Mod Proposal : War Goals / Objectives

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stevepine

Sergeant Knight at Arms
I floated this idea probably more than a year ago ... and now that the game is out and released, I would value your thoughts on it. Mostly, I'd like to know if you think this idea is realistic? and would it be possible to mod it into the game?


The basic idea would be an enhancement to diplomacy. Each war is launched with specific objectives - such as "The enemy took this city from us, we are launching a military campaign to take it back ! "

Once the target / objective is taken - negotiations for peace are then pursued

Other war-goals could be the conquering of a whole region of the map - for different lore-friendly / faction-relevant reasons. ("This land was always sacred to our forefathers")

I think this would add a sense of purpose to military action and war. Rather than what we have currently... which (I think) is super shallow, not to mention repetitive.

So, do you think war-goals be a realistically moddable idea? We have a superb 'diplomacy mod' already ... which has proved to be pretty transformative for the game - so why not this too?

Thank you for your thoughts in advance.
 
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What you described with "Each war is launched with specific objectives - such as "The enemy took this city from us, we are launching a military campaign to take it back ! " was in Warband, you could talk to lords or the king himself to learn what the war plan & reason is. And the fact that this is a mod proposal rather than a game feature, tells a lot.
 
And the fact that this is a mod proposal rather than a game feature, tells a lot.
That hurts. In all senses. And one can even argue that "streamlining gameplay" with menus instead of going to ask a lord face to face is more practical, i would never disagree, but ignoring all flavor and warring for war's sake... it would be ideal if they did both: kept the option to talk to lords and "see how the war is going" like previous games, and show flavor/objetive reasons for their armies and sieges, YET keep the kingdom menu as it is just for practicality, maybe even that omniscient "Lord X's amry is doinf This" info. Do both and you can keep most people haPpy.

With the Death system, they could even implement a "Clan X wants revenge on Clan Y for killing X's Lord". The execution system is already there, they can quite surely make it validate with "killed in battle". A glance at the hopes of a "revenge system", that could easily lead to endless wars... just like in real life and just like it already is in-game, but with a good and plausible reason! A very human element! Pah, that'd add depth
It'd never happen.

My single hope for now is that they mentioned they are adding something like the "id like to know the location of Lord X" in the future, but... im fearing it can be just something minor and possibly tasteless, if jot at all just pointless, just to maie it harder for us to find any one lord in particular. make Lords' locations just like trade rumours. Bland, Just like the kingdom menu and the AI decision making is right now.
For all its omniscient spreadsheet summarizing of everything, all-known knowledge and big graphs can be good for min/maxers or whatever, but flavor is what makes it human. Even the repetitive arrow to the knee line is still better than bland graphs.
 
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I love the idea of war goals and the game desperately needs them. I just wouldn't want it to be a simple binary thing like "set war goal > achieve goal > make peace". I think that would lead to even shorter wars that are over before they get started. I'd want it to be a lot fuzzier. Like, we achieved our main goal and now some lords want to keep pushing, some want to make peace and others can swing either way. It would be a good use for traits.

I'd also like to see the other faction be a lot less inclined to accept peace after a loss. They shouldn't be willing to just accept a tribute offer after losing valuable territory. At least for some time they should stubbornly refuse to accept the loss, even if the odds are stacked against them. People can become pretty irrational when they've lost something valuable to them, and the same goes for kingdoms.

Once a faction achieves its immediate war gains, instead of immediately seeking peace or running off to conquer the next place, they should switch to a more defensive posture to hold on to what they've gained, while the losing faction becomes extra aggressive, throwing all their might behind regaining their losses, especially if it was one of their core territories. Losing something that was recently acquired should have less of that effect.

I don't really know what goes into the war calculations, but the idea of "You took my ancestral homelands and I will sacrifice everything to take them back" doesn't seem to play a big part, even though it was a big factor in Warband and a very common cause for wars all through history.
 
I think it's a good idea but it'd be pointless to implement a feature like this without improving the AI first. AI right now doesn't know why it's fighting or making peace. Factions don't have different strategies or ambitions. Having a random war goal won't make much difference. They should've made the factions more distinct from each other, not just in appearance but also in strategy, tactics, behavior towards others, how peaceful or warring or treacherous they're going to be and stuff like that.
 
Yeah, I'm no modder... but my gut feeling is that this wouldn't be impossible to make as a mod.

Thanks for commenting on the idea.
 
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Yeah, I'm no modder... but my gut feeling is that this wouldn't be impossible to make as a mod.

Thanks for commenting on the idea.
No don't get me wrong, I'm not laughing at you, I applaude you for still having faith on this game being better, and I hope modders like your idea
 
I think the difficult part would be trying to get the AI to actually follow the objectives. This is something even TW struggles with with their huge amount of paid professional manhours, so I'm skeptical if free-time modders can really pull it off...
 
I think the difficult part would be trying to get the AI to actually follow the objectives. This is something even TW struggles with with their huge amount of paid professional manhours, so I'm skeptical if free-time modders can really pull it off...
TW did it once, they can 100% do it, they just dont want to spend time and resources on such "unnecessarily complex" features because they think their player base is bunch of 12 year olds or people with below average IQ. I mean judging from steam reviews theyre not far off tbh.
 
This is one of the goals of Bannerkings mod.

Shame that mod has now made Open Source Armory a requirement... 5GB of bloat for some visual fluff. Really weird decision for a mod that's about gameplay mechanics/features. Should just be a separate module for those that want more visual variety. Hope the mod author reconsiders and releases a version without that requirement but I doubt that will happen.
 
Forum got so dissapointed is now recurring to making suggestions to modders
TW already prooved several times that they don´t listen to any idea that they didn´t want to add anyway, so it makes sense.
 
Shame that mod has now made Open Source Armory a requirement... 5GB of bloat for some visual fluff. Really weird decision for a mod that's about gameplay mechanics/features. Should just be a separate module for those that want more visual variety. Hope the mod author reconsiders and releases a version without that requirement but I doubt that will happen.
this. I was planning to play it but OSA is a no go for me, last time I looked at it (1.:cool: it had only three interesting pieces imo, and they were retextures. Nothing that should be a requirement.
 
TW did it once, they can 100% do it, they just dont want to spend time and resources on such "unnecessarily complex" features because they think their player base is bunch of 12 year olds or people with below average IQ. I mean judging from steam reviews theyre not far off tbh.
TW never had war objectives in their titles. It was all mods.
 
TW never had war objectives in their titles. It was all mods.
Play warband again, talk to lords and kings during the wartimes and watch them actually pursue the objective. You dont know what youre talking about dont be so sure of yourself. I love how everyone seem think everything good in Warband was because of mods. When actually Warband was a near perfect game, it only needed the Diplomacy mod, and the rest was already amazing.

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TW DID have War objectives in Warband and pretty similar system to Casus Belli, a reason and an actual pursuit of the said reason/objective. You knew what was the reason of the war, you knew where the marshall was going with all the lords behind him, you knew what AI was planning in short term. Y'all go out your way to throw dirt at warband when it did everything better than BL.
 
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Play warband again, talk to lords and kings during the wartimes and watch them actually pursue the objective. You dont know what youre talking about dont be so sure of yourself. I love how everyone seem think everything good in Warband was because of mods.
I did play Warband and (more importantly) actually looked inside. That line was literally cosmetic.
 
I did play Warband and (more importantly) actually looked inside. That line was literally cosmetic.
Nope, I did the same, I know how it works (released 2 complete overhaul mods for it), they actually prioritize what they think should be prioritized, lost lands etc. And you can observe the behavior on campaign map, as I did countless times to see if they actually commit to those short term objectives. Not talking about diplomacy, talking about their army/marshal behavior, all kingdoms had war goals and lords had their own goals, lords say "I need to recruit more man before committing to army" and marshals/kings said "we lost X we need to retake it". There was a goal hierarchy that everyone to "some degree" followed, it wasnt perfect but it was miles better than what we have in Bannerlord (we dont have a system at all) and it was observable in world map, BL doesnt even have a """cosmetic""" addition in that matter. Armies didnt change their minds ever 3 seconds, they didnt try to snipe a town at the other side of the world map, what they said to some degree lined up with what theyre doing, so as a player you didnt feel lost in gameplay wondering what tf is going on. Anyways, I dont want to drag this out, what Im saying is WB made sense, BL doesnt, everything is random and vague to player.
 
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Nope, I did the same, I know how it works (released 2 complete overhaul mods for it), they actually prioritize what they think should be prioritized, lost lands etc.
And you can observe the behavior on campaign map, as I did countless times to see if they actually commit to those short term objectives. Not talking about diplomacy, talking about their army/marshal behavior, all kingdoms had war goals and lords had their own goals, lords say "I need to recruit more man before committing to army" and marshals/kings said "we lost X we need to retake it".
I did observe the behavior on the campaign map, as I was dragged around to siege a random Sarranid town instead of the border settlement we were allegedly supposed to be fighting over.
There was a goal hierarchy that everyone to "some degree" followed, it wasnt perfect but it was miles better than what we have in Bannerlord (we dont have a system at all) and it was observable in world map, BL doesnt even have a """cosmetic""" addition in that matter. Armies didnt change their minds ever 3 seconds, they didnt try to snipe a town at the other side of the world map, what they said to some degree lined up with what theyre doing, so as a player you didnt feel lost in gameplay wondering what tf is going on. Anyways, I dont want to drag this out, what Im saying is WB made sense, BL doesnt, everything is random and vague to player.
Bannerlord's campaign AI is a similar utility-based AI one, apparently. And they haven't tried to dive enemy heartlands since a long time ago.
 
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