SP - General I think Smithing feature is dragging down the overhaul gaming experience

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Smithing in MB2 is obviously the best denar making business. Not only it's totally safe that prevent you from getting captured by enemy, but also it's really a denar grab. Way better than fighting a great battle, way better than having a trading route.
What does player need to prepare for smithing? Just need to have around 50 bodyguards and some mules, then you are good to go.
How is the experience of smithing? It repeats, even with the town-NPCs' order feature, it still feels strongly repetitive and making the player irrelative to the rest of the game's feature.
Normally, by the time player clan reaches tier 3, fighting a decent enemy force of 90+ men will yield over 10k denars, but selling a tier 5 2h sword that you craft can also get you that number. How many this tier 5 2h swords player can make per day? Assume the player party has only 1 good blacksmith, then by the time of player's clan reaches tier 3, he can already make about 5 pieces of tier5 2hswords a day. Does the material for making such weapon hard to access? Not really, since player can melt pugios that were bulk sold by traders to get loads and loads of high tier metal materials at very low cost. Don't mention that you don't need to seek out nor hunt down that enemy force if you do 2h sword crafting.

So, in every playthrough a player may have, if the player want to grew its faction fast, then they need to use this Smithing trick to grab denars. Making the all playthroughs basicly similar except for different combat build.

We need to think:
1. Why an owner of blacksmith want to lend their forge and smelter to player?
2. Why player and player's companions need to do all the material grinding task, like making charcoal?
3. Why Smithing skill, along with its crafting system, have so little impact and so little cohesion to the rest of the game?


Maybe we can solve the issues from above by:
1. Player should only be able to access crafting if they were in a settlement that they actually own a blacksmith.
2. The smelt and refine tasks should be migrated to a new UI area for NPCs to do, that player make bulk orders and the blacksmith has its workers fulfill these orders.
For example, I order 100 unit of charcoal, the blacksmith will do it in 5 days, for free if I was the owner of this blacksmith and provided needed hardwood, or for an amount of money if I didn't own this blacksmith, then I came back in 5 days, to receive that 100 units of charcoal.
3.
3.1. No more energy cost, use time-passing instead.
That if player or a companion want to craft something, let the player team or the companion stay and wait in that settlement and let the time pass, if the required time-passing was finished, then generate that crafted item. If was interrupted by a siege, then don't generate that crafted item. The higher tier the a weapon part was, the longer the time-passing should be, also, the more weapon parts were used, the longer time-passing should be. Such as:
weapon part's tier​
time-passing added​
tier 11hr
tier 22hrs
tier 33hrs
tier 45hrs
tier 58hrs
So, if I want to craft a sword with all tier1 weapon parts, then it should take 1hr + 1hr + 1hr + 1hr = 4hrs
if I want to craft an axe with a tier5 axe head and a tier4 axe handle, then it should take 5hrs + 8hrs = 13hrs
3.2. Make Tournament to the same time-passing feature mentioned above. And let each round of match takes half hrs.
3.3. Add a new settlement asset called Warehouse, that allow player to drop goods in there and post guards to prevent getting stolen. Let the crafting process automaticlly access the materials you placed there.
3.4. Allow players to pay money to town's smith to unlock certain weapon part's blueprint.
3.5. Lower the sell price of crafted items.
 
For an online game, the principle of time = money is well known. The farm genre is an example.

The combination of crafting and tournament logic was tested by me on prototypes. Round = detail. If the prize is a tier 5 sword with a tier 4 hilt, then there will be three opponents of tier 5 and one of 4 (because the hilt is weaker). It turned out funny.

Decreasing the price of crafted items or all items in general, especially Tier 5 and Tier 6, has also been tested. Successfully, there are ready-made solutions, incl. my authorship ^_^
 
For an online game, the principle of time = money is well known. The farm genre is an example.

The combination of crafting and tournament logic was tested by me on prototypes. Round = detail. If the prize is a tier 5 sword with a tier 4 hilt, then there will be three opponents of tier 5 and one of 4 (because the hilt is weaker). It turned out funny.

Decreasing the price of crafted items or all items in general, especially Tier 5 and Tier 6, has also been tested. Successfully, there are ready-made solutions, incl. my authorship ^_^
Were you referring to the Multiplayer part of this game? I haven't try that yet.
 
I agree its ruining experience, but here is my alternative suggestion:

1.Players must unlock access to higher Tier craftable pieces based on smithing level.

2. Crafting higher difficulty items over your skillset has an exponentially-scaled chance of failure (scaled based on how much higher the difficulty bar is over skillset) and if you fail, you will lose those mats in the process.

An example: a lvl 20 smith unlocks T2 items, lvl 30 = T3, lvl 40=T4, lvl 50=T5.
Percent of failure over difficulty can range from 0% > to 95% failure depending on how much harder it is to make.

This will prevent excessively mass producing expensive weapons. I think this is much simpler than redoing the entire system.

 
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The problem with the crafting system in MB;BL is it doesn't know what it wants from the player. Think about it for a moment. The stamina system, the amount of clicking required to mass craft, and the gold gained per weapon crafted indicates the system should not be "spammed". Yet the game also wants you to spam crafting in order to level up and unlock blueprints.

It just doesn't make sense. And the amount of clicking needed is insanity. The system really does need a complete overhaul. Coupled with an economy fix for weapons and armour. Why does a modder address the issue of inflated prices better than taleworlds? (Economy Tweak by heu3becteh for those interested).
 
Smithing needs a rework in my opinion. It should be less rewarding in terms of money and to compensate that nerf it should be much faster to level up, the stamina system should be removed and unlocking parts should be much faster as well. It's also completely overcomplicated, doesn't make sense that twohanded weapons give so much more xp than some other weapons.
 
The smithing system is fine as is is, needs some little tweaking though.

I love smithing as a process - i literally spend hours in a smithy. And I don't want to play the game without me personally smithing and smelting all the stuff. Nothing fun about giving orders for the craft to NPC and wait. Just boring.

Stamina system must stay the same, because it's great, time passing is already enough. Time passing for each piece will ruin the fun and will require in-game years of craft. ( Tourneys can take half an hour or so though.)

I agree that selling price must be lowered, for now its ridiculous that 5 good-ish swords can deplete traiders economy.

Thanx to the existing unpredictable system smithing feels like a gamble, like opening lootboxes and that is cool. Yes, rates of learning the parts may be improved a little, but even with the existing system they are fine as is. If you buy it from some smith, its just dull. Then you will get true repetitiveness, because there will be no more hoping and wishing for it when you press the "Forge" button.

I would add a slider to refining though - thousands clicking for every component are too much though. At least let a player chose number of batches - 5-10 pieces, for example.

The smithing is quite simple and not complicated at all (but now it requires too much clicking, hence my suggestion of batches button). If you dont want to smith - just buy stuff from traders - it's more than enough for battles.
 
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