Proposing several changes related to lord recruitment

[freyj]

I have been playing my own kingdom in diplomacy for a while, and I greatly enjoyed it. It is MUCH better than Native, due to all these additional features that are not only convenient but also intuitive. However, lord recruitment remains a challenge. I found a lot of frustration described in this following post very similar to my own experience:

http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,116431.105.html#msg3312381

Now, instead of just saying "diplomacy sucks" (which I disagree), I would like to make some suggestion. I hope my suggestions satisfy three requirements:
a) They reduce the frustration in lord recruitment, making it a little bit easier
b) They are intuitive and make diplomacy's simulation more realistic, not less.
c) They will not be of too much work for implementation

Now here are my suggested changes:

1) Give more opportunity for "private" conversations to allow recruitment. More concretely, change the test for lord proximity, so that when I approach a castle and request to meet someone in the court yard, the conversation is considered private.

I believe this suggestion satisfy the three requirements:

Spoiler

a) A lot of times I couldn't get a lord because his faction has only 2 castles left, each is populated with 6 lords, and these 6 lords - including the lord I want - never come out. I once did a test: I used the cheat menu to force the lord to "go to another friendly castle" or "raid a village". Then I talk to him, and found that the chance of recruitment is often fairly high if I have the best possible status on myself and have chosen the correct dialog option. But in normal game play I never get such a chance.
b) Now consider this: I am besieging a castle, and asked a lord in the castle to come out and talk to me. That conversation should be assumed to be PRIVATE. All the other lords are still inside the castle and hundreds yards away.
c) I found the code of private conversations in module_dialogs.py and the test for lord proximity in module_scripts.py. However, since I didn't spend time learning all the functions, what I did was simply commenting out the lord proximity test, so that all conversations are always private. Well, that's cheating. I would rather to have Waihti implements a proper change, if he/she is interested in.

2) Make the decision of joining or refusing my kingdom less random. More concretely, once the chance of recruitment is calculated, make the pseudo-random number that it is compared to is generated not from 1 to 100, but from 31 to 70, or something similar.

I again present my arguments following the 3 requirements I put myself:

Spoiler

a) If you activate the debug message, you often see something like this: "chance of success = 80; random = 98" (a very good attempt is failed, due to random chance), or "chance of success = 25; random = 10" (a very bad attempt is successful, due to random chance). This is frustrating, because in the game the decision is final - you never get a second chance.
b) Many people have complained about the lord saying "I like everything about you, BUT I refuse", or "You suck a lot, BUT I pledge", and "this word is final". When I first played without the debug message, I thought the dialog was simply fake. I was then surprised to see that Waihti has the decision simulated exactly as the dialog goes, it is the high randomness that is causing the discrepancy. Therefore I think reducing the randomness would be beneficial.
c) Implementing this change is simple. Just change that time-based mod formula would be enough. However, you might dislike that, because then the "chance of success" is no longer a REAL chance of success. So a better fix would be changing parameters in the chance of success calculation, so that when an attempt is really bad, the chance is smaller than 0, and when an attempt is really good, the chance is greater than 100. I have seen chance of success to be -10 or 112 with the current parameters, but I think it is too rare.

3) Make the military reality weigh more in the recruitment decision and fix some inconsistencies. More concretely, I have 3 suggestions: 1) the lord should be REALLY easy to convince if he has no fief; 2) the lord should consider the faction-wise power comparison more (i.e. if his faction only has 2 castles while the player faction has 8 towns and 10 castles, a majority of lords should switch side instead of staying with a hopeless faction); 3) if the lord only has village then he should never say "If I switch side I'll be in a sea of enemy" due to location of his fief, because if he switch side he will lose his village anyway.

Spoiler

Again the 3 requirements:
a) Again, the frustration comes from the situations when all these 12 lords stay in the last castle of a faction. And if you capture that last castle, they will join other factions (who are often also responsible for destroying the original faction), but never join you. I don't know if diplomacy handles the destruction of factions itself or leaves it to native, so I didn't propose to change that. However, if the change I am proposing could be made, my life as a conqueror would be much easier.
b) Now I do believe my suggestions are intuitive. We are talking about feudal world, and all lords are fairly practical when making all their decisions. I would imagine not having a fief by itself would be a very legitimate reason to switch side for most lords. The faction is failing by itself is also a very legitimate reason. The suggestion about village-only lord is by itself intuitive.
c) Again, I have found the code responsible for all these calculations in the code, but I don't know enough syntax or function to change them. I might be wrong, but I imagine none of these should be too hard to implement.

This completes my proposal, for now. Thoughts and suggestions are welcomed.

 

[Caba`drin]

1) Give more opportunity for "private" conversations to allow recruitment. More concretely, change the test for lord proximity, so that when I approach a castle and request to meet someone in the court yard, the conversation is considered private.

I believe this suggestion satisfy the three requirements:

Spoiler

a) A lot of times I couldn't get a lord because his faction has only 2 castles left, each is populated with 6 lords, and these 6 lords - including the lord I want - never come out. I once did a test: I used the cheat menu to force the lord to "go to another friendly castle" or "raid a village". Then I talk to him, and found that the chance of recruitment is often fairly high if I have the best possible status on myself and have chosen the correct dialog option. But in normal game play I never get such a chance.
b) Now consider this: I am besieging a castle, and asked a lord in the castle to come out and talk to me. That conversation should be assumed to be PRIVATE. All the other lords are still inside the castle and hundreds yards away.
c) I found the code of private conversations in module_dialogs.py and the test for lord proximity in module_scripts.py. However, since I didn't spend time learning all the functions, what I did was simply commenting out the lord proximity test, so that all conversations are always private. Well, that's cheating. I would rather to have Waihti implements a proper change, if he/she is interested in.

This completes my proposal, for now. Thoughts and suggestions are welcomed.

One thing that may help ease your frustration is to see this post about fixing Lord behavior (also in my sig below). Since 1.126, the behavior of lord's without fiefs or with only villages has been broken, making the process of getting them alone to try to recruit them unnecessarily difficult. This one-line .TXT or Module System fix will return their behavior to its intended form, and that of 1.125 and previous versions.

 

[bna]

IMHO the most frustrating thing is even not the difficulty of recruitment but the fact that lords from defeated faction are joining to other factions without any hope to get a fief but never to player. Even if I have lots of unassigned castles/villages.
This is a most illogical behavior of the AI.

 

[Stildawn]

Also try this fix:

Speak to lords about private matters at any time even when around others

Go to your SCRIPTS.TXT file and find the following (I cut off the leading text to save space):

cf_troop_can_intrigue -1
......1224979098644774920 2204 2 1224979098644774921 1224979098644774920 31 2 1224979098644774917 1224979098644774921 4 0 31 2 1224979098644774916 -1 2281 3 1224979098644774922 1224979098644774914 1224979098644774920 2147483678 2 1224979098644774922 3 2133 2 1224979098644774918 1 5 0 33 3 1224979098644774916 648518346341351445 648518346341351515 1694 2 1224979098644774923 1224979098644774920 31 2 1224979098644774916 1224979098644774923 2133 2 1224979098644774918 1 3 0 3 0 4 0 31 2 144115188075856163 1 31 2 1224979098644774912 144115188075855987 1106 1 216172782113786060 3 0 4 0 31 2 1224979098644774913 0 3 0 31 2 1224979098644774918 0

Change the two red 1's to 0.  This will ONLY disable the "proximity to other lords" check.  There are a number of other checks that determine whether a lord will speak with you, so this won't guarantee that they'll hear you out.

 

[Stildawn]

Ah that post didnt work... Anyway have a look through this thread:

http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,112413.0.html

Most of your problems can be fixed by looking through there...

On a side note... I have never experienced your problems... I can always sway enough Lords to stay alive... In my most recent game (which is coming to an end) I went on a tour of the weakened factions and recuit over 15 lords easily... Now I have too many lords lol.

 

[Caba`drin]

Also try this fix:

Speak to lords about private matters at any time even when around others
...

Disclaimer: this post is not intended to be snarky, just clarifying.

I want to be clear about the fix I posted above and its difference from the "fix"...tweak...that Stildawn posted. There is an error in the Native code that breaks the behavior of lords that do not have a "walled center"--town or castle. The fix I refer to removes this error, returning the code to its intended functionality.

The tweak that Stildawn posted changes the intended behavior. That tweak is in the spirit of the topic and may be of interest to players in easing the recruitment process...it is, however, a tweak, a change, not a fix.

 

[Stildawn]

Yeah I know lol I use your fix too lol a very very good fix lol...

Yes the one I posted just makes it so you can talk to them even when others are around... (still doesnt mean they will talk to you... Just removed the "others around" thing)

 

[w00d]

agreed, tho i wont blame the Diplomacy mod it is more the general behaviour of Warband .

I just finished my 2nd campaign, conquering everyone. I have "4" vassals in the end. That's right. Even while i was pummelling them to the ground and basically besieging them to death ( 1600 vs 200 of my best swadian knights/nords/rhodoks in a castle? that 1600 have no chance ) the Lords refused to join me. Even my father inlaw and brother in law where they had a 100 relationship with me, hated his current liege, preferred me over the current liege , had zero fiefs AND was safer with me militarily. He refused.

in the end all i needed was 2 other lords and that was it.

/shrug stupid AI behaviour is stupid. Oh and i had just 38 right to rule. It did not matter in the end as i simply wiped the offending realms off the face of the map.

 

[freyj]

Also try this fix:

Speak to lords about private matters at any time even when around others
...

Disclaimer: this post is not intended to be snarky, just clarifying.

I want to be clear about the fix I posted above and its difference from the "fix"...tweak...that Stildawn posted. There is an error in the Native code that breaks the behavior of lords that do not have a "walled center"--town or castle. The fix I refer to removes this error, returning the code to its intended functionality.

The tweak that Stildawn posted changes the intended behavior. That tweak is in the spirit of the topic and may be of interest to players in easing the recruitment process...it is, however, a tweak, a change, not a fix.

Thanks for referring me to the fix! I have only played m&b for several weeks, so I don't know how the game used to work. However, I was indeed wondering why all these village-only lords were patrolling when they were just spawned at the beginning of the game, but then never ever come out when I need them coming out the most... Thanks again!

And regarding fix vs. changes, I agree with you. These "changes" are more or less cheats, because they make the game easier and more unrealistic. I keep these changes for myself: In fact, I was so frustrated in my last game that I have now not only disabled the lord proximity test, but also disabled the "long live the king" response for happy lords, so that I can always try intriguing them. I changed the code related to random number generator as well. I'll probably revert them back after I enjoy being a cheater enough...

agreed, tho i wont blame the Diplomacy mod it is more the general behaviour of Warband .

I just finished my 2nd campaign, conquering everyone. I have "4" vassals in the end. That's right. Even while i was pummelling them to the ground and basically besieging them to death ( 1600 vs 200 of my best swadian knights/nords/rhodoks in a castle? that 1600 have no chance ) the Lords refused to join me. Even my father inlaw and brother in law where they had a 100 relationship with me, hated his current liege, preferred me over the current liege , had zero fiefs AND was safer with me militarily. He refused.

in the end all i needed was 2 other lords and that was it.

/shrug stupid AI behaviour is stupid. Oh and i had just 38 right to rule. It did not matter in the end as i simply wiped the offending realms off the face of the map.

I am by no means trying to blame diplomacy. These problems that I have mentioned are only more severe in native.

Regarding your other comments, well, I can see your point: You can certainly finish the game without any change to the game. I was able to defeat 1,500 enemy with 150 elite troop as well, and I was able to collect 12~15 lords by the end of my last game.

However, that's not the point - because if you are only talking about being able to finish the game, you don't need diplomacy at all. You can conquer the whole world in Native as well, and many people do that. So why many people loves diplomacy? I'd say it's because it makes people feel the game's simulation much more intuitive and realistic. That's diplomacy's strength. And we make all these suggestions here to make the strength even stronger.

 

[w00d]

agreed , we should be able to use Diplomacy to our strength and win as intended recruiting disaffected lords and rewarding good ones while always having to watch 4 unhappy lords. But the whole AI does not allow that atm. It would seem it is intended more than anything else ( as it comes straight from Native ) . The devs either want u to rambo your way to victory or to be super lucky.

 

[Waihti]

I am not planning to change the native code which is used when you talk to a lord. (the code simply is a mess and quite complicated) But since I am working on the emissary way I introduced with Diplomacy anyway, I might also include some additional code which takes for example the number of fiefs of the target and some other things which freyj mentioned into account.

 

[obscure]

It seems to me that recruiting lords is fairly easy once you know what to do - ie often doable but still appropriately hard since it wouldn't make much sense if you convince anyone to become a traitor without trouble.

Perhaps it would be less frustrating if convincing them to join you was harder than it is while talking to them in private easier - so you could have an idea where they stand instead of expecting that a lord would join you if only you could get a chance to talk to him, causing you to keep stalking him for weeks only to find out that... he won't.

But I think the way it currently works is fair regardless. The only suggestion I'd like to make, and since I never managed to successfully convince anyone to join me through an emissary, would be to have your emissary use an argument of your choice from the ones you can use when talking to a lord yourself (I'm the rightful ruler, I'll give you lands etc.). That could potentially be balanced by having a chance that your emissary will fail due to not be able to speak to the lord in private, which could in turn be balanced by choosing how long should they keep trying - ie you could order that your emissary will try once (which would take 2 days as normal) or keep trying until he succeeds talking to the lord (talking not convincing him) which might take weeks, with the ability to call him back through the minister.

 

[freyj]

I am not planning to change the native code which is used when you talk to a lord. (the code simply is a mess and quite complicated) But since I am working on the emissary way I introduced with Diplomacy anyway, I might also include some additional code which takes for example the number of fiefs of the target and some other things which freyj mentioned into account.

Now I see the real constraint in this: Native sucks in many respects regarding lord recruitment, but since TalesWorld is still actively updating it, you don't want to have any unofficial fix that might come in conflict with Native in the future. Well, perhaps this argument should be included in the FAQ as well so that people can understand better the situation.

Even with this constraint though, I guess we can still have a separate and largely different calculation for recruiting through the emissary. I have to admit that currently I don't use emissary for recruitment at all, because I cannot control the process, I will lose my companion for a while, and the chance of success seems even lower than talking in person myself. I imagine a lot of testing and tuning would be required.

It seems to me that recruiting lords is fairly easy once you know what to do - ie often doable but still appropriately hard since it wouldn't make much sense if you convince anyone to become a traitor without trouble.

Perhaps it would be less frustrating if convincing them to join you was harder than it is while talking to them in private easier - so you could have an idea where they stand instead of expecting that a lord would join you if only you could get a chance to talk to him, causing you to keep stalking him for weeks only to find out that... he won't.

But I think the way it currently works is fair regardless. The only suggestion I'd like to make, and since I never managed to successfully convince anyone to join me through an emissary, would be to have your emissary use an argument of your choice from the ones you can use when talking to a lord yourself (I'm the rightful ruler, I'll give you lands etc.). That could potentially be balanced by having a chance that your emissary will fail due to not be able to speak to the lord in private, which could in turn be balanced by choosing how long should they keep trying - ie you could order that your emissary will try once (which would take 2 days as normal) or keep trying until he succeeds talking to the lord (talking not convincing him) which might take weeks, with the ability to call him back through the minister.

I think we differ mainly on "what should be expected". What I expect has been that if there are constantly 100+ feudal lords in the whole world, then if I am a monarch who occupies 2/3 of the world, then there should roughly be 2/3 lords who serve me and 1/3 lords who serve others. I'd say that's roughly what it is in real middle ages and in games such as Crusader Kings. However, we all know that in M&B, in the end you have 9/10 lords either locked in their prison cell forever, or staying in the last castle of a faction like a ghetto. Worse, you can rarely catch them or recruit them, never kill them, and they can always use magic to create large troops if they are free. That's just very unrealistic and counter-intuitive.

Since the problem is inherent in Native, I am by no means saying that Diplomacy should fix the situation directly. However, emissary seems a definite improvement and good workaround, while adding some extra conversation options in prison, as another thread is suggesting, seems yet another definite improvement. With these improvements, we will be able to make the game more realistic and intuitive, even when some Native components are still broken as they are now.

 

[Waihti]

Even with this constraint though, I guess we can still have a separate and largely different calculation for recruiting through the emissary. I have to admit that currently I don't use emissary for recruitment at all, because I cannot control the process, I will lose my companion for a while, and the chance of success seems even lower than talking in person myself.

it's not working as intented in 3.1.1

 

[Deathwarmedover]

Thank you Caba. As soon as I applied your fix, lords that hadn't left a town center for 300 days started to patrol again.

 

[ellwoodis]

I'm so glad to see this discussion. I'm the one who posted the thread up top.
I think you're working on they key problem: Lords never want to talk when in the presence of other Lords or going on a group mission.
To the fellow who says he picked up 15 Lords on his tour of the kingdoms, dream on. Lord recruitment in the latest update is as broken as ever.  I have some many trials under my bout I feel it was a full time job for 2 months this summer.
I've NEVER had an emissary successfully recruit a LORD. I've tried putting them at Persuasion 10 and visiting the most vengeful Lords.  "Count X doesn't want to join you" is all I ever hear.
When I recruit in person, I max out my Persuation, Honor, and RTR to the highest levels and just camp outside their castles for many days.  10% chance they'll come out after a week, and then they always say "another time."
What's the point of wasting your companions' time?  You need the few that remain after 70% of them have vanished on assorted emissary missions.
Wahiti:  Please at least show us a way to change the Warband Lord decision calculation, either through emissaries or in-person.
Figure out a way to prevent most of the companions from vanishing when I send them on simple emissary missions.
Add some new companions or some professional emissaries.
And when a faction is destroyed, at least some of the Lords should join the faction with the highest relation and the most empty fiefs.

 

[Caba`drin]

Ellwoodis, I know I've responded to your posts in the past, but I continue to see the same rant in various threads over a long period of time (while your rank hasn't gone up...so you aren't spending any time reading and learning about the possible answers/solutions to your issues?) and I must admit I remain slightly mystified and frustrated by the overall tone of your comments. In any case, there are already solutions to some of the things you suggest as I outline below.

To the fellow who says he picked up 15 Lords on his tour of the kingdoms, dream on.

I similarly have picked up well more than 15 lords in more than one campaign, most of them without much of an issue. My typical campaign has me turning 2 companions to vassals and recruiting the rest from the other kingdoms. The majority of them, if you target your efforts at raising relations well (Native quest-doing, battle aiding, and shipments of oil and wine), come fairly painlessly. I only keep for myself a town, castle, and village typically and the companions get only 1 (maybe 2) fief each...the rest, which by end game is most of Calradia, are distributed across the lords by renown as I've discussed elsewhere. While you are not alone in your frustration, "that fellow" is by far not alone in having success with the Native recruitment system.

I think you're working on they key problem: Lords never want to talk when in the presence of other Lords or going on a group mission.

...which as always, makes sense. Consider the repercussions of a lord being seen consorting with the enemy...a general seen in the close confidence of the enemy king. Why would they put themselves in such a position? Now, if you want the process for yourself to be as easy as possible, use the tweak Stildawn references above and disable the proximity check. Done.

When I recruit in person, I max out my Persuation, Honor, and RTR to the highest levels and just camp outside their castles for many days.  10% chance they'll come out after a week, and then they always say "another time."

First, it takes some time after you've been rejected by a lord before they are willing to talk politics again. They reset, but it takes more than a week. And you are certain these are NOT honorable lords and they have decently (<-10 at least) negative relations with their lieges? And that you have good (at least 30+ with some 40 or 50+) relations with them? Do consider that you may be playing an unusually difficult campaign because the random number generator gave you more honorable lords than dishonorable lords which will make the process more difficult than others might experience.

But second, please use the fix in my signature and referenced above in this thread, which will allow you to skip the week long camp hoping that someone leaves their castle. That is a legitimately broken part of the Native code, but something that can be easily remedied. Ease your pain.

I've NEVER had an emissary successfully recruit a LORD. I've tried putting them at Persuasion 10 and visiting the most vengeful Lords.  "Count X doesn't want to join you" is all I ever hear.
What's the point of wasting your companions' time?  You need the few that remain after 70% of them have vanished on assorted emissary missions.
Wahiti:...Figure out a way to prevent most of the companions from vanishing when I send them on simple emissary missions.

Aside from rudeness of using that entitled/demanding tone toward a member of the player community, a modder, who is providing you with the fruits of HIS/HER effort for YOUR enjoyment for free, have you not seen Waihti state that he is working on those very bugs?

This one was directly addressed to you...

Even more important, what's the point in emissaries if 95% of the missions come back as failures?

to track the issues with the disappearing emissaries down I need savegames where you sent an emissary and he's not coming back.

And just here in this very thread...

Even with this constraint though, I guess we can still have a separate and largely different calculation for recruiting through the emissary. I have to admit that currently I don't use emissary for recruitment at all, because I cannot control the process, I will lose my companion for a while, and the chance of success seems even lower than talking in person myself.

it's not working as intented in 3.1.1

Clearly your voice (and those of others) has been heard. Perhaps it is not an easy fix? I hardly think Waihti is holding out on us all having a laugh about disappearing companions or ineffective emissaries and is satisfied with the fact that the code isn't working as it is intended to work...

Wahiti:..Add some new companions or some professional emissaries.

Again, this is something you can do at the user end. Check out Malik's bazillion companions mod if that is your style. He even merges it with Diplomacy. (3.1, with the update to 3.1.1 coming shortly)

 

[w00d]

i sorta given up on it tbh.

if u recruit a lord, u have to keep him happy which means alot of feasting or riding around buying ale, wine or oil , time i find better spent killing my enemies.

So either u placate him for minimal support, or u dont which means he leaves your faction taking his fiefs with him or u end up kicking him out. So its better not bother at all !

on my 3rd campaign on highest difficulty atm, i just ignore the lords who come looking to join, its pointless to recruit them as you do not need them for your Kingdom at all, Am looking forward to be the solo King of all of Calradia, every other lord is either imprisoned or left !

 

[ripple]

I too have been really frustrated with the difficulty of recruiting new lords when you start your own kingdom, to the extent that I've usually ended the game at that phase and restart new campaigns. While I'd like to see some of the suggestions ellwoodis fruition in either native or in diplomacy at some point, I am quite content with the fact that shortly after I implemented the script edit from Caba'drin and the text edit suggested by Stildawn, two lords almost immediately defected to my faction--and I didn't even do anything. So thanks for that.

 

[ellwoodis]

I am sorry for the tone and have sent personal messages of thanks to Wahiti.
I just want to raise the general consciousness in the community about the significance of this problem.

Caba:
That tweak really works!
After artificially raising my Persuasion to 10, I find I can pick off suspcious and lower Lords at a fairly good rate once my relation, honor, etc. is high and they lack fiefs.  The problem with the hiding Lords seems to be solved.

Others see: http://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php/topic,112413.0.html

I also saw a thread that allowed me to actually adjust the calculation used to help the Lord make the decision.  I lost it and would appreciate someone posting it.  I believe it was changing just one number in a script file that was at a 1 to a higher value.

Thank you for making this game bearable.

The emissaries are still not working in my game but I see Wahiti acknowledges this. 

Another issue is that Lords from extinctfactions never join my side despite our past hi relations.