Food Shortage

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I think due to current mechanics the ruler gets temporary control of any conquered fief until voting has been concluded. And this is at least part of the reason why they are always on the ballot for every vote. Regardless of if they had anything to do with the conquest.
 
Either way, though, if the King's overrule influence cost is trivial when he has lots of influence from lots of fiefs, per mexxico, the frequency of the override should matter relatively less. There's got to be a way for this, or other mechanisms, to cost more influence the bigger you get.
 
All those analysis are awesome!

I agree, construction feels too fast. All cities are full Tier III pretty quickly, by the time the player enters late game there is no building game at all.

It does not feel very realistic, building a granary could be done in a month but changing the wooden palisade to a stone stronghold should take 20-30 years.

We need a formula to make things more enjoyable and not explotable and I fully agree with Mexxico that we have to keep in mind that nerfing AI making them playing as if they weren't human players (trying to do the best choices everytime they can) does not help the game. Artificial nerf to AI mechanics could be a temporary solution but breaks the game logic.

I don't know if personality traits are involved in decision making but it would be really awesome a closefisted Ruler should be more greedy taking fiefs even if it causes his fief to be less prosperous and reduce his ability to influence other decisions. So he will be spending his influence more frequently to override decisions involving money or fiefs in his favor. But I also expect a Daring ruler will also be spending his influence in armies, an honorable one will keep his peace word more time and so on. I really hope the logic of the rulers and lords don't depend only in how much influence I have available, we expect them to be unique in decision making. Also the player should develop traits around this kingdom decisions not only quests (I think this trait development is in a pretty early state by now).

I also se as very good news an intention to reduce the average wars as in 1.4.1 beta I am having a hard time with my kingdom!

Keep with the good work!
 
I feel like being able to build in cities constantly is a lazy design, building should have a cost. As being a Civil engineer here, having a daily building power which has no relationship to economy or manpower is not that looking well, however current economy sistem is looking sensible already, I dont know what we will have to face if devs make buildings depending on economy.
 
I feel like being able to build in cities constantly is a lazy design, building should have a cost. As being a Civil engineer here, having a daily building power which has no relationship to economy or manpower is not that looking well, however current economy sistem is looking sensible already, I dont know what we will have to face if devs make buildings depending on economy.

They do and don't have a cost currently, pending workshop construction. 500 gold for the daily 50 construction points boost (that's what it is now, right?) ain't nothing in the early-ish game. But once you have the workshop maxed, the gold cost seems less necessary.

And I agree more generally that, even with the 500 gold per day needed to boost construction, construction is too fast (or cheap, depending on what you'd change).
 
The influence system needs self-regulating features. There is no way to balance it currently because the events that allow the accumulation of influence are largely uncontrolled, while the events that allow the expenditure of influence are heavily controlled. No amount of tuning specific values can fix that disconnect. So long as the disconnect is deemed acceptable, another strategy is needed to make the system sustainable. Calculating values based on balances present in the system is one way to do that.

eg. King over-rule cost is scaled by various factors, and this could include the total influence within the kingdom, or the king's influence balance, or the total balance of vassals, or the balance of vassals he's opposing. You get the idea... The specifics can be chosen to suite the circumstances - but the principle stands on its own feet regardless.

Such scaling shouldn't be solely restricted to the King's over-rule capability, but nor can it be applied to EVERYTHING. Otherwise vassals joining a kingdom late game would always be minnows amongst whales.

Another alternative is to cap the influence any clan/individual can accumulate. Maybe that cap is changed by clan rank, maybe the king gets a higher cap... the important thing is that having a cap motivates expenditure rather than hoarding and prevents inflation caused by too much influence sitting passively in the system. You can and should still tune influence income to get it in the right ballpark so that everyone isn't always grinding at their cap, but you no longer need to make perfect predictions about something that isn't possible to perfectly predict (ie. how much influence the player and AI lords will earn at any particular window of time).

Warband had tax income penalties for having too many fiefs. Such penalties could be applied to other metrics too (Loyalty springs to mind). Applying it to Influence is a bit counter-intuitive - it makes sense when only looking at the case of spending it to try and acquire more fiefs, but it is the opposite when looking at other uses of Influence such as voting on laws and raising armies.
 
2-Adding daily influence penalty -(number of towns x number of towns) to clans owning towns.

I agree with other people here that this doesn't make any sense and it's counter-intuitive. I think AI is greedy right now because relationship means next to nothing in the game. Can't you guys flesh out the relationship system to give AI more incentive so it'd prefer giving fiefs to vassals over keeping most of them?
Maybe having too many fiefs while others have 1-2 could have a deteriorating effect on relations which could increase chances of said vassals to defect or even rebel. Maybe army cohesion could deplete at a much faster rate if lords in your amry have bad relations with you. And with good relations you can maybe call them to your army with less influence and things like that?
The game seems to have systems in place to fix this issue but I feel like they're not fully implemented yet. I'm waiting every patch for game to improve upon aldready existing mechanics but you guys keep applying band aids. Or maybe I'm compeletely wrong and these mechanics are there just for the lullz and will continue to mean nothing with the full release.
 
I agree with other people here that this doesn't make any sense and it's counter-intuitive.

I wouldn't say that it doesn't make any sense, you're talking about deterioration of relationship, how is that different from deteriorating influence ?
Relationship need to be fleshed out i agree and i believe it will in due time but it's a completely separate issue from the one discussed here.

The problem here is related to food/prosperity and influence, adding another variable again while trying to fix this will make it even more complex and have impact on something else. Sure it would be pretty and fun to have all of those component intertwined, but it's unrealistic to balance it perfectly without creating again another issue.

You add complex stuff when what's simple already worked, currently it's not.
 
I wouldn't say that it doesn't make any sense, you're talking about deterioration of relationship, how is that different from deteriorating influence ?
Relationship need to be fleshed out i agree and i believe it will in due time but it's a completely separate issue from the one discussed here.

The problem here is related to food/prosperity and influence, adding another variable again while trying to fix this will make it even more complex and have impact on something else. Sure it would be pretty and fun to have all of those component intertwined, but it's unrealistic to balance it perfectly without creating again another issue.

You add complex stuff when what's simple already worked, currently it's not.

The problem here is summerized by @drallim33 pretty well. To quote:
  • 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

And @mexxico made a suggestion of giving AI influence penalty if they have too many fiefs to counter "He's too rich because he took all the fiefs for himself".
I, on the other hand, think that this doesn't make any sense and implementing relationship to it's potential would help preventing this issue from happening at all.
How is that separate from what's discussed here? Relationship is very much connected with AI having all the fiefs to himself.
 
How is that separate from what's discussed here? Relationship is very much connected with AI having all the fiefs to himself.

It's connected because you judge it's absence from the equation as a connection, as i just said it just make the problem even more complex to balance because it's adding another variable to the equation.

Then after that they might be problem with lord defecting because they don't have enough fief, the impossibility to pass some kingdom policy or lord not joining armies anymore, i'm not saying it's going to happened, i'm saying that it might. Due to the fact that lord are unhappy about not having fief because you're bound to have more than some of them, and lord hating each other for the same reason.

Imagine having a lord loosing it's fief, then boom you suddenly have far more town than him, so he defect. So you lost a fief and you lost a lord for no obvious reason. Relationship and Influence loss for lord that lost a fief is already an issue imo actually.

While for the influence penalty, it will either work or not work. But not causing additional issue that might need to be fixed later.

I'm wont defend that option more than that because i have no clue if it will be a good solution or not until it's implemented or tested, but saying that it doesn't make any sense is a bit overboard.
 
It's connected because you judge it's absence from the equation as a connection, as i just said it just make the problem even more complex to balance because it's adding another variable to the equation.

Then after that they might be problem with lord defecting because they don't have enough fief, the impossibility to pass some kingdom policy or lord not joining armies anymore, i'm not saying it's going to happened, i'm saying that it might. Due to the fact that lord are unhappy about not having fief because you're bound to have more than some of them, and lord hating each other for the same reason.

Imagine having a lord loosing it's fief, then boom you suddenly have far more town than him, so he defect. So you lost a fief and you lost a lord for no obvious reason.

While for the influence penalty, it will either work or not work. But not causing additional issue that might need to be fixed later.

I'm wont defend that option more than that because i have no clue if it will be a good solution or not until it's implemented or tested, but saying that it doesn't make any sense is a bit overboard.

But isn't it possible to imagine relations mechanics that would largely by-pass problems with the influence equations (and thus influence-fief-gold snowballing), not complicate the same equations?

E.g. Sessession: If a lord, with fiefs, increasingly didn't like the faction leader, he could secede with his fiefs. If multiple lords didn't like the faction leader, they could conspire and secede together. (The lower the relations score, the higher the dice roll chance of this kind of thing happening.) If so, you would just need to figure out how to put negative ruler clan - vassal clan relations pressure on the ruler clan that would scale the bigger and more powerful the rulers got. (Also, generally, there would have to be be a larger suite of actions that impacted relations positively or negatively so that the player could, with difficulty, potentially manage this new pressure in their new kingdom.) That wouldn't solve the underlying influence bloat - fief bloat - influence bloat dynamic directly, but it would help a lot indirectly by just by-bassing the worst end-state iterations of the influence gain equations. (Because it would be way less likely that any one clan could get so many fiefs in the first place, especially for an AI, w/out fighting a secession. In this context, remember, we are viewing fiefs as influence-farms.)

All of this could work in some form at the intra-clan level, but I feel like it would be smoothest to implement at the kingdom-clan-fief interface level.

(To me, this is such an obvious idea that I have to assume that the devs are already considering it in some form. I ain't no genius! )

Edit: To be clear, relations management is already a minor thing in the game, yes. But a) It is not super impactful in most instances, as most lords with fiefs like you well enough specifically because they have fiefs, so only pathetic little clans defect, which is less significant. b) The influence cost of buying relations does not scale but rather costs a flat amount, more or less, so it's easier and easier to get better relations to bigger you get. It does make sense, of course, that more influence should buy you better relations. But if influence gain is unbounded, such that influence costs do not scale with size while influence gains do scale with size, then relations bloat is the natural result. c) There are generally too few things that alter relations in the game one way or another, and almost all of them involve the flat influence costs described in (B).
 
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E.g. Sessession: If a lord, with fiefs, increasingly didn't like the faction leader, he could secede with his fiefs. If multiple lords didn't like the faction leader, they could conspire and secede together. (The lower the relations score, the higher the dice roll chance of this kind of thing happening.) If so, you would just need to figure out how to put negative ruler clan - vassal clan relations pressure on the ruler clan that would scale the bigger and more powerful the rulers got. (Also, generally, there would have to be be a larger suite of actions that impacted relations positively or negatively so that the player could, with difficulty, potentially manage this new pressure in their new kingdom.) That wouldn't solve the underlying influence bloat - fief bloat - influence bloat dynamic directly, but it would help a lot indirectly by just by-bassing the worst end-state iterations of the influence gain equations.

Of course that's viable and could be fun to play with something like that implemented. But i think a lot of people forgot that something like 2 weeks ago we couldn't create a kingdom without the main quest, and there wasn't even any option to declare war other than manually provoking it by hostile action.

It's an unrealistic option for a balance fix right now and would require weeks or month of work, and i dont know for you but i'd rather be playing on a balanced and working game with those kind of feature implemented farther in developpement than waiting for a big release that could potentially fix everything prior but could create further problems on other side of the game.

(To me, this is such an obvious idea that I have to assume that the devs are already considering it in some form. I ain't no genius! )
I guess we'll find out when they disclose stuff about rebellion and further improve loyalty system :p
 
Of course that's viable and could be fun to play with something like that implemented. But i think a lot of people forgot that something like 2 weeks ago we couldn't create a kingdom without the main quest, and there wasn't even any option to declare war other than manually provoking it by hostile action.

It's an unrealistic option for a balance fix right now and would require weeks or month of work, and i dont know for you but i'd rather be playing on a balanced and working game with those kind of feature implemented farther in developpement than waiting for a big release that could potentially fix everything prior but could create further problems on other side of the game.


I guess we'll find out when they disclose stuff about rebellion and further improve loyalty system :p

Totally agree. But I assume that brings us back to the devs perspective: Let's say they know that they are bringing it more robust relations, loyalty, and rebellion/secession mechanics soon. (Target 1 month, really 3 months, let's say :smile: ) Wouldn't they then have less reason to fix the influence bloat equations, if the amount of influence you needed, as well as the unlimited ways in which it could be used, would be up-ended by those incoming features?
 
Totally agree. But I assume that brings us back to the devs perspective: Let's say they know that they are bringing it more robust relations, loyalty, and rebellion/secession mechanics soon. (Target 1 month, really 3 months, let's say :smile: ) Wouldn't they then have less reason to fix the influence bloat equations, if the amount of influence you needed, as well as the unlimited ways in which it could be used, would be up-ended by those incoming features?

Yes less in game reason related to future development, and while i'm sure that they like what they are doing it's still a compagny that need to keep it's player base, and not fixing those kind of stuff because there would be additional content later is not the way to keep those.

Look at the main quest for example, how many people complain about clan development, the fact that it's not finished and i'm sure that a few people stopped playing partly because of that.

That's drifting off topic tho :p
 
Yes less in game reason related to future development, and while i'm sure that they like what they are doing it's still a compagny that need to keep it's player base, and not fixing those kind of stuff because there would be additional content later is not the way to keep those.

Look at the main quest for example, how many people complain about clan development, the fact that it's not finished and i'm sure that a few people stopped playing partly because of that.

That's drifting off topic tho :p

Yeah that makes sense too.

Consider this hypothesis, though: What if it's actually easier to implement a bare bones version of the relations/secession mechanics (one that could be further enhanced, balanced, and fluffed up with later patches or even later DLCs) than it is to fix the underlying influence equations causing the influence bloat? Both should definitely be fixed, but what if the relations/secession mechanics, which would allow us to partly by-bass the really hard problem of fine-tuning the math on those equations where all of the variables interact, are just easier to add than the influence mechanics are to fix?

I don't know if that's true, but per mexxico's info, and his point about how all of these variables and currencies (construction rate, $, influence, fief ownership, garrison size, food availability etc.) are all intersecting and interacting each other in highly complex ways ... I think it's at least possible that those underlying equations would take longer than the new mechanics that would allow us to by-bass the worst end-state forms of those underlying equations.

(For example, there are already mods that do this. Which, yes, that is definitely apples to oranges for a lot of reasons, but it at least makes me wonder if it could be done quickly relative to other solutions.)
 
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Then after that they might be problem with lord defecting because they don't have enough fief, the impossibility to pass some kingdom policy or lord not joining armies anymore, i'm not saying it's going to happened, i'm saying that it might. Due to the fact that lord are unhappy about not having fief because you're bound to have more than some of them, and lord hating each other for the same reason.

Imagine having a lord loosing it's fief, then boom you suddenly have far more town than him, so he defect. So you lost a fief and you lost a lord for no obvious reason. Relationship and Influence loss for lord that lost a fief is already an issue imo actually.

These are exactly the points that need to be addressed after fully implementing the game features. Defection and relationship mechanics will also need to be balanced but they need to be implemented first. But right now, we're thinking about solutions to fix this issue the easy way because, according to you, taking other mechanics (which are already in the game btw) into the equation will complicate things. Well if it's gonna complicate things, let it be. Because that's how the game should be in the first place.

While for the influence penalty, it will either work or not work. But not causing additional issue that might need to be fixed later.

I'm wont defend that option more than that because i have no clue if it will be a good solution or not until it's implemented or tested, but saying that it doesn't make any sense is a bit overboard.

I'm not saying that giving influence penalty won't work purely in terms of game mechanics. I'm saying it doesn't make sense from a player's perspective because if you have lots of fiefs to your name, that makes you a person of influence naturally. More fiefs bound to mean more influence. More influence generally means more enemies too. That's why relations penalty instead of influence penalty makes more sense. I'm thinking this as a player, not as a developer. Also the relation mechanic is already in the game. I'm not introducing anything new. If you're not going to make it mean something where it matters, why is it even in the game?
 
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.
Do you think giving NPC Nobles some engineering skill would be worthwhile? Many of them serve as governors for towns and castles, so if you give Nobles/Vassals a basic engineering level of 40 or so that would translate to a +10 bonus to construction rate that is unaffected by prosperity.

Another alternative is to cap the influence any clan/individual can accumulate. Maybe that cap is changed by clan rank, maybe the king gets a higher cap... the important thing is that having a cap motivates expenditure rather than hoarding and prevents inflation caused by too much influence sitting passively in the system. You can and should still tune influence income to get it in the right ballpark so that everyone isn't always grinding at their cap, but you no longer need to make perfect predictions about something that isn't possible to perfectly predict (ie. how much influence the player and AI lords will earn at any particular window of time).
I considered pitching an idea for a zero sum influence system a while back. Basically, the total influence in the system would be something like 500 x the number of clans in a faction. If a vassal created an army, then the influence would literally be paid to those who heeded the call to join the army. If some vassals won a battle, the influence that they earned would be divided up amongst the lords who were not participants in the battle and subtracted from their influence pools. There were a lot of loose ends left untied though, and it would require a total overhaul of the way influence works.

I also thought the army mechanic would be better suited to a system of influence 'rates.' Each lord has a base rate of influence that they would be paid by the army leader per day they were in the army. If cohesion was boosted, then the daily influence rate of each lord would be increased by a small amount. For instance, if a lord had a base rate of 2.0 influence per day to join an army, then a cohesion boost would increase that lord's rate to 2.2 per day or something; that way armies can't exist indefinitely. A system like that would complement the above mentioned zero sum influence system nicely.
 
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Do you think giving NPC Nobles some engineering skill would be worthwhile? Many of them serve as governors for towns and castles, so if you give Nobles/Vassals a basic engineering level of 40 or so that would translate to a +10 bonus to construction rate that is unaffected by prosperity.

Do they, though? (not rhetorical) I thought you had to assign a governor and then leave them in the settlement for them to be a governor such that they could impact anything in the settlement.

Assuming that: They would have to loosen restrictions on companion count for this to be worth anything, IMO. Pros and Cons to that (companion restrictions exist for a reason, of course).

I considered pitching an idea for a zero sum influence system a while back. Basically, the total influence in the system would be something like 500 x the number of clans in a faction. If a vassal created an army, then the influence would literally be paid to those who heeded the call to join the army. If some vassals won a battle, the influence that they earned would be divided up amongst the lords who were not participants in the battle and subtracted from their influence pools. There were a lot of loose ends left untied though, and it would require a total overhaul of the way influence works.

In principle, this would be great - clearly better for game play reasons than the current system, and also more realistic. Influence is zero sum in a way that gold is not. I can see why they went with a non-zero sum bankable currency system though - much easier to design and balance, even from the vantage point of starting from scratch, I would think.

In any system, the cost / income rate of anything denominated in that currency affects everything else denominated in that currency, so balancing is always hard. But if it's a zero sum system? Man, that would be hard to balance for every application and every stage of the game.
 
Any chance we will get direct access to the granary?

Being able to stock it manually will help.

If you only have 1 castle or town, it would be nice to have a large garrison to protect it. Being able to restocj the granary would be a benefit to help offset these issues.
 
Any chance we will get direct access to the granary?

Being able to stock it manually will help.

If you only have 1 castle or town, it would be nice to have a large garrison to protect it. Being able to restocj the granary would be a benefit to help offset these issues.

Ideally, we want the devs to fix it so that the existing system works (but with better numbers). But also, there appears to be a mod for that: https://www.nexusmods.com/mountandblade2bannerlord/mods/271. Haven't used it, so can't advise, but 20k downloads is a lot.
 
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