Low level troops do an astounding zero damage to high level troops

[Aeon221]

The title states it pretty clearly. I've lowered the soak slightly on my version to deal with it, as I don't think it's appropriate or fun, but I wanted to check and see if people are in favor of this condition. Seems silly that a horde of peasants can beat on a knight for hours and not even scratch him, while he guts them one by one.

Thoughts?

 

[Camcolit]

Agree 100%. However lowering soak is not an ideal way to deal with it. In reality, the reason one knight couldn't beat a horde of (brave) peasants is that he'd kill one or two while getting swamped, the peasants would quickly pull him to the ground and stick a knife through his visor - dead knight. Actually if the peasants instead tried to kill him by hitting his plate armor with knifes and such they would indeed do 'zero' damage and could continue this all day unless they found the gaps. At the moment plate armor is actually even underpowered in certain areas - for example you can do pretty significant damage (but lower than average obviously)  to someone wearing plate by slashing at him with a light sword. This would have absolutely no effect in real life. But armor in-game is very effective because the game doesn't model anti-armor strategies very well or in cases at all.

Very hard to know how to balance this using the game's mechanics.

 

[Ulvebane]

Also agree. In the beginning you can't really do anything against a lot of the enemies running around, because they are effectively immune to your sh*tty troops. A horde of peasants should at least have a chance to take down a knight that charges into their midst.

 

[mp84]

It's a design intention and that will not change..

The best suggestion I can give is try to get some Mercs in your crew, it can usually help ya out in the beginning of the game.. Also stay the hell away from Renegade Knight parties, Snake Cult Parties, and Vaskerry Parties (The larger parties) in the beginning, as it's most likely certain suicide unless your somehow good on taking them on one by one with a lance..

If anything, low level bandits, and the mobs around Ravenstern are ideal first target candidates, so you can get those low level troops to at least the 3rd or 4th tier, then you'll be ok.. But seriously the Mercs (Espeically those Young Noble Advenuterers) can make a big difference as they level up as well early in the game.

hope it helps!

regards,

MP

 

[Ulvebane]

All good, intention and difficulty and all that, but sometimes it's really frustrating, because you can't beat anyone (except for very small outlaw bands) with your recruits unless you have a bunch and pick your battles, but the renegade knights/heretics/snake cult/jatu/whatever can very easily catch you and your peasant levy, and facestomp happens.
(sorry for the long sentence )

 

[Camcolit]

The peasants probably can't even reach the rider with their knifes so instead attack the knight's super-horse, and do no damage. Heavy horse in M+B does and always has had a ridiculous amount of armor and HP. I think this is more of a necessity imposed by the game's limitations than an imbalance. M+B cavalry are stupid, so they need a boost. What I mean is that RL cavalry would never get themselves into the situations M+B cavalry do (middle of a group on infantry on their own). M+B infantry are stupid too of course, but the penalty for charging mindlessly at the nearest opponent is less significant for infantry than for cavalry. Despite this, I still think horses are too strong. Also so-called anti-cavalry units like pikemen are no better than normal troops against them, while in RL charging a line of pikemen would be suicide.

In reality mounted knights would charge in a disciplined formation, inflict a lot of casualties through sheer mass, and hopefully rout the enemy. If not they would pull around, reform, and charge again. They would not engage in close-quarter confined melee with any kind of solid troops. Being very well equipped, they could hold their own, but any mounted unit is fighting to the enemy's advantage when stationary in close-quarters. Horses are very vulnerable here. It's been said that the horses will kick and trample in close quarters - true but a horse is also a big target and you can never amor it as well as a man. Would you rather have your horse kicking and pushing in a close melee or running over everything in a mass charge.

As much as mount and blade is known for realistically modelling mounted combat this in my opinion is only true on an individual basis. Cavalry in this game is rarely used in anything resembling the way cavalry was actually used. Yes, you can charge in en masse but it takes incredible micromanagement to get your cavalry to charge, withdraw, charge. Better just to charge and leave them in there. This is partly due to the very small battle sizes. Maybe people who can run huge battles can comment on whether it gets better there, I'd imagine so.

None of this is really criticism. M+B is a charge-in-and-take-heads kind of game and there's lots of mods for all types of styles. One thing though -



Wardogs should be nerfed.

 

[Camcolit]

@ ulvebane

Easy start - make a little money doing whatever, it's not hard, arena fighting will even do for the amount you'll need. Get a couple of companions with training (Donavan is good) and one with looting if you don't want to take it yourself (Adonja). Go to Ravenstern, get recruits, train them to wardens and eventually rangers. Go fight vanskerry raiders with about the same number of troops as you. In battle distract them by circling around with your cavalry while your archers mow them down. They give good loot. Sell it off and get enough money to get a full non-conflicting set of companions. When you're ready with a big enough army of rangers become a mercenary and fight enemy lords. You'll beat them easily. Talk to them directly in your prisoner menu after battle and ransom them since they'll escape if you wait for an offer. With that, the money from loot, and your mercenary fee, soon you'll be rolling in dough.

 

[Ulvebane]

@ Camcolit: Tanks for the tip. I do know how to build up my force though, my last post should be seen in the light of "my new character just got ganked by serpent tanks on horses, and couldn't do anything about it". 

 

[Camcolit]

Ok, cool. Those cobra warriors. Is it just me or do they wear plate, ride netherworld chargers with 90 armor and 500hp, and cost 24 gold a week  . Crap proficiencies but nice fodder when you pick them up as prisoners.

 

[Danath]

stay the hell away from Renegade Knight parties, Snake Cult Parties, and Vaskerry Parties (The larger parties) in the beginning

Even the small ones are too hard to defeat unless you picked the noble char and go couching. I started with a hunter and Vaskerry raider's armor soak all damage from a hunting bow of a starting character Not to mention that small parties are faster than you even without any troops, had to flee to castles and towns constantly. It's something that buggers me in most mods: too many empowered bandits from the start.

 

[Starforge]

@ Camcolit: Tanks for the tip. I do know how to build up my force though, my last post should be seen in the light of "my new character just got ganked by serpent tanks on horses, and couldn't do anything about it". 

I hate when that happens 

Seriously, though, I like the design decision as is.  You spend very little time at low level and nearly all of your time at 'endgame' making the harder difficulty enjoyable. 

 

[drunkhobo]

The problem is that this isn't just a early problem. Whenever I try to catch a village-raiding lord, I have to lead him away from the village for a considerable amount of time to avoid villager join in. I've seen villagers kill off the weaker infantry (Sarranid) in Native, but they're basically just take up valuable troop spots in a village fight in

 

[Camcolit]

Well that's true, even a small army 'helping' you can be catastrophic, since if I'm not mistaken on the actual battlefield they can take up more slots than their relative size would indicate. And this is not just with peasants - when fighting top troops, militia, trained militia, and even the first tier of regulars can be just lambs to the slaughter. Case in point, I was attacked by a powerful enemy king with my army consisting of 200 knights of the dawn that he had no chance against. I had been kiting him to get him out of range of a 50-man allied army that I thought was now out of that 'helping' range, but wasn't. So when the battle started it looked like about half my troop slots were taken up by random recruits and light bowmen. Still won, but took far more casualties than I would have without the 'help'. In the second round when I'd finished cursing my allied lord I resorted to staying back and letting as many of them get killed as possible so they wouldn't spawn in the next one. Knights weren't too upset about this, 'everyone's guilty of something, and those idiots are guilty of being idiots' as one of them remarked.

 

[gabriot]

To add to this - this is why I NEVER go archer, because of how little damage you do for so long in the game with arrows.  It sucks having to pelt 10 arrows into a normal troop to get a kill.

 

[Starforge]

To add to this - this is why I NEVER go archer, because of how little damage you do for so long in the game with arrows.  It sucks having to pelt 10 arrows into a normal troop to get a kill.

I don't either as I tend to make a General (CHA / INT) rather than a Warrior but supposedly Horse Archer is the easiest way to go.  I never quite understand that as I go full damage and only 1 stray arrow or bolt unshielded ruins your whole day but I've seen it mentioned often in the forums how easy HA is.  Maybe if you specialise early, go less damage, or import a high level character /shrug.  Then again, I'm probably just average at FPS so it could simply be that .

 

[caligula123]

ohhh...come on ...this mod is all about archers ....okay you are not a killer since you reach WM 250 archery .....but then... even with a fine long composite bow your are a monster!!!

 

[HunterAlpha1]

To add to this - this is why I NEVER go archer, because of how little damage you do for so long in the game with arrows.  It sucks having to pelt 10 arrows into a normal troop to get a kill.

have you tried using something stronger than a hunting bow?  all you need to get a sapphire rune bow is three qualis gems and some wine.  then you can pwn just about everything.  you can also train with the Noldor to get awesome proficiencies.

 

[Aeon221]

You folks know that lowering soak makes everything take more damage, because it weakens all armor, right? Just reduces the flat subtraction amount of armor.

So, really, it should cut against in the late game, when the player is forced to rely on smaller numbers of high quality troops, as much as it cuts in favor in the early game, if not more since it means losing more, and more expensive, troopers to the odd javelin to the face.

Seems to work fairly well all in all, and I'm quite happy with the change. Might up the percentage reduction of armor to compensate some, but I doubt it's necessary.

In any event, I'm not too concerned with the design decisions of the mod itself. Frankly, I feel the best mods are those where everyone takes it into their own hands to change what they don't like and add what they do like -- after all, that's how we end up with new mods and mod-mods! If anyone really wants I can share my changes, but it's simple enough to edit the following (vanilla POP) values in the module.ini file yourself:

armor_soak_factor_against_cut      = 0.9
armor_soak_factor_against_pierce    = 0.75
armor_soak_factor_against_blunt    = 0.7

armor_reduction_factor_against_cut      = 1.1
armor_reduction_factor_against_pierce    = 0.75
armor_reduction_factor_against_blunt    = 0.70

For comparison, here are the same values from Vanilla WB:

armor_soak_factor_against_cut      = 0.8
armor_soak_factor_against_pierce    = 0.65
armor_soak_factor_against_blunt    = 0.5

armor_reduction_factor_against_cut      = 1.0
armor_reduction_factor_against_pierce    = 0.5
armor_reduction_factor_against_blunt    = 0.75

Which leads me to ask why pierce was nerfed so heavily as a damage type!

 

[BlackRainZ]

So what values are you using aeon?

 

[Danath]

Hey, as infantry archer I kill more than with my 75p two-handed! It's the beginning of the game what is flawed in my opinion.