Food Shortage

[Patwick]

One another addition which will make things better is AI currently does not care what is town's prosperity while determining ideal garrison size at fortifications. If we make AI to assign less garrisons in towns with less prospeirty and more garrison towns with high prosperity then there will be less food problem in towns with less prospeirty.

I didn't noticed because i wasn't sieging much on 1.4.1 but garrison don't actually starve, somebody reported it today while i was about to, is that a known issue ?

https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php?threads/defense-troops-wont-starve-during-siege.424496/

So they make up a big chunk sometimes of the food consumption of a city but don't actually decrease in size when they should.

İyi Bayramlar !

 

[mexxico]

İyi Bayramlar !

Thanks.

I examined this problem deeply in last 4 days. Currently in our game influence system and prosperity system is a bit broken. I collected datas. There are several problems and I will give information about these problems. First lets start with datas :

Data 1 (total food change by time) :

As you see total food amount in world do not change so much. It changes between 30K and 40K. This is good. However because 1.4.1 has lots of wars currently these food do not distributed homogenously. Some kingdoms lack of food more than others because in all their borders they have wars. So caravans cannot travel and distribute food equally. I hope this war problem will be fixed soon. By the way in my all tests northern empire is first kingdom destroyed. This is another problem not related to food problem.

Actually there are not much towns starving. At least it was less than my expectations. It is about 25% (changes between 0%-50%) in 1.4.1, with fix of lots of war problem this value will decrease to 10%s probably. You can see at data 2 :

Data 2 (starving towns) :

In my test runs I could not see any towns going below 1000 prosperity but it is possible of course. I see when a town lose its prosperity somehow and drop below 1000 it is very hard for them to get high values back. Most important reason of this is even this town has very less prosperity AI continue to stock there high numbers of garrison, these garrison eat food and stable food income of town like villages barely feed garrison. I will add a code block for AI to stock less garrison in towns with less prosperity probably this will help much. So a town with 0-500 prosperity will get 25% of ideal expected garrison. For example if a town with 3000 prosperity ideal garrison strength is 300 a town with 1000 prosperity's ideal garrison strength will be 150, for 500 it will be 100 and go on...

Another problems I see is in long gameplays king and 1-2 big clans collect nearly all settlements. Especially king override all decisions and take settlements. Thats happening because town projects are nearly all completed in first 15 years. We have a project named forum and it give settlement owner high daily influence gain. At game start king clan have more settlements compared others after some time these settlements make their forum level 3 and they get very high daily influence and then they start to override all decisions. They collect more towns abd they get more influence. This causes king clan to have lots of settlements. For example in long gameplay king clans owns nearly 50-60% of towns. They get very rich because of taxes so they add more men to garrison. This also cause starving problem. Because it is hard to feed big garrisons. They make big food consumpiton. Please see example picture from year 1110.

Picture 1 : Year 1110 (King of Khuzati has 50K influence and 7 towns, 10M money) :

As you see in picture king have lots of settlements and lots of money and lots of influence all together. Because all variables feed each other in a spiral. There should be a penalty for having lots of towns. Even this seems less related to starving problem it is related.

Chart 1 : Ratio of completed projects chart with current construction formula (prosperity x 0.01) and my new suggestion formula (10 + prosperity x 0.005) :

Data 3 : Change of settlement datas according to time at 1.4.1 (projects are counted as level, 3 for level-3 as example)

As you see in datas castle projects are already built slowly but town projects are not because construction is only effected by prosperity which is very high (average 8x) in towns compared to castles. What I suggest is :
1-Changing construction formula to slow down construction of town projects. (10 + prosperity x 0.005 instead of prospertiy x 0.01)
2-Adding daily influence penalty -(number of towns x number of towns) to clans owning towns.
3-Workshop project at towns are OP. Their effect should be as small constant addition not multipication (currently increasing construction of town by 20%, 40%, 60% according top level 1-2-3). It should be additional 2-4-6 or 3-6-9 only.
4-Project costs also need to be doubled especially workshop, forum and aquaduct can be 4x. Not only changing construction formula to 10+prosperity x 0.005 is enough.
5-AI to stock less garrison in towns with less prosperity.
6-Of course there should be less wars in world, 4 in average not 10 like at 1.4.1.

These 5 small developments and 1 fix will make game better in lots of terms.

With influence penalty king or other clans will not want to get new towns after 2nd, 3th or 4th towns. Getting very much towns will cost you. So towns will have also influence penalty and this will stop influence inflation. So there will not be sceanrios where king clan has 7-8 towns but other clans have 0-1. These suggestions are not accepted yet. But I will try my best to make some accepted.

So all problems are connected. Starving-unbalanced influence/money. These problems are very important and need to be fixed soon.

 

[TheShermanator]

Thanks.

I examined this problem deeply in last 4 days. Currently in our game influence system and prosperity system is a bit broken. I collected datas. There are several problems and I will give information about these problems. First lets start with charts :

Chart 1 (total food change by time) :

As you see total food amount in world do not change so much. It changes between 30K and 40K. This is good. However because 1.4.1 has lots of wars currently these food do not distributed homogenously. Some kingdoms lack of food more than others because in all their borders they have wars. So caravans cannot travel and distribute food equally. I hope this war problem will be fixed soon. By the way in my all tests northern empire is first kingdom destroyed. This is another problem not related to food problem.

Actually there are not much towns starving. At least it was less than my expectations. It is about 25% (changes between 0%-50%) in 1.4.1, with fix of lots of war problem this value will decrease to 10%s probably. You can see at chart 2 :

Chart 2 (starving towns) :

In my test runs I could not see any towns going below 1000 prosperity but it is possible of course. I see when a town lose its prosperity somehow and drop below 1000 it is very hard for them to get high values back. Most important reason of this is even this town has very less prosperity AI continue to stock there high numbers of garrison, these garrison eat food and stable food income of town like villages barely feed garrison. I will add a code block for AI to stock less garrison in towns with less prosperity probably this will help much. So a town with 0-500 prosperity will get 25% of ideal expected garrison. For example if a town with 3000 prosperity ideal garrison strength is 300 a town with 1000 prosperity's ideal garrison strength will be 150, for 500 it will be 100 and go on...

Another problems I see is in long gameplays king and 1-2 big clans collect nearly all settlements. Especially king override all decisions and take settlements. Thats happening because town projects are nearly all completed in first 15 years. We have a project named forum and it give settlement owner high daily influence gain. At game start king clan have more settlements compared others after some time these settlements make their forum level 3 and they get very high daily influence and then they start to override all decisions. They collect more towns abd they get more influence. This causes king clan to have lots of settlements. For example in long gameplay king clans owns nearly 50-60% of towns. They get very rich because of taxes so they add more men to garrison. This also cause starving problem. Because it is hard to feed big garrisons. They make big food consumpiton. Please see example picture from year 1110.

Year 1110 (King of Khuzati has 50K influence and 7 towns, 10M money) :

Ratio of completed projects chart with current construction formula (prosperity x 0.01) and my new suggestion formula (10 + prosperity x 0.005) :

Currently change of settlement datas according to time :

As you see in datas castle projects are already built slowly but town projects are not because construction is only effected by prosperity which is high in towns compared to castles. What I suggest is :
1-Changing construction formula to slow down construction of town projects. (10 + prosperity x 0.005 instead of prospertiy x 0.01)
2-Adding daily influence penalty -(number of towns x number of towns) to clans owning towns.
3-Workshop project at towns are OP. Their effect should be as small constant addition not multipication (currently 20%, 40%, 60% according top level 1-2-3).
4-Project costs also need to be doubled especially workshop, forum and aquaduct can be 4x. Not only changing construction formula to 10+prosperity x 0.005 is enough.
5-AI to stock less garrison in towns with less prosperity.

These 5 small developments will make game better in lots of terms.

With influence penalty king or other clans will not want to get new towns after 2nd, 3th or 4th towns. Getting very much towns will cost you. So towns will have also influence penalty and this will stop influence inflation. So there will not be sceanrios where king clan has 7-8 towns but other clans have 0-1. These suggestions are not accepted yet. But I will try my best to make some accepted.

So all problems are connected. Starving-unbalanced influence/money. These problems are very important and need to be fixed soon.

This is awesome - thanks @mexxico ! Quick question: "food count" and "food average" #s are measuring food stocks available in the markets of cities, correct? Or are those charts measuring food #s in granaries of cities and castles? In any case, having AI garrisons scale more closely to city prosperity seems great - as long as there is some kind of modifier for castles.

_____________

Also, the influence analyses, OP notwithstanding, are just as interesting to me as the food data. I do like the idea of, for example, increasing the construction cost of forums and generally decreasing all construction speeds.

I would humbly submit, though, that clans with more fiefs should have a lot more more influence than clans with less fiefs for various gameplay + immersion reasons. Maybe the issue is a lack of things for high influence clans to spend their influence on - political influence sinks that apply more and more the more influential the clan becomes? Because I agree, the most influence intensive thing right now is fief voting, which allows influential clans to get more influence farms, which causes influence-fief-ownership-tax-revenue snowballing.

 

[Patwick]

Nice !
So in your opinion nothing deserve to be changed in regard to Prosperity/Food consumption relationship ?
I would have hoped it to be a little more dynamic in response to food fluctuation so town could recover faster should starvation happens (even if it means faster prosperity loss).
Because for me the problem never really was the city starving, it was more the fact that they could hardly recover, starvation is a gameplay mechanics so if you can reduce the number to 10% only with war less frequent, that's already nearly solved as far as i'm concerned. It's just making sure it's not always the same citys, and to give them a chance to recover after war.

Data 1 (total food change by time) :

As you see total food amount in world do not change so much. It changes between 30K and 40K. This is good. However because 1.4.1 has lots of wars currently these food do not distributed homogenously. Some kingdoms lack of food more than others because in all their borders they have wars.

What strike me the most actually is the food of Vlandia that 5 years after game start makes up for 1/4 of total food count with as much town as the other kingdoms. When you look at it, it keeps increasing every year while all other food count have ups and downs.

When you compare to aserai for example, they have the same number of city, start with 6k food but take 3k in the first season (i guess it's related to moving armies at game start) ; they then take 2 years to reach the same food level again. In the meantime, Vlandia start with 4.4k and take the same time to reach 6k aswell, then outgrow everyone.
If it was only related to caravan and war issue those foods levels should behave like those of other kingdoms with ups and downs related to wars but instead they kept growing so i believe that there might be some underlying reason for that.

1-Changing construction formula to slow down construction of town projects. (10 + prosperity x 0.005 instead of prospertiy x 0.01)
2-Adding daily influence penalty -(number of towns x number of towns) to clans owning towns.

The problem with that is that it makes the Forum even higher on the project priority to counterbalance influence lost by owning additional City, and if you do that + change the construction formula aren't you afraid that it might backfire by having all AI city have Rank 3 forum before queuing something else really late as the construction has slow down ?

I don't really know how AI determine what to build and when tho, so this problem might actually don't exist.

However in the same way daily project that directly scale on construction like Irrigation might take a hit aswell, so it might be nice to tweak the formula of those so they are less impacted by those changes ?

Maybe the issue is a lack of things for high influence clans to spend their influence on - sinks that apply more and more the more power the clan becomes? Because I agree, the most influence intensive thing right now is fief voting, which allows influential clans to get more influence farms, which causes influence-fief-ownership-tax-revenue snowballing.

+1

 

[GeluHUN]

2-Adding daily influence penalty -(number of towns x number of towns) to clans owning towns.

I too don't like to passive influence penalty too much. Maybe make influence costs of decisions scaled by the number of fiefs owned? That way neither the small nor the big kingdoms and clans are in a bad place.

 

[drallim33]

@mexxico Thanks for sharing. I'm really confused that you spent four days looking at solving the starvation problem and this is what you came up with. No mention of making lords buy more food so they aren't walking around starving, constantly abandoning sieges. No mention of any sort of prosperity cap so that towns don't grow beyond their means.

1-Changing construction formula to slow down construction of town projects. (10 + prosperity x 0.005 instead of prospertiy x 0.01)
3-Workshop project at towns are OP. Their effect should be as small constant addition not multipication (currently increasing construction of town by 20%, 40%, 60% according top level 1-2-3). It should be additional 2-4-6 or 3-6-9 only.
4-Project costs also need to be doubled especially workshop, forum and aquaduct can be 4x. Not only changing construction formula to 10+prosperity x 0.005 is enough.

These add up to nerf construction to about 1/6th of it's current values. Your argument if I understand it correctly is that:

• Starvation is being caused by garrisons being too big
• Garrisons are too big because the ruler is too rich.
• He's too rich because he took all the fiefs for himself
• He took them all for himself because he has too much influence
• He has too much influence because he was able to build the forum town improvement too quickly
• Therefore the answer is to nerf construction

I find this a very strange way to approach the problem. Wouldn't it be an easier and more direct solution to just make the ruler AI less greedy?

But more importantly, the town should not be starving because it has a big garrison, regardless of the reasons why it has a big garrison. Actually it should not be starving at all without some hostile action.

Maybe construction does need a nerf, I haven't really looked at it and have no opinion. But I don't see how it addresses the starving problem. Just another nerf that does not solve anything. Towns will still grow too big and end up with an empty granary. Lords will still walk around starving.

This will also make it much harder for low prosperity towns to climb out of poverty since they already have very low construction and it will take forever for them to build orchards and other things.

2-Adding daily influence penalty -(number of towns x number of towns) to clans owning towns.

To me this does not make any sense. If rulers are too greedy with towns then make them less greedy. Another numerical nerf to try to indirectly change things instead of just directly addressing the problem itself.

I would probably agree that there is a bit too much influence overall at the moment. I don't know the answer to that problem but I don't think this is it. At least put a +1 one the end so they aren't penalised for the first town.

5-AI to stock less garrison in towns with less prosperity.

Maybe this will help low prosperity towns climb out of poverty. Makes sense that a smaller town would have less defenders. However it will also make the AI more likely to attack them, which might hurt their prosperity even more.

I'm ok with this one but it still does not really address the core issues.

In previous versions the rulers were not so greedy, and gave almost all fiefs other lords. Also the war was under control, not nearly as many wars and even some periods of peace. But still the garrisons and lords were starving. So we already know from past versions that none of this will fix the starvation issues.

People are quitting the game because they keep trying to feed their towns but no matter what they do they keep starving and losing garrison. So the players get frustrated because the system is so unintuitive and punishes them and does not tell them how to fix it.

Nerfing influence, nerfing construction, these will not solve the problem.

 

[crewsk8200]

Thanks.

I examined this problem deeply in last 4 days. Currently in our game influence system and prosperity system is a bit broken. I collected datas. There are several problems and I will give information about these problems. First lets start with datas :

Data 1 (total food change by time) :

As you see total food amount in world do not change so much. It changes between 30K and 40K. This is good. However because 1.4.1 has lots of wars currently these food do not distributed homogenously. Some kingdoms lack of food more than others because in all their borders they have wars. So caravans cannot travel and distribute food equally. I hope this war problem will be fixed soon. By the way in my all tests northern empire is first kingdom destroyed. This is another problem not related to food problem.

Actually there are not much towns starving. At least it was less than my expectations. It is about 25% (changes between 0%-50%) in 1.4.1, with fix of lots of war problem this value will decrease to 10%s probably. You can see at data 2 :

Data 2 (starving towns) :

In my test runs I could not see any towns going below 1000 prosperity but it is possible of course. I see when a town lose its prosperity somehow and drop below 1000 it is very hard for them to get high values back. Most important reason of this is even this town has very less prosperity AI continue to stock there high numbers of garrison, these garrison eat food and stable food income of town like villages barely feed garrison. I will add a code block for AI to stock less garrison in towns with less prosperity probably this will help much. So a town with 0-500 prosperity will get 25% of ideal expected garrison. For example if a town with 3000 prosperity ideal garrison strength is 300 a town with 1000 prosperity's ideal garrison strength will be 150, for 500 it will be 100 and go on...

Another problems I see is in long gameplays king and 1-2 big clans collect nearly all settlements. Especially king override all decisions and take settlements. Thats happening because town projects are nearly all completed in first 15 years. We have a project named forum and it give settlement owner high daily influence gain. At game start king clan have more settlements compared others after some time these settlements make their forum level 3 and they get very high daily influence and then they start to override all decisions. They collect more towns abd they get more influence. This causes king clan to have lots of settlements. For example in long gameplay king clans owns nearly 50-60% of towns. They get very rich because of taxes so they add more men to garrison. This also cause starving problem. Because it is hard to feed big garrisons. They make big food consumpiton. Please see example picture from year 1110.

Picture 1 : Year 1110 (King of Khuzati has 50K influence and 7 towns, 10M money) :

As you see in picture king have lots of settlements and lots of money and lots of influence all together. Because all variables feed each other in a spiral. There should be a penalty for having lots of towns. Even this seems less related to starving problem it is related.

Chart 1 : Ratio of completed projects chart with current construction formula (prosperity x 0.01) and my new suggestion formula (10 + prosperity x 0.005) :

Data 3 : Change of settlement datas according to time at 1.4.1 (projects are counted as level, 3 for level-3 as example)

As you see in datas castle projects are already built slowly but town projects are not because construction is only effected by prosperity which is very high (average 8x) in towns compared to castles. What I suggest is :
1-Changing construction formula to slow down construction of town projects. (10 + prosperity x 0.005 instead of prospertiy x 0.01)
2-Adding daily influence penalty -(number of towns x number of towns) to clans owning towns.
3-Workshop project at towns are OP. Their effect should be as small constant addition not multipication (currently increasing construction of town by 20%, 40%, 60% according top level 1-2-3). It should be additional 2-4-6 or 3-6-9 only.
4-Project costs also need to be doubled especially workshop, forum and aquaduct can be 4x. Not only changing construction formula to 10+prosperity x 0.005 is enough.
5-AI to stock less garrison in towns with less prosperity.
6-Of course there should be less wars in world, 4 in average not 10 like at 1.4.1.

These 5 small developments and 1 fix will make game better in lots of terms.

With influence penalty king or other clans will not want to get new towns after 2nd, 3th or 4th towns. Getting very much towns will cost you. So towns will have also influence penalty and this will stop influence inflation. So there will not be sceanrios where king clan has 7-8 towns but other clans have 0-1. These suggestions are not accepted yet. But I will try my best to make some accepted.

So all problems are connected. Starving-unbalanced influence/money. These problems are very important and need to be fixed soon.

Awesome work!!! My biggest question/opinion is in the long term, shouldn't it get harder and more difficult to own multiple cities and not have rebellions. When this feature gets implemented, it should be in a way that refutes the possibility of any single clan owning half the map(loyalty penalty that increases its multiplier with direct relation to number of currently owned towns and if current town is same original faction of ruler)

 

[mexxico]

I'm really confused that you spent four days looking at solving the starvation problem and this is what you came up with.

Actually as you know it was holiday and I spent less hours these days (like 2-3 hours a day). After implementing these solutions I will share you new tables and you will see how ratio of starving towns will reduce.

I find this a very strange way to approach the problem. Wouldn't it be an easier and more direct solution to just make the ruler AI less greedy?

If there is no penalty for having too much towns and if ruler has 10-20-30Ks of influence how will you make rulers stop overriding voting results? What will be the logic behind this? Influence inflation (especially at king clan) is a clear problem currently. You say make them less greedy. Ok, in real life there are reasons which make kings less greedy so we should make our game have a logical reason too like in real life. We can give relation penalty or influence penalty. Even you say this is nerf it is not nerf. It is implementation of real life rules. So after that kings can stop taking too many towns because there will be logical reason behind this. Same reason will stop player taking too much towns when he/she is king too. In any case there should be a penalty for taking too much towns, you can say it is a nerf then there will be a nerf. And influence inflation need to be solved. I offered a solution covers both. Currently towns are influence farms already especially if it has forum inside. So there will be influence penalty for having too much towns or project of forum and policies giving influence for each notable in your settlements or for each settlement clan has need to be removed otherwise it is so hard to sort things out.

But more importantly, the town should not be starving because it has a big garrison, regardless of the reasons why it has a big garrison. Actually it should not be starving at all without some hostile action.

If your town / castle has very low prosperity (like 500) and if you place that town 300 garrison it will starve after granary goes empty. Assume there is a natural party size cap and it is 100-150 for towns with that low prosperity. Militia already do not eat from granary. You have to protect low prosperity settlements mostly by militia or you will bring your food to your 300 men every week. Also as you see in data tables I shared there is no town with low than 1000 prosperity in normal 20 year gameplay test I did. What you shared is so extreme case. I accept it is problem but this is so rare, in natural ways towns generally balances at some point and return to normal (have positive prosperity change). Also starving town ratios also low even there are that much problems currently. When we solve some of them ratio easily will reduce to 5-10%s from 25%s.

This will also make it much harder for low prosperity towns to climb out of poverty since they already have very low construction and it will take forever for them to build orchards and other things.

I suggest to change construction formula to 10 + 0.005 x prosperity, it is currently 0.01 x prosperity. If it is changed then towns with low prospeirty have higher construction rate compared to now. Assume a town or castle with 500 prosperity. Old formula give only 5 construction (500 x 0.01) and new formula give 12.5 (10 + 500 x 0.005); even costs are 2x still low prosperity towns and castles will built faster than now.

Lords walking around and starving is another problem. It is a bit related to their decision making systems.

 

[crewsk8200]

I would humbly submit, though, that clans with more fiefs should have a lot more more influence than clans with less fiefs for various gameplay + immersion reasons. Maybe the issue is a lack of things for high influence clans to spend their influence on - political influence sinks that apply more and more the more influential the clan becomes? Because I agree, the most influence intensive thing right now is fief voting, which allows influential clans to get more influence farms, which causes influence-fief-ownership-tax-revenue snowballing.

Agreed. I think kingdom policies should come into play here. If they were more polarizing, you could sink influence to help conserve the relationship.

 

[TheShermanator]

Agreed. I think kingdom policies should come into play here. If they were more polarizing, you could sink influence to help conserve the relationship.

Right. This may be increasingly off topic, but yes, I too have lots of thoughts on this! In short, existing mechanics (relations, loyalty) could be leveraged to make a more robust system for rebellion and secession. E.g. There could be a relations penalty - both ways - between the ruling faction and any vassal faction, or between members of the same clan, that scaled with the # of fiefs held or net prosperity of all fiefs or something. Clans / clan members that got to negative relations numbers with the ruling clan or clan leader would have an increasingly large dice roll chance per day to secede or defect from the kingdom or clan. Clans and rulers could spend influence to help relations much in the way they do now, but those costs could also scale with the # of fiefs.

All of that is just off the top of my head - but it's not hard to contemplate these possibilities, which makes me think the devs have already been thinking about these things in some capacity. So really, my post is a player +1 in that direction, for what that's worth.

Any way you slice it, though, mexxico is right that influence snowballing is spilling over into other problems.

 

[Patwick]

But more importantly, the town should not be starving because it has a big garrison, regardless of the reasons why it has a big garrison. Actually it should not be starving at all without some hostile action.

What do you mean by that ? Direct hostile action like sieging and raiding, or indirect like war declaration, caravan not coming/intercepted ?
Because i guess the point you want to make is related to some sort of prosperity management for a town so that it can sustain it's growth. But i think that restraining this growth by making sure it is self sufficient is unrealistic, commerce/food import need to happens for a town to grow and it make sense that when war is happening and supply from external source is cut off that the said town would fetch food in granary and should the perturbation persist long enough result in starvation after the reserve food are depleted.

What i agree on is the idea that when a town reach high prosperity and has trouble feeding itself it should stop growing before starvation happens, but i don't think hardcaping prosperity and make every town fully self sufficient for it to grow is a good solution.

In previous versions the rulers were not so greedy, and gave almost all fiefs other lords. Also the war was under control, not nearly as many wars and even some periods of peace. But still the garrisons and lords were starving. So we already know from past versions that none of this will fix the starvation issues.

Yes but even if previous version were better on this side, too many wars and too few period of peace were already an issue (in less proportion i agree) + they had issue with tax and lord Bankruptcy that was part of the problem aswell (For lord starving at least).

The problem with your data on towns @mexxico is that it is hard to interpret without knowing who's at war with who, what's besieged/raided and what's not, so it's difficult to see if less war will really fix to only 10% starving cities, but i guess we can only see if it's sufficient when it's implemented.

Currently towns are influence farms already especially if it has forum inside. So there will be influence penalty for having too much towns or project of forum need to be removed otherwise it is so hard to sort things out.

If your influence penalty proposition isn't accepted, is that possible to make the forum something like "Clan Unique" that way you still have an advantage over someone that doesn't own a city, but can't inflate you influence by building it in every town , it would make player growth as vassal smoother aswell. But i'm not sure if that's enough influence reduction to make rulers stop snatching fief.

 

[AfLIcTeD]

Does it cost the kings extra inluence to override a decision? If not then this should be a thing. Maybe a relations penalty too.

 

[mexxico]

Does it cost the kings extra inluence to override a decision? If not then this should be a thing. Maybe a relations penalty too.

Yes it costs. This cost changes according to support ratios. If support ratio is high cost is high too. However if king has 20K influence this cost is nothing compared to king clan's 20K influence.

 

[TheShermanator]

Yes it costs. This cost changes according to support ratios. If support ratio is high cost is high too. However if king has 20K influence this cost is nothing compared to king clan's 20K influence.

What if the king's over-ride cost scaled with kingdom size? Either # of fiefs, total fief prosperity, or just # of vassals (which might be an indirect proxy for # of fiefs in kingdom, considering that vassals with no fiefs seem to leave the kingdom over time).

 

[mexxico]

What if the king's over-ride cost scaled with kingdom size? Either # of fiefs, total fief prosperity, or just # of vassals (which might be an indirect proxy for # of fiefs in kingdom, considering that vassals with no fiefs seem to leave the kingdom over time).

Kings can override all decisions. For example policy decisions or war peace decisions. Increase of over-ride cost according to number of towns king has does not suits in these scenarios and we have to apply only one formula to all decisions to make things simple. Otherwise system become too complicated.

 

[TheShermanator]

Kings can override all decisions. For example policy decisions or war peace decisions. Increase of over-ride cost according to number of towns king has does not suits in these scenarios and we have to apply only one formula to all decisions to make things simple. Otherwise system become too complicated.

That's reasonable, especially if simplicity is the goal. I just wonder if influence gains do scale with size, but influence costs do not scale with size in the same way, influence snowballing is the inevitable outcome?

 

[Sidrath]

@mexxico

In previous versions the rulers were not so greedy, and gave almost all fiefs other lords.

This is my impression as well. I am honestly surprised to hear that high influence is all it takes for a ruler to go ultra-greedy - I assumed the AI had hidden variables governing some of these actions (like how fiefless Lords get some sort of prioritisation that, it seemed to me, overrides ruler greed). Mexxico, are you completely sure that Influence alone is causing this ruler behaviour? Prior to its fix, Council of the Commons caused dramatically more Influence inflation than the (comparatively) meagre impact of town forums, yet I do recall Kings still awarding me fiefs with Council of the Commons active.

If it is incontrovertible that Influence alone is causing ruler greed (I'm sceptical, but I'll defer to the dev!), then I'd offer something simpler... like a (variable) Influence decay rate. Make Influence decay by a percentage every day, so it becomes unfeasible for Influence to inflate beyond a certain level. The decay rate could be zero up to some basic amount, and scale up to penalise more aggressively those hoarding at the top of the pyramid.

Formally, tying this to my biggest concern for Bannerlord - game-ending snowballs - you could make this decay rate scale as a function of:

1. A Lord's current influence pool: 0% decay rate till 100 Influence, scaling up to say 2% per day decay rate at 1000 Influence. Losing 20 Inf per day probably won't happen: the Lord's Inf will probably stabilise (gains from Forums, policies, etc offsetting decay) somewhere between 500 and 1000. High enough to ensure major Lords can still run decent armies and make the occasional big bet on a fief, low enough to preserve the merry-go-round of fief allocation and prevent the formation of those 2.5k doomstacks - no one could hoard enough Inf to marshall the entire snowballing kingdom at once.
   
   
2. The power of the kingdom: The more fiefs the kingdom owns as whole, the more challenging it should become for any one Lord to exert much influence. Model that disunity / logistical overhead as an additive factor on the Influence decay rate, penalising larger kingdoms and giving smaller, more streamlined kingdoms a chance to bounce back... and make the simulation last forever.

 

[AfLIcTeD]

I don't know how it is calculated now. Maybe have it scaled from kingdom strength? The bigger the kingdom> more people to influence> more influence needed.

 

[drallim33]

Prior to its fix, Council of the Commons caused dramatically more Influence inflation than the (comparatively) meagre impact of town forums, yet I do recall Kings still awarding me fiefs with Council of the Commons active.

I'm only guessing but I think before the king could not override the decision and take it for himself. So it was always one of the three in the vote. I could be totally wrong about that.

 

[Bannerman Man]

I'm only guessing but I think before the king could not override the decision and take it for himself. So it was always one of the three in the vote. I could be totally wrong about that.

Were kings previously on every single ballot? I've found that kings seem to appear on nearly every ballot, vote for themselves, and if a new vassal hasn't recently joined, then most of the king's "inner circle" vote for him in the elections as well. So I'm not sure how often kings even need to overrule the vote.