Do you want more complex features, such as proper formation behaviour in Bannerlord?

Do you want more complex features in Bannerlord?


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I'm currently reading your mod's description on Nexus, and will try it. It looks like you're trying to help the devs fixing the game, it's cool.
Cause after several hundreds (even above thousand) hours of playing I'm clearly deceived by the battles (and unconsitant forest maps).

+ lately looks like the AI never attack and will settle for cowardly-mediocre turtling. At last, I attacked an army like I was 300 vs 580, and still they were not attacking. And I checked their units, they were not (the IA) having like 200 recruits, which could be a matter justifying the non-attacking behaviour.
AI calculates its power by tiers of units, quantity and types of units (cav is +50% power). Power is represented by the green-red bars on the strategic map and actual field battle / siege. Esentially if enemy army is running away from you its gonna be defensive, if it is running towards you its gonna be offensive. It is going to run towards you only if it has more power than you. This all applies in both RBM and vanilla, we disabled the defensive tactics for attacker AI to avoid situations when two AI commanded armies might just camp corners of map.
 
I'm really not trying to **** on RBM in this thread but it really should be paired with some campaign adjustments so large battles ate much more rare. Otherwise I'm spending like three RL hours trying to a win single siege.

I can give a few tests just reducing the volunteering rate by a lot and seeing what happens, but there will probably need to be a lot of other adjustments as well, like minor factons just growing larger over time then stampeding into the weakest faction and making factions more willing to peace out when a bunch of lords are prisoner.
 
I don't think a poll on the forum about more complex features will change TW's mind. They know full well that we wish to have those. They also know that we are a tiny fraction of the playerbase, and a particularly zealous one at that. And it is very clear that we are not the part of the market they're trying to sell BL to. Also, I would be shocked if the result of the poll was anything else but overwhelming support.
who are they selling this to cause i doubt many people even heard about bannerlord, we are their only customers. Do casuals even play this game? Maybe when it first came out and after seeing how janky it was they probably gave up and went back to fortnite.
 
who are they selling this to cause i doubt many people even heard about bannerlord, we are their only customers. Do casuals even play this game? Maybe when it first came out and after seeing how janky it was they probably gave up and went back to fortnite.
The estimated sales back in mid 2020 were between 5 and 10 million with Steam data alone. God knows how many more they sold since then and at other vendors. How many people are on the forum again? We are the small, vocal minority.
 
who are they selling this to cause i doubt many people even heard about bannerlord, we are their only customers. Do casuals even play this game?
There are like 10,000 people playing this game right now (as in the last thirty minutes or so) and maybe 100 forum regulars.
 
XD What documents you checking mate?

I'm here rocking thucydides as my primary. Who you got?

Almost every classical historian alive will tell you the greeks fought in semi coherent mobs. The spartans were slightly (and I mean slightly) more organized using music to keep an even pace, which other classical greeks did not do, so when they advanced there was no way for them to tell how to keep pace, meaning parts of the line would bulge. Then they would charge without much consideration of formation, opening all sorts of gaps in their lines, but hoping the shock would carry the day (if it did not, then you get some seriously bloody battles as mobs of hoplites mush together in a rough line and murder each other relatively slowly)

Coherent ranks and files is attested in the hellenic period, which is after the classical period. And after hoplites (as defined as a guy carrying a hoplon, you know, that big ol' shield) when greek armies were mostly using pikes. We don't have a lot of great sources for the classical powerhouses of athens and sparta militarily at this time (and neither power was actually important in the period. Sparta tried twice to rebuild its wider empire and macedon trivially trounced them both times), and the dominant city state of Thebes were burned to the ground by alexander and so we have very little for them too, but we DO have good sources of the macedonians, and how easily they folded the existing city state and ethnos militaries into their own phalangite system.
The Greeks advanced in coherent ranks to within charge distance, and ATTEMPTED to maintain those ordered ranks on the final charge as best they could. Apparently, both sides typically charged a SHORT distance, and met somewhere in the middle, with only modest disruption.

There were several ploys used, such as faking a charge so the enemy would charge almost the entire distance and begin to scatter before the REAL charge was ordered. Taking a charge at the halt risked getting overwhelmed by the inertia of the charging side, but allowed for a more orderly formation if you were able to hold. In several mentioned situations, the armies approached without charging, and spent the better part of the day poking and jabbing from maximum spear range, with no decisive outcome. In at least one confrontation, the two sides pressed together, turning it into a shoving match to topple the opposing front rank over backwards, with multiple ranks behind them all adding weight to the push. There's very little mention of disorderly "mob" attacks except under unusual circumstances, such as when attacked unexpectedly while encamped, or in broken terrain.

Roman tactics under Gaius Julius (later known as "Caesar") were often similar, with a methodical approach, then a brief halt to throw pila or javelins, followed by a short charge to contact. Again, tricks were sometimes used to disrupt the opposing charge or disorder their ranks. Anything beyond that short charge distance risked a disordered front line and high casualties.

Even the bronze age clashes show signs of having been conducted in orderly ranks (aside from a few preliminary contests between opposing champions), and even the Stele of Vultures depicts a row of spearmen with large shields in tight formation.

Macedonia packed more spear points into a smaller area by use of longer pikes and forgoing the large shields. That doesn't mean that the Greeks fought as disorderly mobs.

The tactics of warfare were modified and improved over time, and new tricks learned, but the imperative to dress that line and maintain a solid wall of shields still carries into modern march traditions. It's not about aesthetics: if you don't maintain that firm shield wall, you die.

Thucydides stated a lot of clearly incorrect "facts", as did virtually every other writer of antiquity, since the primary aim was to tell a good story, with historical accuracy as a secondary goal at best. One has to treat their writings with about the same level of skepticism as one would for a modern Hollywood production "based on" a historical incident.
 
Thucydides stated a lot of clearly incorrect "facts", as did virtually every other writer of antiquity, since the primary aim was to tell a good story, with historical accuracy as a secondary goal at best. One has to treat their writings with about the same level of skepticism as one would for a modern Hollywood production "based on" a historical incident.
You know your stuff. My favorite from the period is reporting 300 ships for any large (100+) fleet. Like today on the internet everyone is 2 meters high with 200 IQ and 30 cm.
 
Like today on the internet everyone is 2 meters high with 200 IQ and 30 cm.
Wait a minute, you mean that I'm not? Here I was under the impression that the "American Wild West" was populated entirely by body builders and fashion models. Hollywood wouldn't lie or exaggerate about such things, would they?
 
Thucydides stated a lot of clearly incorrect "facts", as did virtually every other writer of antiquity, since the primary aim was to tell a good story, with historical accuracy as a secondary goal at best. One has to treat their writings with about the same level of skepticism as one would for a modern Hollywood production "based on" a historical incident.
Yes, but Stratigo was asking for your sources.
 
Bannerlord AI understands only 2 things at the moment (and this is on deep level which we mostly cannot access) center of formation (and its general properties like its width) and individual soldier (and its intentionally one soldier in singular) and the AI can focus only on one of these things at the time. So the moment formation becomes loose, reinforcements arrive and formations start to reform (and their center is few hundred metres of), etc the AI may start doing funky things. On the other hand if AI understood that there is mass of soldiers in front of it it might tank performance, or maybe it would not (and this is considered complex BTW, hence the name of thread).

Yes - this is part of the reason why Realistic Battle AI may very well prove to be as important as the main mod that addressed the unrealistically thin armor.
 
Slitherine utilized a concept similar to "rubber bands" to enforce formations in their "Legion: Arena" tactical game. Each individual soldier could move on his own, but would have a strong preference for moving into or staying in a position in the formation, unless drawn by something else. An opposing soldier within a very short distance could temporarily override that, causing the individual to charge and stretch the "rubber band", but that soldier would be drawn back into formation as soon as the nearby threat was removed.

The formation itself should react to enemy formations, so you'd end up with two opposing "armies" squaring off against each other, except for a few soldiers on the fringes reacting to local threats, such as additional enemy formations after the first or scattered individuals nearby. No "mob" behavior, at least until the unit loses all organization under pressure and breaks down. Reinforcements should move toward the existing formation, until/unless that formation is broken, at which point they will form their own formation and the survivors of the broken one should race to fill spots in the rear of the new one as soon as they're out of combat. Typically, the formation should begin a charge against an opposing formation from well outside of the individual's charge range, so you wouldn't have the front rank charging on their own initiative while the following ranks stand there like idiots.

What we have now doesn't resemble medieval combat in any way. The individual combat works quite well, but the tactical AI is awful, bordering on non-existent.
 
All I wanted was WB (features of WB + VC DLC) on a new engine, that supports larger, more detailed map, larger battles, more modern graphics. Slap on top of that battle formations, smarter AI (Horse Archers circle around, cavalry charge couched, infantry brace spears/hold shield wall, AI actually using formations and tactics) and more diplomacy, or politics, options (more criteria/options for starting wars and calling for peace, trade alliances, conspiracy with foreign lords, (maybe?) kidnapping enemy marshal, etc.).
 
Slitherine utilized a concept similar to "rubber bands" to enforce formations in their "Legion: Arena" tactical game. Each individual soldier could move on his own, but would have a strong preference for moving into or staying in a position in the formation, unless drawn by something else. An opposing soldier within a very short distance could temporarily override that, causing the individual to charge and stretch the "rubber band", but that soldier would be drawn back into formation as soon as the nearby threat was removed.
We are actually using similiar rubberband method in the mod.
 
We are actually using similiar rubberband method in the mod.
All i know it that you did some real magic with RBM and now battles and formation fighting are immensely fun to me instead of frustrating like in vanilla.

If only TW would stop breaking things like horse archers AI since it isn't improving them anyway... :roll:
 
All i know it that you did some real magic with RBM and now battles and formation fighting are immensely fun to me instead of frustrating like in vanilla.

If only TW would stop breaking things like horse archers AI since it isn't improving them anyway... :roll:
Unfortunatelly 1.6.4 is even more broken, so far we are trigerring native game crashes when the AI mod is on for some semi-random reason which we cannot properly pinpoint.
 
Unfortunatelly 1.6.4 is even more broken, so far we are trigerring native game crashes when the AI mod is on for some semi-random reason which we cannot properly pinpoint.
I've heard about that so i'm sticking with 1.6.3 for now but damn, even more broken? has TW atleast acknowledged these problems so far? didn't even saw them commenting about the horse archer AI which is completely bonkers right now..
 
I've heard about that so i'm sticking with 1.6.3 for now but damn, even more broken? has TW atleast acknowledged these problems so far? didn't even saw them commenting about the horse archer AI which is completely bonkers right now..
There was a bug report for the ranged AI as soon as 1.6.3 dropped in beta and they still pushed that crap to main, now with 1.6.4 they ****ed up marriages and the goblin children.

Makes me wonder what the **** they are going to break in 1.6.5. Maybe they have an internal contest on who can be the most creative.
 
There was a bug report for the ranged AI as soon as 1.6.3 dropped in beta and they still pushed that crap to main, now with 1.6.4 they ****ed up marriages and the goblin children.

Makes me wonder what the **** they are going to break in 1.6.5. Maybe they have an internal contest on who can be the most creative.
lmao, the only explanation i can think for this is that they don't have strict version control and some dev working on X ends up uploading his part of the work to be released in the next build alongside older code that breaks things that had already been solved by another dev responsible for that area, again and again...

That or they are making many more under the hood changes than they actually present in the changelogs and end up breaking things bad by messing with them all the time.
 
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