So far, through testing as best as I can cheating as little as I can, i've noticed some very interesting patterns in the game.
Set in stone factors pertaining economy, garrison size, food supplies and resource availability, all settlements are broken either positively or very negatively.
You can check a few videos about those topics, yet nothing compiled, the info is very scattered, the most relevant youtubers who analyzed and talked about it were Flesson and Strat Gaming (love those guys), and I've watched their stuff, look at Strat's tables, than started an analytics by myself because I've noticed there's no obvious pattern of Trade Bound patterns through AI (you must literally test it manually to se what happens, at times you get baffling results, and I've not finished doing it neither, it's a lot of legwork).
So, what's wrong? Well, unbalance between towns, and a hardcore hidden prosperity cap that of which's impossible too surpass (I still haven't got exact numbers for it though)
So what do we have? Well, villages will directly affect how well a town can be - garrison sizes are very bonkers because you can't fill an entire garrison without starving the town or castle which in turn tanks the prosperity and will eventually turn a town into utter trash.
What breaks it are some caps applied indirectly towards some systems. First and foremost, food items are much more limited than what we had in Warband, there are only 9 accepted by the current game rules, while some that should be "food" just as much, are not, like Wine and Oil (arguably none are able to feed someone properly, but both carry important nutritional values). This already breaks some towns because they are unable to produce enough food even for a basic garrison with a basic prosperity progression. Once a town reaches 10k prospertiy, hell breaks loose.
So how does it work? Each bound village will give you +6 +12 or +18 food for your main settlement (be it town or castle) - than the main settlement can produce +15 - than we have the upgrades which can add a bit more (If I'm not worng, level 3 orchards/gardens givens +18 food).
Take in all this info, and that means the best cap for food production is actually 4x 18 + 15 + 18 without a governor - with a governor you can boost the effects which will result into +23.4 instead of base +18 (almost irrelevant) from building bonus - that's the cap we have direct control of.
Than the calc starts to be taken from food items in the town, which the most powerful's grain followed by fish - all others provide very little bonus in comparison.
Taking this into consideration, the best realistic expectation of a town food production's 110.4 total food per day. - than the varying food types will give some silly low numbers, they rarely if ever come in massive quantities, and if they do they'll be almost instantly sold to caravans - so we can expect a range from less than +30 for each, and that's already a stretch, 99% of the time it'll be from +1 to +7 at most.
The issue is, 10k prosperity translates into -250+ food.
So let's take my ortysia test run as an example: It has a whooping total of 8 bound villages - of which 5 are over 1k hearths and 3 of these being bound villages
Ortysia:
What gives? Well, the cap on village's food production, and the lack of continuous projects to increas food production makes it impossible to keep any town above 11k if it doesn't have 4 bound villages, preferably producing food, with 600+ hearths. Governor infimous +5% production bonus for villages' basically a gimmick, doesn't help enough to keep anything afloat, nor does it buff enough to give any progress on low prosp towns - of course I pick it for optimal results, but it never saved any towns from hitting prosperity cap and than suffering domino effect of self-destruction.
The pseudo-fix for that would be to have all towns have an equal number of bound villages (making all of them viable and balanced to own) yet keeping a cap and having varying degrees of efficiency depending on produce of the bound villages - or keep the hearths pattern without a cap:
Another would be to make a "town bound" sub-system that allowed castle bound villages to also provide food for a town passively (giving the +6/+12/+18 bonus as if it was bound to the town itself) - but that would only save towns, castles with 2k+ prosperity would still be ravaged and crap.
So under these extensive analytics, the game has zero potential to make for massively long runs without hitting "glitch-like" issues of odd caps and the likes. If you own a settlement and skyrockets it's prosperity, it's bound to be trashed soon or later.
Continuing:
So the unbalance: gold availability for lords is mostly dependable on the same calculations - fief prosperity + fief quantity - yet they are bad at managing their own fiefs, and once they hit the caps, well, we get the self-destruction domino effect from the beginning days of the Early Access.
This makes so that specific towns and castles fare much better than others, why? Well, villages produces make a massive difference, and most towns in the game have 3 bound villages, only 4 have 4 (Jaculan-Sanala-Marunath-Seonon), and that I can remember immediately, 1 castle has a single bound village (making it the ****tiest fief to own for anyone, us or AI at all times) - but I remember someone commenting there was another one like that (like 2 castles with a single village each).
This basically turns the 4 village towns into the Goats of the game, in theory: Marunath, Seonon, Sanala and Jaculan.
Than comes my second layer of analyzis which's, finally, the title of the thread - post conquest trade bound villages
This factor's ever more important now in 1.8 than it was before because of the workshop and economy changes, which basically have the potential to completely break the balance during conquests or border disputes, but will eventually settle for some pretty odd trade bound distributions overtime.
This makes Jaculan into the worst of the 4 village towns, and not a very smart choice at all.
What happens is the following:
Surrounding villages bound to castles, will almost always flip trade bound towns, and often they aren't locked into neither culture nor logical geography, yet it seems I was still unable to find anything above 8 trade bound village stacks after you've managed to take full control of a territorial zone.
In cases like Ortysia, you'll get the 8 - some villages are somewhat distant which makes it less efficient over-time, yet it's the reason why the AI often manages to get the town above 8k prosperity without much issue. It's one of the single towns with 8 bound villages naturally from the start
Than we get the odd ones: Dunglanys' also 8 trade bount, yet it depends upon the conquest of Nevyansk (sturgian castle) and the distance and position of it's village's are further from Dunglanys than they are from Car Banseth, yet that's the default. - This makes Dunglanys prosper much faster than all other Battanian towns, yet it only has 3 bound villages making it cap much earlier too.
Now about the elephants in the room:
both Marunath and Seonon have 4 bound villages, yet Marunath can only have 6 trade bound in total, making it less efficient - while Seonon seems to have a whooping 8 bound villages, when in reality it's 7 - Seordas immediately bounds with Varcheg once you expand, and it's the only wheat producing village that Seonon can have access to. This means it's impossible to define which's worse or better between the two. Both will get the full passive food prod, but only marunath will have villagers actually selling food products to them, this means Seonon will depend on caravan RNG to actually prosper, yet it'll produce wood like water on the other hand...
Finally, this makes Sanala the most OP town in the entire map for late game high prosperity, because it has 4 bound villages, 3 of which make wheat (allowing for mass production of beer, which adds more food) than, 1 fish village producing the second best food bonus produce, and 3 trade bount villages, two of which produce, again, food item as Date Fruits. So, what's interesting about this? Well, all produces coming from Sanala's villages work independently from hidden production from towns (you can see the full explanation and testing in Strat's video: link) which makes it have not 3 food types, but 5 being passively added to it's stocks.
Question is, why was it built like that, and why hasn't TW given any thought to it properly? One would expect at least a handful of such OP towns, not a single one, specially not one being OP due to food while sitting in the desert zone under a desert faction...
Than we have 2 more issues:
This also makes some towns incredibly powerful for specific workshops until the super prosperity ones hit their cap, once that happens, the capped ones will always be much better at it due to how pricing works. So, the strongest Workshop to own early game to mid game is Wool at Balthakand as long as the region remains stable - it'll lose a bit of it's $ power once Khuzaits take Tial, but that's not much of a concern.
Than, Ocs Hall with Wine because it's one of the best prosp starting towns with extremely stable geography (I'm yet to see any faction manage to take any vlandian territory except for Caleus Charas and Usanc - the most I've seen was someone taking sargot and losing it again under 10 minutes.
Ortysia's good for Silver IF western emp manages to stay strong, if they start losing territory (happens often), than it's a bad choice.
Finally, for late game, the GOAT workshop so far in my testing's actually Silversmith in Sanala, as long as they hold Ain Baliq.
All of that's made irrelevant considering the frequency of war declarations because it means you'll mostly own a couple workshops consistently, and their max profit without exploiting Strat's meta is up to 800-900 daily each at very late game with massive prosperity in the town - you'll make more if you simply conquer any of the 4 village towns without the possible hassle or 20k+ investment.
----
Strat's been slowly cracking the game, and giving more in-depth analyzis to it, it's completely unbalanced for both AI and the player, it also has a probably unintentional hardcore bias towards certain playstyles and choices due to meta efficiency/investment reward loops.
The conclusion being that we are in dire need of a total rebalance of all systems so they work together, also, TW should be minding late game effects and progression, the whole "add here subtract there" system for settlements' not only extremely confusing, but it also blocks progression the longer you play. - What would help would be extensive documentation on the math used for all the systems, and a list check of if and how each separate feature was thought out as to how it would interact with other features and systems. I suspect there was never even a faint thought given as to how "caravans" would affect "realm army power", but it does... This current "meta" basically means that it's way more interesting to keep factions coexisting than it is to paint the map, yet it's impossible to do that because AI won't top warring due to having absolutely nothing else to do.
Set in stone factors pertaining economy, garrison size, food supplies and resource availability, all settlements are broken either positively or very negatively.
You can check a few videos about those topics, yet nothing compiled, the info is very scattered, the most relevant youtubers who analyzed and talked about it were Flesson and Strat Gaming (love those guys), and I've watched their stuff, look at Strat's tables, than started an analytics by myself because I've noticed there's no obvious pattern of Trade Bound patterns through AI (you must literally test it manually to se what happens, at times you get baffling results, and I've not finished doing it neither, it's a lot of legwork).
So, what's wrong? Well, unbalance between towns, and a hardcore hidden prosperity cap that of which's impossible too surpass (I still haven't got exact numbers for it though)
So what do we have? Well, villages will directly affect how well a town can be - garrison sizes are very bonkers because you can't fill an entire garrison without starving the town or castle which in turn tanks the prosperity and will eventually turn a town into utter trash.
What breaks it are some caps applied indirectly towards some systems. First and foremost, food items are much more limited than what we had in Warband, there are only 9 accepted by the current game rules, while some that should be "food" just as much, are not, like Wine and Oil (arguably none are able to feed someone properly, but both carry important nutritional values). This already breaks some towns because they are unable to produce enough food even for a basic garrison with a basic prosperity progression. Once a town reaches 10k prospertiy, hell breaks loose.
So how does it work? Each bound village will give you +6 +12 or +18 food for your main settlement (be it town or castle) - than the main settlement can produce +15 - than we have the upgrades which can add a bit more (If I'm not worng, level 3 orchards/gardens givens +18 food).
Take in all this info, and that means the best cap for food production is actually 4x 18 + 15 + 18 without a governor - with a governor you can boost the effects which will result into +23.4 instead of base +18 (almost irrelevant) from building bonus - that's the cap we have direct control of.
Than the calc starts to be taken from food items in the town, which the most powerful's grain followed by fish - all others provide very little bonus in comparison.
Taking this into consideration, the best realistic expectation of a town food production's 110.4 total food per day. - than the varying food types will give some silly low numbers, they rarely if ever come in massive quantities, and if they do they'll be almost instantly sold to caravans - so we can expect a range from less than +30 for each, and that's already a stretch, 99% of the time it'll be from +1 to +7 at most.
The issue is, 10k prosperity translates into -250+ food.
So let's take my ortysia test run as an example: It has a whooping total of 8 bound villages - of which 5 are over 1k hearths and 3 of these being bound villages
Ortysia:
- +110.4 passive food
- +5 dates
- +8 grapes
- +10 fish
- +4 cheese
- +113 grain
- +13 meat
- +8 butter
- +4 olives
- +6 beer (it has a brewery in it - take note)
- -259.51 (10380 current prosperity)
- -31 garrison (629 men)
What gives? Well, the cap on village's food production, and the lack of continuous projects to increas food production makes it impossible to keep any town above 11k if it doesn't have 4 bound villages, preferably producing food, with 600+ hearths. Governor infimous +5% production bonus for villages' basically a gimmick, doesn't help enough to keep anything afloat, nor does it buff enough to give any progress on low prosp towns - of course I pick it for optimal results, but it never saved any towns from hitting prosperity cap and than suffering domino effect of self-destruction.
The pseudo-fix for that would be to have all towns have an equal number of bound villages (making all of them viable and balanced to own) yet keeping a cap and having varying degrees of efficiency depending on produce of the bound villages - or keep the hearths pattern without a cap:
- 200- = +6 food
- 200-600 = +12 food
- 600-1000 = +18 food
- 1000-1600 = +24 food
- 1600-2200 = +30 food
- etc...
Another would be to make a "town bound" sub-system that allowed castle bound villages to also provide food for a town passively (giving the +6/+12/+18 bonus as if it was bound to the town itself) - but that would only save towns, castles with 2k+ prosperity would still be ravaged and crap.
So under these extensive analytics, the game has zero potential to make for massively long runs without hitting "glitch-like" issues of odd caps and the likes. If you own a settlement and skyrockets it's prosperity, it's bound to be trashed soon or later.
Continuing:
So the unbalance: gold availability for lords is mostly dependable on the same calculations - fief prosperity + fief quantity - yet they are bad at managing their own fiefs, and once they hit the caps, well, we get the self-destruction domino effect from the beginning days of the Early Access.
This makes so that specific towns and castles fare much better than others, why? Well, villages produces make a massive difference, and most towns in the game have 3 bound villages, only 4 have 4 (Jaculan-Sanala-Marunath-Seonon), and that I can remember immediately, 1 castle has a single bound village (making it the ****tiest fief to own for anyone, us or AI at all times) - but I remember someone commenting there was another one like that (like 2 castles with a single village each).
This basically turns the 4 village towns into the Goats of the game, in theory: Marunath, Seonon, Sanala and Jaculan.
Than comes my second layer of analyzis which's, finally, the title of the thread - post conquest trade bound villages
This factor's ever more important now in 1.8 than it was before because of the workshop and economy changes, which basically have the potential to completely break the balance during conquests or border disputes, but will eventually settle for some pretty odd trade bound distributions overtime.
This makes Jaculan into the worst of the 4 village towns, and not a very smart choice at all.
What happens is the following:
Surrounding villages bound to castles, will almost always flip trade bound towns, and often they aren't locked into neither culture nor logical geography, yet it seems I was still unable to find anything above 8 trade bound village stacks after you've managed to take full control of a territorial zone.
In cases like Ortysia, you'll get the 8 - some villages are somewhat distant which makes it less efficient over-time, yet it's the reason why the AI often manages to get the town above 8k prosperity without much issue. It's one of the single towns with 8 bound villages naturally from the start
Than we get the odd ones: Dunglanys' also 8 trade bount, yet it depends upon the conquest of Nevyansk (sturgian castle) and the distance and position of it's village's are further from Dunglanys than they are from Car Banseth, yet that's the default. - This makes Dunglanys prosper much faster than all other Battanian towns, yet it only has 3 bound villages making it cap much earlier too.
Now about the elephants in the room:
both Marunath and Seonon have 4 bound villages, yet Marunath can only have 6 trade bound in total, making it less efficient - while Seonon seems to have a whooping 8 bound villages, when in reality it's 7 - Seordas immediately bounds with Varcheg once you expand, and it's the only wheat producing village that Seonon can have access to. This means it's impossible to define which's worse or better between the two. Both will get the full passive food prod, but only marunath will have villagers actually selling food products to them, this means Seonon will depend on caravan RNG to actually prosper, yet it'll produce wood like water on the other hand...
Finally, this makes Sanala the most OP town in the entire map for late game high prosperity, because it has 4 bound villages, 3 of which make wheat (allowing for mass production of beer, which adds more food) than, 1 fish village producing the second best food bonus produce, and 3 trade bount villages, two of which produce, again, food item as Date Fruits. So, what's interesting about this? Well, all produces coming from Sanala's villages work independently from hidden production from towns (you can see the full explanation and testing in Strat's video: link) which makes it have not 3 food types, but 5 being passively added to it's stocks.
Question is, why was it built like that, and why hasn't TW given any thought to it properly? One would expect at least a handful of such OP towns, not a single one, specially not one being OP due to food while sitting in the desert zone under a desert faction...
Than we have 2 more issues:
- Sturgia with a whooping total of 5 out of 7 towns with only 2 bound villages, while the other 2 only have 3 - meanwhile a vastly deserted territory with bad terrain, excessively spread out and with only a "handful" of castles (8 in total, each rocking 2 villages) - it's obvious that the AI will always "lose", considering campaign auto-calc and how the AI operates, they are unable to viably produce enough armies to protect both frontiers, at least 3 of their natural villages will have trouble reaching their trade bound settlements due to bandit spawn distribution and distance, and finally, they start with the lowest prosperity from all factions across the board, translating into a nightmarish economy along with a massive handicap to field armies properly. - this same effect can be observe, through a lesser degree, on any factions and/or clans that own crap settlements outside of Sturgia, but they are carried by other strong settlements most of the time. - the most notirous being Northern Empire which owns one of the best imperial settlements (Epicrotea) but everything else in their terriory's crap, hence why they are often the first imp faction to fall without player input...
- An extra layer of hidden meta, which's to basically focus conquest on castles to leech their village's production to feed your town settlements, yet once you expand again and start taking towns, well, your former Town Leech will break and the domino effect will start almost immediately.
This also makes some towns incredibly powerful for specific workshops until the super prosperity ones hit their cap, once that happens, the capped ones will always be much better at it due to how pricing works. So, the strongest Workshop to own early game to mid game is Wool at Balthakand as long as the region remains stable - it'll lose a bit of it's $ power once Khuzaits take Tial, but that's not much of a concern.
Than, Ocs Hall with Wine because it's one of the best prosp starting towns with extremely stable geography (I'm yet to see any faction manage to take any vlandian territory except for Caleus Charas and Usanc - the most I've seen was someone taking sargot and losing it again under 10 minutes.
Ortysia's good for Silver IF western emp manages to stay strong, if they start losing territory (happens often), than it's a bad choice.
Finally, for late game, the GOAT workshop so far in my testing's actually Silversmith in Sanala, as long as they hold Ain Baliq.
All of that's made irrelevant considering the frequency of war declarations because it means you'll mostly own a couple workshops consistently, and their max profit without exploiting Strat's meta is up to 800-900 daily each at very late game with massive prosperity in the town - you'll make more if you simply conquer any of the 4 village towns without the possible hassle or 20k+ investment.
----
Strat's been slowly cracking the game, and giving more in-depth analyzis to it, it's completely unbalanced for both AI and the player, it also has a probably unintentional hardcore bias towards certain playstyles and choices due to meta efficiency/investment reward loops.
The conclusion being that we are in dire need of a total rebalance of all systems so they work together, also, TW should be minding late game effects and progression, the whole "add here subtract there" system for settlements' not only extremely confusing, but it also blocks progression the longer you play. - What would help would be extensive documentation on the math used for all the systems, and a list check of if and how each separate feature was thought out as to how it would interact with other features and systems. I suspect there was never even a faint thought given as to how "caravans" would affect "realm army power", but it does... This current "meta" basically means that it's way more interesting to keep factions coexisting than it is to paint the map, yet it's impossible to do that because AI won't top warring due to having absolutely nothing else to do.
Last edited: