Perisno Perfect!

[JimmyBlonde]

Having played a lot of good Mount and Blade mods I just wanted to post some encouragement here to the developers of Perisno which I consider to be one of the very few GREAT warband mods.

Just wanted to say thanks for making such an awesome mod, it is truly glorious!

I especially like the intelligent features included like the mini map, continuation of battles and command after the player has fallen (because AI stands for  All-Idiots), barkeepers who buy prisoners, interesting quests and the truly fearsome unique army spawns  units. I get such a kick out of playing Perisno, just from listening to the glorious soundtrack and the game-play is every bit as impressive.

Especial thanks for not going down the route of using tedious player nerfs posing as "realism". There's nothing realistic about being the only warrior in the world who rides a slow paper horse, stumbles all the time, constantly breaks his weapon and runs forward slower than everyone else can run backwards. 

Well done Perisno team!

 

[DahndI]

I am kinda glad to hear I am not the only one who finds that brand of realism annoying. That was what turned me off brytenwalda: You take two steps backward and you stumble. Then you turn tail and see an AI archer running a backward marathon faster than you can run forward 

 

[Drakken]

Keep up the good work, the latest release is really good. 

 

[Redleg]

I am kinda glad to hear I am not the only one who finds that brand of realism annoying. That was what turned me off brytenwalda: You take two steps backward and you stumble. Then you turn tail and see an AI archer running a backward marathon faster than you can run forward 

I know what you mean.  You can disable the "walk backwards stumble" thing along with most of the other "realism" settings.

 

[azxcvbnm321]

It's all about gameplay balance.  Most mods are too easy for experienced players who are going to field primarily cavalry armies and crush the pathetic AI armies.  Brytenwalda tries to counter this by nerfing just about everything except thrown weapons and infantry.  That takes away the player advantage and favorite tactics of cavalry and archers.  Prophecy of Pendor takes another approach, which is to make troops as powerful as the player and to give AI armies enough cavalry and high level troops to counter the player, aka buff everything.  This is probably the most satisfying solution.  PoP assumes the player is going to field armies of high level troops only and have a lot of cavalry so AI armies also have a lot of cavalry and high level troops.  The player is still going to win, but it's more of a challenge and more fun to kill enemies that can actually hurt you and even knock you out if you're not careful. 

I love the Persino map and the unique quests, along with the invasions that add another element to the game.  I still think Persino could improve upon gameplay balance and should take the approach of Prophecy of Pendor, which is to make AI troops better so that they are in-line with the player and companions.  AI armies in general need more troops as well as garrisons and troops should have weapon proficiencies raised so that high level troops of level 40 should have 300 proficiencies, which would still be lower than that of a player (much lower actually) at level 40.  The player will still win pretty easily, but at least the AI troop will have a chance of doing some damage if the player is lazy or does something stupid like charge alone into a mass of infantry.  That will get you knocked out in PoP, but you can get away with that in Persino.

 

[DahndI]

It's all about gameplay balance.  Most mods are too easy for experienced players who are going to field primarily cavalry armies and crush the pathetic AI armies.  Brytenwalda tries to counter this by nerfing just about everything except thrown weapons and infantry.  That takes away the player advantage and favorite tactics of cavalry and archers.  Prophecy of Pendor takes another approach, which is to make troops as powerful as the player and to give AI armies enough cavalry and high level troops to counter the player, aka buff everything.  This is probably the most satisfying solution.  PoP assumes the player is going to field armies of high level troops only and have a lot of cavalry so AI armies also have a lot of cavalry and high level troops.  The player is still going to win, but it's more of a challenge and more fun to kill enemies that can actually hurt you and even knock you out if you're not careful. 

I love the Persino map and the unique quests, along with the invasions that add another element to the game.  I still think Persino could improve upon gameplay balance and should take the approach of Prophecy of Pendor, which is to make AI troops better so that they are in-line with the player and companions.  AI armies in general need more troops as well as garrisons and troops should have weapon proficiencies raised so that high level troops of level 40 should have 300 proficiencies, which would still be lower than that of a player (much lower actually) at level 40.  The player will still win pretty easily, but at least the AI troop will have a chance of doing some damage if the player is lazy or does something stupid like charge alone into a mass of infantry.  That will get you knocked out in PoP, but you can get away with that in Persino.

Obviously you have not tried to charge a group of divine aethlings

 

[Bagelhe]

I still think Persino could improve upon gameplay balance and should take the approach of Prophecy of Pendor, which is to make AI troops better so that they are in-line with the player and companions.

Agree 100%

what makes pendor so good and perisno is so close to it is the troops are tougher. also the runed weapons which cannot be bought but have to be acquired. tough spawns and the possibility of loot (gems) so you can get mentioned weapons. and of course knighthood orders. would be cool to see this in perisno in some form or another!

thanks for the mod its a already one of the best out there

 

[Chiksika]

PoP also has extremely huge enemy (sometimes +5,000) mobs that take so long to fight that you're out of luck if the game crashes while going through the "more is better" tedium you can reload and try again, hoping the same thing doesn't happen or corrupt some of your saves. Some  other mods have enemy knightly equivalents of Tiger tanks. This mod is fine IMO, going it's own direction without copying other mods, Warband has its own limitations on what the AI can do to be more challenging without adding gimmicks like extraordinarily over-powered enemies or just fielding tediously giant enemy armies.

 

[Finch]

I used to have issues running Perisno, due to my having a 3 yr+ machine. About 2 weeks ago, I got a new gaming rig. Now I play Perisno everyday. So the overpowered (read unbalanced) mobs are mostly gone in .75 but Perisno has more than one reason to be popular: the unique quests, the new storyline, factions, etc. Having overpowered mobs or losing to unbalanced armies is not always fun.

 

[Redleg]

To be fair to Brytenwalda, it has fewer mounted troops because the armies of the time in Britain had fewer mounted troops.  Even nobles and retainers who had horses usually dismounted before forming the shield wall for battle.  Archers probably also played a much smaller role than in medieval armies.  In the dark ages of Britain, infantry was king and infantry often had throwing weapons. 

The modders also made it much harder for the player to level up troops and gain the all top-tier army that could crush weaker lord armies.  Futhermore, some of the outlaw troops are quite powerful- Dena and Frankish raiders come to mind.  Faction troops are also buffed a great deal. I don't really see their system as being greatly unbalanced in favor of the player.

Personally, I like many of the Brytenwalda troop features in comparison to mods having tons of heavy cavalry.  Just a personal preference.  I play Perisno when I want to see dreadnoughts on horses and Brytenwalda when I want to focus on infantry.  Different strokes for different folks!

 

[azxcvbnm321]

Brytenwalda is still one of the best mods I've played, in my top three.  Like it or not, the developers had a vision and stuck with that vision.  It has no glaring inconsistencies, such as a lower tier troop having better weapons than higher tier or a weapon that was obviously better than all others, yet somewhat common and affordable.  It's also the only mod I've ever played where I gave up using the bow 100%, I agree it's fun to play different play styles, love throwing weapons in Brytenwalda but never use them in other mods.

Brytenwalda is the hardest start of any mod I experienced.  That's because even the lowest and weakest bandits are like level 15 and nearly half of them have some sort of sling.  Since horses are slower and far weaker than in other mods, plus there are no lances, good luck.  As mentioned, bows have 70% accuracy AND there's no such thing as the horse archery skill lol.  The Dena and Frankish Raiders (level 30+ I think) are actually the easier kills, but you have to run them out of throwing weapons and you can't make a mistake.  Problem is that the mod becomes too easy once you get Elite level troops.  They wipe opposing armies easily and it's a steamroll from there.  But the first few levels is a challenge for sure. 

Developers don't be afraid of making Persino too hard, I seriously doubt it will come close to the difficulty of Brytenwalda and Prophecy of Pendor.

 

[gsanders]

I still think Persino could improve upon gameplay balance and should take the approach of Prophecy of Pendor, which is to make AI troops better so that they are in-line with the player and companions.
...
what makes pendor so good and perisno is so close to it is the troops are tougher.

also the runed weapons which cannot be bought but have to be acquired. tough spawns and the possibility of loot (gems) so you can get mentioned weapons.

and of course knighthood orders. would be cool to see this in perisno in some form or another!

  reformatted a little to suit myself.
  the troop templates were once similar stats to players in v611, and possibly in .71, but now its troops are 60% of heroes for strength, agi, int, etc.  This was one of SilberFalkes rebalance efforts, which took months between December and February-March.
It's possible it could be undone, but it was a huge, slow process to get to the current situation, where troops no longer had 300-400 weapons skills and pumped up stats.  Some people noticed troops were stronger in .71/.72 than  .74/.75

  If that were the preferred way, instead of editing the troops directly the best point of attack is to edit the definition of the attribute flags given for infantry/cavalry/archers/mounted archers every 10 levels, so they scale uniformly and to prevent pockets of weakness among factions.

----
  Not being able to buy/make the best weapons... I was looking at TLD 3.22 today (there is a 3.3.7 but without source code, so its sort of a tease without purpose so far as usefulness to mods) and I admire how little orc gear is worth to for example an elf, or how even resources for lothlorien aren't neccessarily spendable in imrahil.  I wouldn't mind being able to melt steel armor into iron bars again in Pho as well.  It would be interesting to disturb the economy a bit if some factions were extremely disliked by humans / very disliking of humans.  So far that has not happened in Perisno.

  Pho has curbed weapons and armor flooding by limiting the crafting to 100 or so recipes out of Perisno's 2600+ items.  That's a huge number of items -- and about 1100 aren't even used by troops or encountered bad guys.  Theyre just stuff found at merchants; like 250 shields or 800 armors.  I'm thinking all the memory needed by these ought to be reclaimed, probably shed a gig of needed RAM if the textures and resource files of 1000 needless items could be dropped.

  As for knight orders, those are a seperate layer that *could* be added but the team is pretty much saturated with plenty of other things on their plate at the moment.  I doubt it would get done anytime this summer, but I could be wrong.  I personally have plenty to do, so can't commit to more until some of what I'm working on evolves.  I would like to infuse some other mods items and features, where OSP code exists, so I am looking at other examples now to be sure I know how what I sculpt now prepares for what I need to build/borrow/kludge next month...
EDIT: I think I can squeeze it in late July as part of the religion reform, but I wont lift and paste from POP unless I have code furnished.  If I have to write it, it will be different than other mods.

  "Dirk Robbing" has plenty going on for .8 and doubtless there will be micro-update for .751 from Zeph soon; I haven't gotten involved with those so far.  Plenty of buzz left in the beehive...

  - GS

 

 

[azxcvbnm321]

I don't know whose idea it was to make troops weaker, but I'd say it was a bad one  .  Seriously though, if troops proficiencies are going to be raised to that of the player (in the 300's at least), bow accuracy will have to be nerfed so that no bow (except maybe superpowerful unique or ultra rare bows) has more than 95 accuracy.  M&B is special because little changes can have profound effects on gameplay. 

I'm glad to see you guys have so many good ideas.  I didn't even know crafting was possible with Persino.  There's no shame in borrowing ideas from PoP, which I consider the best mod, hell Microsoft has been doing that for years.  PoP is so polished because literally every single thing has been fine tuned, down to the weapons, armors, and horses given to each troop.  Some troops were deliberately not given shields while others had their secondary throwing weapons changed in the last updates to balance them out.  It's that detailed and if Persino is going to take the crown away from PoP, then it's that level of detail that also has to be met.  Persino has a love of 2-H weapons, but the reasoning isn't very clear.  2-H weapons have a place in the game, but a lot of times good infantry is ruined by giving them 2-H weapons thus making them into target practice for archers and reducing survivability.  I don't mind if certain factions have a lot of 2-H weapons but there needs to be a focus or reason for weapon choice like PoP or Brytenwalda has. 

Most people download mods after they've experienced the vanilla game.  Most mods out there are relatively easy, like Floris.  But the popularity of Pop and Brytenwalda indicates that people aren't afraid of "harder" mods that can challenge them.  In fact a lot of us are begging for a mod that can challenge for a long time because there are so so so few out there.  I've been trying just about every mod worthwhile or near finished, but I haven't found any mod that can give a decent challenge like PoP, even Brytenwalda becomes too easy once you can get their Elite troops.  I hope that Persino will increase troop garrisons and lord armies and not shy away from offering a challenging mod for experienced players who know all the tricks and are looking for something to do.  I think the popularity of multiplayer is also an indication that people are looking for a challenge.  There's no bigger challenge than fighting another player!  The AI will never be as good as another player, but with good proficiencies and weapons that make sense, the AI can at least give the player something to think about and that's all that's needed really.  So keep up the good work.

 

[Bagelhe]

PoP also has extremely huge enemy (sometimes +5,000) mobs that take so long to fight that you're out of luck if the game crashes while going through the "more is better" tedium you can reload and try again, hoping the same thing doesn't happen or corrupt some of your saves. Some  other mods have enemy knightly equivalents of Tiger tanks. This mod is fine IMO, going it's own direction without copying other mods, Warband has its own limitations on what the AI can do to be more challenging without adding gimmicks like extraordinarily over-powered enemies or just fielding tediously giant enemy armies.

i never had bigger armies to face then 1500...and it never crashed...i didnt say the more the better...the tough troops make the fun at least for me...50 noldors can destroy 100 normal tier troops easy

 

[Canaris]

There's nothing realistic about being the only warrior in the world who rides a slow paper horse, stumbles all the time, constantly breaks his weapon and runs forward slower than everyone else can run backwards. 

What a subtle jab at Brytenwalda

But yeah, it was so ****ing irritating - not even this stumbling/weapon breaking thing per se but the fact that AI is immune to those problems ( and ofcourse the fact that that entire mod was incredible grindfest compareable only to Lineage 2 ).

I myself enjoy a lot that "Im a walking tank and a ****ing D&D hero" style that both PoP and Perisno represent - AI has enough advantages already ( no need for food, no need to maintain morale, free armies, chance to escape capture after lost battle etc ) so at least on the battlefield i am more powerful than them.

 

[Redleg]

There's nothing realistic about being the only warrior in the world who rides a slow paper horse, stumbles all the time, constantly breaks his weapon and runs forward slower than everyone else can run backwards. 

What a subtle jab at Brytenwalda

But yeah, it was so ******** irritating - not even this stumbling/weapon breaking thing per se but the fact that AI is immune to those problems ( and ofcourse the fact that that entire mod was incredible grindfest compareable only to Lineage 2 ).

I myself enjoy a lot that "Im a walking tank and a ******** D&D hero" style that both PoP and Perisno represent - AI has enough advantages already ( no need for food, no need to maintain morale, free armies, chance to escape capture after lost battle etc ) so at least on the battlefield i am more powerful than them.

As mentioned before, in Brytenwalda, the player can disable the stumbling, weapon breaking, and stamina features (or bugs, depending how you view them).  You can lower the damage done to player and player friends.  Many of the things people like least about Brytenwalda can be fixed by changing a few settings.  As for the paper horses, there's not much you can change unless you want to modify the horses.  I personally appreciate not being trampled by a bunch of heavily armored horses.  Brytenwalda is grindy, especially in the beginning, but so are Perisno and PoP, at least from my experience. 

 

[Canaris]

I know you can disable those things. But they were ****ing annoying and completely backward attempt at adding realism to the game.

 

[zykox]

Stumbling, weapon breaking, and stamina features would be nice ideas in Brytenwalda...if it could also happen to the AI.
Just options for making the grindy play even more grindy.

Overall, it had some good stuff, but at this moment, Perisno is more fun to play. Pop gets grindy, because most replayers are eager to try other stuff!

 

[raz8020]

Tagging another mod as being unrealistic because of some optional features that are designed to add extra challenge for the players that need it, might not be the most objective mode to debate.
Ex. Brytenwalda is not considered realistic or "realistic" because of those optional features.
A mode is realistic if it's well balanced and properly simulates (to a degree, because of it's design limitations) real life aspects and physics.
That would mean to:
-not have a tank armor knight that might have a shield and helmet with a narrow view, and can be more proficient with bows than many pure archer units, and can be more agile than other lighter troops, and has the stamina of a horse, and ... the list is long and the point is stated;
-not have "laser" sword units with uranium enriched arrowheads or bionically enhanced arms and back muscles, and laugh at the above knight;
...
Achieving balance can be done in different ways, but it's mostly interpreted as compromise.
Some experienced players that know the secrets and shortcuts to rapidly advance in game, would agree to "handicap" their character, so the inferior AI would provide a challenge. In Brytenwalda stumbling, weapon breaking, and stamina should be considered just a hard mode for those who need it. These options do partially contribute to realism, their contribution to balance is debatable. AI units do not evolve like players do, are stuck with the same predefined equipment, with the same tactics or lack of, cannot use their weapons in the most efficient way, are predictable, are unorganized. Considering those facts the AI doesn't stand a chance against the player who also has super strength, stamina and agility, and the knowledge to use the damage system and terrain/obstacles to his advantage when attacking. Beating the AI repeatedly is fun until it becomes just routine, after that you realize that in order to change the outcome and have something new, you have to intentionally make a wrong decision or don't exploit AI weaknesses, reduce your army and just charge and pretend your like them, no planing just "hodor". Some might not think that the player influences the outcome of a battle that much, for those just try to charge your army, and stay back, don't get involved. If your army composition or overall strength is almost equal to the AI's one then you should suffer some serious losses. Reload and try again this time just use the horse charge damage to knock down the enemy units, after compare the losses. Then the final test use every advantage, ranged, terrain, tactics to hinder the enemy, you will see that if you had high medical skills then you defeated the enemy with 0 or almost no loss. To prevent this in Brytenwalda, beside the optional features, there are some penalties that contribute to realism and to balance. If you think logically, having heavy armors and shields, with penalties to skills, simulates the impact of heavy armor on agility and other related skills, and prevents the player to become the best at everything. These penalties are only for the player since the troops can be predefined to be better/weaker and they don't change their equipment.
In my opinion, to really improve the gameplay experience, the dev's should focus on improving the AI and formations as much as possible, and reequip the troops with re-tweaked items, so each will be specialized against a specific range of units (ex. anti-armor).
Also instead of decreasing (from 0.71) elite units stats, I think it should be better to increase low and mid tier units to balance, this way the largest discrepancies would be between the untrained farmer and the next tier upgrade.
I know that the team cannot please everyone, and they already have a full plate! I can make the necessary tweaks for my private version, but not the items with penalties.

 

[Redleg]

raz8020: well stated.  It's nice to have options so the player can tailor the game to their whims.  I also agree about AI and formations.  I hope Bannerlord makes great improvements on these.