New Player - Large list of questions, issues, bugs, etc?

[Serenity01]

Hello, downloaded this amazing mod a few days ago! I've been playing it almost non stop, and experimenting with its features and lots of early/mid-game play.
I am using the latest version of the AD1257 Repolished submod.

Just a note that after checking "Load Textures on Demand", it pretty much resolved all the crashes I initially experienced with the mod.

Just some questions and issues I am running into:

1) Character Notes list: the list of names is cut off. The last person on the list is Lady Beatha -- anyone else in the alphabetical order doesn't show up, so it's really painful when I'm trying to look up other lord/lady names and they don't show up on the list. Is it just me, or does anyone else have this issue?

2) AI Lords and Marshal campaign behavior: They seem to be overly effective at rallying almost all lords all the time. I know there is a Mod Option setting for "AI Marshal Inefficiency", so I've been changing that to test the effects on the AI Lords/Marshals campaign behavior, but between "None" and "Masochistic" settings, I don't notice much difference in the AI Marshal ability to rally nearly 95% of their entire kingdom lords on a campaign 24/7 all year 'round.

While this makes the AI factions significantly "smarter and more challenging" on the campaign map, it also makes them more predictable and very steamroll-prone. Rarely will you find single lords roaming around the Holy Roman Empire, maybe one or three at most, while the rest of their 20+ lords are all beseiging Rome for multiple days...

Without cheating to remove FOW, it's extremely rare to find player vs 1 Lord battles or lords in their home castle/town. An AI faction behaves very "Zerg-like", and less like a heirarchy of nobles and fiefdoms with varying level of autonomy (e.g. one of the joys and struggles in CK2).

In Native, AI Marshals were not very effective, and many lords would run around doing their own thing, which made wars more chaotic, less predictable, and less effective (in terms of AI effectiveness) but also felt more "realistic" and immersive. Now, with AI Marshal super efficiency, it's like playing Total War on VH campaign difficulty, with cheating AI autogenerated doomstacks re-cloned every day you defeat one, pouring relentlessly into your borders. A large faction = large marshal army operating with full coordination = steamrolling smaller factions, and it's easy to see the mid/late-game evolve to see only the few superpowers emerge conquering everyone else very quickly in a very predictable, short-lived, Zerg-like way to watch for a player like me (opinion only). I personally prefer more "balkanization" or more "chaos" in the AI marshal campaigns, like in Native (but I love everything else from AD1257 that I can't go back to Native anymore lol)

The AI Marshal super efficiency also applies to the player, so after reaching a certain "critical mass" of empire, the player's marshal has enough troops campaigning with him 24/7 to steamroll everything non-stop, in an exercise of tedium.

Does the "AI Marshal Inefficiency" setting actually work, or what is it supposed to do?

3) AI Lord parties regenerate full stack instantly at Good Campaign Difficulty. I watched a recently defeated/escaped AI King go from 1 to 200+ soldiers overnight (Native Recruitment); basically all Lord parties completely replenish their troops to full strength within 1 day of rest... umm... in Native, at max 149% difficulty, I observed maybe 20-50 units replenished per day, so at least a week or so for a full King army to replenish, not instantly overnight.

I could understand if they had reserve Lances (although I was using Native Recruitment)... but I cheated to test this out, and after wiping out the HRE Marshal doom-army of 20+ lords more than 3 times in 1 week, they keep coming back within 1-2 days at full strength, their entire army with the Marshal out front... we're talking 1500+ men coming back every 1-2 days x 3 = 4500+ soldiers in less than 1 week... NONSTOP, AD INIFINTUM...

It's like playing daily whack-a-mole with entire Marshal doomstacks. It is even less fun than it sounds.

4) Rebelling from a Faction to Create Own Kingdom seems somewhat bugged. At least when I tried it, I only owned a Village, no Town or Castle, and when I eventually captured a Town, as others Lords joined me, they started raiding and beseiging my other fiefs??? Even though they were in my faction.... They also run away from my army, like we were enemies, yet when I catch up to them and interact, they're just like a vassal, "Oh, good day, M'lord!" and I can "order" them around... Huh?

5) If you appoint a companion (e.g. Henry) as Minister in your capital when you start your own faction, you can permenently lose your companion when the city is taken over. I only had 1 town at that time, so when I lost it, my faction disbanded, and so I permantly could no longer Hire or find my companion (Henry). Not sure what happens if you own multiple towns, if your court will automatically move to another town, or if you can "restore" your court by choosing the "Move Court" option, if that was available to you.

6) Right to Rule - how do you build it up prior to starting a kingdom? I know the methods from Native, such as sending companions out, marriage, and peace. Marriage RTR doesnt seem to work or didnt give any. I got some RTR from building up Manors (very little RTR). You can't send companions on RTR missions here? Seems the only reliable way is to Make Peace with other kingdoms... so is that really the only effective way for RTR?

7) Reinforcement Waves Mod Option: This setting only affects standard battles, but doesn't affect Siege Battles. All sieges have infinite reinforcement waves... How do I change the siege reinforcement to match this setting?

"Angry Band of Alcoholics" - why the name?

9) Medieval Conquest mod seems to build on this foundation but sounds even more buggy and unpolished... any chance we can get the source of base AD1257 to patch things up or add new features? Or is the Repolish sub-mod going to continue updating this mod and address some of these more mechanical bugs/issues?

10) I can't seem to find a reference to the different hotkeys for custom commands. What are the hotkeys for: spear brace, rally, taunt, etc. Any other custom commands/hotkeys a newbie should know about?

11) When I order my troops to "Charge", they break formation. How do I tell my troops to attack while maintaining formation (like what the AI army does)?

12) When I use the Chamberlain to find more info about lord characters, sometimes I get something like, "Lord Someone is a 0." For other lords, it would normally say something like, "Lord Someone is a martial person."

13) Someone else mentioned a while back that Venice has Iberian troops. Still does.

14) EDIT: I found Arab Lancers from Moorish culture.


Inspite of all these issues, I totally love the mod, and find it very immersive and "gritty realistic" in early/mid-game, especially Freelancer mode, up to the point when I am managing a kingdom and dealing on a kingdom-to-kingdom scale and then find that the campaign AI cheats horribly with their unit replenishment and their robotic coordination with the Marshals, at which point I lose all immersion.

Thanks for any insight and tips!

 

[Jerar]

1.The names are cut off because there are so many npcs that the notes just dont support the amount

2.3. Well,in my gameplay after i defeated or captured the marshal of the other realm i'll often see 4~6 npcs following some random lord,they will mostly raid,but if there is a low garrison fief they will atack,that happened in the realm that i am a vassal too,and there's alot of lone lords raiding villages.

I also spotted lords running around with just mercenaries after being defeated,just replenishing his entire force after resting back at a allied fief,and it does not matter if you choosed native or lance recruitment system,the npcs will always use lances


I have no problem with finding npcs alone in enemy territory,its quite common actually

Obs:Campaign Good Difficulty


You can build more than one manor,and there is specific buildings that give you right to rule,unfortanely this way and making peace are the only way i found

The AI troops advance in formation because they are "advancing ten paces" instead of charging,just look at the enemy cavalry,they will not charge in formation unless they are slowly advancing

I'm also bothered about the "angry band of alcoholics",they should just named them Mercenaries or something for immersion sake

I am on day 400 on my gameplay playing as a french vassal,we conquered most of the emirate of granada and now there are some french lords that have andalusian muslim troops (the ones that hold land there) thank god that its only like 10% of their army composition,so its acceptable,but it bothers me alot haha

and i playing on the normal angry peasants edition,i dont know if the marshal/lords behave differently with that submod

 

[Laizenbh]

I believe that "angry band of alchoolics" is kind of a joke made by tomas, maybe he is very fond of drinks himself. Not too far from the truth either since a beer or two prob would give much more courage to charge into death 

 

[DeSoto]

You make very good points Serenity01, I'll try to address them one by one.

1) Was answered already, the size of the mod is just more than the game can handle at times.

2) Like Jerar said, try to take out the marshall. This can be done the easiest when the enemy blob reached its destination so that you can shuffle near him without getting swarmed from all angles. When you engage conversation and then exit it again, the AI lords will be randomly clustered around you. You can (ab)use this mechanic to gradually seperate the marshall from the main force and when you finally take him out, most lords will wait for a bit and then disperse into all directions. Very unlikely for them to siege something in that state.

3)Agreed, troop regen is ridiculous at higher settings. This might have been necessary if it was a way smaller map, but we're talking Europe and beyond here. Because of this, a large faction can be in attack mode almost 24/7, which is just stupid. They are still not that effective with sieges, mainly because the fighting takes them way longer in comparison to the player (you resolve a battle instantly). So I guess the AI should take way longer to regen and the player should take way longer to siege, to balance things out. I mean I could potentially siege a town every other day, the AI can't even remotely compete there.

4) Can't help with that one, never happened to me.

5) He should be in limbo somewhere, pretty sure when you capture another fief you have a means to get him back (either he appears there right away or he can be found in taverns).

6) Yep, no ways to get RTR except the ones you listed. I normally aim for a small to midsized faction in the beginning, in order to maximize the war declarations and subsequent peace treaties. Another way would be to start your kingdom in a remote place with 0 RTR, like the Levante region or Scandinavia. There will be very few war declarations there, cause most central european powers don't care for those remote parts. So even with a low RTR score, you should be OK there.

7) Cant' help you there either, but I'd keep the sieges at infinite waves. Your ranged guys can't run out of ammo and your reinforcements *normally* (I'm looking at you Aleppo, screw you to all hell!) spawn near enough so that you can push the attackers back if they should have broken through. Depends a lot on the battle size of course, I'm playing with around 100 men on each side, so that sieges are really a grinder and there is generally not a lot of movement, mostly between chokepoints.

8.) Because let's make fun of our own mod that we poured sweat and tears into to make it as accurate and believeable as possible. Might have just as well named one of the lords "Sir Thundertrunks".

9) Zero chance for the source to be released. They openly mocked requests for that in the past, seems they were content with the thought to leave an unfinished mod as legacy. The repolished sub-version seems to be mostly graphical fixes, I haven't seen any changes / fixes to gameplay mechanics so far.

10) AI should brace automatically. For your char I have no idea, never bothered with spears cause they are clumsy and break too fast anyway. I know there's the option to disable that but I feel that it's kinda closer to the real thing, you wouldn't be able to lance 50 guys with the same weapon repeatedly.

11) You can't, charge cancels all formations. Workaround to this is to let them attack from different angles, so they don't get in their own way so damn much. Or you issue the advance command in very quick succession and charge when they are only a short distance away from the enemy line. But I agree, it's clumsy and the battles are sadly not the high point of this mod. The AI is way too passive in general, you pretty much have to lure them to you with a casualty.

12) Another obvious visual bug that they never fixed. It means the lord is completey indifferent to you. There will be no gradual build-up/decay of relation. Which is not ideal, cause handing out fiefs will eventually deteriorate the relation and you really have no means to get it back up except fighting battles together.

13) Yeah, and that along with every other issue will likely stay that way forever.


At least you made it to king before loosing immersion, for me it was gone as soon as I saw that *every single* siege is just a giant meat grinder where the attacking force stands absolutely zero chance when you participate. It's beyond me why this was never addressed, every other major mods managed to make ranged units work properly. Since then I mainly play it for the challenge (apart from the sieges) and to see how fast you can sweep the map. Surely not for roleplaying, cause there is very little in here that you could work with. Nobody has a personality (not even the monarchs), every faction feels interchangeable with reskinned troops basically. Most of them even have the exact same stats.
I'm not trying to promote other mods here but my god, look at what Prophesy of Pendor or Nova Aetas did with the gameplay. Yeah, they are smaller in scale and PoP includes fantasy elements but they introduced so many gamechanging things that it feels like a new game. While 1257AD mostly feels like a very large historically based version of Native. I could only name the lance recruitment and manor system as major changes, and both add very little in terms of gameplay. Even tournaments are just plain boring, I stopped taking part in them entirely because the combatants are just completely helpless against you. Get a bow and they are done, get a lance and they are done, no challenge.

This mod could have been so much more, basically the definitive historical medieval simulator. But poor judgement and focusing on superfluous stuff (manors could have been done in a much more simplified way without sacrificing "immersion") derailed this mod in my opinion. Add to this the stubborn refusal to let others pick up the work and improve on it, which ultimately led this mod to retire in mediocrity sadly. I know this sounds bitter and I probably am, cause every playthrough attempt reminds you of the glaring shortcomings that could have been oftentimes easily fixed during development but took a backseat to some other idea that did less for the mod in general.

Don't let this discourage you to continue playing though. It's just that when you played it as much as I did you can see it for what it really is and at that point you really wonder why it was handled that way.

 

[Mavi Yay]

Any solution for number 7 ? I want to limit the reinforcement waves in sieges like in Native module. I tried something from mission_templates bu didnt work

 

[kuauik]

I believe that "angry band of alchoolics" is kind of a joke made by tomas, maybe he is very fond of drinks himself. Not too far from the truth either since a beer or two prob would give much more courage to charge into death 

yes..Thomas is very fond of beer?

 

[Easter Cow]

I believe that "angry band of alchoolics" is kind of a joke made by tomas, maybe he is very fond of drinks himself. Not too far from the truth either since a beer or two prob would give much more courage to charge into death 

yes..Thomas is very fond of beer?

oof