PBOD or not PBOD

[Dago Wolfrider]

Sure! I'd love to know the new improvements of 0.9 related to 0.81! the more information the better. Specially I wan't to know if in 0.81 you can make your own troops like it seems you can in 0.9 (havn't advanced much in the game so can't say)
I was really hyped playing 0.9 but got toned down by the "non AI formations" system, so now i'm thinking of trying 0.8 but the no "advanced horse archer AI" makes me doubt xD
How did you personally manage HA in 0.81? Or did u not use them? In floris i usually used them as a light melee / range cav, sitting in the back of the enemy and firing a little and after mele charging archers.
Also in 0.9 do you play with "CHAAAARGE!" or without?
Finally, in 0.81 you say AI is not improved, but at least enemies use "realistic formations" similar to floris, right?
Thanks for your fast reply, and I'd love to see a 0.9 with PBOD, hope it comes soon! 

I have never used CHAAARGE. In Perisno 0.81 there are less customisable mercenaries, they have no gear limits though. AI Horse archers was quite dumb. When they charge at you, half of them (the one in the center) are killed while the others stand in a position not too far from your flanks and keep shooting arrows at you till they flee from your cavalry. Some flee after the first charge too. I did not use many horse archers, I am one myself though. Yes, you and the enemy can use better formations. What I mean is that the AI is not a tactical genius. He acts better according to me and I love delivering orders and preparing my units. Gonna add the links.

Perisno 0.9 Changelog: https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,363468.0.html
For Perisno 0.81 read this: https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,359948.msg8638996.html#msg8638996
There is even a Perisno wiki, I do not know how much it has been updated recently though.
This is the general ( really accurate at the same time ) stuff, if you need anything specific just ask. Have a nice day

 

[pakinov]

Thx for all the info m8! You really helped me out
I think i'm gonna try 0.8 allthought there's no HA advanced AI and no Own faction troop tree (i'll have to manage with mercs). The no formations in 0.9 just kills me.
And let's pray for 0.9 with option to activate PBOD sometime early, would be the greatest mod ever

 

[Dago Wolfrider]

Thx for all the info m8! You really helped me out
I think i'm gonna try 0.8 allthought there's no HA advanced AI and no Own faction troop tree (i'll have to manage with mercs). The no formations in 0.9 just kills me.
And let's pray for 0.9 with option to activate PBOD sometime early, would be the greatest mod ever

There is not an own faction troop tree in 0.9 too. Where did you read it? You are welcome.

 

[pakinov]

My bad, got confused with mercenaries, household troops and all that stuff lol

 

[willyflare]

I am uninitiated regarding PBOD. What makes it good, Dago? I have no problem with either the AI lined up one or CHAAARGE.

 

[Dago Wolfrider]

I am uninitiated regarding PBOD. What makes it good, Dago? I have no problem with either the AI lined up one or CHAAARGE.

CHAAARGE is good if you use Freelancer because armies ( two lords fighting and usually almost equal number of troops ) most times are just stuck in an endless skirmish/dance mode. In other cases is just unrealistic: a lord with 9 tactics order his numerically inferior army to charge at me while he could stay in his better position and kill at least one of my men. PBOD let you prepare the formation of your units before the battle: no need to keep pushing keys like a mad man because the enemy army is insanely charging at you. You can use advanced formations ( shieldwall, ranks ) that increase exponentially not only the realism of the mod, but the ratio killed enemies/lost units.

Here is a story regarding the enemy AI with PBOD. Once, in 0.81, I saw a small party of Valahir People with some Wyvern Riders as their prisoners, I wanted those troops, yet they outnumbered my army 2:1 ( more than 300 Vs less then 150 ) . I had mostly hired mercenaries ( archers and infantry only ), some other infantry and archers and almost 20 cavalry ( me, a bunch of companions and some more ). In general high and mid tier units. I positioned my troops on a hill: my shieldwall in front of the enemy, my archers behind it while my cavalry protected the right flank. The enemy ( only archers and infantry ), positioned his archers in front of their infantry and started shooting at my infantry, most of my archers could not reach the enemy though. Therefore I decided to make their infantry charge, I ordered my archers to hold their fire and with my Dwarven Croosbow ( I was riding a white armored wolf ) I started killing some enemies while investing their archers in order to stop their fire and annoy them. Even after killing some of them, nothing happened. They kept following me for a while in formation and then they fell back to protect their archers. I managed to win ( after leaving a bunch of times ) only because I made them charge my position twice and because their archers had no more arrows, but I lost a lot of troops, mostly k. u. This is the summary of one of the most epic battle I had in Perisno.

In general PBOD is very useful at the beginning of the gameplay ( when you do not have 1000 Geldarin dukes  [ I am quoting an old funny post, not mine ] and you merely have to press F1 F3 ) or when you are really outnumbered ( Zann ). I hope I have been clear and entertaining enough. May this be a joyful day for you.

P. S. I have another interesting story concerning me vs a Tolranian army of almost all cavalry. I was outnumbered in this one as well, but this time I was more stupid than the AI.

 

[willyflare]

That sounds like a smarter AI indeed.
So if I get it right, with PBOD the enemy learn to keep their ranks even if provoked and also can stay out of your archer's range?
Is there any youtube video of PBOD being used in battles? All I found were 4+ years old videos.  And the youtubers/let's plays that I follow seems to not utilize this.
Or is there any other mod with good PBOD integration? (Perisno 0.81 with PBOD lagged badly on my machine back then, but maybe I'll give it another try later)

Also, how come having a smarter AI is useful when you are outnumbered? Because they don't charge and you can chip them away while retreating and coming back?

 

[Dago Wolfrider]

That sounds like a smarter AI indeed.
So if I get it right, with PBOD the enemy learn to keep their ranks even if provoked and also can stay out of your archer's range?
Is there any youtube video of PBOD being used in battles? All I found were 4+ years old videos.  And the youtubers/let's plays that I follow seems to not utilize this.
Or is there any other mod with good PBOD integration? (Perisno 0.81 with PBOD lagged badly on my machine back then, but maybe I'll give it another try later)

Also, how come having a smarter AI is useful when you are outnumbered? Because they don't charge and you can chip them away while retreating and coming back?

Bandit parties = Charge immediately ( that's realistic )
Deserters/Valahir people/Lord's in general do not charge as long as you are not really outmatched.

When you are really outnumbered the AI just charges in most cases or it is fairly easy to provoke them ( this depends on many factors and it is really hard to see the AI acting as well as it did in that story, in many occasions after killing their boss/some of their troops, they just charge ). You just have to position your troop well ( sometimes if the first scene can not provide me a good spot I just leave and hope in a good battlefield out of three ) and hope that they do not charge blindly as soon as the battle start if you need more time to have your troop positioned well. Your archers will do most of the job, their cavalry will crush into your shieldwall and die, their archers will be exposed to your cavalry's second charge: have them destroy their infantry's back once they start fighting yours first. You can create 2 cavalry groups: fast cavalry to deal with archers and cavalry archers and a group of tanky cavalry to destroy infantry and cavalry. You can even lose 0 units if you have a lot of good archers and some tanky infantry without leaving 1 single time.

Moreover shieldwall prevents the stupid death of your shieldless units, ranks grant you a better firepower, I have never used square and wedge formation ( if you use the second all your cavalry units in the first lines will probably die or get dehorsed ). As someone else has already highlighted with PBOD you can even have your dehorsed cavalry and arrows/bolts-less troops join your infantry, which is incredibly useful if your archers only have one quiver. You could even control your units shield usage: I did evil things in allies sieges thank to this .

Maybe Reformist or Plasquar, I have not seen one of their videos for months though and I can not really remember if they use it or not. I mostly watch trmplays but he does short videos so...not too many battles. Moreover there are more sieges than battles in most of his videos.

Good mod with PBOD: AWOIAF, I have just downloaded 4.1 ( I have not played it yet though ), I have played 3.5 extensively and I could field something like 500 units in a single battle ( 300 in most other mods, Perisno 0.81 included, with 100% in the options concerning graphic usage ) and sieges, probably because it is based on Viking Conquest. Most mod use it, but I could never reach the number of units I could field in that mod.

Wonderful mod without PBOD: 12th, check it out. It is the only mod I do not care if it has PBOD or not. It is just amazing, but it can be quite heavy for what concerns CPU usage. I had just a couple of crashes in almost 200 in day games, but in case disable as many optional features as you can ( the one that tell you how much far your arrow went,... things like these ) . If you like it thanks arduus who suggested it to me.

P. S. Archers= archers and crossbowmen
Cavalry = mounted units ( mostly wolves in my case )

 

[Dago Wolfrider]

The proPBOD faction reached 30 votes: 60 % of total votes and to celebrate I will upload some good 0.81 images concerning a wonderful battle I had thanks to PBOD. Hurrah!!!

P. S.Thanks everyone for expressing your opinion.

Here you go:

As you can see, while our infantry were fighting, half of the cavalry of my vassal decided to charge the back of the enemy infantry, while the other half charged the right flank of the enemy archers, followed by my cavalry that engaged the left flank. We had 7 wounded and 0 losses.

I had another wonderful battle in which the enemy decided to directly attack my archers' right flank, he was sure of his number superiority, but the latters were saved by the intervention of my cavalry. I could not take a screenshot though. 

 

[Dago Wolfrider]

The Perisno Secret Illuminati cult is secretly maneuvering this poll. Check the numbers.

Spoiler

Honestly, thanks for the votes and for the opinions shared.

 

[Kehlian]

Hello everyone !

I watched a video of .75 and saw that the dude had his companions following him in tavern and towns. I'm currently playing .9 and do not see that with my own companions. Are there any prerequisite for it to happen ? Or was it scrapped sometime along the way ?

Thanks for reading

 

[T.L.S.]

Yes, this feature was removed.

 

[Kehlian]

Oh dang It made the world feel less lonely. Thanks for the answer. Any chance it will be back in again ?

 

[Dago Wolfrider]

Oh dang It made the world feel less lonely. Thanks for the answer. Any chance it will be back in again ?

Read this:
https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,380095.msg9046826.html#msg9046826. No news since then.

 

[Kehlian]

Well it seems like the most voted option is to bring PBOD back

 

[azxcvbnm321]

I found the companions following you around to be pointless.  It makes any of the ambushes or drunk fights meaningless as you can even stand still and watch your companions kill everyone.  They also get in the way a lot so I'm glad it's removed.

 

[Alecian]

After I finished my Perisno campaign a few weeks ago, I went to try out another mod, and it's a lot of fun playing with PBOD, really wish Perisno had it (at least as an option for the player!) - I love formation fighting with hundreds of soldiers. I don't enjoy it that much when I know the enemy will just go "F1 > F3" and have all their troops charge straight away with no thinking about any formation. Isn't it cooler if enemy cavalry comes attacking tighter instead of trickling in? I often barely have my soldiers in formation ready by the time the first enemy light cavalry reach my frontlines, they die quickly and are just annoying if there isn't any PBOD.

I played Perisno a lot before with the PBOD. And I used to give a lot of feedback on the dwarves about a year ago I think it was, before they got updated. And I hope now that the feedback to at least make PBOD an option resonates with the lead of this mod. It's understandable that some people don't like PBOD, but apparently most people do prefer it. I really hope the lead changes their stance on this issue.

 

[samoja]

As someone who played a lot of Total war series where formation is king i have to say formation in Warband means very little, main reason being that battles are just too small for it to matter much, even in perisno with close to 400 troops (my poor poor CPU) battles are more like small skirmishes then actual full on battles. Even a small medieval battle could have thousands of soldiers on each side, and in this circumstance economics of the battle changes, if warband was able to simulate battles on that scale then formations would absolutely be worthwhile, because with those numbers it becomes possible to take and hold ground, and the enemy can't easily encircle your formation, with a hundred men or so on each side it is nearly impossible (barring some extreme circumstances like Thermopylae where there was an extreme choke point) to form a line and not have enemy soldiers swarm all over it forcing it to descend into disorganized melee, the main power of a formation is that it's nearly unbreakable from the front, but is equally vulnerable from the back (in some battles involving tens of thousands of soldiers a few hundred who managed to get behind enemy lines were able to dramatically swing the tide) and equally unwieldy when it came to turning to meet a threat coming from unexpected direction. That is why in Warband it tends to be a better and more effective to simply charge the enemy. Not only that but Warband's reinforcement system prohibits even the base form of tactics like putting infantry in front and keeping archers back for all but the smallest battles, each new wave will have equal numbers of infantry archers and cavalry, so if you are keeping archers back to shoot at the enemy and sending infantry onward as infantry falls you will get less and less infantry and more and more archers, in the end forcing you to charge your archers into the enemy just to free up space so you can get more infantry.

 

[Goran Hammerburn]

As someone who played a lot of Total war series where formation is king i have to say formation in Warband means very little, main reason being that battles are just too small for it to matter much, even in perisno with close to 400 troops (my poor poor CPU) battles are more like small skirmishes then actual full on battles. Even a small medieval battle could have thousands of soldiers on each side

No. During the Classical Era and in Antiquity, battles would frequently get to 10,000+ men. In the late Roman Republic, there were many battles fought by Caesar and Pompey that had 30,000 soldiers on either side, and during Trajan's reign, the Roman army was at it's peak, over 300,000 soldiers and auxilia. This is in stark contrast to medieval battles - The single largest battle during the medieval period was the Battle of Grunwald, and that was only at 40-60,000 soldiers altogether. Keep in mind that this was over half of Eastern Europe that had come to do battle there.

The organization of medieval armies had some standardization, but not a whole lot. Remember that medieval Europe was very decentralized - They had not the communicative abilities of Rome, nor their governance, roads, or standardization of armies. Indeed, the only edge they had on Rome was their technology, but even that wasn't too much of an edge. In wartime, the leader of the "army" of a kingdom was not getting a national standing military, but instead was calling upon the lords of fiefs to bring men to him, the number of men in accordance to the size of the fief itself. An average lord's retinue, in England known as a "lance", would have consisted of around 200 soldiers (plus the camp followers, who did not typically fight but would bring the lance to about double the size), and these men had to equip themselves out-of-pocket, save for the fifty or so that constituted the standing army of the fief.

On battles, formations were based on each individual lance. In this sense, the lord of the lance was basically the captain, and had autonomy over his men - They would typically do what the marshal wanted, but if a new development occurred in the battlefield, the lord did not have to wait for the marshal's orders to tend to it if he had the initiative. They might even assign captains of infantry, archer, and cavalry divisions within their own lance, so that the lord didn't have to issue orders to all of them all of the time. This made medieval armies far more flexible and unpredictable than Roman armies, especially because medieval armies were nowhere near as drilled as their Roman predecessors.

Warband gets medieval warfare more correct than you might think, in terms of numbers - The real issue that we see (in battles, anyway) is that in battles with multiple lords, they should be taking command of their own men. Outside of major battles, which were largely avoided in favor of skirmishes and supply raids, we really need to see turf control. I don't mean positioning archers on hills - I mean that on the world map, neither we nor other lords should be able to pass right next to a hostile castle, or in many cases, straight through them, with out some sort of challenge. That's what castles, and indeed fortifications, were for - To command the land around them, and render it difficult for enemies to get past them.

All this said, I would love to see PBOD in Perisno .90, or 1.0 when it comes. Medieval battles were not so uncoordinated and unpredictable so as to be a straight charge, nor a pointless dance around each other that leads to a charge anyway.

 

[Expressen]

I want PBOD back. Perisno is the perfect extention to PBOD, it makes PBOD, which is the best mod in the world, so much more fun.

On a serious note though, PBOD gives the player customization, you can mix things up to fit your own experience, and it allows for a wider array of tactics. I loved shieldbash myself, but I know I'm pretty much alone in this.

If you were to look into my previous posts you'd find that almost all my posts is about re-arranging no ammo archers to the infantry division.
When playing factions that rely on archers, and factions that have archers with ok, or better melee it is very usefull, and makes the game more fun.

It makes the line of archers self regulate its size. When archers run out of ammo, they would with PBOD join their brothers in melee rather than just stand there with sword in hand like a fool, and make it less likely that the melee division becomes swamped. If the line of archers is off to the side they will even engage from the side. When new archers arrive to the field, the line of archers will allways be refilled from the left (?) and the archers with no ammo will make the line long and unwieldy. The archers with ammo will not be standing on the hill, they will be standing on the side of the hill, and when the enemy force moves the formation will turn so that the archers att the edges will have to run marathons, just because the formation is full of archers with no ammo just standing there with their swords drawn eager to help their friends in melee.

Playing the elves is really fun if you have PBOD, they will just let lose for queen and country untill the quiver is empty, then draw swords and banzai like 1500s Samurai.

I miss PBOD more than I like the improvements from the last patch, and I think I will downgrade the game to 0.81 just because PBOD is so important for a proper Mount & Blade experience.