jackwhitter - Unfortunately, a lot of your suggestions are not really technically feasible. Here's why.
jackwhitter said:
part A -- mounted/elite troops:
Mounted troops are still the bees knees. they should have a lot of advantages, but there are few disadvantages except for cost, which is easily mitigated. cost being the only limiting factor is not effective. i don't mind spending 10k/week once i'm rolling. that makes me nearly invincible pretty quick against any other army with an approximate number of soldier amounts (really probably closer to double my troops).
The cost becomes significant once you get past the mid-game, where you need to defend multiple territories. Note this is reflected in the AI's choices - they will never field, say, only heavy cav - they draw from recruitment pools based on their individual wealth. The player is the only one isn't restricted by this, so it's up to you if you want to artificially restrict yourself. Keep in mind there are also battles where cavalry are disadvantaged, and where they can't participate except on foot (villages with caltrops, any siege, very hilly areas, very wet areas, et cetera).
make mounted troops take up 1.5x - 2x troop slots. so, 100 senior squires or 200 berserkers! i think the berserkers might actually win (at least at 2x. 1.5x maybe not). horses require extra people to maintain them, but those people don't necessarily fight.
That's not really possible. The code that counts party size can't really be modified like that, and trying hackish way around it would likely break a lot of things. Party size is already kind of buggy, even in native.
2. make elite troops double troop requirement of standard troop. an ivory sentinal would require 2 troop slots vs. an ivory marksman or master bowyer. a paladin would require 3 or 4 slots vs. the 1.5 - 2 slots of a senior squire or cavalier. noble/elite lords had their own retinues they traveled with during war.
Again, that's not really possible, so instead I implemented the Renown and Honour cost for hiring nobles and elites. I feel that's a great counterbalance - if you rely too much on noble troops, you'll quickly be unable to recruit them, your men will respect you less, your party size shrinks and you'll be less likely to be awarded territories by your Lord (or if you are a monarch, your vassals will respect you far less). If you aren't playing on Brutality, Brutality will force the Renown penalties on, and additionally means you are restricted to your kingdom's nobles only, which means you're not going to be able to mix and match.
3. limit the maximum weekly cost you can support for your troops. give is a start price of $500 or so + more based on your leadership, renown, and your companion's leadership! your leadership should calculate independently of your companions in case you don't want companions, but they add to the total. your % of renown + start make up the base, which is then modified by (your leadership + companions leadership). the calculation should be exponential. a leadership of 3 might get you 50% more cost, but a leadership of 10 would get you 10x the cost, for example. the total of your companions leadership should make up the calculation and it should also be exponential though not as extreme. your companions function as squad leaders/lieutenants in your army.
All that really ends up being, mechanically, is a way to force players to maximize their leadership, which nearly every player already is going to do. Additionally, that's what the party size limit is really for, anyway. You could always implement this restriction yourself, but consider that since *eventually* most players will need to defend multiple fiefs, they'll quickly have no room left for their own party, paying for wages on so many castles garrisons, et cetera. I think that would just be very frustrating, finding that you worked so hard to finally take a castle, only to see that you now can't staff a garrison because of some artificial restriction on how much money you're allowed to spend.
5. troop morale and food consumption (horses eat too) should be based on the slot cost and not the number of troops you can field during a battle.
That's also really difficult to implement and probably would be hackish. I don't think the food code can even take the troop quality into account.
6. would be nice if all the lords were subject to similar restrictions (better leadership calculation and/or base as they have no companions)
This would be not very useful. Lords already don't have wealth like the player does nor do they pay wages in the way the player does, they have a fractional amount awarded based on their owned fiefs, and they have to spend it on recruits, which in turn draw from their already low wages. Additionally, the complexity in having to check their roster so much would result in a ton of CPU overhead, and probably cause the game to slow to a crawl every time it needed to calculate troop wages, quality, and party size limits. Right now, Lords already have the same general restrictions players do on their party size, which is why you don't see Lords who have no fiefs roaming around with 250 troops. They used to get hidden bonuses the player didn't, like +20 per castle owned, but now the player can match that by building Barracks.
1. make most the skills more exponential -- pathfinding of 1 gets you 1% faster. pathfinding of 10 gets you 100%, for example. reward specialization
I don't know, I feel I have worked hard to make many skills much more useful without really changing the mechanics of the skill. Lav has too. For instance, Ironflesh used to be a mostly worthless skill, but now it not only adds hitpoints but provides damage reduction. I used to never take it, now I usually jack it up to 5-6. Shield too, where Shield now enables higher shields. Pathfinding now has secondary uses in changing how well you keep track of prisoners or affecting your chances to escape. Persuasion I've added *tons* of additional checks to, so now it's quite useful.
Rewarding min-maxing to me doesn't seem intuitive in this kind of game, especially when you can have any party skill funded by a companion.
2. nords need a hardcore beserker class: maybe one of the noble upgrade paths. the hardcore beserker falls dead -- there is no capturing or surgery to save them (and no way to rescue). but they are VERY scary though lightly armored. make them fast and hit hard.
Making a lightly-armored but extremely skilled troop would be easy. You could even do it yourself, just by modifying an existing Nord infantry record. The surgery effect however is hardcoded, and the game already has a hardcoded "chance to not die" for everyone, even at 0 surgery, so that part can't be done.
3. lances need a division: lighter long lances with no ability to crush through blocks, but a lot of reach but lower damage (these are really anti calvary. khergits should probably use them)
heavy lances crush through blocks with a lot of damage, but shorter on the reach. (anti ground and swadians should favor these). speeds and strength requirements should be about the same
You could already do this, and this is already somewhat present. You will see some lances can crush through blocks and some cannot, usually based on the weight of the weapon, and they have varying reaches. But I don't really feel the weapons themselves need much attention. You can always modify these parts yourself though.
4. horses need a bigger spread. what is the point of hunters with all the warhorses at level 3 available? is there any horse that requires level 10? there should be and that horse should dominate every other horse.
Ok, so
this one I think you've got a good point here. I've long though about how worthless most of the horses are, and how little use I'd get out of most of them. I find in nearly all cases, I get my companions to 3 or 4 riding, and I get myself to 5 riding, which unlocks the most warhorses for all of us. There are some obvious winners here. For instance, the Courser is the absolute fastest, and you need a mere 2 riding to ride most variants of it, and 3 to ride the absolute fastest. Most warhorses are 3 or 4 points, with only the hugely elite taking 5 or 6. Then you have all your farm horses, hunters, steppe horses, et cetera, which aren't any more durable than a courser and aren't much faster than a warhorse.
The problem there is coming up with a systematic way of spreading it around like I did with Troops and Items. If you make the riding requirements too high, you restrict all but the min-max players AND troops from using them. If you make any particular horse too powerful, you will use only that. I find myself pretty much only using Coursers and Swadian elite Warhorses (like the Templar Charger).
If I ever update NE again, I might take a crack at overhauling horses.
5. long reach 2H swords with high strength requirements. the guanren sword reaches nearly as far as the war cleaver doing almost as much damage. we need a 125 reach high level claymore or something.
I doubt I will ever touch items again but you could easily modify the existing claymore if you wanted. One annoying thing about adding items is that you then have to add tons of crap to be able to distribute it throughout the game if you want it on troops.
