Development Update #5: Ranged Combat Update

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Greetings warriors of Calradia!

In this Development Update video, we take a look at the upcoming changes to ranged combat. And as always, a text version can be found below for those of you that prefer to read.

Greetings warriors of Calradia, and welcome to development update #5!

By now, you should already know the format, so let’s jump straight into the video!

RANGED COMBAT UPDATE
A substantial change to ranged combat is in the works that aims to present you with a more meaningful choice when selecting a ranged weapon by making each of them more distinct from one another.

Currently, all ranged weapons share the same aiming system, with the initial crosshair and accuracy timings being the same across the board. With this update, each weapon will have its own unique aiming curve. For example, short bows will reach their maximum accuracy faster and be able to hold their aim for longer, while longbows will take more time to reach their maximum accuracy and have a shorter window for aiming, but will deal higher single-shot damage.

This change applies to all ranged weapons, including bows, crossbows and throwing weapons, giving each weapon a unique feeling in this subtle but impactful update to ranged gameplay.

EDUCATION
Education is a feature that will allow you to interact with and shape your offspring and other young clan members as they reach certain ages throughout their childhood. This will present you with a number of choices similar to your own character creation for each progression stage, giving you much more control over how your clan develops over time.

MANGONEL PROJECTILES
An update to mangonels is on its way that will bring them closer to their historical anti-infantry routes by giving you the option to fling multiple smaller projectiles towards the enemy instead of a single boulder.

LAME HORSES
A horse! A horse! my kingdom for a horse!

Horses that fall in combat can now be crippled or even killed outright, with lame horses that go on to fall in future battles being permanently downed. So be sure to look after your four-legged friend or be prepared to meet the same fate as King Richard III.

RADIAL ORDER MENU
A new radial order menu is being worked on to make the game more accessible for those of you who are playing with game controllers. This menu is still a work in progress and we are very much open to feedback on it so please make sure to let us know what you think!

PRISONER RECRUITMENT
A change to prisoner recruitment is on the horizon that aims to bring some balance to the feature and add a little depth by making recruitment slightly more difficult. With the change, recruiting prisoners will incur a morale penalty for your party. However, we do also plan to add perks that will make recruitment easier and that will reduce the morale penalty.

FOLLOW COMMAND
We recently added a new way to follow parties on the world map to make things a little less tedious when performing certain tasks. To do this, you simply need to hold down the Left Alt key and click on the party that you want to follow.

BATTANIAN CHAINMAIL
Finally, we have a new Battanian armour on its way. This armour features a decorative bronze disk and tartan shawl over a sturdy chainmail vest.

OUTRO
And that’s it for development update #5! Please make sure to leave a reply in the comment section below to let us know what you think of the changes.

Thanks for watching, and we hope to see you again next time!
 
Actually it won't affect your order speed. Only thing different would be the shortcut. Since those(shield wall and loose) didn't change positions, it would still take the same amount of time.

We disabled the mouse selection for orders in order to not lock the camera while giving orders(same as before) so on keyboard, players will still use the keyboard to give orders. Only thing changed is visuals and the F3-F7 command locations, for keyboard users.
Please allow us the option to keep the visuals we have right now for the order when we don't use a gamepad. The radial menu is horrible to look at and much more intrusive/immersion breaking.
 
Very cool! I'm glad range is being looked at, can you guys please look at the Bound Cross issue? It does not show up in shop and has a price of 250K!

I want to make a crossbow character but not if I can't get my hands on the best crossbow.
 
These changes look really nice. IMPORTANT: Do not release this update without first making sure that the Ai ranged units are properly programmed to handle the new aiming system for the different weapons, they still have not had their Ai fixed after 1.5 was implemented over 2 months ago and this is a huge problem. Please make sure that the Ai can handle the new changes before pushing the branch to live, thank you.
Ahahaha, already imagining the posts after the update :iamamoron:
100% sure it will have (some) problems, that's the way the development is being done. The question is how much will it impact the game and will they make it work, eventually...
On a second thought on the AI, I don't think there will be much problems, it's a matter of tweaking timing values (some kind of delay). Some troops may become stronger or weaker, nothing major.
The game might become less spammy and slow down the pace of battles, with more impact on multiplayer, which is not necessarily good.
It will also increase the difficulty right from the start, which means new players might become frustrated if they encounter experienced ones and might discourage them to continue to play because the game is kinda of slower pace than other modern shooter games and let's be honest fewer and fewer people are playing multiplayer.
I'm fine and agree with the idea of having a "hard to master" game but you also have to think that the industry and most new players are not used that, it naturally becomes much slower because you have no firearms, so making the game "artificially" slower by adding timings will be a no-no for some guys.

Suggestion/idea: Having to wait for a shot kinda sucks, but why does it suck? Well, because you see you have to wait for the shot, and is kinda distracting having the crosshair that big and always expanding and contracting. That said I think devs could test the mechanic without having the crosshair showing up when expanding from a certain point/size, maybe having it fading in and fading out (opacity) and only showing when the shot has decent accuracy/the crosshair is smaller.
So, click -- expand crosshair and until it fades out -- delay-- fade in the crosshair when almost fully contracted.

That's it, fade the crosshair in and out, remove/reduce artificial Inaccuracy, keep/reduce the delay (for accuracy) time.
I'm assuming the "delay" or the time to make the crosshair stable only affects accuracy (or vice-versa), hopefully it doesn't change any other value like speed of projectile.

This makes it look less artificial; this way you really have people mastering the timings and accuracy instead of looking for the visual clue; It's less frustrating and distracting; You don't have to reduce the accuracy and have delays some much artificially because you naturally can't aim as well without the crosshair; Fast paced game.


On other topic, when will TW focus on the CORE PROBLEMS identified over and over again in the forums. I mean, the things you are putting in the game are essentially layers on top of layers of code or features, while core problems are left behind.
By core I mean: FIXING models, textures, animations, graphics, audio, performance (doing good on this one), AI - combat (small scale - troops vs troops), battles (actual strategy - army vs army), campaign (purpose, objectives, strategy - armies vs armies and kingdoms vs kingdoms), AI - trade (small scale) to big scale economy, AI - politics ... you get it by now. Then, core mechanics (that the player interacts with) - for the AI it's simplified but for the player you need it fully functional and with proper depth to it - combat, recruitment, politics, trAde, (doesn't)workshops, SmItHiNg, (UzmeLeSs) sCeNEs, NpCc InTeRaCCtiONs, DiE_AloGs... you know the deal
 
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Is the dev using a mod for that lime green clan color?
"Leave a comment telling us what you think..." I think you get enough comments about what your players think already lol.
I wish they would split the ranged skills into other attribute sets, it absolutely garbage to have 3 mutually exclusive skills in 1 attribute.
Put throwing into vigor, put Xbow in INT, but Bow in either CUN or END.
Or just drop attributes completely and let us have actually freedom in how we build our character!
 
EDUCATION
Education is a feature that will allow you to interact with and shape your offspring and other young clan members as they reach certain ages throughout their childhood. This will present you with a number of choices similar to your own character creation for each progression stage, giving you much more control over how your clan develops over time.

Hey, morning!

I have a question regarding Children and Education....

Will the child inherit some portion of the Parent's skills? Like the average of the Paren'ts regarding all skills?
 
Love the education system. Lots of potential there for further expansion, like dedicating a follower to be a teacher, or create buildings such as schools that upgrade to academies for further benefits. Could be a really cool way to build the dynasty and clan long-term.
 
Also crossbow bolts are all the same, the only difference is some have 18 and some have 20. It would be nice if they had quality variations and a stacked version like arrows do.
 
Rycon Caldestan cry with me bro.

FOLLOW COMMAND
We recently added a new way to follow parties on the world map to make things a little less tedious when performing certain tasks. To do this, you simply need to hold down the Left Alt key and click on the party that you want to follow.

Instead of that combination of keys, why not get back the "Accompany" function by RMB? Also applicable to Lords and their parties.
This mod for Bannerlord ( Accompany (Follow) Party) recuperated this function from Warband a few months ago by using the RMB function key.
 
:arrow:
We disabled the mouse selection for orders in order to not lock the camera while giving orders(same as before) so on keyboard, players will still use the keyboard to give orders.
If there is going to be a radial menu covering the center of the screen and your character why wouldn't you be able to use your mouse for it? Not like you can effectively block/attack without being able to see or give movement orders while the wheel is still in the way.
 
I agree with @Craven4 , if the radio menu does not gives keyboard players any extra functionality than what we have now, than this radio menu actually hurts the current experience, which is saying something. Please give us the option to not use this radio menu.

I am one of the those that actually prefer controllers when I play action oriented games and I would still much prefer TW spent time on this rather than controller support. We need more tactical control of our units, please!
 
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I agree with @Craven4 , if the radio menu does not gives keyboard players any extra functionality than what we have know , than this radio menu actually hurts
At least someone will make a mod to give us the option on the first day a radial menu comes out(too bad for captain players). Would be nice if they can keep this on beta branch while collecting feedback and not push this on everyone like crush through.
 
At least someone will make a mod to give us the option on the first day a radial menu comes out(too bad for captain players). Would be nice if they can keep this on beta branch while collecting feedback and not push this on everyone like crush through.
We're not changing our release system, so this will first go to the beta branch to collect feedback. That is not changing. What happens while the feature is on the beta branch depends entirely on the feedback.

Also to answer your other question, enabling mouse selection for order means locking the mouse movement. That means players cannot look around while giving orders. "Go there", "face this way", "left click to move" orders have to be given with the direction the player was facing when they opened the order menu. I think it's obvious that how bad it would feel(I know because we iterated on this).

And like I said, I feel the same way, we can offer an option to change the visuals to the vertical bars since for keyboard users the only thing changed would be the visuals and the F3-F7 shortcuts. Implementing the vertical bars will depend on the feedback and the discussions we will have internally.
 
And like I said, I feel the same way, we can offer an option to change the visuals to the vertical bars since for keyboard users the only thing changed would be the visuals and the F3-F7 shortcuts.
Please do !
As you said, we need to keep control of the character while giving orders, and this horrible radial in the middle of the screen is hampering that. It's adequate for controllers (as it reflect how you interact with the pad) but it's not needed and actively annoying for keyboards.
 
We're not changing our release system, so this will first go to the beta branch to collect feedback. That is not changing. What happens while the feature is on the beta branch depends entirely on the feedback.

A few more things that might be relevant to this update:

Range experience - Currently the way range xp works doesn't reward good gameplay, you basically get a little bit of xp no matter where you hit. There should be bonus xp for headshots giving the player bonus xp for making good shots for players getting their William Tell on. Maybe it could even be linked to damage. The current system feels so bland and makes you want to exploit it because of that, been trying to get my crossbow skill to 150 and it feels like an impossible grind without the killing allies exploit. I really hope this is something that gets addressed with the range upgrades.

The way xp use to work for lances was awesome as it rewarded taking risk of going in and doing couched lance attacks, now it is lame and you get what feels like that same xp from a limp wrist thrust attack. I wish you guys would go back to that system at least as far as the more damage you do the more xp you get.

Force spear/polearm use - There really needs to be a command to get troops to use their spears, I made a pikeman unit and they all stand there with swords out. It would make for much better infantry unit combat as you could do a mix of pikes and voulges and kind of create Flemish or Swiss infantry type tactics. Now they just stand around with swords and get their ass kicked, hope you guys can add a command to force use polearms. Nothing worse than training a bunch of units up to pikeman to find out they are completely useless.
 
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