Haiw
Recruit
Hello,
It's a bit of a list, but I figured it would be less problematic if I threw it all together in 1 thread instead of making 2 dozen threads. It's nice to see that at least some things are being fixed; I could at least take a bunch of things off the list already! It's also encouraging to see that over the past few months the devs have actually adopted some of the solutions provided by some of the more popular mods.
I've tried to propose solutions to most of the issues I've brought up, but I'm sure there's alternative solutions to any of them... more than one road to Rome and all that. The game has a lot of potential, and its still enjoyable enough that I put a few hundred hours into it, but I hope some of this could help to push it closer to realizing its real potential.
Simple QOL additions / changes:
-Storage remains a problem in the early game, and even if I try not to I invariably end up slowly growing into a travelling caravan. The main reason for this is that until one takes a proper city there's no way to store anything. No troops, no inventory stuff, nothing. There's a few simple solutions.
First, add stashes to castles; I see no reason why they shouldn't have one, especially when this is usually the first fief a player acquires.
Second... would it be possible to create hideouts for players? The Warband mod Prophecy of Pendor had something like this; it had a quest related hideout where you could dump 100 troops and a whole bunch of loot and this actually made life a lot easier if for whatever reason you wanted to remain unalligned for a while. In Bannerlord you could either make this a quest related thing where it's in a fixed spot, or maybe allow players to create a dynamic one whever you wanted on the map. Up for debate whehter these should be attackable / siegable, or 'immune'... I could live with either as long as I can at least get a place to dump all my trash.
-Right now there's only 8 formations tags for your troops with 9 being unused. Could we just create a 9th label for 'Companions'? I'm probably not the only one who likes to keep them in their own group as his own personal Praetorian guard, and right now it's unused anyway.
-Ageing: I'm probably not the only one who isn't a fan of the superfast ageing... especially since it's actually not that obvious at first that this is a thing. Since I can see arguments both ways (some might prefer the faster ageing to experience more generations), isn't the simple solution to make this a campaign setting / difficulty setting, so we can have it both ways?
-The ability to lock items in the inventory is genius, but there's one missing aspect: as soon as an item is equipped / unequipped the lock is lost. Would it be possible to make locked items more 'persistently locked', even when they're removed from and readded to the inventory?
-Tournament rewards are often far too underwhelming and lack diversity. I noticed I was mostly accumulating mid-tier helmets and weapons I couldn't care less about. Maybe it would be an option to give a few choices upon winning so you can pick something that's actually useful, and maybe make the rewards a bit higher tier? Also, in previous games the tournaments increased relationship with a city. Maybe allow it to increase relationship with one or a few notables in the city?
-Also some weapon choices in tournaments are just.. awkward. A lot of tournaments end up having fights with foot spear & shield combinations that just make for unappealing combat. Even at high polearm skill these are often slow spears to use, easy to block and it makes for dull fights.
-Right now the spawn rate of higher tier equipment in stores is far too low. I can grind low tier troops to top tier for pennies in no-time, but I can often roam the map for months and still not find their armors in a store. It's not even a money problem; even if I'm swimming in millions of gold I simply can't buy decent gear...it's just not available and there's no option to order it either like in M&B Fire & Sword. The result is that unless I just enable cheats I end up using lesser gear than troops I just recruited 3 game-days ago. That makes little sense. If we can't get it through stores at least allow us to order the higher tier weapons, armor, horses, etc through some NPC.
-Similarly, the pricing is kind of outrageous. I think so far people don't make much of a deal about this since it's easy to smith swords worth 100k gold+, but again, it's kinda silly when I can recruit and upgrade troops for pennies, but if I actually want to buy the equipment they're wearing I have to pay as much as it would cost to buy a small city. That makes little sense.
-In previous games, when sneaking into a city failed you at least had the option to fight your way out in your civilian gear. Why isn't this an option anymore? It would also give us a use for the civilian outfits.
-Since we already have a combat and a civilian outfit, would it be possible to make another one (possibly sharing the same armor with the combat outfit) so we can make a split between foot battles and field battles? I love my polearm & bow setup for open field battles, but it kinda sucks for every siege and bandit camp, where I'd rather use something with a smaller sword or axe. But constantly switching this around is a major nuisance. If we could just make 2 (or more) different weapon loadouts to choose between before every battle that would greatly improve this situation.
-Similarly, unless I'm a blind idiot I can't find any chest to access the inventory anymore in field battles? This was always a welcome addition because it allowed you to either refill ammo, or just change weapons in case you want to change something in your loadout. This would be nice to have on both siege and field battles.
-Right now building any siege throwers as an attacker is basically a waste of time, especially since they'll be half damaged by the defender's equipment immediately upon building. Until the whole system is revised to something proper, allow us to at least build equipment 'in storage' so you can store a few and deploy them at full health to start the artillery duel.
-Why can't we have more companions? It feels rather low right now compared to previous games and I don't see a good reason for it. Personally I always loved having my personalized 'praetorian guard'. For game balancing it doesn't really matter since all the important things (like parties) are limited through the clan tier anyway, and equipping them is way more expensive than just recruiting normal troops anyway. Just for flavor / roleplay I always loved having much more companions around - even if the current random generated ones are a bit bland.
-Transitions between party / inventory / other screens often take a bit, even on high spec computers with nvme SSD and an overobundance of RAM/VRAM. Maybe give us a setting in the options to allow the game to use more memory so it can keep more of this quickly accessible to cut down on these short loads?
-If there is a recent messages / log in the campaign view I can't find it. I really miss this from previous games since it's very easy to miss some text that just temporarily shows up on the left.
-And last but not least... since we got so much imperial stuff, I think it's not too much to ask to give us a lorica segmentata inspired top tier armor. Give it the exact same stats as the scale armor for all I care! You already gave us all accompanying accessories anyway!
Small / simple bugs:
I have to admit you fixed a lot of the stuff I had on this one already so this will be short...
-Selecting troops for a hideout attack would often screw up at least some of the formation preferences on my companions
-Companions often start in the center of a hideout / town battle right next to the enemy troops instead of with the leader. I think this started occuring ever since the 'troop selection' for those battles was introduced; didn't occur before that update.
-If you are a one-clan faction you get to decide every policy decision on your own, yet no matter what you pick, although you'll get your way it will always say the majority was against it.
-For some reason there's still a delay on actually assigning ownership of a castle/settlement after taking it as a one-clan faction without vassals, even if you are the only potential owner.
-When you put stuff into a stash after taking a settlement, all these contents will then be dumped into its market if there is an ownership decision after that (even if you are the one taking ownership of it). This can be really annoying when you aren't aware of this and just take your first settlement for your own faction.
Combat related
-I don't know what you did to the horse archer AI in 1.5 but please revert it... it made them so much worse that I just gave up on my current campaign where I mostly had horse archer armies. While it wasn't perfect in 1.4.3 they would at least do a decent job at circling the entire enemy formation and staying out of melee. Since 1.5 it still works reasonable well against small enemy bands, but in bigger battles it just becomes a ****show that's best described as a 'Cantabrian Criss-cross' right through the enemy formation.
-The changes to ranged combat in 1.5 also seem silly. I can't see any good reason why you would need a full second to get accuracy on a thrown weapon, and especially on thrown weapons I just don't see any reason for it (they were always inferior to me). On bows it doesn't make much sense to me either and it goes contrary to anything I've ever read about combat archery (the problem isn't drawing bows; it's holding them). A more sensible change would be to just revert the timings and for example remove the crosshair when not drawing a bow (to make it much harder to pre-aim).
-In general horse archery feels over-nerfed, and largely in a way that simply makes it more RNG instead of skillbased. Even if I have high bow skill and high riding skill and use the top bow with 100 accuracy, actual accuracy is still extremely mediocre. The rotation accuracy penalty really doesn't help in this regard and frankly I can't see a good basis for any of this in reality. From what I've seen of demonstrations of horse archery the achievable accuracy is at least significantly higher than what it is now in game.
If you want to nerf horse archery, do it in a way that's actually skillbased. Like I mentioned above; remove the crosshair before drawing to make the preaim harder. Or maybe increase the amount of visible headbob so you don't have this hyperstabilized view that makes it so easy to aim. Or maybe make it a seperate skill again. But right now it's just nerfed to the point that it's extremely unsatisfactory to use. The amount of conefire just makes its a lottery based system.
Ironically in the bigger battles it doesn't even hurt its potential that much, since accuracy doesn't matter that much when you're shooting a big blob of troops; you'll always hit something.
-Firing speed of bows also seems too low at higher skills. I can understand this at lower skills, but it just doesn't increase at higher skills. It feels like I'm shooting in slow-motion. I also have my doubts about the actual speed of the arrows, but these are harder for me to compare to what I've seen in demonstrations. Again, I can understand that you want to try and stop bows from being OP but I don't think the solution is in artificially making them worse than their historical counterparts in a lot of stats 'just for the sake of balance'... a more logical solution is to just make them more skillbased / harder to use, or more accurately reflect their real-life weaknesses. Part of the problem I think is that you removed the horse archery skill; in previous games it was compensated at least somewhat by having to invest in multiple skils to really make horse archery worthwhile. And when it comes to foot archers vs cavalry, the problem isn't so much that archers are OP, it's that cavalry chargers are UP.
-Which brings me to my next point. I don't know why charge damage of horses is so weak but it's kinda silly. Even with higer tier horses I usually do something like 3 blunt damage when running down a tier 1 recruit with no armor. Sorry, but this just doesn't make any sense. A horse walking over someone does more than just a little bruising...
-A lot of the spears feel extremely slow while on foot... to the point that they're just lame to use. It's really noticable when doing the tournament battles where you end up with spear & shield fights... even with high polearm skill a lot of those weapons just feel like watching a slow motion movie.
-Cavalry AI really needs work. While the way they do charge runs now (as a group, passing thorugh the formation and then doublign back) is nice, the problem is that most of the time they simply fail to kill or even hit troops upon impact because they're just all over the place with their polearms and their timing is just off.
-Formations are basically useless especially since you cannot split units of the same type. I haven't found any way to split those stacks into different units. This leads to problems in sieges where you can see your entire group of infantry go for 1 ladder, while all your archers go for a different ladder. Give us the option of splitting stacks of units into seperate stacks that we can use as seperate formations.
-It would also be nice if you had a seperate AI order mode to tell cavalry to forego the fancy charges and just go nuts on fleeing troops. Right now they're practically useless for the one thing cavalry realistically would excel at: running down routing troops because they keep making these slow forced charges.
-Probably a somewhat more controversial suggestion... but consider making all spears throwable? And make them recoverable from bodies... Could certainly spice things up and make the throwing skill less neglected.
-Also up for debate, but I would consider adding more longer two-handed weapons. To me the skill feels mostly pointless since they barely give any range advantage over one-handed weapons.
Smithing related:
-While I can understand smithing stamina being in the game to prevent people from powerlevelling it from 0 to 300 in 1 gameday it feels really backwards right now. Adding stamina recovery during normal time progression (like healing) encourages a more 'normal' gameplay where you can just roam around the map and do your smithing on your rest stops. Tying it to forced wait times just feels silly, and rather problematic given the rapid ageing in this game and how much the map tends to 'get out of hand' when you're constantly spending gamedays doing nothing but accelerating the simulation just to recover your smithing stamina.
-It would be great if there was a toggle in the smelting screen to either show or hide locked items. This would make it much easier to smelt down stacks of loot without having to worry about melting down any of your top tier fancy weapons you also happened to have in your inventory (which happens rather easily since it often resets to the top).
-Right now crafted weapons start showing up in both stores and tournament rewards. Could this please be disabled? Because it basically makes most tournaments useless after a while since half the rewards will be your own little crafting experiments / garbage swords you only made to sell.
-Unlocking of recipes just goes way too slow. I can have 3 guys at smithing level 300, regularly pump out millions of coin worth of swords, melted down every single weapon I ever looted in several gameyears and still be stuck having unlocked only about half the recipes.
-Give us a slider or scrollbar or something to cycle through more companions. Right now you can view only 9 in the smithing screen and the only way to use the stamina of other companions is to swap them around in the party screen. This already becomes an issue fairly fast without any modding or cheating; with some family its not that hard to get that many people in your party.
Character development system:
In all honesty... I found the system rather awkward, especially since it introduces a learning limit. If you play the game 'by the rules' this just creates an awkward situation where you end up wasting too much energy on 'levelling efficiently' instead of actually playing / enjoying the game. The whole situation kinda reminds me of TES: Oblivion, where the levelling system was so backwards that you ended up using a notebook and wasting half your time grinding up useless skills just to get certain attributes. In Bannerlord it isn't helped by the skills being artificially put in certain categories... It also leads to the game feeling somewhat grindy.
For me personally most of the problems were actually 'fixed' if I just started a new game by giving myself maxed attribute points & maxed focus points at the start and could then just play naturally without caring. It fixed the extremely low levelling on most skills, and it allowed me to just... play the game without having to worry about whether I was levelling up efficiently or able to avoid hitting another limit. Playing it like this felt significantly less grindy, took the annoyance out of it, without the empty unsatisfactory void you'd get from just cheating your way to the top.
For companions it's an even bigger problem since they often come with an awkward original distribution of attribute / focus points and it's hard (sometimes impossible if they're high enough level) to respec them. The lack of a trainer skill really doesn't help in this regard. Again, at least removing the learning limit would simplifiy things. I had companions unable to level up a certain skill beyond their learning limit of 4 simply because they had neither focus nor attribute points, and acquiring those took ages.
There's also some skills that simply take too long to rank up, and unlike in previous games there's just no way you can invest 'generalized xp' into it to make up for it. Most of the combat skills were fine for me, with the exception of athletics (even if I tried to farm it it would always lag behind and riding always felt way easier to level up).
Scouting skill is a bit too problematic when you really have no skill in it (you can't rank it up if you can't find it tracks) so it should get a tiny boost in skill level 0-25.. after that it's fine.
Trade skill right now is a bit silly in that it only ranks up from trades where you originally bought the goods. I see no reason why it shouldn't rank up from general selling of loot like in most games, especially considering how boring it is to just play caravan. Just make profit-trading gain more xp than loot-selling.
Medicine is a nightmare... it just barely ranks up, especially because you normally try to avoid casualties, and the only way to rank it up is to have casualties. I don't see why it shouldn't get a regular xp gain like steward skill from just being a party doctor (popping blisters, treating general boo-boos). This is one of those skills that you could at least rank up by using your general xp gains or using skill books in previous games, but since this is no longer possible it has to rank up faster than it does now.
Same problem applies to engineering... It just goes nowhere, and there's no good way to actually grind it. Even doing tons of sieges and building lots of stuff in towns barely shifts the needle.
Last but not least renown gain really feels on the slow side. Especially the amount you gain from tournaments is rather laughable. Again it contributes to the game feeling somewhat grindy.
Kingdom / big-boy related:
This may sound kind of silly, but so far I actually found the early game - before you acquire settlements - far more enjoyable. This is largely because once you become a big boy... the game becomes a chore. A large factor in this is that even when you are king, you still end up basically having to micro everything yourself and there's often no good way to make problems go away, not even by throwing money at it. There's just no real management tools to work with forcing you to micro everything yourself. As a result you end up feeling like a slave to your own kingdom, doing lots of menial work, like manually going along every town to recruit, or manually going on shopping sprees to prevent places from starving.
Regarding recruitment / levelling troops:
-I think I'm not the only one who misses the trainer skill. This is especially a problem for the lower rank troops, since they're often too garbage to throw into proper battles, but constantly chasing down looters / bandits to rank them up is also just boring and a chore.
This is compounded by the fact that right now you have no control over how troops are ranked up when trained in your castles / settlements. Please give us a window that allows us to either set preferences for what we want them to rank up to, or allow them to get the xp without actually ranking them up so I can decide for themselves. I didn't recruit a 100 Imperial recruits just so half of them could become useless ****ty archers or crossbowmen... but if I actually want them to become proper legionaries the only real solution is to rank them up manually until you hit a point where there's no branches in the tree anymore.
There's a similar problem ranking up cavalry. I didn't recruit 100 Nomads just to have them walk around like plebs with maces... Give us an option to not only decide what those recruits rank up to, but also give us an option to add horses to some kind of 'levelling troops horse stash' just so we can rank them up to certain types of cavalry. This wasnt a huge problem in previous games when you could at least rank them through the lower levels pretty easy with trainer skill, but now it's just a chore to constantly get them out of garbage tier to something useful.
-I'm not sure if this was in Warband or was added in Prophecy of Pendor (I used that mod for my last few playthroughs in Bannerlord so sometimes its hard to remember what was in the main game and what wasn't), but at least in PoP there was an option to just ask your city major to automatically recruit the troops in a city and surrounding region and add them to the garrison. That would really reduce the amount of boring recruitment runs.
The food problem:
Oh boy... this whole food system IMO is where the game falls apart. I don't know if you had changes to this recently, but especially in the last few versions (I think from 1.4.3 onwards) I really started so many big armies on the map just falling apart because they ran out of food. Who knows maybe I just started noticing it more once I realized these armies were just losing troops due to starvation. Right now the system just sucks so much that the AI doesn't know how to handle it, and for the player it's just a pain in the ass.
Right now there's no way to even do anything about the food situation in castles. If it's starving.. tough luck. Just wait a few months until it starved away its prosperity and you finally got some buildings up. Put up a garrison in the meantime? Have fun seeing your top tier troops melt away! When it comes to cities... the solution is to basically... go to some other city... literally buy them bare, then dump it all in your own city. Oh..wait... friendly noble came along and bought all your food supply from the market, so back to starvation! It's just ludicrous. Cities happily sell themself into starvation. As a player the only workaround to keep your own cities from starving is to basically go on huge shopping sprees in neutral / friendly cities, buy all their food and put them into starvation, just so you can dump it all in your stash and redistribute later. Similarly, the best way to supply your own army is to just buy half the map bare of food, dump it into your stash and supply from there, because otherwise everytime you'll resupply your army you'll again risk putting your own city back into starvation mode!
It's all just extremely unsatisfying, and it feels like I'm mostly gaming the system. And the only real solution to make it work is to put a lot of micro into it, since I can't outsource the import of foods by just... throwing money at it. There has to be a better way to deal with this, even if it means disabling half the system (for example disabling starvation for AI armies, disabling garrison depletion due to starvation, no longer allowing cities to sell food if they have negative food supply).
I understand how you wanted to go the extra mile to actually put a proper food system in the game but I feel like it just gets in the way of actually playing and enjoying the game.
Bandit control:
Being able to order patrols that do this for you would be helpful. The bandit groups are a great way to farm anything you would so I wouldnt change anything about their overabundance in the game, but it would be helpful if you could just set up some patrols or a police force to stop them from constantly killing your looters. It's annoying to have to do this yourself all the time during the middle of a war.
Sorry for the 'volume' of the post!
It's a bit of a list, but I figured it would be less problematic if I threw it all together in 1 thread instead of making 2 dozen threads. It's nice to see that at least some things are being fixed; I could at least take a bunch of things off the list already! It's also encouraging to see that over the past few months the devs have actually adopted some of the solutions provided by some of the more popular mods.
I've tried to propose solutions to most of the issues I've brought up, but I'm sure there's alternative solutions to any of them... more than one road to Rome and all that. The game has a lot of potential, and its still enjoyable enough that I put a few hundred hours into it, but I hope some of this could help to push it closer to realizing its real potential.
Simple QOL additions / changes:
-Storage remains a problem in the early game, and even if I try not to I invariably end up slowly growing into a travelling caravan. The main reason for this is that until one takes a proper city there's no way to store anything. No troops, no inventory stuff, nothing. There's a few simple solutions.
First, add stashes to castles; I see no reason why they shouldn't have one, especially when this is usually the first fief a player acquires.
Second... would it be possible to create hideouts for players? The Warband mod Prophecy of Pendor had something like this; it had a quest related hideout where you could dump 100 troops and a whole bunch of loot and this actually made life a lot easier if for whatever reason you wanted to remain unalligned for a while. In Bannerlord you could either make this a quest related thing where it's in a fixed spot, or maybe allow players to create a dynamic one whever you wanted on the map. Up for debate whehter these should be attackable / siegable, or 'immune'... I could live with either as long as I can at least get a place to dump all my trash.
-Right now there's only 8 formations tags for your troops with 9 being unused. Could we just create a 9th label for 'Companions'? I'm probably not the only one who likes to keep them in their own group as his own personal Praetorian guard, and right now it's unused anyway.
-Ageing: I'm probably not the only one who isn't a fan of the superfast ageing... especially since it's actually not that obvious at first that this is a thing. Since I can see arguments both ways (some might prefer the faster ageing to experience more generations), isn't the simple solution to make this a campaign setting / difficulty setting, so we can have it both ways?
-The ability to lock items in the inventory is genius, but there's one missing aspect: as soon as an item is equipped / unequipped the lock is lost. Would it be possible to make locked items more 'persistently locked', even when they're removed from and readded to the inventory?
-Tournament rewards are often far too underwhelming and lack diversity. I noticed I was mostly accumulating mid-tier helmets and weapons I couldn't care less about. Maybe it would be an option to give a few choices upon winning so you can pick something that's actually useful, and maybe make the rewards a bit higher tier? Also, in previous games the tournaments increased relationship with a city. Maybe allow it to increase relationship with one or a few notables in the city?
-Also some weapon choices in tournaments are just.. awkward. A lot of tournaments end up having fights with foot spear & shield combinations that just make for unappealing combat. Even at high polearm skill these are often slow spears to use, easy to block and it makes for dull fights.
-Right now the spawn rate of higher tier equipment in stores is far too low. I can grind low tier troops to top tier for pennies in no-time, but I can often roam the map for months and still not find their armors in a store. It's not even a money problem; even if I'm swimming in millions of gold I simply can't buy decent gear...it's just not available and there's no option to order it either like in M&B Fire & Sword. The result is that unless I just enable cheats I end up using lesser gear than troops I just recruited 3 game-days ago. That makes little sense. If we can't get it through stores at least allow us to order the higher tier weapons, armor, horses, etc through some NPC.
-Similarly, the pricing is kind of outrageous. I think so far people don't make much of a deal about this since it's easy to smith swords worth 100k gold+, but again, it's kinda silly when I can recruit and upgrade troops for pennies, but if I actually want to buy the equipment they're wearing I have to pay as much as it would cost to buy a small city. That makes little sense.
-In previous games, when sneaking into a city failed you at least had the option to fight your way out in your civilian gear. Why isn't this an option anymore? It would also give us a use for the civilian outfits.
-Since we already have a combat and a civilian outfit, would it be possible to make another one (possibly sharing the same armor with the combat outfit) so we can make a split between foot battles and field battles? I love my polearm & bow setup for open field battles, but it kinda sucks for every siege and bandit camp, where I'd rather use something with a smaller sword or axe. But constantly switching this around is a major nuisance. If we could just make 2 (or more) different weapon loadouts to choose between before every battle that would greatly improve this situation.
-Similarly, unless I'm a blind idiot I can't find any chest to access the inventory anymore in field battles? This was always a welcome addition because it allowed you to either refill ammo, or just change weapons in case you want to change something in your loadout. This would be nice to have on both siege and field battles.
-Right now building any siege throwers as an attacker is basically a waste of time, especially since they'll be half damaged by the defender's equipment immediately upon building. Until the whole system is revised to something proper, allow us to at least build equipment 'in storage' so you can store a few and deploy them at full health to start the artillery duel.
-Why can't we have more companions? It feels rather low right now compared to previous games and I don't see a good reason for it. Personally I always loved having my personalized 'praetorian guard'. For game balancing it doesn't really matter since all the important things (like parties) are limited through the clan tier anyway, and equipping them is way more expensive than just recruiting normal troops anyway. Just for flavor / roleplay I always loved having much more companions around - even if the current random generated ones are a bit bland.
-Transitions between party / inventory / other screens often take a bit, even on high spec computers with nvme SSD and an overobundance of RAM/VRAM. Maybe give us a setting in the options to allow the game to use more memory so it can keep more of this quickly accessible to cut down on these short loads?
-If there is a recent messages / log in the campaign view I can't find it. I really miss this from previous games since it's very easy to miss some text that just temporarily shows up on the left.
-And last but not least... since we got so much imperial stuff, I think it's not too much to ask to give us a lorica segmentata inspired top tier armor. Give it the exact same stats as the scale armor for all I care! You already gave us all accompanying accessories anyway!
Small / simple bugs:
I have to admit you fixed a lot of the stuff I had on this one already so this will be short...
-Selecting troops for a hideout attack would often screw up at least some of the formation preferences on my companions
-Companions often start in the center of a hideout / town battle right next to the enemy troops instead of with the leader. I think this started occuring ever since the 'troop selection' for those battles was introduced; didn't occur before that update.
-If you are a one-clan faction you get to decide every policy decision on your own, yet no matter what you pick, although you'll get your way it will always say the majority was against it.
-For some reason there's still a delay on actually assigning ownership of a castle/settlement after taking it as a one-clan faction without vassals, even if you are the only potential owner.
-When you put stuff into a stash after taking a settlement, all these contents will then be dumped into its market if there is an ownership decision after that (even if you are the one taking ownership of it). This can be really annoying when you aren't aware of this and just take your first settlement for your own faction.
Combat related
-I don't know what you did to the horse archer AI in 1.5 but please revert it... it made them so much worse that I just gave up on my current campaign where I mostly had horse archer armies. While it wasn't perfect in 1.4.3 they would at least do a decent job at circling the entire enemy formation and staying out of melee. Since 1.5 it still works reasonable well against small enemy bands, but in bigger battles it just becomes a ****show that's best described as a 'Cantabrian Criss-cross' right through the enemy formation.
-The changes to ranged combat in 1.5 also seem silly. I can't see any good reason why you would need a full second to get accuracy on a thrown weapon, and especially on thrown weapons I just don't see any reason for it (they were always inferior to me). On bows it doesn't make much sense to me either and it goes contrary to anything I've ever read about combat archery (the problem isn't drawing bows; it's holding them). A more sensible change would be to just revert the timings and for example remove the crosshair when not drawing a bow (to make it much harder to pre-aim).
-In general horse archery feels over-nerfed, and largely in a way that simply makes it more RNG instead of skillbased. Even if I have high bow skill and high riding skill and use the top bow with 100 accuracy, actual accuracy is still extremely mediocre. The rotation accuracy penalty really doesn't help in this regard and frankly I can't see a good basis for any of this in reality. From what I've seen of demonstrations of horse archery the achievable accuracy is at least significantly higher than what it is now in game.
If you want to nerf horse archery, do it in a way that's actually skillbased. Like I mentioned above; remove the crosshair before drawing to make the preaim harder. Or maybe increase the amount of visible headbob so you don't have this hyperstabilized view that makes it so easy to aim. Or maybe make it a seperate skill again. But right now it's just nerfed to the point that it's extremely unsatisfactory to use. The amount of conefire just makes its a lottery based system.
Ironically in the bigger battles it doesn't even hurt its potential that much, since accuracy doesn't matter that much when you're shooting a big blob of troops; you'll always hit something.
-Firing speed of bows also seems too low at higher skills. I can understand this at lower skills, but it just doesn't increase at higher skills. It feels like I'm shooting in slow-motion. I also have my doubts about the actual speed of the arrows, but these are harder for me to compare to what I've seen in demonstrations. Again, I can understand that you want to try and stop bows from being OP but I don't think the solution is in artificially making them worse than their historical counterparts in a lot of stats 'just for the sake of balance'... a more logical solution is to just make them more skillbased / harder to use, or more accurately reflect their real-life weaknesses. Part of the problem I think is that you removed the horse archery skill; in previous games it was compensated at least somewhat by having to invest in multiple skils to really make horse archery worthwhile. And when it comes to foot archers vs cavalry, the problem isn't so much that archers are OP, it's that cavalry chargers are UP.
-Which brings me to my next point. I don't know why charge damage of horses is so weak but it's kinda silly. Even with higer tier horses I usually do something like 3 blunt damage when running down a tier 1 recruit with no armor. Sorry, but this just doesn't make any sense. A horse walking over someone does more than just a little bruising...
-A lot of the spears feel extremely slow while on foot... to the point that they're just lame to use. It's really noticable when doing the tournament battles where you end up with spear & shield fights... even with high polearm skill a lot of those weapons just feel like watching a slow motion movie.
-Cavalry AI really needs work. While the way they do charge runs now (as a group, passing thorugh the formation and then doublign back) is nice, the problem is that most of the time they simply fail to kill or even hit troops upon impact because they're just all over the place with their polearms and their timing is just off.
-Formations are basically useless especially since you cannot split units of the same type. I haven't found any way to split those stacks into different units. This leads to problems in sieges where you can see your entire group of infantry go for 1 ladder, while all your archers go for a different ladder. Give us the option of splitting stacks of units into seperate stacks that we can use as seperate formations.
-It would also be nice if you had a seperate AI order mode to tell cavalry to forego the fancy charges and just go nuts on fleeing troops. Right now they're practically useless for the one thing cavalry realistically would excel at: running down routing troops because they keep making these slow forced charges.
-Probably a somewhat more controversial suggestion... but consider making all spears throwable? And make them recoverable from bodies... Could certainly spice things up and make the throwing skill less neglected.
-Also up for debate, but I would consider adding more longer two-handed weapons. To me the skill feels mostly pointless since they barely give any range advantage over one-handed weapons.
Smithing related:
-While I can understand smithing stamina being in the game to prevent people from powerlevelling it from 0 to 300 in 1 gameday it feels really backwards right now. Adding stamina recovery during normal time progression (like healing) encourages a more 'normal' gameplay where you can just roam around the map and do your smithing on your rest stops. Tying it to forced wait times just feels silly, and rather problematic given the rapid ageing in this game and how much the map tends to 'get out of hand' when you're constantly spending gamedays doing nothing but accelerating the simulation just to recover your smithing stamina.
-It would be great if there was a toggle in the smelting screen to either show or hide locked items. This would make it much easier to smelt down stacks of loot without having to worry about melting down any of your top tier fancy weapons you also happened to have in your inventory (which happens rather easily since it often resets to the top).
-Right now crafted weapons start showing up in both stores and tournament rewards. Could this please be disabled? Because it basically makes most tournaments useless after a while since half the rewards will be your own little crafting experiments / garbage swords you only made to sell.
-Unlocking of recipes just goes way too slow. I can have 3 guys at smithing level 300, regularly pump out millions of coin worth of swords, melted down every single weapon I ever looted in several gameyears and still be stuck having unlocked only about half the recipes.
-Give us a slider or scrollbar or something to cycle through more companions. Right now you can view only 9 in the smithing screen and the only way to use the stamina of other companions is to swap them around in the party screen. This already becomes an issue fairly fast without any modding or cheating; with some family its not that hard to get that many people in your party.
Character development system:
In all honesty... I found the system rather awkward, especially since it introduces a learning limit. If you play the game 'by the rules' this just creates an awkward situation where you end up wasting too much energy on 'levelling efficiently' instead of actually playing / enjoying the game. The whole situation kinda reminds me of TES: Oblivion, where the levelling system was so backwards that you ended up using a notebook and wasting half your time grinding up useless skills just to get certain attributes. In Bannerlord it isn't helped by the skills being artificially put in certain categories... It also leads to the game feeling somewhat grindy.
For me personally most of the problems were actually 'fixed' if I just started a new game by giving myself maxed attribute points & maxed focus points at the start and could then just play naturally without caring. It fixed the extremely low levelling on most skills, and it allowed me to just... play the game without having to worry about whether I was levelling up efficiently or able to avoid hitting another limit. Playing it like this felt significantly less grindy, took the annoyance out of it, without the empty unsatisfactory void you'd get from just cheating your way to the top.
For companions it's an even bigger problem since they often come with an awkward original distribution of attribute / focus points and it's hard (sometimes impossible if they're high enough level) to respec them. The lack of a trainer skill really doesn't help in this regard. Again, at least removing the learning limit would simplifiy things. I had companions unable to level up a certain skill beyond their learning limit of 4 simply because they had neither focus nor attribute points, and acquiring those took ages.
There's also some skills that simply take too long to rank up, and unlike in previous games there's just no way you can invest 'generalized xp' into it to make up for it. Most of the combat skills were fine for me, with the exception of athletics (even if I tried to farm it it would always lag behind and riding always felt way easier to level up).
Scouting skill is a bit too problematic when you really have no skill in it (you can't rank it up if you can't find it tracks) so it should get a tiny boost in skill level 0-25.. after that it's fine.
Trade skill right now is a bit silly in that it only ranks up from trades where you originally bought the goods. I see no reason why it shouldn't rank up from general selling of loot like in most games, especially considering how boring it is to just play caravan. Just make profit-trading gain more xp than loot-selling.
Medicine is a nightmare... it just barely ranks up, especially because you normally try to avoid casualties, and the only way to rank it up is to have casualties. I don't see why it shouldn't get a regular xp gain like steward skill from just being a party doctor (popping blisters, treating general boo-boos). This is one of those skills that you could at least rank up by using your general xp gains or using skill books in previous games, but since this is no longer possible it has to rank up faster than it does now.
Same problem applies to engineering... It just goes nowhere, and there's no good way to actually grind it. Even doing tons of sieges and building lots of stuff in towns barely shifts the needle.
Last but not least renown gain really feels on the slow side. Especially the amount you gain from tournaments is rather laughable. Again it contributes to the game feeling somewhat grindy.
Kingdom / big-boy related:
This may sound kind of silly, but so far I actually found the early game - before you acquire settlements - far more enjoyable. This is largely because once you become a big boy... the game becomes a chore. A large factor in this is that even when you are king, you still end up basically having to micro everything yourself and there's often no good way to make problems go away, not even by throwing money at it. There's just no real management tools to work with forcing you to micro everything yourself. As a result you end up feeling like a slave to your own kingdom, doing lots of menial work, like manually going along every town to recruit, or manually going on shopping sprees to prevent places from starving.
Regarding recruitment / levelling troops:
-I think I'm not the only one who misses the trainer skill. This is especially a problem for the lower rank troops, since they're often too garbage to throw into proper battles, but constantly chasing down looters / bandits to rank them up is also just boring and a chore.
This is compounded by the fact that right now you have no control over how troops are ranked up when trained in your castles / settlements. Please give us a window that allows us to either set preferences for what we want them to rank up to, or allow them to get the xp without actually ranking them up so I can decide for themselves. I didn't recruit a 100 Imperial recruits just so half of them could become useless ****ty archers or crossbowmen... but if I actually want them to become proper legionaries the only real solution is to rank them up manually until you hit a point where there's no branches in the tree anymore.
There's a similar problem ranking up cavalry. I didn't recruit 100 Nomads just to have them walk around like plebs with maces... Give us an option to not only decide what those recruits rank up to, but also give us an option to add horses to some kind of 'levelling troops horse stash' just so we can rank them up to certain types of cavalry. This wasnt a huge problem in previous games when you could at least rank them through the lower levels pretty easy with trainer skill, but now it's just a chore to constantly get them out of garbage tier to something useful.
-I'm not sure if this was in Warband or was added in Prophecy of Pendor (I used that mod for my last few playthroughs in Bannerlord so sometimes its hard to remember what was in the main game and what wasn't), but at least in PoP there was an option to just ask your city major to automatically recruit the troops in a city and surrounding region and add them to the garrison. That would really reduce the amount of boring recruitment runs.
The food problem:
Oh boy... this whole food system IMO is where the game falls apart. I don't know if you had changes to this recently, but especially in the last few versions (I think from 1.4.3 onwards) I really started so many big armies on the map just falling apart because they ran out of food. Who knows maybe I just started noticing it more once I realized these armies were just losing troops due to starvation. Right now the system just sucks so much that the AI doesn't know how to handle it, and for the player it's just a pain in the ass.
Right now there's no way to even do anything about the food situation in castles. If it's starving.. tough luck. Just wait a few months until it starved away its prosperity and you finally got some buildings up. Put up a garrison in the meantime? Have fun seeing your top tier troops melt away! When it comes to cities... the solution is to basically... go to some other city... literally buy them bare, then dump it all in your own city. Oh..wait... friendly noble came along and bought all your food supply from the market, so back to starvation! It's just ludicrous. Cities happily sell themself into starvation. As a player the only workaround to keep your own cities from starving is to basically go on huge shopping sprees in neutral / friendly cities, buy all their food and put them into starvation, just so you can dump it all in your stash and redistribute later. Similarly, the best way to supply your own army is to just buy half the map bare of food, dump it into your stash and supply from there, because otherwise everytime you'll resupply your army you'll again risk putting your own city back into starvation mode!
It's all just extremely unsatisfying, and it feels like I'm mostly gaming the system. And the only real solution to make it work is to put a lot of micro into it, since I can't outsource the import of foods by just... throwing money at it. There has to be a better way to deal with this, even if it means disabling half the system (for example disabling starvation for AI armies, disabling garrison depletion due to starvation, no longer allowing cities to sell food if they have negative food supply).
I understand how you wanted to go the extra mile to actually put a proper food system in the game but I feel like it just gets in the way of actually playing and enjoying the game.
Bandit control:
Being able to order patrols that do this for you would be helpful. The bandit groups are a great way to farm anything you would so I wouldnt change anything about their overabundance in the game, but it would be helpful if you could just set up some patrols or a police force to stop them from constantly killing your looters. It's annoying to have to do this yourself all the time during the middle of a war.
Sorry for the 'volume' of the post!
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