General suggestions - 1.00+

[Demidekidasu]

Just had a quick look in one of my books and, just as I thought, Caernarfon castle did not exist until the 1280's. However, Dolwyddelan was a Welsh castle at this point. Currently it is depicted as a village. Therefore, it seems a more accurate picture of Wales in 1257 would perhaps be like this:

Pembroke castle and Cardiff castle owned by the English in the south.

Aberffraw and Dolwyddelan castle owned by the Welsh in the north.

Also, I feel the need to repeat that I'm pretty sure "Cymry" is not a word. It should be Cymru (Welsh for...well, Welsh.)

 

[Nate884]

Overall the Mod is fantastic, awesome, great job Dr Tomas and the entire team, we thank you and praise you!

As far as suggestions, I agree with many others, that it seems very easy for factions to be completely eliminated very early on in the game. I'm sure it is a fine balance between having AI that is too passive, or having them too aggressive as they seem to be now.

It certainly was much easier to defend a castle or city with a significantly smaller force than your attackers in many instances, so I never minded having to assemble large forces and pay dearly to take a fortification as in previous versions of this Mod.

I did also like the Crouch feature that was available in the SVN, was there a reason that was not included in 1.0?

I will continue to gratefully play and see if it's possible to make this awesome piece of work somehow any better

 

[Jason L.]

First of all I want to congratulate the dev. team for the magnificent work they did making us happy...
Some minor things may worth your consideration .
1) When one is serving as a soldier in a lords army and takes the "two weeks leave" if he returns earlier the quest of returning in duty in time fales et the end of two weeks and he receives a message for that . It doesn't appear to effect the game though (as far as I know).
2) the horse archers should ride around the enemy NOT clockwise but the other way to be able to shoot arrows as they can not shoot to their right . I noticed only some cavalarii so far, that where turning right and just couldn't use their bows ..
Many thanks , yours faithfully. 
     

 

[Tripnip14]

Get rid of the deal where if a lord leaves a kingdom he takes his fiefs with him. I was playing as the Teutons and one of our lords switched to an Italian state and I lost several villages. It doesn't seem very accurate that a lord could break his oath AND be allowed to take the land he had been granted. Several instances of this ruined my game.
And missile weapons are overpowered. It's like marine snipers are hitting me with modern rifles rather than peasant archers hitting me with crappy bows. My heavy armor should negate alot of the damage, but right now I fear archers more than any senior knight.

Great mod other than these 2 things. Keep up the great work!!!

 

[illapa]

Add more Armenian troops. Apparently only Ermenak and Karaman let you hire these soldiers. Why is it that if i conquer Tarsus (the capital of Armenia Minor) All the troops are either latin or arab? Every village in and around Ermenak and Tarsus should have Armenian troops too shouldn't they?

 

[Sarkiss]

another thing that could be a great addition for any mod that is striving for historical accuracy and realism would be stamina system and/or armour penalties, like in Brytenwalda. you could make it optional so that little superman fan boys dont whine too much.

Adding Stamina system and Armor penalties could be nice additions but there is a catch there..
Imagine the character has 15 Strength. It is OK that some abilities drop when you wear a heavy armor. But when the same amount of penalties apply to a character with 18 Strength, it starts to be illogical. Same goes for stamina..
So if any or both systems will be integrated, some work is to be done to include the strength (or agility or any related skill) factor, in my opinion.

it might not be perfect, it is still a much better system and makes more sene than the native arcade style fighting, imho.

Add more Armenian troops. Apparently only Ermenak and Karaman let you hire these soldiers. Why is it that if i conquer Tarsus (the capital of Armenia Minor) All the troops are either latin or arab? Every village in and around Ermenak and Tarsus should have Armenian troops too shouldn't they?

seconded

 

[Arszi]

An option at the start of a new game, all the factions starts the game in peace, and they decide later whom to attack.

With the current historical system, Mamluk Sultanate and Cymir dies in the first 70 days (without the help of the player). They don't have any chance to survive...

 

[stevehoos]

An option at the start of a new game, all the factions starts the game in peace, and they decide later whom to attack.

With the current historical system, Mamluk Sultanate and Cymir dies in the first 70 days (without the help of the player). They don't have any chance to survive...

Agreed, the Welsh garrisons are never able to reach a decent number maybe? Subsequently, England attacks their capitol and defeats them in the first week, every time. . It leads to a very linear and repetitive start to the beginning of each new game, which leads to carbon copy games. Even if you try to help the Welsh, it will make no difference. The Welsh have 5 lords in Othr's version, which seems to help them. With the current system in place, The Welsh are useless to have as a faction. The mod at least for me, is not playable in its current state. But I am ruthless with perfectionism.   

 

[Gthaatar]

In my experience, sometimes its a good thing the Welsh get wiped out so fast.

In my current game, I managed to forge peace between England and Wales, and after about 3 weeks, Wales went to war with England again (on their own terms this time) and conquered their Ireland holdings as well as Chester and one of the castles closer to it.  Granted, the lords of England were having a feast in Bordeux apparently, but even so.  They conquered a lot in the time it took the English to return.  And they kept it for that matter, having since made peace again after Scotland and France declared war against England simultaneously.

Frankly, with the near blitzkrieg like way they took England, I wouldn't want to go to war with Wales at their current power.

 

[stevehoos]

In my experience, sometimes its a good thing the Welsh get wiped out so fast.

In my current game, I managed to forge peace between England and Wales, and after about 3 weeks, Wales went to war with England again (on their own terms this time) and conquered their Ireland holdings as well as Chester and one of the castles closer to it.  Granted, the lords of England were having a feast in Bordeux apparently, but even so.  They conquered a lot in the time it took the English to return.  And they kept it for that matter, having since made peace again after Scotland and France declared war against England simultaneously.

Frankly, with the near blitzkrieg like way they took England, I wouldn't want to go to war with Wales at their current power.

In principle I would agree with you. But The Welsh have been eliminated at the same exact time during the very beginning of each of my 4 test games. There is no sense in having a faction in game that has no % of surviving the first 3 weeks. It's the same thing every time; that goes against whole ideal of a sandbox type game. Simply put, the Welsh are toast from what I have seen about 90% of the time within the first 2 to 3 weeks of game play. Unless you intervene (which does not work unless you cheat), the Welsh will exit the game at the same time each play through. 

 

[Gthaatar]

Actually I just lucked out and got the Guild Master quest to forge peace.  Didn't take long for peace to actually happen.

But yes, my game is probably a stray duck in a pack of wild boars.  I still say all you need to do is just stop England being at war with them right from the beginning.  Even just looking at history, Wales was never necessarily at war with England in 1257.  There was some fighting, but not full scale war.  Wales wouldn't be truly invaded and (basically) conquered until after Henry III's reign.

If anything, they should actually be on good terms with each other from the beginning and then gradually degrade from there.

 

[Ivan the Awesome]

except that one time where they took a city somewhere in the middle east, remember that?

 

[Arszi]

Will, I restarted my game, and in both of my games Damietta and Jerusalem were took away from the mamluk sultanate till day 50. Once both by the Ilkhanate, then Damiette by the crusaders, Jerusalem by the Ilkhanate. The "same" pattern twice. I hope won't be all of my new games the "same".

 

[Demidekidasu]

Actually I just lucked out and got the Guild Master quest to forge peace.  Didn't take long for peace to actually happen.

But yes, my game is probably a stray duck in a pack of wild boars.  I still say all you need to do is just stop England being at war with them right from the beginning.  Even just looking at history, Wales was never necessarily at war with England in 1257.  There was some fighting, but not full scale war.  Wales wouldn't be truly invaded and (basically) conquered until after Henry III's reign.

If anything, they should actually be on good terms with each other from the beginning and then gradually degrade from there.

I've not checked and am only relying on fuzzy memories from things I've read, but wasn't Henry III a relatively weak king whom the prince of Wales at the time forced into a peace deal somewhat favourable for the Welsh?

Eventually, yes, Longshanks utterly ROFLstomped them, but he was a completely different character and before that, I'm sure the Welsh were quite resistant and quite a pain in the bum for the English.

Therefore, having them vanish so quickly is indeed unrealistic...

 

[stevehoos]

Will, I restarted my game, and in both of my games Damietta and Jerusalem were took away from the mamluk sultanate till day 50. Once both by the Ilkhanate, then Damiette by the crusaders, Jerusalem by the Ilkhanate. The "same" pattern twice. I hope won't be all of my new games the "same".

As I have stated in another post, there are a lot of similarities in beginning game patterns, many are playing out much the same. 

 

[wladouche]

You can add a link to the website ? 

 

[PrinceNaga]

I know its subjective, but Norway and Sweden seriously need their colors separated in hue a bit, because when I first started playing the mod last month, it took me a week to realize thus. One of them needs to be darker than the hour. Perhaps the Norwegian's, because they're evil?

What the mod needs is stronger garrisons to begin with, especially smaller Faction's more-so. Didn't one mod incorporate "Captains" that led armies around to and simply followed other Lord's? Otherwise they should at least have 5 Lord's and a few ladies too I agree.

Besides that, two changes I would do is implement historical relations between Faction's, not to be utterly deterministic, but throughout the sandbox, every nation has a list of high priority neighbors to go after that could be used wisely in balancing warfare out. The idea is not that the Teutonic Order will always strike the Baltic's, but 7/10 it will.

And the distances the AI will go to invade enemy territory seems too stretched for them to competently deal with. Since the English begin with Bordeaux, at one point in my on-going game the Marinid Dynasty captured Pamplona or one of their Iberian castles - the English immediately declared war upon them to retrieve it. I know it must've had to do with Religious relations between Faction groups, but it seemed not necessarily unrealistic, what it affects in my opinion is gameplay. When Hungary fought with the HRE, the AI regardless of knowing how strong garrisons are, shouldn't march through Deutschland to besiege Lubeck after the Danish just lost it to the German's. It makes logical sense to do so in the short-hand, but when you measure the distances between Hungarian territory and that area, its bad strategy to take something so outta your reach. I doubt this could be fixed, but if the AI could be forced to lay siege to settlements much closer to them even if much more harder, it would improve warfare. Native AI didn't have to deal with so many Faction's in so many places, although it did dumb things like the Khergit deciding to take Sarrinid Castle when Jameyyed was just south of Halmar.

 

[Hypno Toad]

You implemented the crossbow texture on the wrong model

The siege crossbow is supposed to have the crossbow_a model, not the steel prod model. I tried the sinew texture on the steel prod crossbow as an experiment, but it looked.. strange, so I switched to using the normal crossbow model.

In principle I would agree with you. But The Welsh have been eliminated at the same exact time during the very beginning of each of my 4 test games. There is no sense in having a faction in game that has no % of surviving the first 3 weeks. It's the same thing every time; that goes against whole ideal of a sandbox type game. Simply put, the Welsh are toast from what I have seen about 90% of the time within the first 2 to 3 weeks of game play. Unless you intervene (which does not work unless you cheat), the Welsh will exit the game at the same time each play through. 

That's odd, I've not once seen the welsh defeated (except for when I starved out the abberfraw garrison)

They have a garrison of like 1000 men, some 300 of whom are longbowmen. It's an impossible battle and Ive never seen the bots actually try to siege the castle before.


Does it have something to do with the campaign AI setting maybe?

 

[stevehoos]

You implemented the crossbow texture on the wrong model

The siege crossbow is supposed to have the crossbow_a model, not the steel prod model. I tried the sinew texture on the steel prod crossbow as an experiment, but it looked.. strange, so I switched to using the normal crossbow model.

In principle I would agree with you. But The Welsh have been eliminated at the same exact time during the very beginning of each of my 4 test games. There is no sense in having a faction in game that has no % of surviving the first 3 weeks. It's the same thing every time; that goes against whole ideal of a sandbox type game. Simply put, the Welsh are toast from what I have seen about 90% of the time within the first 2 to 3 weeks of game play. Unless you intervene (which does not work unless you cheat), the Welsh will exit the game at the same time each play through. 

That's odd, I've not once seen the welsh defeated (except for when I starved out the abberfraw garrison)

They have a garrison of like 1000 men, some 300 of whom are longbowmen. It's an impossible battle and Ive never seen the bots actually try to siege the castle before.


Does it have something to do with the campaign AI setting maybe?

In the "kill the peasants edition" the garrison at Abberfraw is usually less than 450. Are you playing othr's SVN version? 

 

[Gthaatar]

I've just had an idea.

What if we could go to the Pope and convince him to give the player (or buy) the rightful claim to any particular kingdom we want (or if we want to keep it semi-balanced, only a faction we're a vassal of, and while having sufficient renown, RTR, etc).  IN essence, allow us to start our own rebellion of sorts without retaliation from the Papal States which in turn can get you into war with the rest of the Catholic world.

For instance I wanted to create my own Empire out of the conquered Latin and Nicaea Empires. And while I was able to conquer them both easily enough, I ended up in war with the Papal  States that I simply couldn't end, eventually leading me to wipe them out just so I woudn't have to keep retaking my own lands, which I didn't like because it locked me out of all the things I could do with the Pope (IE, get crowned, go on crusade, etc) as well as making me go against my roleplay, as I my character was supposed to be a Catholic.


And incidentally, I've also fallen prey to the issue of kingdoms not being conquered properly if you capture their lands too fast.  Nicaea in that particular game still existed for the longest time because I conquered their lands relatively faster than they could field an army.  So they ended up being stuck in some other kingdoms castle and I was inable to defeat them properly (because to do so I'd have to declare war on like, 5 different nations).  I eventually destroyed them by giving them one of my fiefs and then defeating them and imprisoning them as they showed up, but still.  It was a lot of effort to destroy a nation that should have just disappeared once they lost their lands.