Lets talk snowballing and campaign combat AI.

[blackdoggie]

Hi. I wanted to share some of my experience of modding the campaign AI and things I found when trying to reduce the snowball effects.

we know the campaign AI is very aggressive and I think this is done on purpose not to bore the playertypes that seeks that experience,
and with just 2 factions on the map they will get locked into endless war.
with that in mind i started to experiment.

Increasing the number of factions on the map with interlocked relationships (A hates B, B hates C, C hates A for example) can significantly increase the stability of the map and reduce snowballing.
But if we are going to make real factions they can't be too weak either, If we want a power ping pong effect each faction needs to start with a minimum of 2 towns.
towns are the real powerfaction for any faction and not lords, if you create a faction with just 1 town but 20 lords for example they still get steamrolled fairly quick as they can't recruit.

we currently got 48 towns on the map, this mean we can have 24 factions if each faction should hold 2 towns.
but balancing it like this is not ideal either and can actually speed up the snowballing as power projection increases significantly if a faction captures it neighbor.
just taking 1 town means a faction becomes half as powerful as its rival.

From my experience with 48 towns - 16 factions with 3 towns each is as far as we can go, and 12 factions with interlocked relation and 4 towns each is the best balance for vanilla.

Now lets talk about what we can do for artificial tweaks if we want a different type of balance and what we can do the reduce the speed of snowballing.

increasing garrison size works great if you want a slow paced game, but also have the drawback that it makes it very hard for a loosing faction to make a comeback.
then there is allot we can do scripting ofc, best examples i have seen is Nick's war attrition mod over at the nexus https://www.nexusmods.com/mountandblade2bannerlord/mods/145
But if you are not that good at scripting as just want to mod with XML the best solution I found is to create "punching bags"
Fake factions that everyone hates and that will get the majority focus of war declarations.

setup a faction that has no holdings, and just a tiny army, or no army at all for example, you can even hide them off the campaign map by flagging the lords as "wanderer"
has to be kingdoms else they go and join as mercenaries.
the wars against such factions lasts for a long time and can act well as a "artificial peace time"

Increasing the number of minor hated factions also adds allot to map stability, but keep in mind that they will still go around and act as mercenaries.

 

[Midnightknight]

For me, the snowballing effect is caused by a few weakness in design and various bugs firstly. I will name a few, but in my game, after the 3rd attempt i finally have 2 main factions and me in between the two attacking carefully the stronger when at war to prevent it from snowballing.
Yet is see that towns of one faction have 5 notables giving troops, that's a lot of troops in Bannerlord standard, while mine, usually have only 4 notables and each town of my faction have one that is bugged and do not give troops anymore. And this is a really common issue. Add to this that some notables never gives quests and have no hideout spawning close, so it mean you will never be able to improve relations with them and stay locked to recruit only half their troops. Of course this last issue is only related to player as AI do not do quests, but still.

Last one, AI randomly throws war in totally brainless way. You can see factions that are already near extinction, with 2 wars going on declaring war to the player. Seriously they really wants to get destroy to this point. So basically they do full random on their survival giving away their town with no real goal as they are already low troops and already loosing on two fronts. My vassals do the same sh ... too. Sometime i just went into a war that left all my generals dry on troops and i pay 100K to hurry for peace only to see one stupid vassal starting a war 2 minutes after peace was done. Luckily you can give another 50K for peace again cause with no troops you can't really fight. But this is pretty annoying.

So to me there are so many issues to solve, not make more factions, cause in my opinion it will end exactly the same way. Once a faction becomes stronger it can recruit more troops. Unlike in warband troops are really hard to level, so they have less troops, they are defeated more often so have weaker troops and this is a downward spiral.

To my opinion what is really needed is a way to actually allow "defeated" kings to come back to the game, instead of staying near their former capital with 0 troops giving away money for everyone going around. They should also have a machanism making the last city harder to take, what isn't the case cause actually all cities are starving and militia an defending troops dying cause of it. They do not know how to make stocks and how to manage a priority in stocks ...

So to me currently it's fixing a wooden leg, there are many things to rework and rebalance before the campaign will be actually interesting to play, and that was to be expected on a early access game.

 

[azakhi]

I wanted to try making a simple mod (as I am part of server team, I don't work on SP) that increases troop wages depending on how far away you are from your own settlements and ally settlements. Like considering logistics of a battle. Of course AI should also be tweaked to choose staying in settlements a lot more to save some money for later. I think this alone would help a lot but haven't had the time to try it yet.

 

[Kommissar]

Let me shameleslly advertise my revolutions mod, which you can customise as to never see snowballing again, or let it continue as it was.

I think each campaign should have randomly generated lucky nations which grow, but do not snowball quickly. That way a different faction would dominate each playthrough.

I don't like the idea of interlocked relationships (aside from a few) as they tend to make the game more bland imo. I think each playthrough should be a bit different.

I think we need to see a bit of CK2 dynamics - events which can cause collapse of a nation upon king's death or something like that, which would cause a split into minor nations.

There is a revolt mechanic that's not used yet, so we will certainly see something like that eventually.

 

[pada]

I think what the map and these issues could really use is more "dead space" ie a vast tract of uninhabited desert, or a region full of hordes of bandits that needs to be conquered and claimed, building castles in these empty regions, or having abandoned relic castles/towns/villages that can be resurrected/activated to create a wholly new kingdom.

islands off the coast, undiscovered mines/resources, etc etc.

exiles & weak factions could flee to this regions, and rebuild themselves.

I like the idea to add alliances and deeper diplomacy, ie Aserai might help Sturgia to prevent vlandia getting too powerful - as in total war as you get more powerful more factions consider you the biggest risk.

revolutions mod, etc, is great - how about robinhoods that target powerful factions to curb their spread? or entire towns simply going mutiny and going rebel forcing a faction to retake it, weakening their overall forces.

1 big issue is poor income for crippled factions, perhaps random stranger gold drops to ex emperors? maybe aserai finance a sturgian fallen king to retake his kingdom? etc etc..

 

[ἀποκάλυψις]

Let me shameleslly advertise my revolutions mod, which you can customise as to never see snowballing again, or let it continue as it was.

I don't know your mod, but the mod highlights the fact that the vanilla game highlights the Faction on the map and with respect to strategic npc decisions, instead of focus on Clans -- the bannermen.

If you look at the map after steamrolling, it is still a map of competing clans. If you allowed clans to have their own banner base color, would it still look like steamrolling? I'm reminded of vassal wars in CK.

I don't know anything about the M&B lore, so perhaps these factions have more emotional significance for players than I give credit.

 

[Kommissar]

I don't know your mod, but the mod highlights the fact that the vanilla game highlights the Faction on the map and with respect to strategic npc decisions, instead of focus on Clans -- the bannermen.

If you look at the map after steamrolling, it is still a map of competing clans. If you allowed clans to have their own banner base color, would it still look like steamrolling? I'm reminded of vassal wars in CK.

I don't know anything about the M&B lore, so perhaps these factions have more emotional significance for players than I give credit.

I get that point, and where vassal dynamics are certainly something I'd like to see more depth in, variety tends to die with it. The game at this point is not suited just for vassal wars, and so far has been made to show warring kingdoms.

revolutions mod, etc, is great - how about robinhoods that target powerful factions to curb their spread? or entire towns simply going mutiny and going rebel forcing a faction to retake it, weakening their overall forces.

Being worked on

 

[Midnightknight]

I'm trying to experiment something inside one of my mod, to see if it could change a bit the snowball effect.
Basically it's a variable calculated for each kingdom that i call "comfort" and ranging from -100 to 100. When the kingdom is expending well, having more cities than it's supposed to the variable goes positive and on the contrary when the kingdom loose castle/Cities it goes negative.

What it does is when positive it boost the prosperity values of settlements while slightly reducing militia and troop refresh speed, and when it's negative it goes the other way, boosting troop refresh and militia but reducing prosperity. Need tweaking and testing to see how it would affect the game but it's the fixe i could come with so far that would mess too much with TW's model.

 

[Mars_Mullo]

If only lords could own villages like in Warband.... this might not happen. the snowball effect that is.
Sigh