Settlement management

[NamingIsHard]

Edited Dec,4th,2020
This post was orginally posted mid-April, I stopped playing for half an year then retried Bannerlord this week. Now editing for some new idea and changes to existing ideas.
This post was originated from food problem in early patches. As I can see TW has tried to fix it, but via a brutal approach: increase the number of food income and slow the speed of prospersity growth(food/prospersity interaction aimed at a soft cap for settlement prospersity). It is true that this change somehow decrease impact of food problem on playthrough, but in-depth mechnics problem is not fixed.

So I have some suggestions for this problem.

1. For this point, I want to first clarify a claim. Are food in player inventory and food of settlement on the same numerical scale? i.e. if a set of units consume 1 units of supply when in player's party, they will consume 1 unit of food when in garrison. As far as I can see, it is a true claim, but still need clarification from others. This is what I did to verify this claim: I moved all troops from a castle which shows 'garrison -14' on food income, then my party food consumption increase from 3.24 to 18.1
2. As I can see, prospersity is related to daily production, which is good.(though detailed formula beneath is unknown, settlement with higher prospersity will have higher daily production. Looks like simply prospersity/100=daily production bouns from prospersity) However, in current version of the game, daily production is only mainly related to building project, and become completelynearly useless after completion of all feasible building projects. But 'production' is supposed to mean more than construction, for example, food production and goods production. So what about adding more functionality related to daily production and let player decide how daily production will be used? More specifically, we may have options like goods, food, construction for daily production, and player may decide amount of production goes into each category.
   • Construction: Daily Production goes to this category will be used for building project. And we may have some repeatable construction project after completion of all buildings. I know we have daily defaults now, but that just does not interact with daily production. Daily defaults now interact with daily production: daily defaults in settlement with higher daily production will yields a higher output, though numeric scale looks weird.
   • Food: Daily Production goes to this category will increase food production
   • Goods/Workshop/Industry: Production goes to this category will affect workshop production.
   • Any other ideas?
   • To make the gameplay even closer to reality, we may have features like gradually change towards player setting after modification, or reduction in loyalty when unpleasant modification was made by lord, or even some vic2-like features. But whether these changes will lead Bannerlord gameplay to a better or worse result requires further discussion.
3. Each settlement can only have 3 workshops, regardless of any other measures. This is wierd, what about adding building project that may create extra workshop slots after met prospersity requirement?
4. It feels like the current settlement celebrity system can have some changes and interact with the above two points, like workshop/civilian daily production controlled by local celebrity and lords(Does the current daily production represent the whole city or the proportion that the lord has control over?), but didnt have an organized idea, will try edit this later.
5. As the dev diaries said, settlement growth are now visible in Bannerlord, which is already implemented. However, this implementation is too simple at this moment. Only upgrading city walls has such effects.
6. Currently, food for civilian market and military use is not seperated, which is not realistic. Military supplies may be on market during hard time, but now in the game, military supplies are always on civilian market regardless of any other measures. There is no way for lords to store food for their garrison troops and result in constant 0 food storage during siege. What about let garrison troops consume supplies in settlement stash first(but to achieve this design, we also need to add stash to castle settlement. Already implemented), and buy food from market only when stash is empty. In addition, constantly transport food to settlement stash is annoying for player, and also irrealistic. So what about add options for players to do it automatically? For example,
   • Let caravans/family members do the job(in fact, I prefer a caravan system like in The Patrician III games),
   • Setting a price threshold and let garrison troops purchase food beneath this threshold from local market
   • Any other ideas?
7. There is food from fiefs listed in settlement food income. I'm assuming it represent tax(as far as I know, ancient peasent did submit food as tax), because food income from trade are listed seperately for each food category. But tax should go directly into lord's stash. So this point 7 will only be meaningful if we have point 6 achieved.
8. Village management and construction, but I guess this system is planned and on its way to the game. We only need to wait for it being installed. Here I have another idea about family system. What about let the family leader to further distribute village fiefs to family members? In current version of game, nobles only have 2 ranks, kings and direct vassals of kings, which is not a good simulation of medieval time.
9. Auto-recuritment. As lord of fiefs, why are we supposed to recurit by ourselves all the time? Officers can do this job for players. Let settlement automatically recuit soldiers from local recurit pool(by this I mean, the town/castle and related villages), players can set several limitations for auto-recuritment, like minimal tiers of recurited soldiers, maximum number of garrison, noble/non-noble soldier choices, etc.
10. Partols/guards for civillians. Raiding are annoying, no matter from enemy lords or bandits. Though we can have sub-troops lead by family members, we can't order them to do certain jobs. In addition, there is no reason that lords must take care about everything for fiefs on their own.(Family members can also be regarded as minor lords) (point 9&10 are added by improved garrison mod, but I still believe they should be part of the vanilla)
11. Loyalty and security is kind of meaningless now. I can't see to what these two statistics contribute. A simple idea could be relating security to respawn rate of bandits. Any other ideas?
12. Now finish quests from settlement celebrity will increase prospersity grow. However, it's implemented in an unsatisfying way, no bonus from quests completion, only less penalty if you complete the quests. And the mechnics of mission spawn/result is questionable, for example, if I complete a soldier training quest, the number of soldiers in village won't increase, if I complete a grain collecting quest, I cant see improvement to the village, and they spawn randomly(from my perspective). An ideal implementation example would be, if there are lots of bandits around, the villager will request soldiers training quest, and completely finish will increase the number of soldiers in the village with same numeric amount.
13. Local quest's interaction with settlement management also brings some new problems:
    • Followers numbers: The number of followers are limited, At family level 6 you can have up to 8 followers, and your own troop need followers for engineer/scout/surgeon/quartermaster, other troops of your family may also need this kind of staff(currently you can change positions of family troops, though you can only have 1 NPC in other troops), your caravans requires followers to lead, your settlement can have a follower in charge and provide bonus. Then you can hardly have followers left to do annoying and time-consuming missions for you, can you imaging a medvial lord spend half of his life travelling through the continent for guarding caravans? I understand the game is somehow broken if player has a full legion of followers, but current number limit of followers is too small. A simple solution can be increasing number of followers limit with respect to number of owned of settlement. I also understand that the design may prefer players to distribute more role to family members, but in current stage of Bannerlord, content is not sufficient for players to maintain such a long playthrough.
    • Follower skills: Even if you have follower availiable, they can hardly met required skill levels for many quests. Like my troop leaders that has been leading a seperate troop for several years does not have required skill level for soldier training/hideout cleaning quest, that is weird, really weird. Simply lower skill requirement/accelerate skill leveling/increase follower starting skill level can do the job. In addition, currently being in charge of settlement will only give the NPC steward experience, but manage a settlement requires much more skills than that.
    • Mission accept: why does a lord have to go to each village and ask locals "if you have any urgent?"? If they really need help, why is it so hard for them to simply send a request to the lord or at least to the city so the lords can see his/her people need help after returned from battlefield?

That's all the ideas I have currently, looking forward to ideas from you guys.
By the way, I'm not sure if this kind of post is supposed to be at the singleplayer forum or suggestion forum and if this post is too long and supposed to be seperate into several posts., please tell me if I'm not posting at the appropriate place and in a proper way.
I'm not a native English speaker, please let me know if my wording was inapproariate/led to confusion/hard to read/etc.

 

[NamingIsHard]

Also not sure when I have new ideas whether I'm supposed to create a new post or editing the existing post, any ideas?

 

[Andrei[beast]]

Also not sure when I have new ideas whether I'm supposed to create a new post or editing the existing post, any ideas?

Maybe make a reply as when someone gives a reply on the thread they probably won't check the initial message but they will probably check a new reply from the op.
Regarding your suggestions, they are great and feel well thought but you would've maybe wanted to publish it in the suggestions part.

 

[reyismujafi]

For now, i suggest we could have a method as Ruler or fief owner to move troops between garrison remotely.... its annoying when i have to come to my fief just to move the troops between garrison, while my kingdomg grow far and wide... (my first fief is at Battania, and now my campaign already reach central empire and central Aserai)

 

[Hero07911010]

That's interesting. They could form a party and move to the other Settlement. Risk being attacked by an enemy party/army... That would be an interesting addition.