Starting a new game has become too much of a chore..

[Luthius]

I hate to say it, but i preferred the older version of M&B. I find now with only getting one skill point every 2 levels of intelligence and not being able to upgrade your troops past an arbitary level dependent on your own, starting a new game is too difficult to be fun. In short, it has become a chore. Latter gameplay is fine, i just can not be bothered starting again each time a new patch comes out. I liked being able to raise an army quickly to beat off the inevitable early dark knight attack and i liked having my skill points in surgery, first aid and (the other healing one) which kept my men alive. Now every time i venture out i meet a pack of dark knights or sea raiders which whup all my peasants and leave me with nothing again. It's fun to have a good fight, but the restrictions on the skill points and troop upgrades mean than you run from most you meet. In fact the fights that you're supposed to take on, being those against small parties of bandits, can not be achieved bacause the bandits move quicker than your merry band of peasants so you never catch up.

OK.. Yes you do eventually get off the ground and establish your army and it is good when you can finally upgrade your men to horsemen (only you tend not to have the men ready to upgrade as they're all dead) and it is maybe more realistic because of this but it makes starting to game no fun (for me) and on a very serious note to the Devs, this will put potential customers off buying the game!

OK(2).. I know i can use cheats to advance levels etc, i just don't like doing it. It ruins my feel for my character and seriously detracts from the game. I may as well just be using an instant battle program instead.

Finally. I'm sorry i had to say all this, it's just been nagging me for a while and i don't mean and disrespect to the Dev's, they are doing a fantastic job (i consider this constructive criticism) it's just something i had to point out, from my perspective anyway.

Please don't all flame me for having an opinion (even if it seems rather negative to the great game). I just felt it needed saying (and maybe i'm in a bad mood )

Thanks,
Luthius

 

[Visigoth]

I agree... it's too bad that a new game must be started every patch. Like you, I HATE using cheats... it's a pet peeve of mine.

 

[Sir Saladin]

Just take a break for a week or two, then you might feel better with it.

 

[Narcissus]

There is no reason to apologize. If you were being rude or hateful, yes ... but you stated your opinion very maturely and with loads of respect. For that, thanks.

I'm sorry that you feel that the troop limits and lower skill bonuses are ruining the game for you. I'm also sorry that you hate creating new characters so much.

The skill bonus opinion is just that, opinion. Many people like it the old way and many people like it the new way. I think Armagan's intent was to slow down the uber-powerful character from appearing for a while (that is a guess and nothing more). On that point, it was needed. By the time a character reached level 15-20 ... they were nigh unstoppable. A balance issue was what caused the change and I'm sorry that you dislike it so much.

Creating new characters is a tough thing to debate. Even the people that prefer to start each version with a new character like to have their favorites still around. Yet it is a necessity. If Armagan made each version compatable with one another ... there would be a whole new slew of bugs that he would have to chase down, find, and fix. That isn't including the time that it would take to code in the ability to use the older versions saves. On some upgrades it is possible (depending on what changes and addition the upgrade makes) and on some it isn't. Regardless, it is still a necessity. We get updates on quite a regular basis and the game advances and grows quickly. If he spent the time to make the versions work together, the increase in time between updates would be drastic.

As Sir Saladin said ... maybe taking a week or two from the game would help? Several of us (myself included) get burnt out on the game or get frustrated with changes that have been made ... but after a 'break' we come back to it and fall in love with the game all over again.

I hope that you aren't giving up on M&B completely as it is a great game and getting better all the time.

Hope to see you around soon,

Narcissus

 

[barbaros]

I also miss "a skill point for each point in intelligence" days. In current system I have to distribute all non-combat skills to Marnid and Borcha until level 20-25. Its not a very big problem for me though.
You are complaining about the peasants being slow and weak. May I suggest not to hire a lot of peasants?. In low levels you should fight solo or hire 2-3 peasants at a time for not slowing down too much. To be able to fight solo, you should stick to river pirates for first 4-5 levels. Then advance to mountain and forest bandits. In fact, if you choose you fights carefully, you don't really need an army in most of the situations. Why do you expect to beat powerful enemies such as dark knights or sea riders at low levels?. Of course you will run away. If you can beat them at low levels, then there is no motivation to continue playing.
And for upgrading your troops, a lot of people have complained about the fact that you can command a lot of knights at low levels when your all money and equipment does not worth a single knight's armor. They say its nonsense.
You say the game is less fun for you and this makes me think balancing a game and making everyone happy is very difficult for a developer. In fact I think its practically impossible.

 

[Sir Saladin]

It is a little depressing when you can't have a group of knights until you are level 20. Peasant troops are worthless when you can't level the survivors up because they die instantly, I would think it should be OK for a level 6 player to at least have some worthy men at arms at that point because otherwise you are soloing all the time which isn't that much fun because killing 20 bandits might take two hours and you don't get the fun of ordering your men to charge or guard this position because you have no men. I miss the old having troops M&B too.

 

[Louster]

I also have to say, I pretty much agree with the OP. I gave up playing ages ago while waiting for .7, and only recently got back into it, so I've had plenty of "break", but nowadays the initial grind feels much too tedious for me, really. The combination of slower income (I mean, the only viable route early on for making money at a 'reasonable' rate now seems to be via slaves, which is frustratingly limiting), slower skill gain, and whatever else has changed just makes getting to the point where you can experiment (which is where the game becomes fun) a chore.

I somewhat understand the need to delay the "uberness", or whatever, but surely the best way to do that would be to extend the content and challenge, rather than slow down the rate of progress? I realise this is much easier said than done, of course (as any MMORPG will attest to, for example), but yeah.

 

[Kelpo]

I agree wholeheartedly about the silly upgrading level cap system, that doesn't make any kind of sense, and is one of the main reasons your money income is painfully slow for a very long time. Off with it, I say.

 

[captain_bloodloss]

i think the upgrading cap does make sense in a way, since your level represents how much experience you have, you are not going to have knights at a low level because they will not respect someone with no experience, someone who is "beneath them" thus you have to be somewhere in the same ballpark as the people you are hiring, i don't know if this makes sense to you, but to me it does

 

[skorulis]

I really enjoyed the start of M&B, I found the pace about right and liked the skill system, I didn't use many troops so improving them wasn't a problem. The second time I started it wasn't nearly as much fun (knock out river pirates, sell them, repeat) , so I cheated until my character was decent but I ended up just cheating my way through the whole game (i've come this far syndrome).
I think a nice solution would be a savefile converter utility (Remember how Interplay used to let you transfer characters between similar games), rather than introducing bugs by trying to let the game be backwards compatible with savefiles, have a seperate utility that reads old saves and converts them into new ones. I wouldn't even worry about game details (quests,rank,world map etc), I think having my old stats and equipment would be enough to get me past the start of the game and back to where I was before.

 

[Sir Saladin]

i think the upgrading cap does make sense in a way, since your level represents how much experience you have, you are not going to have knights at a low level because they will not respect someone with no experience, someone who is "beneath them" thus you have to be somewhere in the same ballpark as the people you are hiring, i don't know if this makes sense to you, but to me it does

It makes a lot of sense since you are basically a mercenary at the beginning of the game and even if you were the son of a king who would want to follow some spoiled prince into a battle, the problem is that it is no fun leading peasants into battle that can never upgrade because even if you manage to keep some of them alive they won't upgrade and they will all die in the next tough fight. This game is fun when you have a bunch of fighters with you rather than being the High Plains Drifter. at least for me. I say give earlier characters soldiers that can last you know? leather armor instead of cloth nightshirts real weapons rather than scythes and shovels. There must be some way to make sense and yet not make my character so lonely.

 

[Manitas]

I hate to say it, but i preferred the older version of M&B. I find now with only getting one skill point every 2 levels of intelligence and not being able to upgrade your troops past an arbitary level dependent on your own, starting a new game is too difficult to be fun. In short, it has become a chore. Latter gameplay is fine

I feel very different about that.
at around lvl 15 I don't even feel like distributing my skill points anymore. My char is powfull enough to win almost any fight anyway, so it feels somewhat stagnant. Starting anew is the most fun part for me.

I also abandoned raising my own troops in favor of freeing swadian knights being held as prisoners. There's enough of them roaming. Since .703 I even saw knights taken prisoner by river pirates several times.

 

[Kelpo]

i think the upgrading cap does make sense in a way, since your level represents how much experience you have, you are not going to have knights at a low level because they will not respect someone with no experience, someone who is "beneath them" thus you have to be somewhere in the same ballpark as the people you are hiring, i don't know if this makes sense to you, but to me it does

Yes, nobles make an exception, but what about the ordinary rank and file troops like crossbowmen of mercenaries? A soldier follows who he is told to and a mercenary will not turn down any employer if the pay is good enough. The only things that should limit hiring troops should be your rank in the military hierarchy and the amount of denars you're able to pay, not an artificial level cap.

 

[Ahadhran]

perhaps you should be able to hire more skilled troops but not train them past a certain point since how much good is a lvl 6 character going to be at traing a lvl 18-23 or so character...? I think for this reason the level caps are pretty realistic...

although maybe the mercs could advance even when you are low level but at a much reduced pace...

As to the intelligence thing I'm afraid i have to agree that I much prefered it before...this is not because I feel I don't have enough skills to put into combat abilities so much as it is that I don't get to do the more superfluous skills like trading, spotting, tracking or pathfinding, which often add more flavor than actual benefit (at least for me).

Anyway thats my two cents....

 

[Juicy_jae]

I enjoy the challenge, I am very sorry that others dont feel this way.

 

[Elshar]

I'm kinda mixed as well. I honestly don't like starting new games anymore, it seems more like a grind to get to a point where I can get into the bigger battles I like fighting than before.

I also wish the int thing gave more like the .6x series. Maybe some kinda compromise, like 2 skill points for every 3 int? one every two int seems like it's not enough, but I do realize that 1 every int seemed almost excessive. At least this way here someone who gets 27 int would only get 18 skill points instead of 27 or 9.

Ah well, I still love M&B though

Elshar

 

[Kelpo]

perhaps you should be able to hire more skilled troops but not train them past a certain point since how much good is a lvl 6 character going to be at traing a lvl 18-23 or so character...? I think for this reason the level caps are pretty realistic...


although maybe the mercs could advance even when you are low level but at a much reduced pace...

We already have a 'training' skill representing the training the main character does. The experience your troops gain on the battlefield, is something they get all by themselves, regardless of the skills of their commander.

If a country is at war and an inept commander is given a bunch of troops to command, the troops still become hardened veterans as they fight battles, regardless of what their commander does. Fewer soldiers may of course remain alive, thanks to the poor leadership, but the ones that do, learn as they fight more battles. The leader doesn't teach them new tricks as the soldiers gain "levels" they learn them on their own.

 

[jrawlings]

I like the new system, both the level caps and the INT change, here's why:

When you start out, you should be weak, so should your party. You should run in terror when you see the first sign of Black Khergits or Dark Knights, praying that they didn't see you first. Peasants suck, so do militia. But given good orders in battle and sufficient numbers, they can do good things. Simply give them a "1" to start the battle. Let the enemy close in, when they are close, let loose with the "3" and en masse, your peasant army can take down even a mounted knight like pihrana. The other good thing about peasants/militia is that if they die, no worries go to the tavern and get more. Personally, I don't bother hiring mercs in the early game. They slow me down. I focus on completing merchant missions, picking up hirelings only to have sufficient forces to escort caravans. Once I raise in level, I become more skilled, then I get comfortable commanding a larger force, by then, I am almost to the point where I CAN upgrade them to footmen which are decent and soon after, men at arms which are quite nice. This type of character progression makes for a nice game in two parts, first being an evader and the latter being the pursuer.

Now, the INT: Wouldn't it be great if your character could be a tracker, spotter, pathfinding, first aid, surgeon, with a power draw that made the girls feint? Maybe. But I like having to make some choices. I usually play with Marnid as a healer and Borcha as the tracker pathfinder guy. I pump a lot into their INT so they can perform those skills, as a result they are not the best fighters on the battlefield. Early on, when party slots are hard to come by, do I want to have both Marnid AND Borcha? Or do I want to have a larger party? I LIKE dilemmas like this, I think this is what makes the game fun for me.

I realise that this may not make the game fun for all, but that's why the cheat codes are there. If you don't like the current system, edit it to suit you. I wish they didn't call them "cheat codes" because of the stigma that is associated with it. This is a BETA game, so I think you should play it the way you want as it probably isn't balanced like it will be in the final edition anyway. And even if it was in its final version, as long as you aren't cheating another human player (if this were multiplayer for example) then use the codes. The point of playing computer games is to have fun, if using the codes gives you fun, then do it and don't feel guilty!

 

[Vachir]

I am a complete newbie so sorry if this post isn't as informed as those who have been playing for many versions already.

IMHO the early game was fine, the first time around. I started out having 0 idea what to do, so I did the training and that was ok, then I did the arena and that was amazingly great! So I tried buying some peasants and going out to fulfill the river pirate quest, but my peasants died and I tended to die myself since I was quite bad at combat, so being broke and quite unsuccessful I went back to the arena.

Basically I played in the arena over and over, betting to make money early on for a few upgrades and to max out my party again. I got to about level 8 I think before going outside again, and by then I had a much better idea of how to fight, so my next outing was better. I don't remember the breakdown of when you can upgrade to the next tier of soldiers, but IIRC I could hire them at about this point (hadn't figured out upgrading yet) and was able to kill some groups and investigate some other nearby towns, though I did end up losing guys left and right almost every combat.

I would say that the river pirate groups are a little much for a total newbie to handle, and should probably come in (more) groups of 5ish to start with if the idea is to cut teeth on these guys before venturing out into the world (I'm guessing the arena spree is not the intended low level design). Come to think of it I still don't think I've actually completed that quest, so more smaller groups would definitely help that as well. It would also be nice if you could get at least one tier of soldier upgrades right from the start so that they are at least a match for the river pirates, as just completing that quest should be able to level a newbie up to a point where the next (3rd) tier of upgrades become available, hopefully making some money along the way from pirate bounties and slave trading.

I think if I had to start over (or I should say when, since I guess this happens every new version?) I would just powerlevel up a bit in the arena then solo pirates etc., giving up on peasants entirely until they become upgradeable. Since I'm guessing this is what seems most effective right now, and probably not what the game design intends newbies to do, I would guess changes will probably happen to give newbies an easier time with getting started, maybe as simple as giving the first tier of upgrades at level 1 and making pirate groups smaller and easier to take on right from the start.

On a side note, I did feel very underpowered up until about level 15. I'm at 18 right now and feel almost invincible which is a really steep power curve. Advancement is a bit slow to start, and maybe a bit overpowered in the mid to late teens from what I've found. Maybe I just need to fight tougher opponents, I don't know the map well enough yet, but it seems even enemy war parties of 30ish with knights and all are fairly easy to defeat, even if my party (of 29 now) does take some losses.

Maybe the advancement system could do with a bit more hand holding so that there's not this huge jump off from the starter town (it may already be there, I should really finish that river pirates mission someday). At any rate I can verify that while the low level experience is harsh, the mid(?) levels become almost too easy running random missions and easily killing almost anything you run across.

As to skill points, I haven't played with the system enough yet. My initial feeling is that I dislike having to choose between combat skills and non-combat skills for allocation of a single pool of skill points. I'm all for going out and killing things, so of course 90% of my points go into combat skills, and so far I've done the same for my two heroes (I guess 2 is all you can have right?). My suggestion, again somewhat uninformed, would be to split off combat skills from non-combat and give players points to allocate for each set of abilities every level (maybe twice as many points with half the effect per point?). In theory you could even tie this in to classing at some point if the game design is going in that direction, but in general I would just prefer not to have to make that choice between making my character good at fighting, and making my party good at doing stuff outside actual combat.

 

[Luthius]

Well this has divided people. I like that, good debating

I would guess changes will probably happen to give newbies an easier time with getting started, maybe as simple as giving the first tier of upgrades at level 1

This is a nice idea, saves all the peasants getting killed too early on (so long as they live long enough to upgrade them )

In response to some points posted already-

I don't go looking for the khegrit riders or dark knights early on, they find me!

You can't do any merchant missions (which helps enourmously to level up at the start) without a party of about 9 or a load of goods which slows you down so the black knights catch you, as above! So soloing is only good for fighting. (Im not saying that footmen would fare much better but would at least have some chance). Ransom and bandit missions need a mini army too!

Although large numbers helps it doesn't work for 2 main reasons: Firstly when half of even a bandit party consists of horse archers (i could have been playing a mod to see this) your mass of peasants can hold the biggest hill in the world and still die. Secondly the cost of hiring loads of peasants is astronomical in early game terms (The pricing is valid, before life was very very cheap, now it's reasonable) and as such you can not afford to replace your peasants.

I liked putting skills into healing myself, to insure i had enough (Borcha and Marnid level up to slow to be effective). Maybe this is why i get annoyed about these issues as now i can not have enough skills to save the lives of my peasants who deserve at least to be footmen if not men at arms so that all my good men die needlessly.

Cheating annoys me, not because i feel i have cheated myself, just because i don't associate with my character enough for it to be fun anymore.

Maybe i should play the game with a limited party at first and pick my fights. It will be slow going though and not what im used to, which may be part of the problem - i could be trying to get into the meat of the game too quickly, trying to do what accomplised adventurers would do, rather than the noob you start out as.

Anyway it's good to hear opinions from people. My thoughts still remain as this, the game needs to be slightly easier earlier on. This could be achieved by quicker upgrading of basic troops (see top), or a strange influx of very cheap peasants that happens to dry up when you reach about level 8 (or whatever level you can upgrade past footman at)

Luthius