107%....
i cant shoot at all from a horse.. and when i hit somebody, damage 5! damage 12! damage 16!!
thats why i prefer two-hand sword.... damage 26! damage 15! damage 28!... and can use as shield against verious attacks(besides nonmelee)

and by the way....
in real life, when a horse walks OVER you, it doesnt do 4-0 damage, it kills you! at least half to death if youre very lucky... also, when you drop from a horse that died, you get some damage too...