Do you CHEAT?

Do you cheat (As defined in OP)

  • Yes

    Votes: 9 69.2%
  • No (don't cheat here too)

    Votes: 4 30.8%

  • Total voters
    13

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Browsing over the wiki and the forums over the last few years it's fairly clear that a lot of people play PoP using a little or a lot of cheating.
************Importing, code tweaks, using below average AI for combat / campain, reduced damage, save scumming.
 
TBH, calling myself out here, I don't believe it's possible for .. well myself at least, to play PoP on normal settings and not cheat at all, especially save scumming, but also just generally the average AI seems to be overwhelming. I've played this game WB and PoP for years and while I consider myself a legit strategy gamer, I just don't seem to have what it takes to play PoP on full legit mode.

But I honestly doubt many do.
 
I only cheat upon game-testing tweaks or features in general. But during a serious playthrough, never. That would kill the fun and the whole point of enjoying a good game. All combat/campaign/damage settings on maximum, the only thing I alter between is manual or automatic blocking. I play with manual (unrealistic) saving, but that's only for avoiding savegame corruption. Savescumming removes a big part of the challenge for me, I'm not fond of it either.

I wouldn't say PoP is a particularly hard mod after you really got the hang of it both combat-wise and in terms of its features and shortcuts. I mean Warband on its own is not a game that throws a forever doomed situation your way, nothing is impossible in the long run. You can always start over and build up, no matter how badly you screw up. Sure it's challenging many times, but you got workarounds.

Using terrain to your advantage is key, and I usually proceed to cycle through the 3 different battlefields I get and then choose the best for my fit. When setting myself with custom scenarios that exclude using mounted units, I try to initiate/bring battles near mountains and rivers. Knowing which towns and castles are easy to defend is another necessary factor against the odds.

Well, to be completely honest, the only exploit I tend to do is when I try to make two parties collide and for the love of god, the slower one can't manage to catch the faster one, yet it always manages to close the distance again. In such cases I talk to the faster party repeatedly to make it do short stops until the other catches it finally. I consider this an annoyance reduction factor rather than a cheat.
 
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I'm pretty sure your years on the forum and wiki qualify you as having insider information that's only legal if you are in congress.
 
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Insider information? None of that is useful during a playthrough. It's just a matter of experience from completing 15+ playthroughs over the years. When you reach the point of knowing what to expect and how to deal with it.
 
I'm just saying I wouldn't expect anything less from someone with your experience. Sadly as of this post over 50 people looked at this thread and couldn't be bothered to answer the poll. :grin: Really just a bit frustrated with PoP most of the time (over the years) and looking to justify my position.

I still think most people cheat, but of course not everyone does, or would need to.
 
You can play however you want, that is the beauty of gaming. I don't like to cheat in my games as I enjoy earning my stuff the proper way. If I feel like I could enhance a certain aspect without making it easier than it's intended purpose, then I may go with it. Depending what it is. I'm a firm believer in playing how you want to play. Simple as that. I like how PoP challenges me even this many years after I started playing it for the first time.

But tbh who cares if people cheat. If thats what brings them joy to play the mod, then so be it.
 
You can play however you want, that is the beauty of gaming. I don't like to cheat in my games as I enjoy earning my stuff the proper way. If I feel like I could enhance a certain aspect without making it easier than it's intended purpose, then I may go with it. Depending what it is. I'm a firm believer in playing how you want to play. Simple as that. I like how PoP challenges me even this many years after I started playing it for the first time.

But tbh who cares if people cheat. If thats what brings them joy to play the mod, then so be it.
That isn't the point at all. Actually the point if anything is that, I believe most people HAVE to cheat outside some masochists or people with a decade of experience with this mod or some other fringe category player. If my hypothesis is correct (I'm sure it is), one might say that the balance of the mod encourages cheating by the majority, If I was PoP game dev would ask myself, is that what I really wanted.
 
For me, I rarely finish playthroughs anyways so for me the biggest fun is early, mid and mid-late game (when I am starting my kingdom and fighting for survival). Given this, I don't really care to play in a min-max way (by playing horse archer for example). As far as cheating goes, sometimes I decide to play in a unique way so I cheat "just a little" to make my playthrough more fun. Like my latest playthrough I wanted to play a foot character (huge handicap) who uses an arquebus. I made the arguebus much stronger than it is (way more damage) so I can still kill stuff with it reliably though still not as efficiently as a horse archer anyways. Of course this makes barclay much harder to fight, but whatever.

Sometimes I will do what Gorvex describes, talking to a party to slow it down so that a slightly faster party can catch them which for some reason the AI is incapable of doing.
 
Thesis: cheating in singleplayer is fine and morally acceptable.

Justification: in my opinion, cheating in singleplayer is fine. If it does not ruin anyone other's game, then why punish it?

Every single M&B Warband engine mod boils down to exactly the same: gathering a party and capturing the world map. There are plenty of mods out there and if one wanted to complete them all, they would not have enough time in their entire lifetime. Cheating to speed up the process is fine, as the lion's share of the gameplay across various modifications is repetitive, similar and plainly dull. Without cheating or modifying the source of OSP/ LSP mods in singleplayer, I would not have been able to complete many of them. Time is money, you know. Why waste it?

Of course there are plenty of unique mods that add more than just weapons, a new world map, armors, NPCs and textures, but they are in minority.
Think of a cancelled mod 'Crusaders Way to Expiation'. It has innovative shaders, scripts, presentations and even a custom launcher. For such labor of love mods like it, Sands of Faith, PoP, TLD, Deeds of Arms and Chivalry, Light and Darkness and many more which I have not played yet, playing without cheats is alright as there are plenty of other elements of the game to dive into. For the majority, however, speeding up the playthrough through cheating is alright as there is nothing else to dive into. The rest of the mods is just a reskin without bringing anything new to the table.

Conclusion: cheating in singleplayer is fine as it saves time; it also is morally right since it does not ruin others' fun.
 
I cheat in PoP. I handicap myself, I save scum, I export/import, I spawn troops, I abuse things. I do ANYTHING within my power to break a game, and I enjoy it. Do I need to cheat in PoP, especially to get the custom knighthood order? Not really, but did I want to? Oh yeah. Every game has different learning curves but ultimately the more experience you have with them, the more you understand how to play them.

Some games I play legit, some games I don't. And sometimes it's not limited to SP games, I do what I enjoy - period.
 
Thesis: cheating in singleplayer is fine and morally acceptable.
Conclusion: cheating in singleplayer is fine as it saves time; it also is morally right since it does not ruin others' fun.
I totally agree, I guess my point is, I wish I didn't have to cheat to beat any MB mod and be able to finish it in a reasonable period of time, because while I agree it's OK to cheat, I would prefer not to. Not really much I can do about that in PoP though, it's just too crazy. :mrgreen:
 
I did not cheat when I completed it in 3.8 a couple years ago. Never cheat in games anymore as I feels it defeats the purpose of it, so to continue playing the mod and resorting to cheats to deal with all the BS from 3.9 I simply play something that feels more rewarding.
 
Warband is grindy and boring, and since most mods just add stuff rather than removing it, they make the grind worse. Unless you really want to sit around doing the same repetitive things for ages, cheating yourself a bunch of money is the best way to enjoy a mod. I think the mods that make you start from nothing like thebase game are really missing the point of what people play warband for.
 
Do you guys count playing on 1/2 or 1/4 damage cheating? I try to avoid it, but I find PoP better balanced for reduced damage due to how flimsy armour is in this mod. Top tier troops, which take so long to train, die almost as quickly as middling tier troops otherwise.
 
Warband is grindy and boring, and since most mods just add stuff rather than removing it, they make the grind worse. Unless you really want to sit around doing the same repetitive things for ages, cheating yourself a bunch of money is the best way to enjoy a mod. I think the mods that make you start from nothing like thebase game are really missing the point of what people play warband for.
I personally enjoy the early + mid-game the most, "the grindy parts" as you would call them I guess.

The reason many people find the start "grindy" is they min-max. For example, I saw a playthrough on youtbube where a guy played a horse archer and would fight Vanskerries Solo by riding round them until they exausted their ammo and would then shoot/lance all of them down 1-by-1 by using extra quivers of arrows which he brings in his stash. He would repeat this many times and gain lots of money this way. Is this legit? Sure! It's not really cheating. But for me it defeats the purpose of the game because he could have saved himself this grind and just cheated in 50k denars.

There are many other people that basically do the same things over and over because they are "the most efficient", so no wonder they find it grindy!
 
Do you guys count playing on 1/2 or 1/4 damage cheating? I try to avoid it, but I find PoP better balanced for reduced damage due to how flimsy armour is in this mod. Top tier troops, which take so long to train, die almost as quickly as middling tier troops otherwise.
For me I like to play 1/2 sometimes but don't maximize my own armour. I just take the one that looks the best and sometimes even fight without a helmet!!!
 
Thesis: cheating in singleplayer is fine and morally acceptable.

Justification: in my opinion, cheating in singleplayer is fine. If it does not ruin anyone other's game, then why punish it?

Every single M&B Warband engine mod boils down to exactly the same: gathering a party and capturing the world map. There are plenty of mods out there and if one wanted to complete them all, they would not have enough time in their entire lifetime. Cheating to speed up the process is fine, as the lion's share of the gameplay across various modifications is repetitive, similar and plainly dull. Without cheating or modifying the source of OSP/ LSP mods in singleplayer, I would not have been able to complete many of them. Time is money, you know. Why waste it?

Of course there are plenty of unique mods that add more than just weapons, a new world map, armors, NPCs and textures, but they are in minority.
Think of a cancelled mod 'Crusaders Way to Expiation'. It has innovative shaders, scripts, presentations and even a custom launcher. For such labor of love mods like it, Sands of Faith, PoP, TLD, Deeds of Arms and Chivalry, Light and Darkness and many more which I have not played yet, playing without cheats is alright as there are plenty of other elements of the game to dive into. For the majority, however, speeding up the playthrough through cheating is alright as there is nothing else to dive into. The rest of the mods is just a reskin without bringing anything new to the table.

Conclusion: cheating in singleplayer is fine as it saves time; it also is morally right since it does not ruin others' fun.
Depends on your approach. Based on what you wrote, it seems like you play mods to "beat them". I play mods to... "play them". I rarely end up finishing a playthrough, usually I just get bored or get "close enough" to victory where I know that it's just a matter of time.

For me, I like to play the mods in "non-optimal" ways but ones that are fun for me. Even if I end up losing or can't win I just start a new play through
 
Do you guys count playing on 1/2 or 1/4 damage cheating? I try to avoid it, but I find PoP better balanced for reduced damage due to how flimsy armour is in this mod. Top tier troops, which take so long to train, die almost as quickly as middling tier troops otherwise.
Yes that is "cheating" as you are playing below 'normal' difficulty. But it's also exactly how I played through PoP for the same reasons and others, like how npc lords get free endless resupply of elite troops every week without money :grin:
 
Yes that is "cheating" as you are playing below 'normal' difficulty. But it's also exactly how I played through PoP for the same reasons and others, like how npc lords get free endless resupply of elite troops every week without money :grin:
IMO the biggest "cheating" that one can do is to save scum. Because that is literally the biggest advantage one could get. Imagine if the AI could save-scum and "load" a game after you win a tough battle?
 
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