Messengers and detachments

[cadadr]

Currently the player has to do a lot of things, like finding mercenaries or contacting other lords etc., all manually. I suggest two game mechanics to improve the situation:

1) Messengers

This has been brought up before numerous times, but I still wanted to suggest a concrete way to achieve this. The player would pick a random group of units and assign them enough horses so that they are faster than say 6.5, and some denars. Then, they could be tasked to:

(a) find the leader of a mercenary faction and ask them to join your kingdom. You set a top price per influence point, and if they agree, they join your kingdom. If the messenger party includes a companion with high charm, they can negotiate and there's a chance that they join for a lower price.

(b) locate a companion or family member and bring them to your party. E.g. your party is slain and you want to regroup. You collected recruits and horses. You assign a messenger to collect selected clan members and bring them to your party. You could even assign them enough denars to ransom them if necessary.

(c) handle the parts of quests which require returning to a settlement or a lord. I.e. a lord asks for some horses. You don't have a companion to handle this so you do the collecting. Then, you can send them back to the lord with a detachment of messengers.

2) Detachments

I hadn't seen a proposal for this before, so I'm sorry if I'm repeating without acknowledging prior art. The basic premise of this feature is you create a detachment from your party or army, lead by a clan member, and assign them tasks. The possibilities:

(a) Collect food. E.g. you're in a siege and need food. You create a detachment of 30, grabbing troops from parties of your clan, or of all parties if you're army leader, and send them to collect food from wherever.

(b) Raid villages. You create a party lead by a clan member that goes and raids villages you select, and bring back the loot.

(c) Attack some party. E.g. for defending a near village that's being raided, or to help a party that's being attacked nearby.


These features would help eliminate some of the chores of the game.

 

[cadadr]

Also a related feature would be sea navigation between cities. E.g. hire ships to go from Syronea to Chaikand or Vostrum to Sanala across the lake / sea. It could be N troops per day at some cost. The actual shipping part need not be visible or interactable. It would be nice to not have to roam around the lakes and seas in the came.

 

[Premackattack]

Just going to necro this a bit since the same conversation is happening in the mercenary clan exploit thread.


To add to what you have above, it would be great if we had messengers/messenger detachments that could give us a slow progress through npc dialogue exchanges at range. It was brought up that dialogue is generally scripted/set up for in-person encounters, but maybe this could address that:

1) only exchange correspondance with NPCs that you've met, and who perhaps have a minimum value positive relationship with you or you have a minimum renown (so they take the time to "write" a reply).
2) forgo the first couple of messages where people are saying "it's been a while." Skip to the part where you "i need to ask you a question" or something.
3) limit the dialogue options that are available to exclude any that just don't make sense to do remotely.
4) have your messenger return with a reply "letter" that contains the same response the npc would have given you in person when they received the communication. This may necessitate further replies/exchanges that continue to be carried out with appropriate delays for travel.
5) put the feature behind an in-game paywall such as hirable messenger services, companions who require leave and who need denars for the journey, etc.

You can already remotely summon people to you when you call an army, and somehow townies just "know" when you've completed many quests, so there's already a need for an explanation on how that works. Devs may as well please elaborate on that process with something like this.

 

[Gandamula]

There is a mod, Simple Bank, that gives you a possibility to talk with all lords if you reach a middle level of money in bank.