My thoughts on the Faction Snowball effect. Campaigns should go on forever!

[ABAlphaBeta]

I'm on 40h and every faciton is still there cept the north and west (Rhagaea unified the empire except Lucon who still has 2-3 settlements and won't die)

 

[Shemet]

1. Feasts and Peace.
Bring it back! Have factions at peace for longer times, right now they're just at peace for a few days at most.

2. Resurrecting fallen nations.
If the right conditions are met, have a fallen nation be able to resurrect itself in a city or a few, perhaps with a large army in its control.

3. Introduce Rebellions asap in Early Access.
This will naturally curb expansive nations. Give larger nations more stability issues.

4. Have multiple weaker nations declare war on the strongest until it is made slightly weaker, then peace time.
This is another way to slow down the big boys.

5. Make Campaign AI prioritise defence rather than offence.
Patrol borders, attack incoming armies.

6. Have Campaign AI focus on raiding more when on the offence, instead of capturing castles/towns constantly, make raiding more profitable.
Make raiding great again! This will also naturally slow down the pace of the campaign.

Just my thoughts currently, may add more. What are your thoughts? Please add ways to stop snowballing and I will add them to this topic, make them numbered from 7.

bump, really like your ideas for the game, hope they notice this!!

 

[Mawotb]

Yea i sat in a sturgian town, grinding my smithing up( Which by the way needs work, smithing way to long to grind, should get weapon parts from loot to make easier) and sturgia got wiped out quickly and then went vlandia, i have 22hrs in game ik its EA and the devs dont have the late game stages done, but the fac wars shoudlnt been done and over with so quickly

no one is arguing that. Its inert and so is wanting just the sieges to be the only polished part of the game this early on. Warfare is central to the game so no doubt has a high likelihood of balancing later on, right now its not completely and utterly broken like save files which is more crucial.

 

[Jumara]

Jep all your points sound solid. At the moment one faction crushes through and is unbeatable and takes castle after castle and the towns as well.

 

[Gand]

Right now, the snowballing + the fact that nearly 200 armor pieces are accidentally(?) locked to being multiplayer only, leaves the singleplayer campaign being an early game demo at best. You can only play for like 20 hours before a faction takes over the whole map and makes it impossible to be your own kingdom and the best armor you can get is mid tier bandit trash. Oh yeah and skills give so little xp that I "beat the game" as a vassal of western empire before even getting a single skill to level 100. Adding ranked to multiplayer is hardly a concern rn for a game that has always had singleplayer as its main draw for many people.

Yea this single patch is not enough to fix this issue, the snowballing will continue. Thats not enough changes in the base AI to warrant otherwise.
I haven't gotten a skill past 30 before it was over...

 

[Benisfug]

First time playing M&B and I have to say I'm addicted
There's a lot that bothers me...clanky combat, terrible looking NPCs, bugged quests etc. but I'm sure all that will be taken care of either by the dev or mods (there are already some neat ones out there!). In spite of all the issues, I can't stop playing

Now, on to my observation of this issue:
My first save was about 50h and I had the same issue with Southern Empire taking over most of the map, however, an interesting thing happened. They did not conquer the complete map, but left the other nations/empires down to 1-2 cities with military strength between 100-300. Needless to say, those empires were useless and could not recover.
I was able to finish the quest and formed my own Empire (after lots of trial and error due to bugs and wars lol), taking 2 towns and 2 castles with me in the process. I was immediately in war with Southern Empire.
Sadly, I looked for an option to try and get the other empires on my side, to form an alliance, to try something to help them out so we can take the Southern Empire down, but nothing was available.
I was able to persuade a few lords to join me so I had a pretty decent army before I faced the might of Southern Empire lol but it did not help.
After several battles it was clear I wasn't going to last long so I enabled cheats to see how far I can push them!

I ended up with well over 30 lords in my prisons, but there was nothing that I could do with them. Option to execute them was grayed out...I tried talking to them to persuade them to join me, but that was not available either...so they just sat there, some escaped too.
Still, Southern Empire would come with more and more lords and armies, it was pretty hard to keep up with them attacking from each side, even with cheats! My castles and towns were falling before I could move my army around and they were practically next to each other!

There needs to be a way to deal with most of these lords...execution, banishment (idk overseas lol) or ability to persuade them to join you when they're your prisoner. By my count I've encountered around 50 lords in that war (some could be repeat)!
Sieges need to last a lot longer. My two castles were pretty close to each other and all I did for a few hours was run between them and fight people off, recruiting in between and from my prisoners and they would still fall frequently!
Alliances, pacts, mercenary troops (as in hire mercenaries/gangs not individual troops, to wage war against your enemies, like lords do), pay bandits to join you or harass your enemy.

Maybe I missed some feature that could have potentially got me out of that situation...but on to the new save!

Ugly NPC's won't get fixed. It's part of mount and blade due to the scope of the game. I'm actually surprised that the game looks this good. Compare it to the last game. Combat feels weird at first but you get used to it and then you're blocking like a pro.

 

[Mawotb]

Ugly NPC's won't get fixed. It's part of mount and blade due to the scope of the game. I'm actually surprised that the game looks this good. Compare it to the last game. Combat feels weird at first but you get used to it and then you're blocking like a pro.

? why would you block unless in a tourny, even in massive faction wars / battles you can get by without needing to needlessly put yourself in range of a one shot. there are plenty of ways to substitute for one method of fighting, solo scumming, archer scumming, meat grinding so on and so forth.

 

[Jandoedel]

Look at the patch 1.0.4 notes everyone, lords now manage their finances which should slow down the snowball effect!

Yeah i kinda doubt that. The AI is very aggresive. Day 8 and the Khuzaits are already conquering place after place with a army of 800 while the northern empire just crumbles into dust.

 

[Benisfug]

? why would you block unless in a tourny, even in massive faction wars / battles you can get by without needing to needlessly put yourself in range of a one shot. there are plenty of ways to substitute for one method of fighting, solo scumming, archer scumming, meat grinding so on and so forth.

It was a figure of speech dofus. It means that he may feel like the combat is clanky but eventually he'll get used to it and fight like a veteran.

 

[Prifter]

Yeah i kinda doubt that. The AI is very aggresive. Day 8 and the Khuzaits are already conquering place after place with a army of 800 while the northern empire just crumbles into dust.

Yeah a dev mentioned that while the new patch does slow down the snowball effect a little (a few months in game) it will definitely still occur sadly... Another thing that worries me is that said developer seems to talk about the snowball effect as if it is actually something they want to happen

 

[Mawotb]

It was a figure of speech dofus. It means that he may feel like the combat is clanky but eventually he'll get used to it and fight like a veteran.

and my point still stands, there are alternatives to blocking. ive done on foot one handed, ive done mounted one handed and mounted archery as well as army micro. there are issues with the combat but also tons of alternatives. if anything reading it again i see sarcasm stating that you gonna be blocking all the time because hitting things is so hard. again there are alternatives.... even the archery is on the weaker side until tier 3/4 +. lances have always been op. they are lances.

 

[Lokitoh446]

I am with that empire, we started 5 vs 1 against us, after losing all of hour capitals we made piece with 4 of them and started fighting 1v1 FINALLY!!!

 

[Benisfug]

and my point still stands, there are alternatives to blocking. ive done on foot one handed, ive done mounted one handed and mounted archery as well as army micro. there are issues with the combat but also tons of alternatives. if anything reading it again i see sarcasm stating that you gonna be blocking all the time because hitting things is so hard. again there are alternatives.... even the archery is on the weaker side until tier 3/4 +. lances have always been op. they are lances.

Your social skill needs some grinding jesus.

 

[sherdil]

New patch 1.04e is out.They remedied the Lord with 0 soldiers issue being killed by bandits. Early feedback seems to be positive. Anyone else have feedback on a new campaign?

 

[nitroSkirata]

Clearification about one improvment:

Clan and Party

• After some time during a campaign, some lords were remaining without troops in their party because of financial problems and constantly being harassed by bandits. Lords now manage their finances more effectively and take troops from garrisons if they are at risk of going bankrupt. This was one reason for the snowball effect in the campaign, with kingdoms being eliminated too easily.

This was one of the main reasons of snowball efect (one kingdom ruling all world) but there are still another reasons causing this and we continue working on this to make more balanced world without decreasing number of hostile actions happening in world.

In first 1.0.0 one kingdom was ruling all world in average 1088-1089
In 1.02 average go up to 1090
In 1.04 average is now rised up to 1092

There are still problems and still we cannot guarentee one kingdom will not rule all world without player interaction however in every patch we will develop this area and soon until 1100s you will not experience this.

If you mean this: i dont think its intended per se, but rather a natural occurence, when you have warmongering factions and is something that needs to be balanced, but for balancing, you have to change something, and then wait to see what that change did, preferrably with an as large as possible samplesize.

They seem to want constant war, but a state of constant war that is almost always in stalemate. with each patch they want to make the breaking of said stalemate harder and therefore push back the average year of steamrolling, untilit won't really happen without player input.

But thats also what you get, if the faction AI's think for themselfs and are not "on rails", if yopu look into the History of europe, its not uncommon to have the continent (nearly) Steamrolled...


What really is missing are alliances, wich were the reason europe was seldom completely steamrolled and if it was, it returned to the old status quo with minimal change rather quickly


All of this is what my head currently says is true, but it might as well be wrong if so please correct me

 

[Mawotb]

Your social skill needs some grinding jesus.

No i just need to refute the need to explain to kids for 6+ hours that screeching EA on an EA forum is beyond stupid. heaven forbid like one other they call play testers noting issues as brain dead monkeys. being 6 30 am doesnt help either or someone interpreting someone elses comment that could be any number of different intentions (and yet my statement still being perfectly pertinent).

 

[Backstabak]

im going to make it very simple for you:

1. it isnt an easy fix
2. it has missing content
3. there are multiple reasons why factions steamroll
4. im like 2.5 years in on a second playthrough testing **** other than sieges in game time as an independant clan level 1 and the faction i trade is already in possession of ~50% of the map.
5. an example of the steamrolling is if the armies dont take penalties for starving ie having no food which explains armies leeching off players.
6. I gave you coding / developing based responses that were very clear and concise. Historically speaking and accuracy wont be in the game because reasons.
7. its called context, this is a medieval / feudal faction sim to keep it simple, in EA. i said multiple times you focused on end game balancing that is likely to be a huge waste of time before all content is in.
8. wanting a very very very small part of a game to be hyper polished to your personal preference shouldnt need further explanation.

Except my reply was mostly about missing diplomacy which could provide much better balancing to the faction warfare, which you entirely skipped and decided to nitpick the last point about maybe making sieges longer which could help make wars more interesting. Again read what you reply to. Also providing a bandaid by e.g. scaling troops cost based on the kingdom size is really a simple fix. The game already calculates and gives a rating of kingdom troops and size.

If armies don't bring enough food and not suffering morale, it is just a bug, but that doesn't affect what we have now. As when that bug is fixed it would result in them bringing enough food and to not suffer morale penalties, i.e. what we have now.

Yes, history is irrelevant from gameplay perspective, but the gameplay isn't fun or engaging when the siege is long over before you can even get there.

And again, it isn't a small part of the game and it isn't something to wave off as an "end game" (whatever you mean by this). Because if you have one empire ruling entire map just a few hours into the game, then it is basically game over.

Anyway, latest patch added some fixes to hopefully help this issue. So I'll see over the weekend how it works.

 

[somaholiday]

All of these are great ideas, you could also make it so that the flag gets changed to a bit more warlike after you progress sufficiently in the main story, then they may switch from overly defensive to more expansionist, albeit with the overextension/rebellion and other effects as well to slow it down some. The fact that I have to rush renown 3 to jump into being a vassal in order to experience some of the conflict before the game is over is blatantly ridiculous.

 

[Tuco]

Kinda curious to see a timelapse with 1.0.4 to see if the couple changes help that much.

 

[Mawotb]

Except my reply was mostly about missing diplomacy which could provide much better balancing to the faction warfare, which you entirely skipped and decided to nitpick the last point about maybe making sieges longer which could help make wars more interesting. Again read what you reply to. Also providing a bandaid by e.g. scaling troops cost based on the kingdom size is really a simple fix. The game already calculates and gives a rating of kingdom troops and size.

If armies don't bring enough food and not suffering morale, it is just a bug, but that doesn't affect what we have now. As when that bug is fixed it would result in them bringing enough food and to not suffer morale penalties, i.e. what we have now.

Yes, history is irrelevant from gameplay perspective, but the gameplay isn't fun or engaging when the siege is long over before you can even get there.

And again, it isn't a small part of the game and it isn't something to wave off as an "end game" (whatever you mean by this). Because if you have one empire ruling entire map just a few hours into the game, then it is basically game over.

Anyway, latest patch added some fixes to hopefully help this issue. So I'll see over the weekend how it works.

i didnt note the diplomacy because it wasnt contested as a point. my whole point is that it needs to be in first before final testing can be done, and that if starvation is a bug that isnt done needs to be to help curb the snowball of armies. you assume the fix will be to kneejerk armies having excess food in a simulated economy that doesnt have that 'excess food'. that would also negate the whole morale and other penalties completely by making them redundant. 'end game balancing' means when most if not all core functional concepts are in the game, ie diplomacy, starvation / attrition, morale debuffs, forced dissolution of that combined effort, adding in a choice to supply food to the army etc (final balancing needs all components in play or it likely gets skewed or borken again). expecting a magical fix to something without using specifics is wishful thinking and ignorant. how is increasing the cost / upkeep of troops going to fix a godmode snowball army that is immune to food and morale penalties and if it doesnt suffer those penalties likely wont lack any funding ever? - this is all balancing AFTER all the components are on the table and can be tested