Abseits_Ger
Recruit
Half of these suggestions will be economical, a quarter for fief management and another quarter for battle or army management. Reason I've set it into economy since there are the "greatest" problems I suffer will result from. Also this will be quite a huge thread so it might take some time to read and think about aswell.
1. First off I'd like to suggest a "Fief focus" or orientation setting. Basicly a little option just like to set AI clan parties, but in fiefs of any kind. Maybe exclude Villages but defenitly for castles AND towns the same possible settings, some maybe exclusive to a town or a castle. Add a cooldown or a minimum duration of like a year for such settings so players cannot willy nilly decide to change them to their likings just because they notice things go south in loyality or something.
1.1 Neutral. Just a neutral fief. Default like they are.
1.2 Security/Prison castle or town. Disables or at least reduces escape chances of Prisoners in the dungeon without astronomical 250 riding for a companion which they will never ever reach in a non cheated or modded game. Increased max Garrison size. Maybe Militia production. Passive bonus to security, thanks to tight management maybe either higher expenses, so less tax or a loyality decrease, since people are watched closer/forced into militia training. This would to some extend reduce the annoyance of tribute payments to landless kingdoms that the game currently has, since they will spend their time in prison. And please factor in a kingdoms strenght in the diplomacy/peace agree votes of AI... We do NOT need to recover from war as a 9k power kingdom vs a kingdom that has.... at most 500 power since they have no parties or are all imprisoned. It's just annoying.
1.3 Economy. A Economical setting for Fiefs. Basicly increases production of food INSIDE the castles or towns. Reduces max garrison capacity. Maye security lost per day. Production increased in general. Maybe has an effect for villages aswell. Maybe increased tax gain thanks to higher production? It's very likely that a city or castle that is not close to the warzones will help out its own economy or surrounding villages more than usual.
1.4 Border setting. A castle on a border basicly. Greatly increased maximum Garrison capacity. Troops train in the garrison a lot more than usual, high exp growths per day.
No militia growth, you cannot rely on peasants in warzones to fight. Decreased output for bound villages. Sets the castle so the garrison does not decrease on food shortage, the castle will prioritize to feed all produced food to the garrison soldiers first. Once on food shortage, daily decrease of existing militia, loyality takes a greater hit than usual through food shortage. Tie negative or low values of loyality closer to taxes in general, so taxes automatically reduce in such fiefs. Maybe reduce daily hearth growth of bound villages (never make it negative, just cut like half of the increase away) to simulate peasants of surrounding villages are recruited to be trained into actual troops and therefore explain the reduced production menitoned above.
2. Sub settings. These could be either based on owner or governor personality traits (once they work properly, to gain and reduce them in some way). If they are not based on personality traits, I'd suggest sub settings like:
2.1 Neutral. Once again, neutral setting. Maybe defaulting everything for anything in any way for AI is simpler for the system.
2.2 Greedy. Just as it says, greedy. More tax income. Maybe reduces hearth growth in bound villages. Reduce security. You won't keep too much of a close watch to security if you want to fill your purse. There is enogh things hitting loyality, though could also hit loyality instead. Idk about that part of balance.
2.3 Generous. Either reduces tax or adds a fixed cost for your clan. Settlement itself develops faster, construction bonus. This way it would also fit to increase the other daily projects in a way and better fit into the current system. OR straight off increases village growth. Also a loyality increase, people are happy to not pay as much or get help for their daily needs yknow.
2.4 Once again. Secure subsetting. This time only affecting miltia production, for both villages and the settlement itself, at the cost of tax. Increases Security. You pay to increase miltia quality, or numbers. Maybe both. Maybe increases villager party sizes, or gives them a higher movespeed (giving them horses to bring their produce quicker and therefore safer of bandits to the market of the town, welp unlucky khuzait area doesn't work for you guys)
2.5 There could be so many more possibilities for Fief settings, main and subsettings a developer team could think about. I have no idea how things would fit into the balance though, after all these are just suggestions. You maybe noticed, I've never mentioned anything with prosperity gain or loss, simply because I find the prosperity system somewhat... broken right now. Which I come to now.
3. Fief prosperity problems.... As of now....Especially for me, since I use a mod to fix the entire clans dieing (which I will get to later aswell), I come into lategame very often and I like dragged out games (which I literally added tons of mods to lenghten the game, stabilize the AI through settings of certain mods).... Prosperity bount to food. And food bound to Garrisons reduction.... If you leave on auto recruitment it's a hell of a money sink. And if you have it disabled you've got fiefs with literally only militia, which are finally balanced then. Even in peace times, once our prosperity is too high, the food drains out of the storage slowly, it will drain your garrisons slowly, whenever garison food decreases due to starving soldiers leaving the garrison.... the prosperity rises again and more soldiers leave to the point noone but militia is remaining. At that point the settlement finally hit its "maximum" prosperity. That just put a limit to prosperity alltogether or weakens your defense. Have your choice. Because of that ANYTHING a governer does to increase prosperity gain in the long run hits your defensive power of your kingdom unless you want to be a one clan kingdom without any garrisons, only to rely on militia numbers. Also with enogh prosperity gain you can never balance food with prosperity to keep it at a place.
3.1 my current fix for that problem: Enabling War tax, Road tolls and crown duty. These all reduce prosperity in settlements. That way you still have the surplus food bonus, meaning you produce enogh food to have your garrison fed aswell, but it will not outweight the prosperity loss at some point, so your castles and towns will go back and forth in an area of 50 prosperity up and down once stagnating. I keep my Garrisons. If I increase my garrisons slowly, prosperity reduces slowly without starving the settlements. Aqueduct is the worst existing upgrade in towns, it effectivly reduces the prosperity average once stagnating. Thankfully above 6k prosperity, housing cost kicks in and hits the aqueducts down, which luckily do not exist in castles. Sadly I cannot demolish already existing aqeducts in conquered towns, I want to be mercyful. I hate beeing cruel.
There is an alternative fix to this, including only Road tolls -0.2 prosperity decrease, but that only works with low security AND low loyality to have prosperity decreases by that. Which you then have to ride the perfekt 21 loyality and security to not risk rebellion, and that line is very slim. And only works for towns above 6k prosperity, castles will still go rampage. Any culture that passivly increases settlement prosperity growth wrecks this into rebellion at some point, thanks to starving garrison because of the prosperity gain. Miltia high, garrison low = rebellion.
4. Battle management. I prefer and will never update to a version above 1.6.5 because of this, but do play 1.6.4 because of my mods. 1.7 Introduced a better system for pre battle party and army setup, but a pretty bad execution. The same fights (with realistic battle mod) I have significantly higher losses on 1.7 as I would have on 1.6.5 or lower. It entirely wrecks group setups. Good, you can tell infantry to split before the battle, yeah, but I just don't want my anti cav pikemen in my shieldwall. They have no shields. Hell they just die a wasted death! And once I need them against the coming cavalry, they are DEAD! I can't use troops that died a wasted death. I want to split unit types. I want to split my low tiers away and retreat them with my non battle companions in my 8th group.
Taking as example a infantry mix of legionaires, peltasts with shields, spearmen with shields. I want my peltasts to be in front of my legionaires at first. I want them to throw their stuff then retreat behind the legionaires. I cannot do that with the 1.7 version. Also my legionaires die quicker if they are in the same group as the peltasts becuse the peltasts die quicker and leave brackets the enemy can hit my legionaires from the sides better. I want to advance my legionaires and send the peltasts to advance after them, so they fill the gaps when legionaires fall or flank somewhat. It's better if they fill the falling gaps than to have noone fill the gaps, but a legionaire is stronger shoulder to shoulder with other legionaires. Because they won't have to suddenly take care of 2 blades against them since the peltasts fall so quickly. Same goes for my shock infantry or 2 hander axes. I want them behind a line of legionaires or flank once my main infantry butts heads with the enemies. Of course you could argue "the AI cannot do that either!" yeah. I don't know how hard it is to code that, but if you send a 2 hander vs a shielded unit, a t3 can kill the t5 2 hander. I don't want to waste them in a formation they not belong into! And the AI should not either, but as I said I don't know how hard it is to code that. But apparently splitting the cavalry into half once you let the seargents into command and defend both flanks THAT works and probably is pretty complicated too, so why doesn't it work for unit types? Just introduce "pikemen" "2hander" and "shields" into the encyclopedia. It works for weapon types why doesn't it work for troop types? Then the system of the AI also would have something to work with. Oh and also default anything that has a shield into shields group, even if it has a pike + 1 hand and a shield. Or do it diffrent per unit type. Like a 220 polearm pikeman with a secondary sword and a shield with 140 one handed shouldn't be in the shielded section, their main purpose is diffrent and that culture probably has a dedicated shield infantry. You could even introduce a "shieldbreaker" category for anything with a shield + axe since they work the best vs other shielded infantry (if units would properly use their shields without mods). I want to be tactical. The game is a large portion about large scale battles and in the current state where you have troops in entirely wrong formations..... is just not enjoyable. You cannot avoid large scale battles forever.
4.1 Also something for the battle system. Give us a command to have .... "protect group XY from enemies" and have it work something like it tries to stand between group XY and the closest enemy. Pikeman would be so much more effective, protecting archers against cavalry or at least forcing the cavalry to ride around the pikemen since they move faster, and risk taking arrow shots in the meantime. Medieval lords defenitly had that idea already. The one leading the cavalry could decide to instead fall into the infantrys back. The pikeman won't be there. Though it should wage up the numbers, just splitting 5 pikemen to protect the archers AND infantry shouldn't work to glitch the AI riding with 40 cavs to not attack. And I am pretty sure this is possible to code aswell to have the AI react to it. That the AI stops going for archers because pikes block them and instead hammer anvil the infantry.
5. Clans dieing. Can't note anything else than, please contact the maker of the mod "Houses of Calradia". That mod fixes ALL marriage problems that happen on the transistion into endgame which just depletes the lordcount through ageing. In vanilla game you literally can conquer the world by feeding and f*cking ur family without ever recruiting units, if you wait roughly until 1180, aka 3 generations. The game defaults the ownership of fiefs to the player once a kingdom has no lords anymore, and at some point they inevitably WILL die since the vanilla game does NOT have any marriages in the third generation, possibly even the second. No marriages, no children. I didn't check that too close, could be just childage default spawned at gamestart into the clans. The longer you take to conquer the world, the easier it becomes. And that shouldn't be. I understand it would be horrible to code random impregnations unless you add option to talk to women with good relation towards you (or be cruel and... you know...) to spend the night with them in a tavern or something. For NPC this could result in randomly spawned children without a mother for lords. That defenitly did happen in medieval times but would be horrible to implement into the code for any developer I belive. Or the relationship losses between diffrent clans if such happens between lords and ladies.
1. First off I'd like to suggest a "Fief focus" or orientation setting. Basicly a little option just like to set AI clan parties, but in fiefs of any kind. Maybe exclude Villages but defenitly for castles AND towns the same possible settings, some maybe exclusive to a town or a castle. Add a cooldown or a minimum duration of like a year for such settings so players cannot willy nilly decide to change them to their likings just because they notice things go south in loyality or something.
1.1 Neutral. Just a neutral fief. Default like they are.
1.2 Security/Prison castle or town. Disables or at least reduces escape chances of Prisoners in the dungeon without astronomical 250 riding for a companion which they will never ever reach in a non cheated or modded game. Increased max Garrison size. Maybe Militia production. Passive bonus to security, thanks to tight management maybe either higher expenses, so less tax or a loyality decrease, since people are watched closer/forced into militia training. This would to some extend reduce the annoyance of tribute payments to landless kingdoms that the game currently has, since they will spend their time in prison. And please factor in a kingdoms strenght in the diplomacy/peace agree votes of AI... We do NOT need to recover from war as a 9k power kingdom vs a kingdom that has.... at most 500 power since they have no parties or are all imprisoned. It's just annoying.
1.3 Economy. A Economical setting for Fiefs. Basicly increases production of food INSIDE the castles or towns. Reduces max garrison capacity. Maye security lost per day. Production increased in general. Maybe has an effect for villages aswell. Maybe increased tax gain thanks to higher production? It's very likely that a city or castle that is not close to the warzones will help out its own economy or surrounding villages more than usual.
1.4 Border setting. A castle on a border basicly. Greatly increased maximum Garrison capacity. Troops train in the garrison a lot more than usual, high exp growths per day.
No militia growth, you cannot rely on peasants in warzones to fight. Decreased output for bound villages. Sets the castle so the garrison does not decrease on food shortage, the castle will prioritize to feed all produced food to the garrison soldiers first. Once on food shortage, daily decrease of existing militia, loyality takes a greater hit than usual through food shortage. Tie negative or low values of loyality closer to taxes in general, so taxes automatically reduce in such fiefs. Maybe reduce daily hearth growth of bound villages (never make it negative, just cut like half of the increase away) to simulate peasants of surrounding villages are recruited to be trained into actual troops and therefore explain the reduced production menitoned above.
2. Sub settings. These could be either based on owner or governor personality traits (once they work properly, to gain and reduce them in some way). If they are not based on personality traits, I'd suggest sub settings like:
2.1 Neutral. Once again, neutral setting. Maybe defaulting everything for anything in any way for AI is simpler for the system.
2.2 Greedy. Just as it says, greedy. More tax income. Maybe reduces hearth growth in bound villages. Reduce security. You won't keep too much of a close watch to security if you want to fill your purse. There is enogh things hitting loyality, though could also hit loyality instead. Idk about that part of balance.
2.3 Generous. Either reduces tax or adds a fixed cost for your clan. Settlement itself develops faster, construction bonus. This way it would also fit to increase the other daily projects in a way and better fit into the current system. OR straight off increases village growth. Also a loyality increase, people are happy to not pay as much or get help for their daily needs yknow.
2.4 Once again. Secure subsetting. This time only affecting miltia production, for both villages and the settlement itself, at the cost of tax. Increases Security. You pay to increase miltia quality, or numbers. Maybe both. Maybe increases villager party sizes, or gives them a higher movespeed (giving them horses to bring their produce quicker and therefore safer of bandits to the market of the town, welp unlucky khuzait area doesn't work for you guys)
2.5 There could be so many more possibilities for Fief settings, main and subsettings a developer team could think about. I have no idea how things would fit into the balance though, after all these are just suggestions. You maybe noticed, I've never mentioned anything with prosperity gain or loss, simply because I find the prosperity system somewhat... broken right now. Which I come to now.
3. Fief prosperity problems.... As of now....Especially for me, since I use a mod to fix the entire clans dieing (which I will get to later aswell), I come into lategame very often and I like dragged out games (which I literally added tons of mods to lenghten the game, stabilize the AI through settings of certain mods).... Prosperity bount to food. And food bound to Garrisons reduction.... If you leave on auto recruitment it's a hell of a money sink. And if you have it disabled you've got fiefs with literally only militia, which are finally balanced then. Even in peace times, once our prosperity is too high, the food drains out of the storage slowly, it will drain your garrisons slowly, whenever garison food decreases due to starving soldiers leaving the garrison.... the prosperity rises again and more soldiers leave to the point noone but militia is remaining. At that point the settlement finally hit its "maximum" prosperity. That just put a limit to prosperity alltogether or weakens your defense. Have your choice. Because of that ANYTHING a governer does to increase prosperity gain in the long run hits your defensive power of your kingdom unless you want to be a one clan kingdom without any garrisons, only to rely on militia numbers. Also with enogh prosperity gain you can never balance food with prosperity to keep it at a place.
3.1 my current fix for that problem: Enabling War tax, Road tolls and crown duty. These all reduce prosperity in settlements. That way you still have the surplus food bonus, meaning you produce enogh food to have your garrison fed aswell, but it will not outweight the prosperity loss at some point, so your castles and towns will go back and forth in an area of 50 prosperity up and down once stagnating. I keep my Garrisons. If I increase my garrisons slowly, prosperity reduces slowly without starving the settlements. Aqueduct is the worst existing upgrade in towns, it effectivly reduces the prosperity average once stagnating. Thankfully above 6k prosperity, housing cost kicks in and hits the aqueducts down, which luckily do not exist in castles. Sadly I cannot demolish already existing aqeducts in conquered towns, I want to be mercyful. I hate beeing cruel.
There is an alternative fix to this, including only Road tolls -0.2 prosperity decrease, but that only works with low security AND low loyality to have prosperity decreases by that. Which you then have to ride the perfekt 21 loyality and security to not risk rebellion, and that line is very slim. And only works for towns above 6k prosperity, castles will still go rampage. Any culture that passivly increases settlement prosperity growth wrecks this into rebellion at some point, thanks to starving garrison because of the prosperity gain. Miltia high, garrison low = rebellion.
4. Battle management. I prefer and will never update to a version above 1.6.5 because of this, but do play 1.6.4 because of my mods. 1.7 Introduced a better system for pre battle party and army setup, but a pretty bad execution. The same fights (with realistic battle mod) I have significantly higher losses on 1.7 as I would have on 1.6.5 or lower. It entirely wrecks group setups. Good, you can tell infantry to split before the battle, yeah, but I just don't want my anti cav pikemen in my shieldwall. They have no shields. Hell they just die a wasted death! And once I need them against the coming cavalry, they are DEAD! I can't use troops that died a wasted death. I want to split unit types. I want to split my low tiers away and retreat them with my non battle companions in my 8th group.
Taking as example a infantry mix of legionaires, peltasts with shields, spearmen with shields. I want my peltasts to be in front of my legionaires at first. I want them to throw their stuff then retreat behind the legionaires. I cannot do that with the 1.7 version. Also my legionaires die quicker if they are in the same group as the peltasts becuse the peltasts die quicker and leave brackets the enemy can hit my legionaires from the sides better. I want to advance my legionaires and send the peltasts to advance after them, so they fill the gaps when legionaires fall or flank somewhat. It's better if they fill the falling gaps than to have noone fill the gaps, but a legionaire is stronger shoulder to shoulder with other legionaires. Because they won't have to suddenly take care of 2 blades against them since the peltasts fall so quickly. Same goes for my shock infantry or 2 hander axes. I want them behind a line of legionaires or flank once my main infantry butts heads with the enemies. Of course you could argue "the AI cannot do that either!" yeah. I don't know how hard it is to code that, but if you send a 2 hander vs a shielded unit, a t3 can kill the t5 2 hander. I don't want to waste them in a formation they not belong into! And the AI should not either, but as I said I don't know how hard it is to code that. But apparently splitting the cavalry into half once you let the seargents into command and defend both flanks THAT works and probably is pretty complicated too, so why doesn't it work for unit types? Just introduce "pikemen" "2hander" and "shields" into the encyclopedia. It works for weapon types why doesn't it work for troop types? Then the system of the AI also would have something to work with. Oh and also default anything that has a shield into shields group, even if it has a pike + 1 hand and a shield. Or do it diffrent per unit type. Like a 220 polearm pikeman with a secondary sword and a shield with 140 one handed shouldn't be in the shielded section, their main purpose is diffrent and that culture probably has a dedicated shield infantry. You could even introduce a "shieldbreaker" category for anything with a shield + axe since they work the best vs other shielded infantry (if units would properly use their shields without mods). I want to be tactical. The game is a large portion about large scale battles and in the current state where you have troops in entirely wrong formations..... is just not enjoyable. You cannot avoid large scale battles forever.
4.1 Also something for the battle system. Give us a command to have .... "protect group XY from enemies" and have it work something like it tries to stand between group XY and the closest enemy. Pikeman would be so much more effective, protecting archers against cavalry or at least forcing the cavalry to ride around the pikemen since they move faster, and risk taking arrow shots in the meantime. Medieval lords defenitly had that idea already. The one leading the cavalry could decide to instead fall into the infantrys back. The pikeman won't be there. Though it should wage up the numbers, just splitting 5 pikemen to protect the archers AND infantry shouldn't work to glitch the AI riding with 40 cavs to not attack. And I am pretty sure this is possible to code aswell to have the AI react to it. That the AI stops going for archers because pikes block them and instead hammer anvil the infantry.
5. Clans dieing. Can't note anything else than, please contact the maker of the mod "Houses of Calradia". That mod fixes ALL marriage problems that happen on the transistion into endgame which just depletes the lordcount through ageing. In vanilla game you literally can conquer the world by feeding and f*cking ur family without ever recruiting units, if you wait roughly until 1180, aka 3 generations. The game defaults the ownership of fiefs to the player once a kingdom has no lords anymore, and at some point they inevitably WILL die since the vanilla game does NOT have any marriages in the third generation, possibly even the second. No marriages, no children. I didn't check that too close, could be just childage default spawned at gamestart into the clans. The longer you take to conquer the world, the easier it becomes. And that shouldn't be. I understand it would be horrible to code random impregnations unless you add option to talk to women with good relation towards you (or be cruel and... you know...) to spend the night with them in a tavern or something. For NPC this could result in randomly spawned children without a mother for lords. That defenitly did happen in medieval times but would be horrible to implement into the code for any developer I belive. Or the relationship losses between diffrent clans if such happens between lords and ladies.
