But doesn't detract from the fact joining them is extremely easy and quickly rewarding, in a very short amount of time.
I'm not a particular fan of the 'balance' they have to date - yes, the snowballing at the very start of EA was bad but that was because of other factors. This tribute/peace calculation is a poor implementation to anti-snowballing as it's essentially the same as they are doing with how loyalty drift 'balance' works with towns.
What I'm asking for - wage, upgrade, or both - accounting for the balancing after-affects with how their AI works.
And any combination to make them work more (be it by nerfing damage, less accuracy, more cost, etc...); tweaking the stats of all the other units in order to address the 'balance' KGs/Fians is not the route I would go as OP suggested (not to say some of those troops also need some work regardless).
Just make the swing damage scaling lesser, and have smithing be the only opportunity/route for the player to create some crazy weapon.
well, my take on it is that they are "nerfing" - meaning "leveling through the bottom line" and not actually making positive changes.
What would be a positive change? Through addition of layers - not through counter-acting an obvious and logical result, but rather by adding more variables into the fold.
Create conditions to actually be able to permanently flip a town to your side (despite culture differences) through active mechanics, not passive ones (recent conquests creating looters & rebels - having to curb those through mini-tasks and mini-quests even for AI) how? well, there are mods that already allow AI to fight hideouts and the likings, make it automated for the AI to deal with those once the new town owner get's voted - effectively slowing down conquest by removing a clan. If the AI's too rebel to respond positively to that, than force army cohesion to 0 after any conquests automatically, and burn everyone's influence involved in the ballot picks immediately after the vote (killing multiple army formation possibilities and forcing the AI to deal with the mini-quests involved after the conquest).
Give garrisons functions like having patrols (much similar to improved garrisons mod) so bandits do not infest the vicinity of settlements, as long as the clan has the resources for it, so on so forth...
There are ways and ways of implementing measures to properly balance AI snowballing - while also doing the same for players in a fun way instead of more boring biased bs to deal with... And even with the negative take, we as players are still able to circumvent it completely. Once you reach certain lvl of power in-game you are basically unstoppable, but the world feels dead and empty, even during major wars once we reach that point... That's because there aren't meaningful choices nor meaningful effects to anything we do, AI never reacts to any input, and when they do it's a full robotic feedback - making the game feel even worse.
I've done world conquest by around 10 times already - each and everytime once I have 3/4th to 1/3rd of the map under my control it becomes a trivial task of hunting down armies and retaking backdoor sieges - no challenge, just pure nuisance and annoyance that we have to deal with... Until they make the AI more organic, this game's gonna be crap on the "campaign" side of it - until they make battles more engaging and challenging with proper rewarding mechanics, battles will feel boring either due to being OP or by being too underpowered depending on progression stage... The same ends up happening for the RPG elements like their leveling system, where most perks are meaningless and we're constantly striving for the next decent improvement only to be met with boredom after because it was too powerful or too irrelevant. Or because to make a fully specced build we must sacrifice a lot of interesting options because the perk distribution makes absolutely zero sense.
without entering technicalities, until tactical input isn't the major element on winning both on campaign map and battles, this game ain't gonna be much - if to win it's about measuring numbers like in Top Trumps than the game will always feel boring, nerf whatever you want, buff whatever you want - it'll ultimately always have the same result.
I'm not sure what you guys are arguing about because to me all of that shenanigan's summed to gameplay choices that aren't really choices. There's no fun to be had once we reach certain pt besides world conquest, and after that the game dies. - Oh look I conquered Sanala as a Sturgian king - what effect does that have in-game? None, just that now you have to deal with another loyalty silly min-game where you can counter with passives through governor / continuous project / policies - congratulations on your conquest, you now receive + passive income and there's absolutely nothing to do there other than visiting a keep.
PS: I can think of numerous (have already thought of really) ways of using current systems to flush depth to the game - each and every single one depends on creating layers, and that means a lot of changes because each and every feature should converse to all others at all times - at this pt I don't think TW will ever bother with the changes the game needs to be good because it's lengthy and time consuming work. At bare minimum I wanted they improved the baseline, specially if it's stuff hardcoded that cannot be modded.
