kapko
Recruit
Hi, wanted to post this for some time and I finally think I got most of my stuff together. I am sorry for making it so long and I know it does not meet the guidelines for suggestions, but i would feel silly for posting each thing separetly. I would rather have an overall discussion over here.
So, after almost 9 months of bannerlord in early access, I think I owe the developers of this wonderful game review of sorts. This is a list of things that I am missing in the game and hopefully will be added into the game sooner or later.
Love your games, TaleWorlds. Please, keep up the good work.
First off, the diplomacy:
Tracking relations with other factions (Currently you are either at war or neutral with them)
Alliances - This may prevent snowballing (or make it worse
)
Non-Aggression pacts
Truce period after making piece
Feasts & Tournaments where you invite the other faction to improve relations; This could work with just clans as well
Spending influence to get a quest with a chance to improve relations with other factions/clans; For example, hunting (would be a nice quest, PLEASE add hunting as a quest) or invitation to a tournament/feast (you must attend it, or you will lose relations) with some additional tasks once you are there, like you can bet on which one of you will get further into the tournament or who will hunt more deer or simply who will get the first kill of the hunt. This would help the overall immersion so much. And you could use the people’s traits in it as well. Say, if the NPC is cruel it will enjoy killing more animals then you, hence your relations may improve more if you actually lose the bet. You might get some dilemmas like the devious lord tried to trick you and gave you weaker/broken bow/weapon. Or the opposite, you sabotage his weapon as you go hunting boars and he gets killed.
Some possible new features:
Allow the player to add another NPC (noble) to a quest. For example, I get a quest from a village notable that there is a dangerous bear roaming around. Allow me to either do it on my own or call some nobles in and make a hunt from it. Or “extortion by deserters”, let me call in a noble from the owning clan for a bit of influence (if we are part of the same kingdom) and let him deal with it, or just request help from him or let me boast right into his face that I saved his village and tell him how incompetent he is that is IMMERSION; Right now, the interactions with nobles are rather few and they are unattractive (the interactions, not the nobles ). There is just no merit to dealing with nobles if my clan cannot gain/lose anything from it.
More in-depth quests. Right now, we have a ton of very good, yet rather simple and short quests. It would not hurt to get some more complicated quests or quest chains like the one from Viking conquest where you killed members of a former royal family.
Settlement quests/disputes. In warband, whenever you go into your fort/city, there is a chance you have to solve a dispute. This helped the immersion a lot and it is definitely missing in the game.
Manhunters (F*ck you bandits, you always kill my villagers and swarm my kingdom if I do not hunt you down personally!); If I own a Castle/City allow me to create/buy Manhunter groups please, or even better make a building that will allow automatic recruitment of manhunters, they will patrol around said castle/city, or make it so it can only be build in cities, the higher level of the building the better and bigger groups of manhunters
Feasts – who would not like to besiege a settlement expecting help, when suddenly the king hosts a feast. I am looking at you Harlaus!
Special units/Knighthood orders/Guilds or anything of the sort; This was one of my favourite features in Prophesy of Pendor mod for Warband; Overall the game needs some more unique troops that the player could recruit. There are some nice units like the triarii, but you can never recruit them, except from prisoners. Give us the chance to recruit them. They should have a guild where you could go and do some quests to get some relations so they will let you hire some of their troops. That would be great. Where do they get their troops anyway?
Make Attribute points do something! In warband getting attribute point mattered a lot! Bannerlord does not have that feel. The AP are there just so you can learn skills faster. To give possible examples:
Training my troops – allow me in the clan menu to create a quest for my companions to train my troops. Say, I have 50 imperial recruits and I will send my companion, who is skilled with bow, to train them into imperial archers and afterwards they will get into one of my castles or join my party.
Coming from the last one, allow the player to issue quests to clan members. And maybe even to other nobles for influence.
Boats/Ships – I would love you to implement boat traveling between ports so I can get faster from Sturgia to Northern Empire, or from Southern Empire to the desert or the Western Empire.
Let the prisoners go! I am talking about the enemy lords/ladies. Let me set them free for some relation boost please and allow me to talk to them while they are in prison, especially in my own town/castle
Notes - in warband there was a log of what happened in the world. Right now, you can only see it for a moment in the bottom left before it disappears forever
Let me interact with raided villages! Let me help my villages recover faster. Make it a quest, once you enter the village you can speak to a notable – you will need to bring food, wood maybe some tools to help them out or simply stay there for day or two to help them rebuild – could improve your engineering skill (or leave a companion there)
Religion/culture – it is great for bonding people as well as dividing them. Fits perfectly into Calradia. You can use priests/monks to tell the player more about the country and its history. Or simply use culture as the divider and make it more impactful. Especially in the rebellions that are to come hopefully soon. Instead of priests (and religion) use public speakers to tell the player about the world.
Invasion forces – this is probably more suitable for mods, but still, you could implement some invasions. It can help prevent snowballing by targeting the strongest faction. The invaders might just run around and raid castles and cities (once it is implemented). It could be 1-4 armies each with 600-1200 men strong or smaller more professional armies of like 200-400 men that would just go around raiding villages
Now, the last thing on the list, the skill grinding. To make it short, you could implement a difficulty setting that would change the speed of leveling up the skills. From there, if you can track it somehow, you would be able to see how many people actually want to grind each skill for hours upon hours.
The longer version:
Grinding the skills is just so tedious. Especially 120+. You can get through the lower levels relatively fast because you have high multipliers, but those slowly fade away and you need a lot more exp per level. It is just too slow in my opinion. You should try to keep the pace of lower levels to at least 180, then slow it down (I am talking about skills I have 5 focus points in + at least 4 or 5 attribute points). And I am not even talking about companions – They level up so slow, the only skills that they level up relatively fast are scouting and steward (trading, if you form a caravan and they have some focus points in it). Riding and athletics level up passively over long time but try to level up their melee skills - It will not happen! Companions should probably have additional buff to their fighting skills exp gain.
This comes from hundreds of hours in the game. The grind is not that bad
Thanks to all who actually got thrugh all of this. I love the game and I hope there will be much more content to come.
So, after almost 9 months of bannerlord in early access, I think I owe the developers of this wonderful game review of sorts. This is a list of things that I am missing in the game and hopefully will be added into the game sooner or later.
Love your games, TaleWorlds. Please, keep up the good work.
First off, the diplomacy:
Tracking relations with other factions (Currently you are either at war or neutral with them)
Alliances - This may prevent snowballing (or make it worse
)Non-Aggression pacts
Truce period after making piece
Feasts & Tournaments where you invite the other faction to improve relations; This could work with just clans as well
Spending influence to get a quest with a chance to improve relations with other factions/clans; For example, hunting (would be a nice quest, PLEASE add hunting as a quest) or invitation to a tournament/feast (you must attend it, or you will lose relations) with some additional tasks once you are there, like you can bet on which one of you will get further into the tournament or who will hunt more deer or simply who will get the first kill of the hunt. This would help the overall immersion so much. And you could use the people’s traits in it as well. Say, if the NPC is cruel it will enjoy killing more animals then you, hence your relations may improve more if you actually lose the bet. You might get some dilemmas like the devious lord tried to trick you and gave you weaker/broken bow/weapon. Or the opposite, you sabotage his weapon as you go hunting boars and he gets killed.
Some possible new features:
Allow the player to add another NPC (noble) to a quest. For example, I get a quest from a village notable that there is a dangerous bear roaming around. Allow me to either do it on my own or call some nobles in and make a hunt from it. Or “extortion by deserters”, let me call in a noble from the owning clan for a bit of influence (if we are part of the same kingdom) and let him deal with it, or just request help from him or let me boast right into his face that I saved his village and tell him how incompetent he is
that is IMMERSION; Right now, the interactions with nobles are rather few and they are unattractive (the interactions, not the nobles ). There is just no merit to dealing with nobles if my clan cannot gain/lose anything from it.More in-depth quests. Right now, we have a ton of very good, yet rather simple and short quests. It would not hurt to get some more complicated quests or quest chains like the one from Viking conquest where you killed members of a former royal family.
Settlement quests/disputes. In warband, whenever you go into your fort/city, there is a chance you have to solve a dispute. This helped the immersion a lot and it is definitely missing in the game.
Manhunters (F*ck you bandits, you always kill my villagers and swarm my kingdom if I do not hunt you down personally!); If I own a Castle/City allow me to create/buy Manhunter groups please, or even better make a building that will allow automatic recruitment of manhunters, they will patrol around said castle/city, or make it so it can only be build in cities, the higher level of the building the better and bigger groups of manhunters
Feasts – who would not like to besiege a settlement expecting help, when suddenly the king hosts a feast. I am looking at you Harlaus!
Special units/Knighthood orders/Guilds or anything of the sort; This was one of my favourite features in Prophesy of Pendor mod for Warband; Overall the game needs some more unique troops that the player could recruit. There are some nice units like the triarii, but you can never recruit them, except from prisoners. Give us the chance to recruit them. They should have a guild where you could go and do some quests to get some relations so they will let you hire some of their troops. That would be great. Where do they get their troops anyway?
Make Attribute points do something! In warband getting attribute point mattered a lot! Bannerlord does not have that feel. The AP are there just so you can learn skills faster. To give possible examples:
- Strength – Increase in melee damage
- Control – increase in ranged damage / improve handling of all weapons
- Endurance – More HP
- Cunning – Better deals/barters; maybe higher advantages to simulation battles and higher chance to get into enemy town
- Charisma – Better deals/barters
- Intelligence – Improve learning multipliers for ALL skills (Not increase the threshold, just the multiplier)
Training my troops – allow me in the clan menu to create a quest for my companions to train my troops. Say, I have 50 imperial recruits and I will send my companion, who is skilled with bow, to train them into imperial archers and afterwards they will get into one of my castles or join my party.
Coming from the last one, allow the player to issue quests to clan members. And maybe even to other nobles for influence.
Boats/Ships – I would love you to implement boat traveling between ports so I can get faster from Sturgia to Northern Empire, or from Southern Empire to the desert or the Western Empire.
Let the prisoners go! I am talking about the enemy lords/ladies. Let me set them free for some relation boost please and allow me to talk to them while they are in prison, especially in my own town/castle
Notes - in warband there was a log of what happened in the world. Right now, you can only see it for a moment in the bottom left before it disappears forever
Let me interact with raided villages! Let me help my villages recover faster. Make it a quest, once you enter the village you can speak to a notable – you will need to bring food, wood maybe some tools to help them out or simply stay there for day or two to help them rebuild – could improve your engineering skill (or leave a companion there)
Religion/culture – it is great for bonding people as well as dividing them. Fits perfectly into Calradia. You can use priests/monks to tell the player more about the country and its history. Or simply use culture as the divider and make it more impactful. Especially in the rebellions that are to come hopefully soon. Instead of priests (and religion) use public speakers to tell the player about the world.
Invasion forces – this is probably more suitable for mods, but still, you could implement some invasions. It can help prevent snowballing by targeting the strongest faction. The invaders might just run around and raid castles and cities (once it is implemented). It could be 1-4 armies each with 600-1200 men strong or smaller more professional armies of like 200-400 men that would just go around raiding villages
Now, the last thing on the list, the skill grinding. To make it short, you could implement a difficulty setting that would change the speed of leveling up the skills. From there, if you can track it somehow, you would be able to see how many people actually want to grind each skill for hours upon hours.
The longer version:
Grinding the skills is just so tedious. Especially 120+. You can get through the lower levels relatively fast because you have high multipliers, but those slowly fade away and you need a lot more exp per level. It is just too slow in my opinion. You should try to keep the pace of lower levels to at least 180, then slow it down (I am talking about skills I have 5 focus points in + at least 4 or 5 attribute points). And I am not even talking about companions – They level up so slow, the only skills that they level up relatively fast are scouting and steward (trading, if you form a caravan and they have some focus points in it). Riding and athletics level up passively over long time but try to level up their melee skills - It will not happen! Companions should probably have additional buff to their fighting skills exp gain.
This comes from hundreds of hours in the game. The grind is not that bad
Thanks to all who actually got thrugh all of this. I love the game and I hope there will be much more content to come.
