Suggestions for a better late game

[ottomanski]

Hello all,

Last few days, I have been playing Custom Settlements .67 for hours. I have some complaints and suggestions for a better gameplay. I will be happy if I can help.

It was very nice in the begining. I discovered the new features, built a castle town and conquered new settlements for my own kingdom. I am on day 250 or something. Mostly, I made mock sieges or just waited in my settlement but I think I experienced most things. After some time, the game became imbalanced. Here is some of the problems:
There is a mercanary party that has 1300 soldiers. It patrols around Custow and it merges with new mercenary parties leave Custow. This party isn't a big problem because it is very slow. It means no harm to noone. But the problem is I can't find small mercanary parties to hire. I have a party capacity of 75 so no matter how rich I am, I won't be able to hire this men.
I have two solutions for this problem. First, large mercanary parties may be divided into smaller parties. For example mercanary parties larger than 100 automatically divide into 2 equal parties. Second, we may be able to hire a part of the mercanary party. Just like hiring in taverns. When we talk to them, we will say "I will hire X of you" (X is the free space in our party or the number we can afford to hire)
After a few hundred days, hero parties became very large so that I can't hire them too. For example Borcha has 320, Esmirelda has 250, Rhon has 200 men in their party. They don't fight against anyone so their number increases day by day.
I think if they have a real oppenent except the weak bandits (actually they aren't bandits, just naked fool people who wants to die ) their number will be stabilized. This oppenent may be stronger bandit parties (maybe hero parties that train better soldier) or adventurers may fight against each other. For example Borcha hates Jeremus and he will attack him if he sees him, but Borcha will support Marnid in battles because he likes him.
Custow is the only superpower of the Calradia. Bandits isn't an opponent to them, they are weak. I think there should be a few more castle towns and kingdoms for each of them. And they should fight against each other, just like Native. So bandits may become stronger and have a few villages, not only Charfield.

Those are just my ideas.

Thanks for reading it.

 

[Diavolo]

all those ideas are very good and I agree completely with everything.

 

[LuckyDuckly]

I do agree that whoever takes over Custow becomes way too powerful, way too quickly. The many patrols they send out don't detract from their town's garrison, so killing them is almost pointless. But this mod is definitely still on the higher end of my favorite mod list.

 

[mollsomg / TWC]

I think, the more conquering, raiding features are implemented, the more it will be necessary to take away the early custow faction. It just has too much power too early, the other AI kingdoms will not be able to compete with that.

 

[muratcan]

i completely agree .

i have a question do you think it will be better if the recruiting  and the economy converted to this style :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lords_of_the_Realm_II

please just read the  following subjects :

Town Management
Resource Management
Castle Building and Management.

In my oppinion the way you recruit soldiers is great in this game and also town management. if we can add building extra  buildings to that which we already have this in our Custom settlements mod, it would be great.  Still there won t be any micro-management,  and when you recruit soldeirs still they can gain experience and can be upgradeble.

Please let me know what you think

 

[Damnation]

I agree with those points, but I'd like to ask another thing: How do I decrease the time that I need to spend in a scene together with Heroes to make them like me?

It's been really silly and arduous work to get Nizar to relations of +18, he has 20 men and I still cant hire him. There are no bandits around, he never gets into fights (the others near Falconpass, my city, don't seem to find any bandits either, ever.) and it takes several minutes to increase the relation by 1 point, I cant even talk about the other Heroes I tried to hire, because trying them was a waste of time on account of them being a far too high level to reach without spending hours idling in scene with them. 

Basically I'm whining that I waited too long to hire heroes, have none now and can't expand my empire at all :/

 

[Wu-long]

this belongs in the suggestion area 

 

[Liquidninja]

this belongs in the suggestion area 

While that is true, some posts are topic worthy I think the totality of this thread has shown its merit

@ ottomanski, I think many of these game balance issues will be addressed in future patches, but I do think your suggestion for large mercenary groups to split up makes a lot of sense - as does the suggestion made to have them recruitable (up to max party size) like in Native/Tavern recruiting.

One other issue I've noticed is that once Charfield rises up as a faction, they basically convert hundreds of bandits instantaneously to faction troops. No more bandits to fight! (Okay, random peasants will still leave as bandits, but then they are pathetically weak).

 

[Kaibur]

Great suggestions, there. They'll probably be addressed later on, but it's good to note it just in case they aren't.
Building extra buildings wouldn't be good... extra scenes. Which makes more work. Which means no, I think.
Custow indeed has too much power. But who attacks Custow? It's too powerful, and it's a naff settlement anyway. I'm keeping Griffinhill until I get done with Minas Tirith.

 

[AA0]

My initial thought was the world is missing spawns of bandits, and deserters around to actually pose a threat.  You can't gain relations because no one ever gets in trouble.  Settlements aren't sieged, heros for the most part are all buddies, only do the bandits fight with anyone else. 

I noticed even if I get a negative relationship with a faction, their heros will try to attack me but if I have a positive relationship to a hero they don't do anything, but they keep following me. 

 

[Diavolo]

yep, war with a faction is slightly buggy. I once took custow this way:

had about 20 relations with swadia (which held custow), and attacked the city.
they had like 2000 peasants and other crappy forces, and I had an army of 100 swadian knights.
I attacked once and killed 300-400, then I went home and got more soldiers.  (now relations with swadia 15 or so, so still we were at "peace")
then a week later I had more forces, and attacked, now I nearly won, but retreated when they had 400 ppl left. (now they had 5-10 relations or so)
did this an other time one week later, and took the town. (after taking the town they finally got bad relations with me, -2 or so)