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

[stevehoos]

Just ran a test campaign with the latest patch, summer 1092 Vlandia has more than half the map. Once the ball gets rolling it's over.

 

[stevehoos]

Warband pace suits perfectly for new mechanics (childs etc). Also if you really wanted to speedrun Warband, you had ability to do that. In Bannerlord otherwise the game speedruns itself, trashing all new generational mechanics and making them useless.

Yep, this is the most prevalent issue in the game. There's no generational aspect to playing for 35-50 hours. You can get that with other non sandbox games.

 

[Androme1]

Something that shold also be taken into account, I will be using a situation I was in to describe what I mean: I was a vassal of the Sturgians and we were fighting a war agains the Khuzaits, who had taken Tyal, Varnovapol and everything in between. We managed to take Varnovapol back and started raiding the villages around Tyal. Meanwhile, the Northern Empire declared war on the Khuzaits, but instead of attacking the Khuzaits core territory, they went for Balgard (which had been taken by the Khuzaits), and conquered that instead.

When two factions are in conflict with one another, and a third faction enters the fray by declaring war on either of them, the third faction should (in my opinion) prioritize territory belonging to the original settlements of the faction that it's targeting, instead of a random town originally belonging to a faction that it hasn't declared war on.

I understand that it might be a lucrative target due to recently being conquered and thus having a low garrison, but it paints the map in a very ugly way and actually makes things harder for (in my example) Sturgia, who is trying to regain as much territory as possible in order to fight back against the Khuzaits.

So not only will this problem fix the map being painted a bit ugly, but it'll also help weaker factions defend themselves better against snowballers by giving them an opportunity to take back recently conquered territory and start recruiting from those centers again.

 

[Broxogar]

No one is adding new original objective information to his thread. its just more wasted space, as i said watering down the thread, keep it to the point. stop derailing the thread into subjective useless crap.

Literally not even worth quoting your entire post except to say.

LOL

 

[Hawkerra]

Spend all night/morning trying a new campaign and saw no difference other that weird armor values, and stupidly high prices.

Definitely noticed the stupidly high prices... 70k for armor? That feels like overkill. At least as a baseline. 10k sure. 20k maybe. 70k seems like it should be reserved for super high quality versions of high tier armor.

 

[Tornnado]

Played as sturgia,after many battles vs vladians and when I barely got level 2 and half for the clan, I realised that khuzait took half of the map then they wipe our faction and I was forced to change the kingdom. Sturgians had laws with -2 influence points, lords being captured by looters even the king(wtf?) all the loords loosing 1 soldier every minute now they wipe my new faction vlandia (sorry if i misspell the kingdom names not used to them). Feels like single player is broken and you cant do anything to stop the chosen op random faction

 

[Aho]

In its current form, the game Bannerlord in the campaign is not possible, here is my screenshot.

隐藏: 259 game day

https://i.ibb.co/LRL6p5X/259-game-day.jpg

In conservation, I have written 259 game days.
I haven't even started doing the main game quest yet.
Here is a global map. There is no understanding of the borders of the states, how could a green fraction for half the continent have possession of even the cities - it’s just nonsense, because Yavuz once announced 3 years ago that countries would have a territorial understanding. In fact, everything is just as it was in Warband, some kind of stupid endless transitions of Lords from one state to another. While he ran around the global map, fought with gangs and traded with a traveler, he again saw lords and kings robbing villages that were deep behind enemy lines. It seemed that after such mistakes in Warband, this would not happen in Bannerlord - but no, everything was just like Warband.

After patch 1.04 it started like a snowball, I played 8 hours after the patch.

1. It is necessary to introduce into the game a real understanding of the territories for the states, so that the conquest takes place starting from the border, until they conquer the nearest castle or city, deep into the territories, the state should not direct the armies to capture some weak castle / city, on another border, already with other state. Similarly, warlords should not rob villages where they choose at the other end of the global.

2. Prohibit the passage of lords from kingdom to kingdom until the state is completely destroyed. After that, it is only possible to send the conquered lords to other kingdoms requests for acceptance into another kingdom, and it is important that the transitions are territorial, the conquered lords should not cross the entire global map, but only flee to the territories adjacent to the conquered country.

3. Enter the treasury in each country, from which in case of war money will be allocated for the recruitment of troops, in connection with the loss of territory and villages from those lords who have lost their property. In peacetime, the Treasury replenished.

4. The dependence of troops among the Lords should be tied to the economy of the state, and not to the enomics of the village.

5. If the war begins, and the enemy gathered troops for the treacherous invasion of another state, all personal affairs of the lords should be canceled and a global mobilization to protect the country should be declared, when one village on the border was smoking, it should be for all lords, like a red rag for a bull. Even if the assault has begun, all the lords of the kingdom of the lords must come to the defense of the castle / city to help the garrison besieged.

6. For each possession a real fierce battle must unfold.
The besieged in the garrison have no chance of surviving even when 300 defenders take a hit from 600 to 700 warriors. It turns out the walls do not help them.
Now lords and clans of the city surrender and castles as if they have behind them another 100 pieces of such castles.

All this I described how it worked in one of the mods on the warband engine.

I understand that in the near future it will not be possible to fix it, since there is a global redesign of the system of the game in Bannerlord by developers.

I'm already running around to see how it ends in my case. 5 real days spent on the game is already a pity to me, and the developers will be able to offer something intelligible only after six months, probably.
Starting from the beginning is pointless, because all players eventually have a colored kaleidoscope on the global map.

Your point 5: Lords not coming to help. That's the point, bro. Remember Braveheart? All them cocksucker lords turned their backs!

 

[Guiflick]

Hey guys this is a test i made after the 1.0.5 update, first time a campaign reach 600 days without full control of a faction.
I did 3 campaign test's before 1.0.5 and everytime one faction had all map whitin 350-400 days.

 

[The Luminary]

Until the player, the, chosen one, decides to unite all of Calridia at least. There should not be any one faction taking over the map without player intervention until at least 100+ years in game have passed.

Mount and blade is a sandbox, not something campaign oriented like total war. AI should be rather stagnant and limited in sandboxes to allow players the freedom of a 200+ hour play through or just to walk around trading for 50 years.

Devs need to figure out what they want. More campaign, story driven with a time limit for max play-through and objectives for victory, or a sandbox like warband was.

 

[durbal]

I agree that the snowballing needs to be resolved. Sieges and taking territory in general should be strategic decisions as they should cost significant investment. And sometimes, that investment shouldn't even pay off or leave the conquerer vulnerable due to committing so many resources to them.

However, I am fine with a faction like the Western Empire losing most of the time. Asymmetric difficulty is totally cool to me and kinda makes sandbox games a bit more exciting a lot of times (see Paradox games for example).

 

[faleshar]

well my last save with 1.04 the north empire was gone...in 3 different savegames.


now with 1.05 the north empire is too good i think. Khuzait are to. weak. south and north empire vs the khuzait..have 3 citys and next war they must hardcore conquest or nope..

1.05 savegame:
day 112:

Vlandia have the the second war now with sturgia. first war was with battania, and conquest pen cannoc,lageta,dunglanys. and some castle.
but before the war ends, battania take all cities back thanks god.

battania is now in war with south empire...little stupid...to much distance between the kingdoms.
the west empire has the classic war with aserai. i think my be the west empire goinig too lose again. aserai have always the last savegames. always win.

but the Khuzait are gone, little sucks. when the empire is to powerful now.

but in my last savegame. 1.03

day 194:

was Khuzait,Vlandia and aserai to powerful.
but again khuzait in war with batteria in war....and vlandia was to strong.

but 1.02 was it worse...day 177.

the factions balance is in 1.05 very good, i think
until now.

 

[Guiflick]

670 days now, only vlandia and khuzaits on the map. Something that i see a lot is lords being captured by bandits, city garrisons with less than 300 man and more than half are militia.

 

[Forrestownz]

If the small clans could create their kingdoms, this would probably be a good solution to the problem.

 

[Doodlzbtw]

sturgia needs a buff

 

[Sidhwen_Khorest]

I think the balance of kingdoms is an important note, I've noticed in all of my playthroughs so far that battania wipes the western empire, I think that is due to me stabilizing their lands and being overpowered compared to them.

 

[xtremzero]

O

Lords are too independent and oblivious in Bannerlord. They make almost no effort to cooperate defensively so basically as soon as one faction can somehow muster an army above a critical point (usually 200+) they can run into enemy territory with only small parties of 40 or so to meet them. No army is mustered in response and every lord they beat is dumped back into the world alone to be captured several times by looters and mountain bandits before they can slowly recover their modest sized party, if they ever do before they defect.

I like the idea of smaller lord parties and lords having to cooperate on campaigns, but there needs to be better defensive cooperation. Each faction should have certain "heavyweight" lords who take leadership and muster armies in response to enemy sightings/attacks. As it stands it seems armies are only mustered for offensive campaigns.

As well, the army system is an improvement (in theory) to the marshall system in Warband but lords don't seem to be able to cooperate outside of it. I've watched 3 40-man parties of Vlandians take turns running away from a party of 60 Battanians raiding a village. The only time individual parties reinforce one another is when they're coincidentally near each other when the battle is started. There needs to be some way for nearby lords to recognize a threat and automatically form an army if they can muster enough men to deal with it.

Completely agree. Many times when enemy army is besieging there are 3 smaller lords just sit idling

 

[ShotgunJed]

Sieging should be high risk high reward. I think there should be additional resource costs (food, and influence) for factions that decide to be aggressive often. That way any faction that tries to attack too much will find greater difficulty in snowballing.

 

[SuWu84]

+1

 

[MountainBladesMan]

In my most recent game which is on day 300 or so, it seems to have gotten better. Battania was able to take some land from the West and Sturigia and border settlements changes hands frequently between powers. The Kurgz always **** over the North tho, and that makes them pretty powerful. It was the North being split between Battania and Kergz and the former taking over half of the West when my South went to war with them that Battania became pretty dominate but this was right as I became a vassal so it seemed appropriate. Fighting barbarians as Empire is fun.

 

[Jhaerik]

Honestly I just want to see things get to the point where no empire gets wiped out without player intervention in MOST playthroughs in the first decade and no single empire controls the entire continent before your kids are in their 20's in any playthrough and often not until your grandkids are of age.

It should also be BRUTALLY difficulty to conquer the map with your kingdom of choice in the lifetime of your character. It needs to be a HELL of a lot more than "side with the big dog and wait in town for a few years." It should be near impossible to do so in your characters lifetime if you form your own kingdom.

That's about what I'd expect from a balance perspective. I want a campaign I can sink my teeth into for a few hundred hours at least.

For people that want shorter games my suggestion would be to include "end condition" options upon starting a new campaign.

Examples of this would be:

• Game ends after so many years.
• Game ends after one faction controls X amount of territory.
• Game ends after founding your own kingdom and control X amount of territory.
• Game ends after you fall in battle (Permadeath/Ironman style.)
• Game ends after you acquire X amount of weath.
• Game ends after you reach X amount of renown.
• Ect.

I also feel that this needs the absolute top priority. After all there isn't much point waxing the court(bug fixing) if you don't have a ball to play with.(snowballing.) A crash here and there isn't going to make the game unplayable. It auto ending itself effectively does. To use basketball as a reference again what we currently have is a game where they do the tip-off and whoever gets possession wins the game.

If the AI needs to cheat when behind so be it. I mean we are playing a game where you can hire a unit wearing a quarter million gold in equipment for 12g a day.(Which with time-scaling is more like 2g per day) The economy already makes zero sense, so I'd much prefer better gameplay at the cost of a little number fudging.