Somethings gotta give

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Being an errand boy is no longer required. You can max out slots in a town (any town) simply by leaving a companion there. Nobles generally can't reach the two deepest slots unless they own the settlement in question, and not always then, so by having 40 relations or more, you can pretty reliably get the highest tier troops that particular notable offers.
For the town - yes, for the village - no (or has it been changed?). Tried leaving a noble in a village when the emissary-feature was only implemented, they had no effect on village nobles.
 
For the town - yes, for the village - no (or has it been changed?). Tried leaving a noble in a village when the emissary-feature was only implemented, they had no effect on village nobles.
Not for villages, but villages push out so many nobles now that I don't mind.

edit: On reflection, I do mind, because those nobles get hoovered up by the AI. It ultimately contributes to the grind of having to wear down a faction over like a half dozen or more huge battles before you can start successfully sieging stuff and having it stick.
 
Being an errand boy is no longer required. You can max out slots in a town (any town) simply by leaving a companion there. Nobles generally can't reach the two deepest slots unless they own the settlement in question, and not always then, so by having 40 relations or more, you can pretty reliably get the highest tier troops that particular notable offers.

The emissary system is one of the bigger game-changing things they've introduced and I'm really surprised (in a pleasant way) that they haven't nerfed it into the ground because it takes one of the worst grinds -- running quests in the early game -- and effectively makes it optional. Or you can combine the two and practically maintain over a hundred near-untouchable recruits, available most of the time by throwing emissaries and running quests.
I have to use emissaries more often it seems. Does their charm affect how frequent they boost relationships or is related to your charm?
 
It boosts your Charm and the emissary's but doesn't require it at all.
You mean, "their" charm? Because the emissary right now receives a lot of charm points just for sitting inside the town, but I receive nothing from it. My source of charm points are quests.
 
You mean, "their" charm? Because the emissary right now receives a lot of charm points just for sitting inside the town, but I receive nothing from it. My source of charm points are quests.
I'm pretty certain my own Charm has ticked up on the campaign map due to one of my emissaries increasing relations with a clan.
 
I'm pretty certain my own Charm has ticked up on the campaign map due to one of my emissaries increasing relations with a clan.
This may be true though, since my Charm has already reached its limit. Maybe I can test it when one of my daughters will take place of the character I'm in control now.
 
100K men moving through a province that doesn't even support 12K normally or some literal random desert bandit instantly raising an army of 250K because too many of my cousins like to party definitely feel like cheating to me.

The first thing you mention isn't a mechanic for AI to allow them to cheat. It's available even to the player, but they receive penalties for doing so (being in a province over the limit). Considerable penalties, in fact. So...yea. Secondly, you're misrepresenting power spread, even among what you consider less favorable AI (desert bandit), with cheat AI and it's simply not accurate at all. But uh...sure thing.

There was a lord of the rings mod for warband, the third age, where whenever an a.i. army or player would be defeated, it would weaken the overall faction slowly. This feels more satisfied when defeating armies, but also challenging for everyone, if you lose a lot of battles, it'll cost you.

That'd be great to see, but very unlikely to even be considered.

I was going to write something very similar, you beat me to it. They probably lack both direction, organization *and* skill. No offense for Taleworlds, I'm not saying they're horrible people. They're just below-average developers.

I actually think it has to do with direction and leadership. I have this feeling they are running very, very, very poorly. It isn't that their dev team is incompetent in regards to their development skills, at least that's not what I think. Leadership is probably just breathing down their neck, "correcting" them, diverting attention to other meaningless features or those that could wait etc. This results in a product that is grossly disconnected feeling.
 
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The first thing you mention isn't a mechanic for AI to allow them to cheat. It's available even to the player, but they receive penalties for doing so (being in a province over the limit). Considerable penalties, in fact. So...yea.
When the AI event armies suffer 0 attrition for going over province, they are cheating. The Mongol, Turkish conqueror, Aztecs and Chinese doomstacks are all attrition-free in CK2. That's not a mechanic available to the player.
Secondly, you're misrepresenting power spread, even among what you consider less favorable AI (desert bandit), with cheat AI and it's simply not accurate at all. But uh...sure thing.
I'm not misrepresenting the power spread. The size of the revolt doomstack scales with realm/levy size. If you think it is good for the game, whatever. But it is a very obvious cheat to have hundreds of thousands of men just appear out of the desert. Or anywhere, really. CK2 cheats so much more than BL it is almost unbelievable.
 
When the AI event armies suffer 0 attrition for going over province, they are cheating. The Mongol, Turkish conqueror, Aztecs and Chinese doomstacks are all attrition-free in CK2. That's not a mechanic available to the player.

AI territory? Maxed out defensive tree? These things can dramatically reduce attrition. You're being incredibly vague on the situation beyond it involving AI. And there's always at least 1% attrition even at maxed trees, even for AI. AI attrition from friendlies costs me many battles, so I've experienced it, and I've seen 30k troops from enemies take attrition/etc as they cross into my territory or over rivers/etc. Secondly, there are Paradox events in game which spawn special troops that may not have these restrictions—such as in Stellaris, when a certain event is triggered (I think all of us Stellaris fans know what I'm talking about lol). In these events, they are meant to be difficult, almost "doom" like, for a challenge. They are certainly not "cheaty", at least not in the same way as you are suggesting or even comparable to Bannerlord pulling 1000+ men out of nowhere and only in a few in-game days. So...not the same thing.

I'm not misrepresenting the power spread. The size of the revolt doomstack scales with realm/levy size. If you think it is good for the game, whatever. But it is a very obvious cheat to have hundreds of thousands of men just appear out of the desert. Or anywhere, really. CK2 cheats so much more than BL it is almost unbelievable.

See above for more of the answer, but just wanted to point out this is from 2013 before I duck out of this....
 
This not a very Mount and Blade suggestion but what if instead of recruiting from villages the villages (and towns) instead have production queues for troops, like many other games have. An AI lord can have a few queues going in various villages and he will go around collecting them when done. Recruit queues could be fast, higher tier queues could take days.

Troop production queues are a staple of many games but not for Mount and Blade and it may not work, or even be fun. But it's an idea.

I think a steady supply of troops for each lord through a queue system so that they aren't each scrambling to recruit the few precious troops available in the villages could work.

It's an idea.
 
A que production system would align Bannerlord up with strategy games like Northgard/Stellaris/Civilization. I don't think that'd fit very well at all in Mount and Blade, and is because of that, very unlikely. The requirement for the AI to run about to unpop ques would probably make it go a little slower before he has that same army again, though.
 
I think the whole idea of "snowballing" was overblown to begin with. Before Bannerlord, I'd never heard the term in the context of gaming, but the thing its referring to is "momentum". Momentum is an important factor for any competitive undertaking. Take momentum away, and you're left with a static, unchanging world.

If the same faction keeps steamrolling everyone, you don't block all possibility of steamrolling, you rebalance the faction(s) until they all have a decent chance to do it.
 
A que production system would align Bannerlord up with strategy games like Northgard/Stellaris/Civilization. I don't think that'd fit very well at all in Mount and Blade, and is because of that, very unlikely. The requirement for the AI to run about to unpop ques would probably make it go a little slower before he has that same army again, though.
That was my thinking with it. It should be take longer for the AI to amass a large party again, and I'd want to prevent them competing with each other for recruits because villages are first come, first served.

I think the whole idea of "snowballing" was overblown to begin with. Before Bannerlord, I'd never heard the term in the context of gaming, but the thing its referring to is "momentum". Momentum is an important factor for any competitive undertaking. Take momentum away, and you're left with a static, unchanging world.

If the same faction keeps steamrolling everyone, you don't block all possibility of steamrolling, you rebalance the faction(s) until they all have a decent chance to do it.
The problem is this isn't one of those competitive momentum games either. This is supposed to be a long-term game you don't play to "win" like a 4x or RTS or something like that. The devs are trying to balance it so the war is ongoing and the AI doesn't start snowballing/steamrolling other factions. Not easy to do.
 
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The problem is this isn't one of those competitive momentum games either. This is supposed to be a long-term game you don't play to "win" like a 4x or RTS or something like that. The devs are trying to balance it so the war is ongoing and the AI doesn't start snowballing/steamrolling other factions. Not easy to do.
This is a game about military conquest. It doesn't get more competitive than that. You can "win" on the micro scale in individual battles, and you can win on the macro scale by controlling the entire map. I agree that this should take a long time. The problem is that letting every AI lord regenerate their army in a week is a terrible hack that keeps the winning side from advancing. It makes battles meaningless and turns the game into a giant stalemate.
 
They are certainly not "cheaty", at least not in the same way as you are suggesting or even comparable to Bannerlord pulling 1000+ men out of nowhere and only in a few in-game days. So...not the same thing.
It is literally the same thing: the AI cheating to have an advantage in the form of massive troop numbers. Those special event troops almost always scale to your realm/levy size, the mechanic hasn't changed much since 2013 like you imply and has gotten worse over the lifecycle of the game because PDS keeps adding in new doomstack events for "challenge." People complain about AI armies in Bannerlord just appearing from nowhere when they don't. Saying CK2 is a better example when it does create troops from nothing, then have those troops not suffer from basic mechanics like attrition (otherwise they'd faceplant every time) is nonsense.

CK2 cheats in the exact way you think BL does (it doesn't, except for like 10 troops on spawn) then it cheats another way because the AI is too dumb to manage otherwise.
I think the whole idea of "snowballing" was overblown to begin with. Before Bannerlord, I'd never heard the term in the context of gaming, but the thing its referring to is "momentum". Momentum is an important factor for any competitive undertaking. Take momentum away, and you're left with a static, unchanging world.

If the same faction keeps steamrolling everyone, you don't block all possibility of steamrolling, you rebalance the faction(s) until they all have a decent chance to do it.
The full context of the complaint was people who went 10-15 years without joining a faction in BL and were upset that Sturgia was wiped off the map by time they felt ready to join. They wanted a situation where every faction was available after 1280 days in-game. They call it snowballing because it was really marginal early game advantages becoming bigger and bigger over time, because battles are pretty deterministic in BL and there are a lot of them in any given war, meaning the law of averages took over and made sure those factions with slight advantages would eventually prevail.
 
It is literally the same thing: the AI cheating to have an advantage in the form of massive troop numbers. Those special event troops almost always scale to your realm/levy size, the mechanic hasn't changed much since 2013 like you imply and has gotten worse over the lifecycle of the game because PDS keeps adding in new doomstack events for "challenge." People complain about AI armies in Bannerlord just appearing from nowhere when they don't. Saying CK2 is a better example when it does create troops from nothing, then have those troops not suffer from basic mechanics like attrition (otherwise they'd faceplant every time) is nonsense.

CK2 cheats in the exact way you think BL does (it doesn't, except for like 10 troops on spawn) then it cheats another way because the AI is too dumb to manage otherwise.

No, it isn't "literally" the same thing and I explained how, and even pointed out the "proof" you had for one of your claims was old as dirt and expansions old + balance patches old. That was 8 years ago. 8 years. And yes...it has changed considerably over the years and any AI not getting attrition was due to bugs (you can confirm this by just checking the forums, in which the devs respond to these threads to say that that's not an intended feature) or balance issues, which had been patched/changed. I play this game all of the time, and have nearly 500 hours into the game. The only time AI does not get any attrition is when special events spawn or situations like that, which are not all that common. Any other time AI has low attrition, is due to game mechanics which are open for players to use as well, such as maxed out defensive trees.

You can learn a bit more reading this (which mentions one of those event or culture specific situations in which attrition is not a thing): https://ck2.paradoxwikis.com/Attrition

Players can further avoid this problem by keeping watch on provinces for seasons, supplies, religions (pagans etc) as well as, if it is their territory, buffing up their trees. On the road, players and AI, can help stave off attrition by looking at the supply amount in each province and even avoiding costly routes (rivers, mountains, snow etc). This is not something only available to AI. It simply isn't. If a player is smart enough to take advantage of it, they do. If they don't, they're going to get steam rolled by anything that moves, regardless of if its 10k or 30k.

Bannerlord, on the other hand, has this problem spread out through all AI constantly. It isn't a "oh, maybe this will happen, better be careful!" it's a constant problem. Beat an AI, they come back tenfold. Always. Instead of handling this seemingly endless population in Bannerlord or restrict it somehow, they just allow AI to recruit endlessly immediately after loss. So I say again: not the same thing and you know it. But whatever floats your boat, huh?
 
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