Just realized how disappointed I was in the lack of strategic gameplay.

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If only this system works as you describe here. My biggest problem is the voting for fief when, as a ruler, you are presented with only three candidates, and it is quite possible that neither you nor the clan who took the settlement would be included. Therefore, it is impossible to grant the fief to your most trusted vassal or simply take the land for yourself regardless of the amount of influence you have.
I haven't done it in awhile (like, six months or more), but you can still revoke or expel the clan to gain their holding, then grant it to someone? At any rate, the Merit scoring process isn't designed to be player-facing at all and is more designed to make sure the AI doesn't do certain things when assigning fiefs.
 
Thanks for sharing that. I completely agree with you. I also agree with Apocal, if I am understanding him right, in that TW is deliberately trying to dumb down the game for the sake of dumbing it down, because TW leadership has demonstrated to be that incompetent in thinking that dumbing down is good and that players shouldn't be bothered with "complex" decision making opportunities.
Well lets face fact here, some people are a bit less, how can I put this, complex that others and I completely understand trying to simplify things for these people. You kind of got to do this when your trying to appeal to a large audience. I mean it may be insensitive to say but simple statistics say 49% of all people are of below average intelligence hehe. I am only being kind of serious here with that comment to be honest but all kidding aside, things have to be simple enough for the majority of people to understand and be comfortable with and that is going to include people who have trouble making complex decisions.

What I don't condone is dumbing down the game so work on substandard and sub par hardware just because someone made the decision to purchase a "cheap" console for gaming rather than investing in a substantial gaming PC. I am not talking about settings per se, I am talking about things like dumbing down the AI since consoles don't have the same processing power as even a moderately powerful gaming PC. I don't want a worse gaming experience just because a company wants to capitalize on the console gaming market and is too lazy to produce a separate version of the game that allows for each platform to utilized to its fullest. To me, that would be a bigger betrayal than all the features the promised and eventually cut form Bannerlord combined.


Are they going for the most basic they can then letting modders add the extras they want? Or really feels kind they are taking "the modders will fix it" approach to game design.

Actually I am fine with this although wish they would make that clear if this is what they are going for so everyone not only understand the expectations but also the limitations. For example, I am already running a modified, much more complex AI in Bannerlord so I know that much of this can be modded in. However, if they came out and said, "We are shooting for a basic level of AI that allows for low spec machines and consoles to run the game with acceptable performance however, we are including robust toolset that allows for modders to enhance the AI to much greater levels of complexity." then modders would know that they can increase the complexity of the AI and players would know to actually look for mods that increase the complexity of the AI.

Seriously, I truly belive that the strength of Bannerlord lies in its modding community and I know the game with improve 10 times over because of that community. I just wish they would make it clear what the expectation are.


I'm too sure about that, but regardless I'm not playing as a king so I can be in charge of a democracy. I don't have a problem with lords having a say, but if I'm king I should have the final say.

This is my point exactly. No, no Monarch operated completely in a vacuum, immune to the wishes and desire of his vassals and to either a greater or lesser degree the common person. However, it is also true that the final say generally always rested with the Monarch.

Generally speaking, anyone with political power underneath the King could "advise' the King on decision making but that it as far is it would go. For example, They (the advisor) could loudly proclaim, "There will be rioting in the streets!" if a King made a certain decision but that decision STILL rested in the King's hands to make and it was up to him if he was willing to accept the conquences.

To put this in game terms, what should happen is something like this.

1) Vote comes up with 100% of vassal wanting to declare war on Vlandia however, King does not want war.
2) King can decide to use his "Influence" to change the minds of his vassals.
3) Should the King decide to use his "Influence" to change the vote, depending on how much influence he uses and/or has available the 100% vote will change from 100% to some split between 99% and 0% still voting for war. This is the final split of votes prior to King making a decision.
4) Whether King decides to use influence or not, he has final say on if war is declared, period. IMPORTANT, THE KING HAS FINAL SAY.
5) King decides no war, final decision, war is NOT happening. Nope, NO, end of story.
6) All vassals voting for war, after all influence if any is used, get pissed at King for not listening to their wishes and he loses relationship with them.

Again to reiterate, the King make the final decision. This includes policy decision. However, the King can't just steadily ignore his vassal's wishes so he HAS TO take into account what they are vote for or against and decide if he can afford the relationship hit for overriding his vassal's wishes. He has to decide if using his influence to change them minds of his vassals is worth it or not. If he doesn't listen to his vassals and doesn't use his influence to change their votes, eventually all his vassals will get pissed and leave him and his kingdom will fall apart.

What shouldn't happen is a King needing to spend 2700 influence to override his vassals in a war declaration and realizing that he only has 2500 influence so CAN'T override the war declaration. That is a democracy, not a monarchy. That is an issue since any sort of real democracy was unbelievable rare if it even existed at all during the time period represented by this game (11th-13th century).

Note: Does anyone aside from me see how making a minor change such as this to how voting works and incorporating influence and relations mechanics, which already exist in game, in a slight different way, adds a TON of depth to the diplomatic gameplay loop. Why can't Taleworlds come up with this on their own.
 
I've said this before, I don't remember where, but as a ruler I would like to see a transparent reason to see why vassals are moving for war/peace and have a way to pacify them, in addition to final say (with consequences). I would like to have report of what clans are ambitious for territory, what clans are struggling for money, what clans are restless, and have a means to satisfy them so I don't lose relation for telling them no, or to make it up afterwards.
I know this is pie in the sky since the vassals have no wants or desires, they all just paint by numbers and this would be adding to the game, so very unlikely.

It's just kinda lame that even in warband we had simplistic feature of "a village had a problem...." that lets us know there would likely be a new war and at lets let us pretend there was a reason. In bannerlord it's just "everyone wants war all the time the end". The recent snowballing fixes seem to have slowed down wars a bit but I wonder if it effects vassals on a over powered faction the same way, like once you really take of with 10+ vassal clans.
 
Different realms had different variations of feudalism. Norman English monarchy and early German (HRE) monarchy were both very powerful. The popular recognition of limited power for medieval monarchy is a result of a mixture of overgeneralization and oversimplification, like almost everything history related. Generally speaking, war declaration and fief management were the main responsibilities of the Kings. The 'overmighty vassal' thing you mentioned refers to a different dimension of autonomy.
When we were doing graduate degree, the professor suggested the works of Marc Bloch as a start. Instead of listening to me, you could spend some time reading those. They are very good read, I suggest start with Feudal Society.

Warband has a possibly unintended feature where you can declare war independently of your king. There are no consequences for this and it's an unintended side effect of lazily written parts of the code which have a separate player faction, but something of this nature would be pretty interesting in giving the player more agency and allowing for small preludes to larger wars. A limited, undeclared vassal vs vassal war could even be something your king tells you to do in secret.

There is also a historical precedent for this, where if a king failed to accumulate enough power the lords would act almost independently. I definitely think there should be fewer arbitrary roadblocks just because you're in a kingdom. Instead of being forced into wars by code triggers you should be coerced into them by the threat of punishment later down the line.

Well lets face fact here, some people are a bit less, how can I put this, complex that others and I completely understand trying to simplify things for these people. You kind of got to do this when your trying to appeal to a large audience. I mean it may be insensitive to say but simple statistics say 49% of all people are of below average intelligence hehe. I am only being kind of serious here with that comment to be honest but all kidding aside, things have to be simple enough for the majority of people to understand and be comfortable with and that is going to include people who have trouble making complex decisions.

It's this kind of elitism that got us here in the first place. Well designed games are self explanatory and literally anyone can learn them. I personally have an IQ of 30,000 and am the best gamer on the planet, but if a game is poorly explained i spend ages running around like an idiot trying to work out wtf I'm supposed to do.

Conversely the most mechanically complex game I've played substantially is Civilization 4, but I learned how to play it in a few minutes in 2008 because it has excellent tutorials and intuitive mechanics.
 
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It's this kind of elitism that got us here in the first place. Well designed games are self explanatory and literally anyone can learn them. I personally have an IQ of 30,000 and am the best gamer on the planet, but if a game is poorly explained i spend ages running around like an idiot trying to work out wtf I'm supposed to do.
See I knew this would come up even though I tried to make the comment light hearted. Let talk facts.

The average IQ is 100. Average means dead center, the middle. Logically this means that at least 49.99999% of people's IQ are higher than 100 and 49.99999% are lower. By the very definition of average, roughly 1/2 the population of this planet has a below average IQ. This is no slight on them, we are just discussing FACT here.

That being said, if you are designing a game and you want it to appeal to MORE than 50% of the potential players, you have to account for those with a below average IQ that cannot deal with complexity as well as someone with an above average IQ. AGAIN FACT.

This is not Elitism, this is FACT.

I honestly hate when people dismiss fact because it is inconvenient or not politically correct. I cannot help that some people are more or less intelligent than others or for that matter have different talents/issues independent of IQ that make the game easier or more complex. However, my comment stated, that I understood that the games complexity level had a limit due to having to accommodate for those who could not handle complexity well. That is Inclusiveness, not Elitism. That is willingness to accommodate with the understand that their needs to be an accommodation so please do not make me out to be the bad guy here because I am willing to state truth and address that truth accordingly to reach such an accommodation.

God I hate how no one can discuss real facts and solutions without being labeled as something or another anymore.
 
Catering to people who cant grasp anything beyond the most basic gameplay will only result in a game that is boring for everybody.
 
But Bannerlord isn´t even close to rocket science. Even if you´re not "that smart" (below average IQ) you should be able to play the game.
You would be surprised. There are all kinds of reasons why any sort of complexity causes issues and not all of them are related to intelligence. Sometimes it is laziness for example. I exemplify this right now. I got lots of things going on in my real life, so much so that I don't want to do anything that requires lots of thought so despite having a 144 IQ and having been invited to join Mensa at one time, I don't play any games that are really complex.

As a developer of a game you have to take that sort of thing into account as well. I guess my point is, you have to kind of shoot for the lowest common denominator as your target when your designing a game based on the scope of the audience you want to appeal to. Also complexity for complexities sake isn't usually good even if you only wanted to appeal to a very small audience. Most people just appreciate simplicity.

However, that doesn't mean that a game can't be complex. For example, I am all for a "basic" and an "advanced" setting tab. The basic tab would be simple and easy to use with no confusion. The advanced table would be dozen and dozens of sliders and toggles with a big fat disclaimer that the user experience may very greatly if these advanced setting are used. Also there would another big fat button at the top of the screen that would set everything back to default. That is my ideal vision of the game. Sure dumb the basic settings, even battle size and AI quality, down to the simplest, easiest to digest format you can, but give those who want a fully customized experience a way to actually customize there experience.
 
if you are designing a game and you want it to appeal to MORE than 50% of the potential players, you have to account for those with a below average IQ that cannot deal with complexity as well as someone with an above average IQ. AGAIN FACT.

This is not Elitism, this is FACT.
I don't think pure IQ figures much into accessibility of games - IQ has a bell curve distribution, so only about 2% of people are really stupid.
(I have an IQ of 30001, and can't figure out optimal strategies because I don't care.)
Other issues than player IQ are more important: age (children are idiots and there are so many of them), attention span, motivation to learn the game, imagination (used to fill in the blanks left by the game), UI familiarity...
It's not that games need to be stupidified, it's the interface and the gameplay that need to be intuitive and the graphics shiny enough. You can always keep the basics simple for everyone, but at the same time add depth and complexity for the more demanding players.
If Taleworlds feels they need to remove a feature because it's for smart people only, they probably designed it badly - the smarts were needed to use their confusing interface or convoluted game mechanics.
 
That's pretty realistic actually. Kings as absolute monarchs was mostly a post-medieval thing.
To be realistic the king should be able to do as he damn well pleases but if it's against the will of his vassals it would start to brew resentment with the monarch (loss of relationship in the game) to the point they would start to scheme to have things their own way and eventually led to assassination attempts, open rebellion trying to get independence or civil wars trying to place a claimant on the throne that would do their biding etc.

Vanilla warband had this system partially implemented, you could never please everyone as a monarch and eventually they would switch allegiances or be indicted for treason before they could manage that, civil wars only happened if the player support a claimant himself but atleast it was there.

Honestly with all the lore, imperial civil war etc in bannerlord i was sure they would expand on this making it more dynamical this time instead of axing the system altogether in favor of a dumbed down electoral system.
 
To be realistic the king should be able to do as he damn well pleases but if it's against the will of his vassals it would start to brew resentment with the monarch (loss of relationship in the game) to the point they would start to scheme to have things their own way and eventually led to assassination attempts, open rebellion trying to get independence or civil wars trying to place a claimant on the throne that would do their biding etc.
It did more than just brew resentment; people actually told the king to **** off and fight them about it -- and sometimes he wouldn't. The ruler's capacity to actually force their vassals to do a damned thing was sharply limited during the Middle Ages. It wasn't just rebellions either. It was dudes frequently just digging in their heels and refusing with a plain "No."

Obviously, that makes a terrible game unless you've structured things from the ground up around politicking and its inappropriate for Bannerlord, so chuck the realism and just gamify it.
Vanilla warband had this system partially implemented, you could never please everyone as a monarch and eventually they would switch allegiances or be indicted for treason before they could manage that, civil wars only happened if the player support a claimant himself but atleast it was there.
That was why you didn't elevate companions (most were the ****head personality types) and only recruited the good ones to your faction. It was vaguely exploit-y because the AI factions would have all the ****heads congregate before getting yeeted off the continent, so you could easily cause a feast/indictment-spiral by only taking a few fiefs from an otherwise powerful faction.
Well lets face fact here, some people are a bit less, how can I put this, complex that others and I completely understand trying to simplify things for these people.
To be clear, I think it is less "TW thinks players don't understand these complex systems" and more "it has actually been demonstrated players don't understand or care about these systems." Like I mentioned in the other thread, Mexxico spent months trying to balance the scales between garrisons starving and the player being able to do serious damage to a faction without having to siege their settlements. But players would get mad about garrisons starving even when all their bound villages were on-fire and they hadn't built granaries or orchards.

So now the game has things tuned where you literally cannot starve out most settlements, no matter how long you wait. They lose prosperity faster than they lose men, which means they quickly get under the -20 food threshold for dudes (like one or two per day) to start starving..
Warband has a possibly unintended feature where you can declare war independently of your king. There are no consequences for this and it's an unintended side effect of lazily written parts of the code which have a separate player faction, but something of this nature would be pretty interesting in giving the player more agency and allowing for small preludes to larger wars. A limited, undeclared vassal vs vassal war could even be something your king tells you to do in secret.
It was clearly a bug but Bannerlord had private wars at the start of EA. You could not only be at war with a faction but also any of the individual clans (including minors) -- a war that carried on even if they swapped factions. Back then, it was obnoxious because the war decs were completely random and TW was pretty quick to get rid of it. But I figured, for a time, there was going to be scope for petty vendettas to actually **** up the factions and introduce a layer of surface tension to disrupt any steady-state politics.

Something like two imported clans have massive beef with each other and are effectively hostile at all times, so they'll wipe out each other's warbands, raid villages, etc. and the ruler has to burn influence to keep it from spinning truly out of control. Even worse if they are in an unfriendly faction and your own faction's clan goes across the border to do the same -- either admit you're too weak to control your vassals and let the hostile nation effectively gang up on your lone maverick clan or pretend you authorized that **** and find yourself in a war you didn't want. The net effect basically being the smarter, more granular version of those two dumbass border tension events from Warband.
 
It was clearly a bug but Bannerlord had private wars at the start of EA.
Holy **** i didn't catch that at the release of EA, that would actually be an awesome feature with clans waging private wars against each other while the monarch couldn't control that so if his faction had too many feuds it would grind his ability to summon armies to attack/defend, would be great if the larger the faction the more feuds it had so it would be very unstable.

They could even introduce that small quest from warband where you tried to make two vassals end their feud and they could accept or reject it based on relationship with you etc, it would help a monarch to make peace inside his realm if he tried hard enough.
 
The average IQ is 100. Average means dead center, the middle.
I think you mean median not average. But I somehow believe that human IQ largely follows normal distribution, so the average value should not deviate too much from median.
I basically agree with your idea. Personally, I think this is why we have difficulty settings in games. You can prevail on lower difficuties without bothering with complicated mechanics and strategy/planing. But if you want to be successful on higher difficulties, you need to understand more complex systems, be more knowledgable about the game, and be willing to do some serious planning and strategy. I usually play on the hardest difficulty, because I want to get the most out of a game.
 
Its not IQ, its pure lazyness. Its not like we have Forrest Gump fiddling on the keyboard wondering why letters make things go boom. People have simply gotten lazier, gotten used to things being streamlined for them so that they only have to press 1 button instead of 5 and in that sense -they are "dumbed down" though its really lazyness of thought and action.
 
At any rate, the Merit scoring process isn't designed to be player-facing at all and is more designed to make sure the AI doesn't do certain things when assigning fiefs.
It would be a problem If this is the case, why can't TW designed two separate systems, one for players and one for the AI? And I tried the revoke and expel solutions. Revoke does not work at all. Say the original candidates are A, B, C. You give the fief to A and revoke it. The new candidates will be B. C. D. If your intended receiver is not D, it's too bad, becasue no matter whom you will give the fief to this time, if you revoke it again, the new candidates will be the other two plus A. Expel works, but in a very silly way. You can expel and expel until the intended receiver shows up in the candidates, so unless you only have 3 clans in your kingdom, fief management is out of your reach.
In my current playthrough, I have around 4,000 influence and 8 vassal clans, all at 100 relation. But these matters very little, I still have no control over fief grant unless I start to expel people, which I think is a very stupid thing to do. So I just stopped playing. I don't really need any vassals to unite Calradia, but this is not how I would like to play a medieval simuilator game.
 
See I knew this would come up even though I tried to make the comment light hearted. Let talk facts.

The average IQ is 100. Average means dead center, the middle. Logically this means that at least 49.99999% of people's IQ are higher than 100 and 49.99999% are lower. By the very definition of average, roughly 1/2 the population of this planet has a below average IQ. This is no slight on them, we are just discussing FACT here.

That being said, if you are designing a game and you want it to appeal to MORE than 50% of the potential players, you have to account for those with a below average IQ that cannot deal with complexity as well as someone with an above average IQ. AGAIN FACT.

This is not Elitism, this is FACT.

Mr 'FACTS' here doesn't even understand how a bell curve works. More people have 100 IQ than any other score, because the mean on a bell curve is also the mode. The vast majority of people are only 1 standard deviation away from 100, meaning that most people (~68%) are almost indistinguishable from an 'average' person. IQ itself is not an objective or consistent measure of cognitive ability; regardless, having a low IQ does not make you too stupid to understand a slightly involved video game. It's laughable how little you know. You are an elitist with delusions of brilliance.


Ignorance and arrogance going hand in hand. Colour me surprised.
 
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Its not IQ, its pure lazyness. Its not like we have Forrest Gump fiddling on the keyboard wondering why letters make things go boom. People have simply gotten lazier, gotten used to things being streamlined for them so that they only have to press 1 button instead of 5 and in that sense -they are "dumbed down" though its really lazyness of thought and action.
Yep.
It would be a problem If this is the case, why can't TW designed two separate systems, one for players and one for the AI? And I tried the revoke and expel solutions. Revoke does not work at all. Say the original candidates are A, B, C. You give the fief to A and revoke it. The new candidates will be B. C. D. If your intended receiver is not D, it's too bad, becasue no matter whom you will give the fief to this time, if you revoke it again, the new candidates will be the other two plus A. Expel works, but in a very silly way. You can expel and expel until the intended receiver shows up in the candidates, so unless you only have 3 clans in your kingdom, fief management is out of your reach.
In my current playthrough, I have around 4,000 influence and 8 vassal clans, all at 100 relation. But these matters very little, I still have no control over fief grant unless I start to expel people, which I think is a very stupid thing to do. So I just stopped playing. I don't really need any vassals to unite Calradia, but this is not how I would like to play a medieval simuilator game.
Yeah this is just so silly. Having to abuse one feature to make another work in a reasonable way, messing up the progress you've made in the process. It's stuff like this that makes me feel as though nobody at TW really plays the game.
 
Mr 'FACTS' here doesn't even understand how a bell curve works. More people have 100 IQ than any other score, because the mean on a bell curve is also the mode. The vast majority of people are only 1 standard deviation away from 100, meaning that most people (~68%) are almost indistinguishable from an 'average' person. IQ itself is not an objective or consistent measure of cognitive ability; regardless, having a low IQ does not make you too stupid to understand a slightly involved video game. It's laughable how little you know. You are an elitist with delusions of brilliance.


Ignorance and arrogance going hand in hand; colour me surprised.


Couldn't have put it better myself. What a ridiculous post. This is part of the reason why we're in this mess, because the developers continually assume that if a feature is misunderstood it's the fault of the player and not the UI or tutorials.
 
Couldn't have put it better myself. What a ridiculous post. This is part of the reason why we're in this mess, because the developers continually assume that if a feature is misunderstood it's the fault of the player and not the UI or tutorials.
I'm not trying to be racist or ageist here, but it would honestly surprise me if the majority of people posting the bug reports about "low performance" that led to the removal of the troop slider weren't either very young or didn't have very good English skills.

Point 1. Kids aren't as smart as they think they are. This is not their fault. It is simple biology and they (depending on how old they are) aren't done developing. In Swedish driving school it's even highlighted as one of the reasons for why young male drivers cause more traffic accidents than female drivers of the same age (18-24).

Point 2. People that have poor English comprehension will have greater difficulties comprehending things written in English.

Point 3. Combine the above two.

Somehow this very vocal minority has convinced the devs to dumb down the game to the detriment of everyone else.
When I read the dev citing the reason why, this is the first thing that popped into my head.

 
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