Does the AI get instant armies?

[Bannerman Man]

But the player bonus is indefensible to me and you'd have to be disingenuous to think it's a) a good approach to solve the instaspawn zombie armies and b) healthy for the game as a whole.

I get your concern, and I wouldn't be surprised if the devs do too. They lurk on this forum constantly.

But personally, I just don't see how having one entity on the entire map getting slight preferential treatment on one small aspect really affects the overall balance of the game all that much in the current moment. We've already agreed the player is overpowered, but this in particular seems relatively minor IMO compared to other aspects of the game, and if it gets people to shut up about lords escaping I can live with it. And what's the quick and easy solution to insta-armies then? Timing out lords for a bit might make the snowballing issue come right back and I'm sure the devs would rather not touch it out of fear something else breaks.

I haven't seen any proposals put forth yet that aren't easily countered by the two issues outlined in the previous post.

You seem to have a relatively good grasp on programming. Can't you make a mod in the mean time to help out others who share your concerns? That way you can implement the exact solution you think would work and the devs might see it and take notice. I bet they even really appreciate people who take the time to work on a fix for issues the community have so they can focus their attention on developing features. I'm not trying to shut down your criticism, but it seems obvious to me the answer is to have patience because it will be worked out eventually.

And I'm not saying this thread is an over-reaction. This thread has had some good discussion.

Edit: And as far as this goes:

Usually a shortcut is the longest path.

They aren't shortcuts, they're temporary solutions for temporary problems.

 

[drallim33]

So if I have to walk 4 days to my settlement

You might also say, "no one is going to walk all the way back to their settlement

Yes, that is exactly what I would say. Because no one is going to walk all the way back to their settlement.

Fact is almost all the lords ever captured are captured by AI lords, and put in AI dungeons. They escape very quickly and respawn with a free army. All this other crap is just distracting from the problem at hand.

Snowballing was a major issue upon release.

Every defence this ridiculous system of instantly escaping lords respawning with free armies seems to fall back on this eventually. Nobody actually seems to be arguing that the current system is good. Everyone agrees it's bad, even the devs. So why do we have a system everyone thinks is bad? Fear of snowballing.

Well I've yet to see any evidence that a more sane escape rate causes snowballing. I tested it myself and saw no significant difference. No faction got wiped out. No faction got bigger than it normally does, Khuzait has got big in every game I have played. Battania got caught out of position all the way down in the desert fighting the Aserai, when the entire Khuzait host descended on their homeland. This has nothing to do with prisoners, just the AI being bad at dealing with spread-out empires. Despite this, they actually had more towns after the 500 days than they did in vanilla. Pretty much all the significant gains came when a faction got double or triple teamed. Nobody really lost much ground in 1v1 wars. Again this has nothing to do with prisoners. Respawning prisoners doesn't make any difference when you are in a three-front war.

The snowballing thing is a red herring. If prisoner escape rates have any effect on it, the effect is minor. It doesn't matter how good you are at designing systems, if you design them based on a false premise then it's not going to be good.

Seems to me that the devs are still afraid of this snowballing thing and that is the root cause of the system we have now. It wasn't like this originally, they are not dumb enough to think the current way is ideal. It is the way it is now out of fear of some problem, that isn't actually a problem. There is some "replacement lords" system in the works, but if they still think snowballing is a problem, and that it can be fixed by spamming free armies everywhere, then it is not going to address the cause of this issue.

There is nothing wrong with gaining a castle or two after wiping out your enemy's armies. That's what supposed to happen. That's not "snowballing", that's called winning a war. If some lord wants to get back into the fight then he should contact the captor and negotiate a ransom. This cheating AI nonsense is lazy, I don't care if it's early access. You want lords back out in the field in one day then pay the ransom. A fat ransom. A king's ransom if it's a king.

Imprisoned lords should have something like a five or ten day miminum before they can escape. One day is not enough. This would stop the absurd situations when you get attacked by the same lord multiple times during a single siege. It's easy to implement and would not cause any snowballing.

OR if they are going to escape instantly then they should not get free armies. They should start with nothing in their home town so it take them a while to build up. If they are dumb enough to get captured by looters mere moments after respawning, well they deserve it.

Either one of these simple changes would solve the issue entirely with no ill effects. Or just lower the overall escape chance?

But they just traded it for a possibly worse issue, and the way they handle it through the 'player bonus' as an ostensible means to just shut up the players about prisoners escaping doesn't even address the fact that people largely care that they escape because they're tired of the zombie lord instaspawn armies.

I agree having the player bonus does not address anything. It's a band-aid on top of another band-aid. Escape rate should be the same for player and AI alike.

Living in fear if snowballing is living in the past. That was one month ago, there have been tons of patches since then. Garrisons are bigger, militia just got buffed by 50%, and they made factions not declare war on the whole world at once.

 

[SkiFreeYeti]

Snowballing fix: Give the AI leaders some brains and proper diplomatic functions and the basic failsafe motivations that prevented drawn out steamrolls that were present in warband, i.e. dogpiling a dominant force in a desperate state, as well as some of the stuff that the old diplo mod made up, NAP's etc. Has no involvement whatsoever in the problem at hand here.

Instaspawn lord fix: get rid of it. No AI cheats. Give them some common sense and a horse by default, leave them, as the player does, at low HP, and let them run to park and heal in a damn settlement, recruit daily from said settlement or whatever. Lords aren't just instantly back in the fight and spend downtime at towns, no more conjuring armies out of thin air, no more pointlessly-low jailbreak chance. No, it's not a good idea to have them get free training either if the player doesn't have access to them, have them sensibly purchase horses, fix bandits being absolute speedsters and have them farm bandits. Next linked problem shows up though:

Autoresolve killing high tier units fix: Itty bitty bits of code that say basic things like archers should get x amount of preliminary hits based on proportion of cavalry/infantry enemies, cavalry should get x amount of preliminary hits based on same composition, shield units should negate damage based on overall troop level, overall troop level / skill levels should imply they block chambered hits as the AI does x amount of times, and provide an exponential bonus to number to attacks vs received attacks based on the amount of troops, i.e. an outnumbered bonus. These alone should make autoresolve less trash, BUT, there's also another problem

surgery is pointless. 200 skill levels for a 2% chance to avoid death? I think not. Massive, I'm talking 10 to 20x effectiveness bonus. Maxed out surgery should be talking something like 50%-100% save rate compared to how other skills scale up. That's right, at 300+ surgery I'm expecting there to be a reduction of at least 80 to all deaths because of the investment required for such a thing, then apply this skill to nobles and bam. Still vulnerable due to wounded dudes (probably amp up the slow from wounded soldiers,) but game is already that much better with this alone. AI now becomes at least as efficient as taking prisoners as a player, which provides some high tier unit replenishment.

Fix troop xp gains. No more "entire troop type gains xp for every single hit" causing the most optimal plan to be weird micro games of "send one platoon to fight looters forever." archers don't need even more overpowered crap, revert to simplistic "for each kill any of your guys does, your entire army gains a fixed amount of xp distributed equally," ai is no longer boned and stuck with 50% recruits, higher tier units show up more but die just as easily etc., battle participation is encouraged, armies of relatively equal strength have incentive to fight one another for them sweet gains instead of just "outblob them" because your blob will see a lower xp-per-troop yield due to it being equally distributed, still works, but is the safer more consistent method, albeit less rewarding. Like in the old days, higher tier units give much greater xp gains meaning looters aren't the meta for troop training anymore.

Riding should affect overworld speed imho, base the cavalry speed bonus off the riding skills of mounted units including companions, well-trained nobles should know how to navigate better, scouting should also lead to scales-with-level, not perk-only movement speed bonus. This makes it less of a dead skill, prevents lords from being bandit fodder, etc.

 

[Bannerman Man]

Because no one is going to walk all the way back to their settlement.

The (realistic) scenario I've used for this case is that you barely win the battle and and decide to head back home with all the lords you've captured to recruit and regroup. Are you saying you never return to any of your settlements even if you've lost 75% of your army?

What if you win a battle on the defensive to begin with? Then you can deposit all of your freshly captured lords and head out to enemy territory with plenty of time to spare. That's another realistic scenario.

If you do nothing but curb-stomp the enemy left and right with barely any casualties then you can expect an average time to escape in the ballpark of 13 days.

Fact is almost all the lords ever captured are captured by AI lords, and put in AI dungeons. They escape very quickly and respawn with a free army. All this other crap is just distracting from the problem at hand.

If this was the "problem at hand" all along, why did you originally post a nice and neatly formatted comment that makes no mention whatsoever of AI lords? I feel like I'm aiming at a moving target haha.

I'll level with you though. I'm not that concerned with snowballing either, and I never was. But I can at least understand the reasons why the devs took the steps they did and that it's all temporary. You can't deny the changes they've made from day 1 until now have been effective in slowing faction steamrolling, so obviously they know what they are doing, right? Can't you just trust them to get it all worked out in due time?

If you've already found a mod that fixes escape chances then why not find one that fixes the "whack-a-mole" issue and be done with it? Why the impatience?

 

[Lord007]

Snowballing fix: Give the AI leaders some brains and proper diplomatic functions and the basic failsafe motivations that prevented drawn out steamrolls that were present in warband, i.e. dogpiling a dominant force in a desperate state, as well as some of the stuff that the old diplo mod made up, NAP's etc. Has no involvement whatsoever in the problem at hand here.

Instaspawn lord fix: get rid of it. No AI cheats. Give them some common sense and a horse by default, leave them, as the player does, at low HP, and let them run to park and heal in a damn settlement, recruit daily from said settlement or whatever. Lords aren't just instantly back in the fight and spend downtime at towns, no more conjuring armies out of thin air, no more pointlessly-low jailbreak chance. No, it's not a good idea to have them get free training either if the player doesn't have access to them, have them sensibly purchase horses, fix bandits being absolute speedsters and have them farm bandits. Next linked problem shows up though:

Autoresolve killing high tier units fix: Itty bitty bits of code that say basic things like archers should get x amount of preliminary hits based on proportion of cavalry/infantry enemies, cavalry should get x amount of preliminary hits based on same composition, shield units should negate damage based on overall troop level, overall troop level / skill levels should imply they block chambered hits as the AI does x amount of times, and provide an exponential bonus to number to attacks vs received attacks based on the amount of troops, i.e. an outnumbered bonus. These alone should make autoresolve less trash, BUT, there's also another problem

surgery is pointless. 200 skill levels for a 2% chance to avoid death? I think not. Massive, I'm talking 10 to 20x effectiveness bonus. Maxed out surgery should be talking something like 50%-100% save rate compared to how other skills scale up. That's right, at 300+ surgery I'm expecting there to be a reduction of at least 80 to all deaths because of the investment required for such a thing, then apply this skill to nobles and bam. Still vulnerable due to wounded dudes (probably amp up the slow from wounded soldiers,) but game is already that much better with this alone. AI now becomes at least as efficient as taking prisoners as a player, which provides some high tier unit replenishment.

Fix troop xp gains. No more "entire troop type gains xp for every single hit" causing the most optimal plan to be weird micro games of "send one platoon to fight looters forever." archers don't need even more overpowered crap, revert to simplistic "for each kill any of your guys does, your entire army gains a fixed amount of xp distributed equally," ai is no longer boned and stuck with 50% recruits, higher tier units show up more but die just as easily etc., nattle participation is encouraged, armies of relatively equal strength have incentive to fight one another for them sweet gains instead of just "outblob them" because your blob will see a lower xp-per-troop yield due to it being equally distributed, still works, but is the safer more consistent method. Like in the old days, higher tier units give much greater xp gains meaning looters aren't the meta for troop training anymore.

Riding should affect overworld speed imho, base the cavalry speed bonus off the riding skills of mounted units including companions, well-trained nobles should know how to navigate better, scouting should also lead to scales-with-level, not perk-only movement speed bonus. This makes it less of a dead skill, prevents lords from being bandit fodder, etc.

+1

 

[Tozze101]

I've only noticed minor factions cheating to get full armies. Let me explain.
I started a playthrough with me declaring on all minor factions. I defeated one guy belonging to the wolfguys..can't remember exact name. I decided to release him to build relations. Back to main map i click to go to nearest town to sell my loot and the guy i released suddenly comes into view with a full army. Half was recruits but rest was high tier units from his faction. I defeated him again but this time i took heavy losses. I continue to town but barely 5 seconds later he comes into view with ANOTHER FULL ARMY. Same composition as before.
So yes, i know the AI cheats. Just not sure if that includes lords

 

[SkiFreeYeti]

I've only noticed minor factions cheating to get full armies. Let me explain.
I started a playthrough with me declaring on all minor factions. I defeated one guy belonging to the wolfguys..can't remember exact name. I decided to release him to build relations. Back to main map i click to go to nearest town to sell my loot and the guy i released suddenly comes into view with a full army. Half was recruits but rest was high tier units from his faction. I defeated him again but this time i took heavy losses. I continue to town but barely 5 seconds later he comes into view with ANOTHER FULL ARMY. Same composition as before.
So yes, i know the AI cheats. Just not sure if that includes lords

Bro, we've went over this above. From in-game code to devs confirming how said code works, Lords get free dudes and more. Please read the thread.

 

[Tozze101]

Bro, we've went over this above. From in-game code to devs confirming how said code works, Lords get free dudes and more. Please read the thread.

Read 5 pages of posts before posting a short story about my experience? Naah pass

 

[Blood Gryphon]

Sorry but I have to revert that fix because it caused another bug (player could not recruit prisoners of defeated parties). We solve that bug (clan parties recruit from defeated parties and go over party size bug) wrong way so it is reverted for a time. Probably this bug is still happening. Will check it again and solve it when issues currently we are working on (some (10%) lords go bankrupt) are completed.

Just curious did this fix ever make its way back in for the next update?

 

[mexxico]

Just curious did this fix ever make its way back in for the next update?

We solved this in different way about 2 months ago. When parties are over limit they are disbanding lowest tier troops. It should already be in 1.4.2, isnt it there? Does at 1.4.2 player clan parties still suffer from losing high tier troops due to having more man than party size limit?

 

[Blood Gryphon]

We solved this in different way about 2 months ago. When parties are over limit they are disbanding lowest tier troops. It should already be in 1.4.2, isnt it there? Does at 1.4.2 player clan parties still suffer from losing high tier troops due to having more man than party size limit?

Sorry I only asked out of curiosity, not because I believe its still an issue. I didn't remember it being reported fixed. Glad to know its been resolved, well done!

 

[Honved]

The snowballing could have been handled another way, such as having the besieging armies eventually need to return to friendly territory to replenish supplies, with restrictions on how many prisoners can be liberated, how many can be recruited from prisoners, and other such limits. The defender of a walled settlement should have all of the advantages, other than the ability to concentrate a lot of troops at a single site, suddenly and unexpectedly. The attacker should take a lot of casualties, even if they drastically outnumber the defenders, so it becomes impossible to take castle after castle, because you'll run out of both men and supplies. Instead, we have "free troops" and "easy escapes" to allow defeated armies to return just a bit smaller, and be defeated over and over again, which gets tedious in a hurry.

The bigger underlying issue is that the lords don't take time to recover and rebuild their own properties after a war, they just jump straight into the next war, so unless the game gives them massive manpower boosts and a lot of passive income, they'll run out of men and money, leading to disaster and the entire faction getting steamrolled. Defeat should be serious, and require time to recover. Victory should also be expensive, and require a period of recovery after a couple of battles or a siege, ESPECIALLY if you're out of friendly territory. Forays into enemy lands should be brief and costly, even if successful.

Attrition in foreign territory (minor if neutral, significant in hostile lands) would be one possibility to limit expansion and snowballing, with significantly slower recovery and a few additional troops becoming inactive (wounded) each day due to disease, injury, or other conditions, rather than the ridiculous extreme of having some percentage of your troops die each day. Return to friendly land, and they'll eventually recover; continue advancing and your entire army will gradually become ineffective. OBVIOUSLY, the AI needs to consider that, and retreat to friendly territory if/when their percentage of casualties reaches some "unsafe" level, to avoid having the entire army easily defeated and captured.

The AI issues make a lot of these crazy balance tricks necessary. Fix the AI and most of the problems shouldn't happen in the first place.

 

[guiskj]

A recommendation I have seen before is to tie the number of cavalry units a Faction can field to the hourse production capabiity of their fiefs. Kuzaits should have a larger percentage of cav, but at least half of their armies should still be non-cav units. This would lend itself to a better native bonus, instead of increase speed (which coupled with the high number of hourses makes Kuzait armies very hard for the AI to deal with), make their bonus tied to hourse production in owned fiefs so that they can field a larger cav than the rest of the factions, but there is still a cap on how much, forcing them to still use non-cav units more.

I would also like to see an increase of food consumption for cav units to help examplify how costly it is to maintain a large cavalry regiment.

 

[warpowerfull]

I wondering are people confusing AI lords escaping with them being ransomed? I feel like whenever I dump AI lords in a AI owned dungeon they seem to ransom them pretty quickly.

 

[scarface52]

I feel like whenever I dump AI lords in a AI owned dungeon they seem to ransom them pretty quickly.

There is actually a bug regarding that actually. It's been reported here.