Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord Developer Blog 12 - The Passage Of Time

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Hello Bannerlord blog regulars and newcomers. In this entry, we are once again responding to your demands to hear more about single player gameplay - specifically, looking at the overworld map and some of the improvements made there. We revealed the map at Gamescom and mentioned some new features in the last blog. Here, we'll take what we've revealed and go into some more detail.

Read more at: http://www.taleworlds.com/en/Games/Bannerlord/Blog/14
 
that said, it should be obvious to anyone that the whole "swords cut mail" thing is a gameplay abstraction. especially since the game uses critical existence failure. what could be a "cut through mail" could also be a blow to the neck. a stab through the padding. a chop under the mail shirt (if short enough). even the blunt trauma of getting hit with a thin hard stick-like object would be able to give bruises. then we also have the fact that your post is a massive strawman to begin with.

also,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Variation_over_time
sadly the only sources considering peasants I could find are either a comedy article whose sources are broken:
http://www.cracked.com/article_20186_6-ridiculous-myths-about-middle-ages-everyone-believes_p2.html
or unable to trace, or scientific articles that want me to pay around 20 euro to read them...
 
SenorZorros said:
also,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Variation_over_time
sadly the only sources considering peasants I could find are either a comedy article whose sources are broken:
http://www.cracked.com/article_20186_6-ridiculous-myths-about-middle-ages-everyone-believes_p2.html
or unable to trace, or scientific articles that want me to pay around 20 euro to read them...

You're just searching in... well not the wrong places, but I found this just from typing in "Life expectancy of a medieval peasant"

The average life expectancy for a male child born in the UK between 1276 and 1300 was 31.3 years. In 1998, it is 76. However, by the time the 13th-Century boy had reached 20 he could hope to live to 45, and if he made it to 30 he had a good chance of making it into his fifties.

Can't verify that though.
 
well... I could try to make a guess... in this source of which I don't know if it's to be trusted it states an infant mortality of 50% to 30%. if we assume this is in the first year we could simply divide 35 years which is a guess for the average age.
35/(1-0,5)=70
35/(1-0,3)=50
off course this does not factor in that many deaths may be accidental instead of from old age. in the medieval times war was more common and the environments were less safe. which means I guess the average natural life expectancy for adults  is probably 60 +- 15 years...

also, what does this have to do with bannerlord :wink:
 
well... I think this topic is kind of dried out a bit so please allow me to tell you what my favorite feature would be. I think mount&blade is a great core game surrounded by a lot of (badly) tacked-on features. the gameplay feels good but gets a bit repetitive. one of my main gripes is that when using a fairly standard infantry base with archer support and a group of knights to break the formation you're options are either stand and wait, go move a couple of meters to stand and wait there, or a reckless headlong charge. I would personally really like to have an "advance command" which would let your divisions advance to the enemy like the charge order but while maintaining formation. you might be able to do something similar using the "advance ten paces" or y ordering your units to hold position on the enemy but I feel this is still an inelegant solution which requires to much precision and micromanagement. especially if the opponents run away. furthermore I think it would be nice to be able to have your units in different modes. if I for example want my knights to harass a group of archers I would like to be able to set them to "harass mode" in which they try to run through the enemy without getting captured while a "charge mode" for example would make them try to form a tight group and break through the enemy's lines.

also, please have the option to put the same type of unit into different divisions...
 
Cilginturk46 said:
The four ???? is probably 90+8, don't forget the slaves.

Well in this Video (with timecode) you can see that 1 "?" was a group of a couble looters + 5 prisoners...
https://youtu.be/ZpkrdMAyCmo?t=3m8s


"male child born in the UK between 1276 and 1300 was 31.3 years"
You forget that usaly studies use this method for this result (50% of the children die at age 5-7 and 50% at the age of 60-70 = well i quess the avarage life expectance is 31 duhhh)
 
Sekij said:
Well in this Video (with timecode) you can see that 1 "?" was a group of a couble looters + 5 prisoners...
https://youtu.be/ZpkrdMAyCmo?t=3m8s

You are right. It means we will see thousands of soldiers in battle. So, DX12 confirmed ? :ohdear:
 
I'm just wondering, how to be look when we gonna catapult walls. We gonna see flying rock and exploding walls?
And seriously, i cant wait for Banerlord.
 
Varrak said:
Sekij said:
Well in this Video (with timecode) you can see that 1 "?" was a group of a couble looters + 5 prisoners...
https://youtu.be/ZpkrdMAyCmo?t=3m8s

You are right. It means we will see thousands of soldiers in battle. So, DX12 confirmed ? :ohdear:

Could be but not necessarily, they could have made it totaly diffrent than we expect here, 1 "?" is maybe not equal just a 0 at the end. it could be (and i believe some allready said it) 1-50, 50-100,100-150 or totaly diffrent. TaleWorld is playing with us :grin: allways showing groups of small looters but everything else is like "????" :grin:
 
I am very excited for the Aging Character aspect. I hope player (and A.I.) mortality plays some role in BL. Having a stronger sense of risk vs reward when fighting difficult battles will add some spice that WB is currently lacking. Plus how cool would it be to kill the Lord of a faction, to provoke reckless hostility from their fellow retainers and heir? You can make things very personal and political.

I could think of a few cases where a perticular retainer was getting on my nerves, or he was in my way from getting what I want, ending him rightly would have been nice. Plus an heir/legacy system adds depth to the game, we already know that customized weapons remain in game regardless of ownership. It would be cool for your son to return his Father's sword from the man who slain him. I'm all for adding depth to the game, even if it's in small doses. It adds to immersion, and keeps things fresh (mods help, but I like to think the Native should stand on it's own as well.

Lastly, what I've been desperately waiting for is a co-op/joint player campaign. As in, two people able to play together in a game. Able to freely do what they want, but adding that other friend to roam about either for or against you would be amazing. It doesn't seem that difficult to imagine. Plus as a wild card, when a difficult battle, the other player comes into the battle, he/she can opt to fight against you. Again, some kind of joint-play to spice it up. Kind of like Rome: II's co-op campaign minus the forced working together part.
 
Sekij said:
it could be (and i believe some allready said it) 1-50, 50-100,100-150 or totaly diffrent.
I'm about 85% certain this is how it will work. The ?'s are likely there to relay a general amount of troops. Which is even realistic. Without training you wouldn't be able to look at an army of people and know how many there are, but you might be able to get a general feel for it. With training in spotting or other skill you'd be able to see the actual numbers at further ranges, but without you'd be stuck with the ?'s until you get closer.

? = Small Group

?? = Average Group

??? = Large Group

???? = Huge Group


It also makes no sense that 900 men would look the same as 100. The scale is WAY off.
 
I realy hope there will still be smaller Armies. Just imagine trying to acomplish anything at the start of a new game when every lord has 10.000 Soldiers with him.
Also...please don't force the story at us at all, like not even like at the start of WFAS.
 
SenorZorros said:
well... I could try to make a guess... in this source of which I don't know if it's to be trusted it states an infant mortality of 50% to 30%. if we assume this is in the first year we could simply divide 35 years which is a guess for the average age.
35/(1-0,5)=70
35/(1-0,3)=50
@SenorZorros, could you please elaborate your calculation process? I don't understand what infant mortality rate has to do with the average age and what that number '35' actually stands for. Excuse my eventual confusion.
This is how I understood it:
30% to 50% mortality rate is the chance of a person dying within infancy. Dividing 35 by 0.5 would calculate the number of which 50% is 35 (70). Same goes for the division by 0.3, meaning the children who are still alive. However this would make sense if we had an unknown total number of 'test subjects' and we know the number of children that died/lived. I don't see the relevance to the aging process.
 
the discussion what about the age that people died in the middle ages.  because it was almost impossible to find good historical sources I tried to make a guess at the average age when one does not count the dead infants. studies usually give an average of about 35 years so I used it as the base. this is off course a very rough number. child mortality according to the only source I could find is generally considered to be 50% though the source believed it would probably be 30%. this means that either 50% or 70% of the people did not die in infancy. if you divide the mean age by those numbers you should get a very rough estimate of how old the average adult became. off course this is extremely rough and the age should both go down because not all children died when they were 0 and go up since we only have to consider natural deaths. after all, the maximum age is only important if the character survived.

the gist of it i that I think that characters should only start to risk dying when they pass the age of 60 and even then they should have something akin to a 50%-70% chance to get to 70. anything above that should be really hard though

EDIT, on the party size, have you considered that even though the part size can surpass a thousand the amount of units on the field may still be capped relatively low?
 
SenorZorros said:
EDIT, on the party size, have you considered that even though the part size can surpass a thousand the amount of units on the field may still be capped relatively low?
That however seems a like it would cause battles to not be much fun. Think of how many rounds of combat you would have to go through to finish them off if they number in the thousands.

I've actually played a battle in Warband between two giant armies(1500-2000 on each side), with normal battle sizes. There was a good at least 10-15 rounds of combat, about 5-10 minutes each at least. For that individual battle it was fun and quite epic considering it was the decisive battle of the war. But I certainly wouldn't want that for every battle.
 
Varrak said:
Sekij said:
Well in this Video (with timecode) you can see that 1 "?" was a group of a couble looters + 5 prisoners...
https://youtu.be/ZpkrdMAyCmo?t=3m8s

You are right. It means we will see thousands of soldiers in battle. So, DX12 confirmed ? :ohdear:

That is an extremely oversimplified way to look at it and may not be true at all.

Shidan said:
SenorZorros said:
EDIT, on the party size, have you considered that even though the part size can surpass a thousand the amount of units on the field may still be capped relatively low?
That however seems a like it would cause battles to not be much fun. Think of how many rounds of combat you would have to go through to finish them off if they number in the thousands.

I've actually played a battle in Warband between two giant armies(1500-2000 on each side), with normal battle sizes. There was a good at least 10-15 rounds of combat, about 5-10 minutes each at least. For that individual battle it was fun and quite epic considering it was the decisive battle of the war. But I certainly wouldn't want that for every battle.

Good god no, that would be terrible.
 
that sounds like quite the... experience indeed. I also hope that it wouldn't happen but it is an option. after all, it might already be quite a challenge to have a 500-man battle.

I do hope though that the engine has no hardcoded maximum so that in six years 1000-man battles could be a reality.
 
Varrak said:
Sekij said:
Well in this Video (with timecode) you can see that 1 "?" was a group of a couble looters + 5 prisoners...
https://youtu.be/ZpkrdMAyCmo?t=3m8s

You are right. It means we will see thousands of soldiers in battle. So, DX12 confirmed ? :ohdear:


I doubt it's gonna use DX12 since people with bad machines will cry as always.
 
578 said:
Varrak said:
Sekij said:
Well in this Video (with timecode) you can see that 1 "?" was a group of a couble looters + 5 prisoners...
https://youtu.be/ZpkrdMAyCmo?t=3m8s

You are right. It means we will see thousands of soldiers in battle. So, DX12 confirmed ? :ohdear:


I doubt it's gonna use DX12 since people with bad machines will cry as always.

If TW were to support DX12 that wouldn't necessarily mean that you would need a new high end graphics card to play BL.
DirectX12 seems to be backwards compatible, so older cards woudn't take advantage of the newer DX12 features, but would still be able to render the game (i.e. using DirectX 9/10/11 features).

It seems you would only need a "modern" (a card that would support "DirectX feature level 12") mid range card if you wanted to take advantage of the DirectX12 features in a game.

(My guess is that Khronos "Vulkan" is going to be as fast as DirectX 12 seems to be with optimized software).
 
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