Snowballing?

[Zergit]

In Warband, Kingdoms had a habit of banding together to stop any one empire gaining too much power, happened a lot with your own kingdom too, suddenly you'd have 3 empires declare war on you at once if you took several fiefs.. I'm up to my 3rd playthrough and at 1089 the map is now 90% red and 10% blue.
I think the problem might have a lot to do with the army system and defections. Often I've seen kingdoms siege 3 places at once, and the defenders can't do anything, then suddenly like dominoes lords look like they defect and what was 6 cities and 12 castles on the defenders side is only 2 cities and 1 castle after 10 days.
I watched the southern empire collapse in what felt like 5 minutes of gameplay when they controlled 1/4 the map. Its frustrating because it seems to happen just as I am ready to pick a side to fight for and my skills are sufficient to actually join a battle without begin the first to get knocked out.

Also just to add, It is impressive to see you guys working so hard on the fixes and such, keep up the good work devs, the games still great even with the bugs.

 

[Woopzilla]

Better to side on the more static wars mentality than to have peoples' generational play throughs wiped out. Thanks for the work DEVs, I am testing too! Not much to do here. One thing I rarely ever see is a faction take back their territory once the have lost it. Viking conquest's measures to stop empire spam worked very well if i recall.

Yes, it would be better if they worked in the other direction.

They should achieve a near static state first, and then slowly tweak it to make it as dynamic as they want it to be. It's preferable to have a world being too static than being a complete steamroll as it is now, because then it won't impact your campaign as much and you can still play on and test things (like the family aspect). I think it's critical to keep players interested in playing long campaigns so they can really test all the systems and find more bugs and issues.

Static does not mean lack of sieges and big battles either... because we've had plenty of experience of that with Warband. I remember some very good campaigns there, with loads of fighting despite the castles and towns changing very little. And when towns get captured, we all remember the frustration of it being not awarded to anyone for a few days, so it's left poorly garrisoned and enemy factions were quick to retake it. Conquering a place is one thing, keeping hold of it is another thing entirely.

 

[paladinx333]

There is starving effect on garrison sizes caused by raided villages also.

Garrisons seem to starve no matter what. Right now I am looking at a castle with two healthy villages and the garrison has no food. I am trying to decide if I should starve them out instead of assaulting. It should take a week tops.

 

[Timbotron]

Making stable world is not hard. We just close defections, decrease sieges, make garrisons huge and give ai extra money to feed his garrison then its easy to make game stable. However it is not entertaining and it is not player-like ai playing. In every game you should see map is dynamic and take you in different direction. Of course one faction controlling all map is not something we also want to see. However we do not want to see stable world also. Currently AI is acting just like you same rules are applied everywhere. It makes no cheat. They pay their troops just like you they collect recruit from villages just like you, they suffer from raids, their economy get damaged after raids. There are lots of actions happening. There is starving effect on garrison sizes caused by raided villages also. All these mechanics make controlling snowball effect harder. It is also because we are currently at Early Access and development continues. Day by day game will be better and balanced.

You can see results in next patch I hope if it passes tests.

The way the AI has the same rules as the players is one of my favourite new features about bannerlord , its one of the most important foundations in my opinion for building a game that is challenging but also feels fair and Im glad this is in the game

Because the ai is like a player now it makes sense that an ai ruler likes to push his advantage and keep snowballing once he's winning so maybe there needs to be some kind of mechanic that makes the ruler of the attacking kingdom want to seek peace the longer a war goes on. i.e a "War exhaustion" type penalty to vassal relations or taxes the longer a war goes on.



1. Just an idea but perhaps having the ruler of the attacking kingdom (ie the kingdom that initiated/declared the war) take a daily influence loss while continuing a war could be a solution, the longer the war goes on and the more casualties incurred the more daily influence it costs the ruler to continue the war.

2. If the ruler runs out of influence there could be penalties like reduced tax income across the kingdom, reduced troop morale, recurring loss of relation with his vassals, decreased settlement prosperity and loyalty across the kingdom (im assuming loyalty will play into the rebellion feature that seems to be planned in the future) and other negative modifiers (these are just suggestion) as the time goes on where the ruler is at 0 or negative influence these penalties get worse.

3. These penalties and rules would only apply to the attacking kingdom (lets call them kingdom A), the defending kingdom (kingdom B) would not have any influence loss to continue the war nor would they have any of the other penalties mentioned above. However if the attackers/ kingdom A tried to offer peace and kingdom B refused kingdom B would become the attacker and the ruler of kingdom B would now have to pay daily influence to continue the war and have the possibility of suffering penalties for the attacking kingdom and kingdom A would be the defender and would no longer suffer from any influence loss due to the continuation of the war, their other penalties described above would slowly return to zero (giving kingdom B a chance to press their advantage for a bit) this way a kingdom would have reason to seek peace the longer a war goes on even if they have an advantage over another kingdom .



Just an initial idea that hopefully could help limit the snowball effect while feeling fair and providing interesting choices to be made. Might be too complicated, maybe it would be simpler just to get rid of the influence loss and give the attacker an increasing penalty to taxes or relations or whatever the longer the war went on. Anyways just throwing it out there.