five bucks
Knight at Arms
It just boggles me how you can think that punishing the player for skipping something they gain no enjoyment from in a video game is "good game design".The case of elite units dying in objectively safe and overwhelmingly favorable auto-calc battles has been a meme since long before Bannerlord.
Though in this instance, I actually like that auto-resolving battles is dangerous and unpredictable, because it promotes active gameplay from the player. There is a high chance you'll be punished for using auto-calc, so instead of just simulating the best part of a Mount&Blade game (the combat), you are incentivized to take an active role in the struggle.
And that is good game design.
Auto-calc should remain how it's been for over a decade: A very unwise risk taken by the player, often resulting in disaster, thus prompting them to take a hands-on role in future fights. And a source for funny memes.
First, please see the first 30 seconds of this video.
Keep in mind that when Reggie says "battle" here, he means challenge.
A player with 100 banner knights fighting against 10 looters isn't challenging. The player could be completely terrible, or even AFK, and still win. So there's no challenge, and thus, no fun.
And if you're not having fun... Why bother?
None of us are asking for autocalc to be a viable option in close battles. Close battles are indeed the "best part of Mount & Blade." But curbstomp battles are one of the most boring, unfun parts.
There is no benefit gained by forcing the player to engage in them, by punishing them with losing troops. It is the antithesis of good game design: because it's ANTI-fun. The time I spend in six curbstomp battles, I could instead be spending fighting one actually close and exciting large battle.
The only reason I've seen you give here is "memes". And honestly, I think most players would happily erase all memory of those memes in favour of having an autocalc system that lets them skip boring one-sided battles without losing troops.
On the argument that "it's always been like that"-- well, I spend most of my posts saying that mechanics from Warband should work the same in Bannerlord. But not this time. Why? Because older isn't necessarily better. FUN is what matters.
+10The best part of Mount & Blade is not the 500th time in a campaign that you've steamrolled a party with less than 5% of your strength. TW might imagine it encourages active gameplay but it doesn't -- it encourages people to **** right off and play something else that's less out-and-out grindy.
That's because TW doesn't actually play this game, so they think a number of things are fun when they really aren't.
It isn't even like it actually forces the player to do a damned thing except wait a minute or two to resolve the fight 'live.' You can literally hit "Join your troops" and tab out, then come back when you hear cheering and (assuming your party has the bare minimum necessary) never take losses against parties you greatly outpower. It is 100% a waste of time that could be saved with an autocalc that had a built-in threshold for party power required to cause casualties.
Of course, that ties back into the intended playstyle (mixed quality parties, semi-frequent wipes, etc.) vs. the typical player playstyle (max-tier, max size party, never losing, few casualties). You can get by never fighting looters after the very start of the game, without caring too much about your troops' survival and (IMO) that is a much more fun way to play but it isn't by any means the most common way to play Bannerlord.
@Antaeus Yes, but a specific type of convenience you have to admit, which is: cutting out the part of the game the player doesn't enjoy.It's a convenience feature
Autocalc isn't just there to reduce the overall length of the game, because that would make no sense- if the player didn't want to be playing at all, they wouldn't be using autocalc, they would just quit. True?
Player is given the option to autocalc for one very clear reason: Getting to the more fun parts of the game.
Close battles? Sure, autocalc should be incredibly risky.It must have risk, otherwise it just becomes a lazy exploit that kills the game. You can have your short cut, but you have to be prepared for the possibility that it might cost you.
But lopsided battles? They don't have any meaningful risk. So why should the autocalc version of them?
Why is preventing the player from being "lazy" - in an entertainment product which is primarily played for people looking to relax - so important that it should take precedence over fun?
The Warp Zones in Super Mario Bros. didn't take away your powerup for using them to skip all the way to Zone 8. Creative Mode in Minecraft didn't delete random blocks as a punishment for switching from Survival. Even Dark Souls didn't punish you for skipping Upper Blighttown. Why were these things in those games? To give players the option, entirely at their own individual choice, of skipping parts of the game they didn't find challenging or enjoyable.
So I have to ask: Why is it so important to you, to force other players to do things they don't want to, in a game they bought?
For starters, surely you can agree savescumming is the exploit in this instance. Not the autocalc itself.It's also exploitable. I've recalculated/reloaded an auto-siege over and over to see the spread of results. You end up with a bell curve of casualties - the majority of results clustered around the same place, but occasionally you end up with a result well outside the bell curve, even better than you could get if you managed the battle yourself.
Secondly, the un-deserved successes you are describing are just the flipside of the same thing we are complaining about: excessive random chance in autocalc results. If there was less randomness, the player would be experiencing less undeserved results, both in their favour and against.
It's definitely worth spending their time on if it makes the game more fun and less boring.I'm sure the devs could tinker with it and change the probabilities, but it seems to me like a pretty mundane thing to waste their time on. It might not be perfect, but it certainly isn't broken. Th rest is subjective.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/broken - "not working properly".
If autocalc is intended to allow players to skip battles they don't find fun, but nobody is using it because it punishes them for doing so, and thus nobody is using it for its intended purpose, then it's not working properly.
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