It's more effective to max those skills that reduce penalties

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Leadership reduces the base cost by 5% per skill level. But the real cost is reduced by a larger percentage for every skill level. Let's say we have a theoritical unit with a wage of 100 denars. At level 9 Leadership, that unit's wage is 55 denars. By going from 9 to 10 Leadership, the wage goes from 55 to 50, which is a little over a 9% reduction.

The inverse is true for most skills that increase bonuses per skill level. The real percentile increase becomes lower as your skill gets higher. This doesn't mean that you should never max out such a skill, because even the diminishing returns may still be worth it, and other factors may offset this effect (such as the soak factor of armour in the case of Power * skills). But it's nonetheless useful to keep in mind that skills that reduce penalties become more effective at higher levels.
 
Captain_Octavius said:
Leadership reduces the base cost by 5% per skill level. But the real cost is reduced by a larger percentage for every skill level. Let's say we have a theoritical unit with a wage of 100 denars. At level 9 Leadership, that unit's wage is 55 denars. By going from 9 to 10 Leadership, the wage goes from 55 to 50, which is a little over a 9% reduction.

This hurt my brain for a moment because i haven't done maths in years, but I think this is a bit confused. It's a 5% reduction of the original total, not the current amount, so it's linear and not logarithmic or exponential reduction, and the actual value is the same. The idea of it reducing the wage by "more" is sort of misleading since the percentage increases while the current value decreases.

It's the same for the damage increase skills. You get the same value of damage for each skill level, and even though the percentage of the current skill increases, that's kind of irrelevant because what you get from it is the same.
 
jacobhinds said:
Captain_Octavius said:
Leadership reduces the base cost by 5% per skill level. But the real cost is reduced by a larger percentage for every skill level. Let's say we have a theoritical unit with a wage of 100 denars. At level 9 Leadership, that unit's wage is 55 denars. By going from 9 to 10 Leadership, the wage goes from 55 to 50, which is a little over a 9% reduction.

This hurt my brain for a moment because i haven't done maths in years, but I think this is a bit confused. It's a 5% reduction of the original total, not the current amount, so it's linear and not logarithmic or exponential reduction, and the actual value is the same. The idea of it reducing the wage by "more" is sort of misleading since the percentage increases while the current value decreases.

Say we have 10000 denars available for wages. At Leadership 9, this allows us to have 181 troops with a wage of 55 each. At Leadership 10, this allows us to have 200 troops with a wage of 50 each. That's 19 more troops, about 10% more. If we go from Leadership 0 to 1, i.e. wages of 100 to 95, we go from 100 troops to 105, a 5% increase in troops. So the percentage of additional troops you can support per additional point of Leadership increases as Leadership gets higher.

Think of it like this, imagine Leadership could go up to level 20. Going from level 19 Leadership to 20 would set all wages to zero, so you can suddenly support a virtually infinite amount of troops. That should make clear that skills that reduce penalties by a percentage of the base value become more effective at higher levels.
 
Captain_Octavius said:
Think of it like this, imagine Leadership could go up to level 20. Going from level 19 Leadership to 20 would set all wages to zero, so you can suddenly support a virtually infinite amount of troops. That should make clear that skills that reduce penalties by a percentage of the base value become more effective at higher levels.

Things are getting confusing now because you're bringing in a third variable, party size, which has its own limits anyway and isn't directly related to troop cost. Essentially, you aren't getting anything "better" from upgrading higher skill levels, like 9->10, than from lower ones, like 2->3. It's linear like all the skills are (exponential calculations are imprecise and complicated to implement in warband).

Calculating the percentage increase is sort of needless because the previous value and new value are both moving variables.
 
jacobhinds said:
Captain_Octavius said:
Think of it like this, imagine Leadership could go up to level 20. Going from level 19 Leadership to 20 would set all wages to zero, so you can suddenly support a virtually infinite amount of troops. That should make clear that skills that reduce penalties by a percentage of the base value become more effective at higher levels.

Things are getting confusing now because you're bringing in a third variable, party size, which has its own limits anyway and isn't directly related to troop cost. Essentially, you aren't getting anything "better" from upgrading higher skill levels, like 9->10, than from lower ones, like 2->3. It's linear like all the skills are (exponential calculations are imprecise and complicated to implement in warband).

Calculating the percentage increase is sort of needless because the previous value and new value are both moving variables.

I'm sorry that you don't see that going from 100 to 95 is not nearly as good as going from 55 to 50, or even from 5 to 0. Yes, the value which is substracted is the same (linear), but the relative difference between the before and after increases exponentially.

I wasn't talking about the party size limit by the way, just the army size one can pay for with a particular amount of money available. Going from level 18 to 19 in Leadership doubles the amount of soldiers you can support financially. Going from level 19 to 20 Leadership makes the amount of soldiers you can support financially infinite, because you have a 100% reduction in wages.
 
Here is a plot of how many soldiers (Y axis) that have a base wage of 100 you can afford with a budget of 10K denars at a particular level of Leadership (X axis):

graph.png


Same formula, but now the graph is extended to show Leadership up to a theoretical level 20:

graph2.png
 
Lord Brutus said:
And hanging around Skyrim more, I'll wager. :lol:

Not nearly as much anymore. After our MERP total conversion got a cease and desist letter from Warner Bros. lawyers, I lost most interest in that game. Besides, after developing my character to a certain level in games like Skyrim and The Witcher and such, I crave to start an army and conquer the world. But only M&B offers that delicious mixture of first person RPG and RTS.
 
Not quite. Let's take engineering as an example. Base speed for building ladders is 14 hours. Each level of engineering reduces this by 1 hours. The difference between lvl 0 and lvl 1 engineering is 100/14 = 7.14%. By 10+2 engineering you are down to just 2 hours. Raising engineering by another point reduces this to 1 hour. In other words, that level halves the remaining time it takes to build ladders. It was still only reducing the time by 1 hour but think about it this way:

You are sieging a city of 400 enemies and you have 100 Rhodok Sharpshooters. At 0 engineering you build ladders and assault after 14 hours. You line your crossbows up and take cover while they fire. When they are all out of ammo you retreat and resiege the city. It's another 14 hours before you can assault again. If you raise engineering by 1 then it's 13 hours, a difference that makes almost no difference

Now supposing you are sieging with 12 engineering. It's currently 2 hours between assaults. You have your crossbows use their ammo and retreat. 5 assault laters, 12 hours in total you finally finish the garrison. On the other hand if you had 13 engineering you could have sieged it in 6 hours and then gone and wiped out a castle garrison as well. And if your engineering is 14 you can instantly siege over and over again, essentially wiping out entire fief garrisons with only crossbows provided you don't run out of men. When you have 10+ wound treatment, 14 surgery, 10+ pathfinding and 14 engineering and a decent size army you can literally zoom across a kingdom sieging fiefs even when a huge army is nearby and take over an entire kingdom in days without having to fight directly against the faction army, they lose all their soldiers sieging the fief garrisons you generate to hold the fiefs you are taking, and retaking a lost fief is easy since the garrison will be small and untrained

The difference between 10 and 14 engineering/surgery really cannot be overstated, they're each a world apart. Engineering was severely nerfed in Viking Conquest to try and stop players from roflstomping entire factions, but with high enough engineering and surgery and an army of svear warriors/veterans you can still solo entire factions just by assaulting their fiefs very quickly and replacing your losses with the garrisons you generate after each successful siege, and you don't need to make multiple assaults since infantry are the only units worth using and an army of mercs and tier 3+ soldiers will easily take over castles in 1 assault and cities in 2 (resting in a fief between assaults)

Really the main problem with this game is that these abilities which are only really effective for players are just so OP at high levels that players can ignore all the kingdom management and diplomacy and just zerg the map once they have an army of 200 elite warriors and a fief with another 300 reserves garrisoned and just give the fiefs they take all to one good natured companion lord so he can foot the bill for the garrisons

I should also note: Using the same troops as the faction you are fighting gives a negative morale penalty that can lead to desertion, but there are a few ways around this. If you are using your own troops then just keep some Swadian Sharpshooters specifically for wiping out the Rhodoks. They're nearly as good as Rhodok Sharpshooters. You could start with Swadian then switch to Rhodok after you wipe out the Rhodok faction or when you need to deal with Swadia. If you are just trying to zerg the map, using a small starter army and bolstering your forces with forces from garrisons then you need to consider that the troops you get are based on the location of the fief, not the faction holding it. You can be fighting Vaegir that has control of Dhirim, but upon taking Dhirim it will generate Swadian troops. You can repeatedly resiege Dhirim to generate lots of Swadian troops and just put them in another nearby castle then use them to take over Vaegir. Alternatively just make sure you are never outside at night. Just dump all your soldiers in a garrison til morning. This is also where engineering helps since it would suck to be trapped outside an enemy castle building ladders at dusk when your soldiers morale is terrible! It also saves money and time since its faster to siege and resiege fiefs and transfer the garrisons to your own fiefs than it is to recruit and train those soldiers normally
 
The problem is that percentages are used to make a point, when percentages are actually irrelevant.

I have 200 denars to spend.  If my wages are 100, I now only have 100 denars.  I get a point in leadership, so now my wages are 95.  That means I have 105 denars to spend.  Okay, now I get another point in leadership.  Now my wages are only 90 so I have 110 to spend.  I got 5 extra denars from the first point and another 5 extra denars from the second point.  It's exactly the same.

Now, I can do a calculation that clearly shows that 5 is a greater percentage of 95 than it is of 100 and convince myself that I'm getting more out of the skill.  But I'm not.  I'm still getting 5 denars.  Percentage of the last wage is irrelevant to how much money you have to spend.
 
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