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Hey everyone.
So long since I've been around.
My life has been, well, very chaotic, as one would expect given the times, but still...

I've recently started playing M&B2:B again to see how much the game improved after so long without touching it and wanted to share my thoughts, impressions and some issues I had after playing it again, also considering things I've mentioned in the past, in my deGoucan Scrolls, so I won't really go TOO in-depth in anything, but I will definitely talk a lot about several different things.



Random wars declaration = Still a huge problem (Old issue still present)
Lack of a proper diplomacy system (Probably being worked on for a while, I hope)
Still, I wanted to mention this because it has always been one of my biggest issues with the game since I ALWAYS enjoy playing as an independent kingdom starting from 0 instead of serving anyone.

Troops and Combat
This I've separated into multiple smaller things, some of which affect a lot more heavily mounted troops which made more noticeable to me, since I use almost exclusively cavalry.
  1. Troops don't seem to accelerate to their max speed or try to match your speed when in "follow me" command.
    This also includes companions, so if you set them to follow you and run, there will always be a HUGE gap between you and your troops which always isolates you alone far from them with more then enough time to be killed by enemies if picked off. You will constantly outrun any ally mounted troops in folllow command even with the slowest horse in the game by a LOT.

  2. The AI constantly blocks you or cuts your path when in follow command, surrounding you instead of trying to match your speed and orientation and placing themselves behind you, which constantly gets you stuck, surrounded by everyone with no way or direction to escape.

  3. You constantly seem to spawn behind or in the middle of troops, which with the follow command making everyone simply walk towards you and trying to go straight towards you constantly gets you surrounded by your troops at the very start of almost every battle.

  4. Ordering certain formation shapes constantly make troops stop in place and take forever to organize themselves. It seems the AI tries to fit everyone in specific number placements in the formation and they can't get in the formation shape and move at the same time, so they stay still in place slowly moving to their spot in the formation, instead of slowly forming into shape by simply sliding to the closest enabled space in that formation and moving to the next empty closest place to open spots for troops closer to them to better allocate, like living humans would, for a more fluid organizing.

  5. AI still seems to have a LOT of issue with all sorts of stairs in a siege, which makes battling sieges on the ground extremely filled with AI bugs or stupidity, where troops simply won't climb a stair because they are fighting each other on who will climb, or pushing each other out of the stairs trying to all climb at once or simple not climb, when they should gather close, but with a small gap behind the stairs (or siege tower) and organize them selves into a line(or lines) so that they go up the stairs one after the other in an orderly manner with barely any gap between them.

  6. The AI has no real strategy or variation in 1x1 battle. The decision taking of the AI is very uni-directional, it's pattern is too easy to understand and predict and everyone fights exactly the same. The AI will NEVER use things like couch lance or shield bash and much more which even culminates on AI archers having infinite ammunition and no AI ever grabbing items on the ground or climbing on free horses.
    This needs a huge rework on the battle AI to be solved but for the easiest solution in short term with a low cost is to create multiple battle patterns and make each Hero have a set number of patterns they can access (Call the accessible patterns their "Habits".) The AI will then constantly change their pattern every few seconds in combat to be way less predictable and feel more like fighting an intelligent entity. Allowing them to grab items on the ground and use the full scope of their items would also be amazing, to see cavalry using couch lancing, enemies on tournaments climbing on horses of units they defeat or archers on tournaments and arena grabbing a shield on the ground to pair with their sword.

  7. This one isn't really an issue but just something that would be really helpful. I kind of miss a sort of "flying eye" ability or item to give more advanced orders mid battle from an upwards down view perspective. This could be done using a scope item you'd need to have equipped on a slot of its own or something like that, that you need to actually equip in hand during battle in order to use, taking up both hands (needs to be out of combat and gets vulnerable to attacks) but as someone really used to Total War franchise games, having the ability to order troops precisely but not having any way to actually give proper orders anywhere farther than a few meters from you is kind of really annoying.

  8. I still really miss the ability to order ranged units to attack a specific unit or even target a specific place on the ground even with no unit there.
    It could be that I missed it in the F# commands, but I've looked a bit searching for a "Target there", "Target that unit" or "Focus Fire" for ranged units to attack without moving and with "Fire at will" turned off and haven't found anything.

Prisoner escape is still too common.
The prisoner system with the ransom prompt is a lot better and I see a clear reduction in the number of escapes, but the rate at which prisoners escape is still too high with sometimes 4 or more people escaping almost at the same time from several different castles and my party perfectly coordinated.

Secondly, the time between the prisoner escaping and them being up again to fight with an army of their own is too short.
It is to the point where a person you captured right before a siege and escaped during the siege can appear as the head of an army to fight you before the siege finishes.
It should be very rare for a prisoner to actually escape, with most escape ATTEMPT being a failure.
One possible solution without a much change of the system is to
  1. Turn the current escapes into escape attempts and giving them a low chance of success.
  2. Create ways to make it even lower the chance of escape, to discover the chance of a prisoner trying to escape.
  3. Create a way to talk to the prisoner and dissuade their wish to escape and possibly work on relations with prisoners, instead of that "I'm not allowed to talk to you" which never changed (and still is a pet peeve).

Food damage during siege is too low.
A human usually dies after around 1 week without food.
I literally held a town in siege for over a month after they already were out of food and they still had garrisons and militia when even the populace should already either have died or revolted, reducing the town's prosperity and killing all the guards.

Food counter of settlements and armies during siege stop at 0. A suggestion would be for the counter to go into the negatives and the loss of troops to raise progressively.
So if the first day with 0 food they lose 20 troops, the second they should lose 40 and the third they should lose 80 and so on to 160, 320,... meaning that in less than 5 days, a city that had almost a 1000 troops will already be at less than 400 troops and in the 6th day without food will be at 0 troops and conquered without even a fight.
Starving a settlement to death on a siege was the main tactic for war in medieval times and that is not currently properly represented.

Garrison costs should be lower than army troop costs or settlements should provide a lot more profit.
The reason why the wage of a military troop that travels is high is mostly because there is a LOT of danger, while a town garrison is mostly a safe job of guarding and defending against bandits and possible invaders, which is much more stable with the comfort of having a fixed living place.

As such, town garrisons should have their base wage cost, without the need of any governor skill, reduced to 50% in the least and 30% at most.
That or the possibility of the Garrison wage being paid by the town itself before the money coming for the player.

Currently, the cost of maintaining your fief's garrisons truly well protected with troops is so high that it goes way beyond the amount of profit the very settlements produce.
Meanwhile, when a town produces so much gold that their stores gold goes up to 40 to 50 thousand gold in a few days after you get to empty them and you only receive lest than 1000 gold from that town seems far too little.
Which also adds to the next one.

It is weird that towns have so little gold and equipment prices being ridiculous.
When a single equipment can cost hundreds of thousands of gold and equipment would be the most sought thing in a world of war lords and battles, it is weird that a town doesn't even have 100 thousand gold at a time when their total gold should be closer to the millions.

Also added to that, the prices for high tier equipment are far too ridiculous. A bow that I got from my wife after marriage, because it was a long bow and I was equipping her to be a horse back archer, would give me over 100 thousand gold if I were to sold it, to towns that don't have even 50 thousand gold, so I wouldn't even be able to get that single bows worth.

We are not talking about a single store, but double a whole town's worth of gold in a single bow.
There are armors and helmets that are 4 to 5 times that to purchase. Which is over 10 times the average gold of a whole town. This is so unbalanced that not only the prices are senselesly unfairly high, which is too big a nerf considering how effective the equipments actually are.

Towns should have closer to 1 million gold on average and a really expensive piece of armor or weapon among the best in the world should be around a few dozen thousand gold. Jewelry should also be closer to a thousand at minimum low price and silver should be between a 100 and 500 in its price variation to account for that.

Workshops profitability seems too low and they can't be improved.
About improving, I believe that will be implemented since they have a "Level: 1" in their information inside the clan window, so I won't comment on that, but the workshops seem to produce far too little gold.

200 gold a day at most is too little for a silversmith that produce jewelry silver at a 100% to 170% profit per unit (Silver between 30 to 70 and Jewelry from 100 to 200 gold) with only 10 gold per worker for wage (inside workshop information). And I'm not even mentioning brewery's, smithies and all others. Sometimes they could and should possibly have even higher profits than silversmiths in the right places and conditions.

Trade Skills Marked Prices
1- These perks that mark the prices of items should mark ALL items and not just Misc and Horses.
Equipment also needs to have wide price variations and places where it is cheap to buy and expensive sell for profit with proper marked prices.
2-The color change to deep red and deep green for cheap items should at greater thresholds. The faded red and faded green or yellow/white for when the prices are not too expensive or not too cheap should be the norm, with the bright green and bright red being rare occurrences for when the object is REALLY cheap or REALLY expensive.

Limits
The game currently feels far too limited in several things.
The number of workshops, number of companions and number of parties you can have.

You should be allowed to have from 3 to 5 times more companions than you currently do, maybe more, and with ways to manually unlock even more companion slots. This would benefit the game a LOT, since you'd be allowed to actually have governors to your settlements, to have a much greater number of caravans, to actually have a good number of parties to rival the computer as an independent kingdom player and much more.

It doesn't really make much sense why you can only have so few workshops, why your limit of companions is so low when they are arguably the most important asset in the game, why you can only have so few parties when an independent kingdom has to fight hundreds of enemy parties since it currently is EXTREMELY hard to convert nobles to your faction and much more.

Charm
It currently works a lot more consistently in persuasion, but actually became more useless, paradoxically.

Charm became a skill that you barely ever use and not having the ability to have conversations with heroes and actually gain relation with them is too detrimental, but I believe an interaction system should probably be in the works so I won't mention too much. Just hoped this aspect would have advanced more, but indeed the persuasion is at least a lot more reliable for charm-focused builds.

Solo
There seems to be a lack of possibility of living as a mercenary, a smith of a city. As in not having a party of your own but being a single unit that works as a hired blade, travelling with a group and other play styles that would allow for you to be a single 1 man unit in the world or even a more localized play where you rarely travel and constantly return to a town, using a lot more the "Take a walk around the town" function in a lot more immersive way and having more to do around towns and inside towns.

Management haven't really changed.
Won't mention much, but I kind of hoped this would have a LOT more advancement.
Management of towns, castles and villages really has stayed basically the same with barely any perceived change.
Possibly values, since it seems more "stable" in a sense, but still, one of the things I hoped that would receive some really due attention and didn't really change much.



There is a lot I can assume might possibly be in the works and can still take quite a long time to actually see any change, so I didn't get into too much detail, which is why I made this single post instead of multiple individual posts, but the game did improve in a lot of aspects since the last time that I played but there is clearly a lot to be improved still, with some things being in a pretty dire state.
 
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Just a tiny nitpick, this is what fat people believe. :smile:
It's ackchyually up to two months if you have water. If you don't, it's about ten days. Happy hunger strikes!
Still, it would a lot less in a heavy stress + very active situation such as being inside a besieged city.
Having to run around, keep focus while fully equipped all while stressed with the possibility of enemy attack at any time increases your calories burned by a lot.
It also depends on how well fed you are and your nutrition level, both of which weren't too well in medieval times.
Upon research, starvation with water in current times indeed can take up to a month or more to actually kill, but still in a lot less it destroys your mood (morale very low) it causes weakness and boneloss (reduced health/already starts injured and reduced attributes), loss of focus (reduced accuracy) and after a while, severe weakness in which there would be no possibility to fight at all (wounded state).

Up to a month for someone not active, as I said, a militia and garrison during a siege would be very active, which reduces the time needed to closer to a week, without food. And this has been show in several periods of history in which an army had their supply line destroyed and blocked. 1 week without any food at all is more than enough for an army to be unable to fight and for a town to fall due to not being able to defend itself anymore at most 10 days.

It still would be a progressive loss of troops, starting low and raising with times, but maybe instead of *2 in the 20, 40, 80, 160,... progression I first suggested, a *1,5 or *1,2 would be closer
q(1,5) = 20, 30, 45, 67.5, 101.2
q(1,2) = 20, 24, 28.8, 34,5, 41,4
At least it would be growing progressively and in a few days you'd clearly see huge losses from one day to the next by people giving up or too weakened to fight.

But currently, I held a town without food for quite literally a month (it was a rebel owned settlement, so there was no army coming to help) and the number of defenders only reduced from 400 to 200 or 170 something, somewhere still in the hundreds, after 30 days without any food at all.
 
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+1 for pointing out the problems everyone has been railing against them to fix but they refuse to, but keep posting it, maybe one day they might care enough to at least listen.
 
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