Players are actively discouraged from using infantry classes

[Lord Blueberry]

I've noticed plenty problems with the game that boil down to the player being actively discouraged to play infantry class and use melee. I will be expanding upon this list through edits

• Registry of thrown weapons is broken.
• Registry of cav rearing is broken.
• The sound design is so poor that
  • you can no longer rely on audio to tell wether you hit or killed an enemy.
  • You can hear horses, but you can't tell by the sound if they are near you, behind you, or closing in.
• Archery classes are higher-armored and better armed versions of infantry classes (for example Menavlion Inf -> Palantine guard. Aserai infantry -> Aserai veteran)
• Aserai infantry units simply don't have any armor.
• The game was designed to make 1v1 near impossible and demand teamwork to take out a single opponent. Oversized shields with invisible forcefield around them are key in this.
• Chambering is so hard to use it might as well not be in the game at all.
• Block delay affects infantry in melee and no other class.
• Stab animation goes further back upon release instead of immediately forward, another meaningless unnecessary delay that makes melee fighting more sluggish.
• Skill limitations are no longer a thing. Right now, any archer can become a horse archer. Even any infantry can become a horse archer.
• Cavalry has too high armor and health value for horse, no cooldown on couch (such as there was in Warband), and plenty more problems.
• Archery is ridiculously easy to do and very powerful (can land heavier hits on people than any infantry class or weapon can (50HP or more), at next to no risk)
• there is no game manual to teach players the finer details of the combat system

The art of melee fighting was willfully removed from Mount&Blade by Taleworlds, and the infantry class was essentially removed from Multiplayer.

Also, TW, i've spent so much time on this forum doing your job for you i should be on the payrol by now. Consider this my last report/thread of the sort.

 

[MArdA TaleWorlds]

This is not a bug report thread. Moving it to discussion board.

 

[Caps]

https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php?threads/bannerlord-guide-compilation.416974/

but ye balancing around statistics doesnt necessarily make for fun gameplay

 

[Sluggo]

Thank you for putting into words what we're all thinking

 

[Lord Blueberry]

This is not a bug report thread. Moving it to discussion board.

@MArdA TaleWorlds Could you move it to balancing issues instead? Sorry for misplacing the thread

 

[Lord Blueberry]

Today in invisible forcefield shields (yes that spear is "stuck in the shield")

 

[hoonii]

I totally agree with Lord Blueberry in some cases.
Stopping a horse is really annoying because it's not reliable at all and even if you do 100 damage to the head of a horse from front with a spear, there is a chance it will run you over and you'll get couch lanced, even though you've done everything right.
Thrown weapons', especially throwing axes' hit registration is so random that I have seen at least half of my axes just go through a knights chest and not being considered a hit.
Not every archer should be able to ride a Charger horse and be a titan horse archer.
Aserai units should get some love and receive some armour and better shields. Also the basic sword is so weak.
The most important thing is the stun duration after hitting a shield should definitely be increased. When someone is spamming your shield with over 90 speed weapons and when you try to counter attack you will get hit and shield bashing does not fix this issue.

 

[Caps]

Today in invisible forcefield shields (yes that spear is "stuck in the shield")

i dont think this is shield related, might be server & networking related. If you look at the dev post about dropped items.

But totally agree with you that infantry isnt that fun in its current state. Khuzait infantry options are just straight out unfun. The shields last way too long aswell against 1h spam, which makes axes super useless right now.

 

[yedrellow]

The footwork is one of the biggest detriments against infantry. An infantry gets to an archer, and then the archer can escape almost for free and kite forever.

 

[Caps]

The footwork is one of the biggest detriments against infantry. An infantry gets to an archer, and then the archer can escape almost for free and kite forever.

depends on the unit

 

[yedrellow]

depends on the unit

I would agree, but I'd argue it shouldn't really depend on the unit. Normal infantry shouldn't have problem engaging while someone is abusing strafing movement to kite and attack simultaneously forever. Take for example a matchup between a palatine guard using menavlion and an oathbound. The oathbound can hold w all day, but because of a mixture of the menavlion, strafing speed and time to block the oathbound can't really force a fight. If you take an even worse matchup like legionary vs sturgian berserker or wildling, then a player with enough patience to abuse the combination of time to block and strafe speed can kite to the point of never even needing to parry.

Even if you look at duelling at the moment, most people tend to strafe away from strikes continuously as time to block makes defense unreliable close. Which means people are kiting away from strikes to avoid the weaknesses that time to block forces on the player. Even the stance system works against sensible close range defense, by increasing time to block as a penalty to what in other melee games would be sensible defensive footwork. The resting weapon position for example is on the bad side for a defensive strafe.

Time to block is bad. We already had a time to block after all, called latency.

The footwork is omnidirectional and enables kiting

Kiting has the additional element of punishing the forward movement player by abusing their time to block.

The combination of both means that getting people stuck in actual melee fights is largely impractical for proper infantry classes (i.e one's people would use normally in skirmish), without something like a flag forcing it to happen.



Strafing and attacking away from someone should cause enough of a speed penalty to allow a forward moving player to catch up easily.

 

[Caps]

I would agree, but I'd argue it shouldn't really depend on the unit. Normal infantry shouldn't have problem engaging while someone is abusing strafing movement to kite and attack simultaneously forever. Take for example a matchup between a palatine guard using menavlion and an oathbound. The oathbound can hold w all day, but because of a mixture of the menavlion, strafing speed and time to block the oathbound can't really force a fight. If you take an even worse matchup like legionary vs sturgian berserker or wildling, then a player with enough patience to abuse the combination of time to block and strafe speed can kite to the point of never even needing to parry.

Even if you look at duelling at the moment, most people tend to strafe away from strikes continuously as time to block makes defense unreliable close. Which means people are kiting away from strikes to avoid the weaknesses that time to block forces on the player. Even the stance system works against sensible close range defense, by increasing time to block as a penalty to what in other melee games would be sensible defensive footwork. The resting weapon position for example is on the bad side for a defensive strafe.

Time to block is bad. We already had a time to block after all, called latency.

The footwork is omnidirectional and enables kiting

Kiting has the additional element of punishing the forward movement player by abusing their time to block.

The combination of both means that getting people stuck in actual melee fights is largely impractical for proper infantry classes (i.e one's people would use normally in skirmish), without something like a flag forcing it to happen.



Strafing and attacking away from someone should cause enough of a speed penalty to allow a forward moving player to catch up easily.

exactly, but i think kiteing away should be in the game as defense (or something the player should actively try to do on his defense)
i dont think its possible to give every unit this opportunity with the variety of movement speeds, made a post last week aswell in the tech section.

https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php?threads/movement-speed.422631/#post-9435347

 

[yedrellow]

exactly, but i think kiteing away should be in the game as defense (or something the player should actively try to do on his defense)
i dont think its possible to give every unit this opportunity with the variety of movement speeds, made a post last week aswell in the tech section.

https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php?threads/movement-speed.422631/#post-9435347

Then maybe kiting should specifically be penalised for ranged/two hand attacks more than 1 hand?

That way regular infantry can still kite while archers/ skirmishers struggle to do it with ranged attacks. Either that or have a long term forward sprint like warband.

 

[Caps]

Then maybe kiting should specifically be penalised for ranged/two hand attacks more than 1 hand?

That way regular infantry can still kite while archers/ skirmishers struggle to do it with ranged attacks.

it should be fairly equally punishing for everyone because everyone can pick up stuff from the ground

 

[yedrellow]

it should be fairly equally punishing for everyone because everyone can pick up stuff from the ground

I dont mean to tie the penalty to the class, but instead the weapon being used. So if anyone at all is strafing while using a menavlion, it slows them so a forward moving person can catch them, regardless of their class.

Another alternative is have a reduced movement speed penalty for moving forward while blocking.

 

[Caps]

I dont mean to tie the penalty to the class, but instead the weapon being used. So if anyone at all is strafing while using a menavlion, it slows them so a forward moving person can catch them, regardless of their class.

Another alternative is have a reduced movement speed penalty for moving forward while blocking.

This just overcomplicates things, so you want for some people to have it super easy against the menavlion (oathsworn) and for some (legionary) its still hard. Shock Infantry and Infantry in general should have less variety in movement speed, to balance things out. Obv this will make variety worse and might make the game boring, but i think its absolutely necessary in this context. Different controls still have a huge impact on the feel of a class even if they are just minor differences.

It would be easier to nerf its attack speed, or damage but i dont think the menavlion is particular broken or too unbalanced at the moment.

If TW fixed blocking animations and made combat more smooth instead of jump animations infantry would be far more enjoyable. Imo the biggest problem is still that infantry 1h weapons dont do any damage against shields, which makes infantry combat really boring to begin with. Kicking might need some fixes aswell.

You can nerf archers around numbers (ammonition, damage) and the cav mechanics need obv fixing and their armor values of heavy horses need to be reduced or reworked. (Its what they are doing at the moment, which already got stated like 100 times now)

 

[yedrellow]

This just overcomplicates things, so you want for some people to have it super easy against the menavlion (oathsworn) and for some (legionary) its still hard.

Why would you tune it such that it's still a problem?

The problem I have is that simply changing running speeds of certain classes ignores the fundamental problems in the movement system, which makes kiting trivial compared to other games in the genre (eg. warband, mordhau)

Sure an oathsworn runs faster than a legionary. But why is forward movement while blocking such a slow endeavour compared to strafing-kiting while holding attacks?

That is the issue. You can easily normalise forward movement while blocking across classes such that an oathsworn in that scenario does not have an advantage over a legionary.

If all you're doing to balance is instead cheap changes to individual classes movement speed, then all you're going to do is make kiting dependent on class selection rather than human mechanics. Human mechanics should fundamentally overcome kiting, unless it's against a SP/cheated character with 160 athletics. That's why the solution to movement has to be a complicated one, and can not be fixed by taleworlds changing a few runspeed values.

Coincidentally helping forward movement speed while blocking would help ai infantry fight ai archers, which ironically means that this change would help both the singleplayer and multiplayer balance.

Kicking at the moment either feels useless or brokenly oppressive dependent on run speed differences as well, so I would agree that kicking does need a rework though.

 

[Caps]

oathsworn has 0.9 combat speed, legionary is 0.7 thats a 20% bigger penalty which is insanely big. Maybe directional movement needs some rework aswell and fine tuning i didnt test enough in this regard.