Great analysis as always!
Aside from the great points you have mentioned, the thing is that I find Sturgia mostly week due to some other factions overperforming (Battania and Khuzait). As I have mentioned before, I am disabling the cavalry bonus in simulated battles in all my new campaigns and Sturgia is doing ok in the first 5-10 years (not sure what happen after that because I just start a new campaign).
In all my new campaigns, Sturgia is able to defend from Vlandia without much problems, and they just start getting wrecked if facing Battania and/or Khuzait (like any other faction).
The fact of Battania being able to wreck Vlandia in some campaigns is something which has surprised me a lot if we think about Vlandia amount of fiefs and clans.
Talking about the map redesign or adding some few villages for Sturgia, I am not sure if this is something which could be do easily and it probably requires an insane amount of work (maybe I am wrong here), and not sure if it is something which devs could see as an option, but this would probably help Sturgia a lot.
You bring up some great points. Cav bonus gives too much power to cav dominate kingdoms.
I think Battania is an outlier to most of the general reasons Kingdoms are strong because they are so condensed that their defensive response time is fast and their ability to recover from loss is fast (its not that they don't lose fights). This is why I think Sturgia is at such a disadvantage, all of their settlements are so disperse that they take forever to respond to defensive needs and can't build up forces fast enough after a defeat, which is often due to lack of inf advantage in autocalc (having some of the best inf in battle doesn't mean anything in autocalc).
Vlandia suffers from not having a giant lake and having the Battanians as neighbors, although are better off than Sturgia due to their high town/village numbers. Aserai also shows us a long kingdom that does fine because they have the highest amount of towns and villages and also have strategic cutoff points at the edge of their kingdom instead of the middle of it.
I truly hope they considering adding new villages/castles as I don't think mexxico can do anything with the map, it is not his decision (just like cav bonus and Khuzait faction traits).
Great writeup! My two cents: Considering that in the setting, Battania is meant to be an underdog like Sturgia is now, perhaps Battania could lose some villages while Sturgia gains some villages? In other words, nerf Battania at the same time as buffing Sturgia?
You would think that right? Battania is supposedly one of the weaker factions that dont survive to Warband. Khuzaits strength seems acceptable in 1.5.6, I mean if we go by Warband lore they defeat the empire in a couple hundred years (not 20), but not the Sturgians (who split into nords/Vaegir).
I believe that one of the problems with Sturgia is that the expansion/invasion points are too conditioned by agressive bottleneck narrowing passages. In
this thread, I proposed a series of modifications to make the map a little closer to the warband heritage.
Terco will you promise to make a mod with all your suggestions if they aren't taken in by the end of EA? So many of your suggestions are spot on. Sturgia looks a lot more open like Aserai instead of bottlenecked in the middle of their own territory.
I am trying to run this test on my new campaign 1.5.5... Battania and Sturgia inevitably eats up Vlandia and Khuzait snowballing (I know it's still expected in 1.5.5).
However there is a thing I miss a lot in the game. Heroic AI vs AI battles. All these battles are simply mathematical calculation. Bigger number wins all the time.
Maybe TW could introduce some hero spawns with high tactical skills. This could lead to several heroic battles where the weaker faction randomly defeats the strong which could trigger comebacks.
This is a great point and something I've suggested before is letting weaker kingdom AI focus on training up their troops by going into manhunter/patrol/recruit mode until their strength level is decent. Something that is missing from Warband is a kingdom focus on gathering their strength again, instead in 1.5.5 they form armies once they get enough influence and other lords have 40% of their party with just recruits. But this is one of the fixes mexxico has made in 1.5.6 with ensuring parties actually fill up their parties.
Something that
@Apocal has suggested which is think is great is making lords have a higher focus on retreating once a portion of their troops are dead, I think that would only be possible with a change to armor/health/dmg resistance, like
@Terco_Viejo has tested, to let the battles last long enough for the AI to retreat (right now battles are over so fast their is no chance to strategically retreat for AI). I think in autocalc the AI do a decent job of retreating when severally outnumbered, but it wont happen when the player is involved.
snip- hitting word count limit
Again as has been mentioned by
@Blood Gryphon before we see in your tests that battania makes a comeback but its lost no clans and from what I saw from these tests
Losing clans= Uou die
Good notes. Sorry about your pc that sucks.
I really do think the clans deserting thing is the major issue in kingdoms dying. I think when they lose a clan they need to focus on getting them or another clan back at a high priority, like increase the kingdom wallet tax rate to gather funds for Clan recruitment. We can even see in mexxicos 1.5.6 test at year 30 the sturgians start to die off once the Kuloving clan desert over to the Western empire handing over Varcheg (or being giving Varcheg after losing it).
I also think maybe they should try out a version where deserting because you are surrounded is turned off, that seems to be a big factor for Sturgians deserting once they lose one or two of their settlements (once again due to how dispersed all of their settlements are). Its honestly almost like a penalty to specifically screw over the Sturgians because of their geography.
I actually have a decent computer and it wasn't lagging, I honestly don't know why it was so slow maybe a bug or I wrote 1 instead of 10 don't know
I have a feeling it was
this, the typical fast forward button speed is 3 so you likely went below that. mexxico does his test at 10 speed, apparently above 20 has shown some issues in his tests.