Playing beta 1.5.6 with death enabled. Just hit tier 2, and have been helping the Khuzaits in their war against one of the Imperial factions, and I'm losing companions at an alarming rate. The worst part is that I've never lost a fight. My suggestions are:
1. to lower the chance of death in combat, and/or
2. allow troops to be placed in reserve so they're not immediately spawned in the initial wave.
3. An alternate scenario might be to only allow rolls for death after distinct conditions are met (your side loses, your side suffers X casualties, etc.). That way the player has better control over whether a chance encounter with looters is enough to kill a companion.
I started tier 1 with three companions: an Accursed as an archer, a Silent whom I groomed for command, and a Willowbark as my surgeon. The Silent & Willowbark are both in the infantry line, though they both had shields. I managd to lose both of them over the course of half a dozen battles as part of a lord's army, only one of which was especially close. This hurt especially because there are no other companions in this game who have a Surgeon skill, nor is my main character playing with any sort of Intelligence build.
Some things to note:
Given a static chance for death (P) on any given defeat (by defeat here I just mean 'reduced to 0 hps in a scene') we can get a probability of how long a companion (or lord) will survive given N defeats. This is a Bernoulli Process that can be modelled. There are also handy calculators on the web if you don't want to explore it manually. I made a table below with chance of death given in %:
P is the left column, with N being the white portion.
With the chance of death at 10% there's a 50/50 chance your companion will be dead by his seventh defeat. If we drop that chance to die to 1% your companion can get through 68 defeats before living on borrowed time. If it's true that companions don't roll for death in an autoresolve battle then this creates a perverse incentive to avoid playing battles if you think your companions might be defeated.
It might make sense to keep your companions in their own formation, if you think there's a chance for them to suffer defeat, and then order them to retreat right at the start of the battle, but that wouldn't have helped in my case. All of these battles were ones where I was part of an army, and wasn't commanding all the formations myself.
1. to lower the chance of death in combat, and/or
2. allow troops to be placed in reserve so they're not immediately spawned in the initial wave.
3. An alternate scenario might be to only allow rolls for death after distinct conditions are met (your side loses, your side suffers X casualties, etc.). That way the player has better control over whether a chance encounter with looters is enough to kill a companion.
I started tier 1 with three companions: an Accursed as an archer, a Silent whom I groomed for command, and a Willowbark as my surgeon. The Silent & Willowbark are both in the infantry line, though they both had shields. I managd to lose both of them over the course of half a dozen battles as part of a lord's army, only one of which was especially close. This hurt especially because there are no other companions in this game who have a Surgeon skill, nor is my main character playing with any sort of Intelligence build.
Some things to note:
Given a static chance for death (P) on any given defeat (by defeat here I just mean 'reduced to 0 hps in a scene') we can get a probability of how long a companion (or lord) will survive given N defeats. This is a Bernoulli Process that can be modelled. There are also handy calculators on the web if you don't want to explore it manually. I made a table below with chance of death given in %:
P is the left column, with N being the white portion.
With the chance of death at 10% there's a 50/50 chance your companion will be dead by his seventh defeat. If we drop that chance to die to 1% your companion can get through 68 defeats before living on borrowed time. If it's true that companions don't roll for death in an autoresolve battle then this creates a perverse incentive to avoid playing battles if you think your companions might be defeated.
It might make sense to keep your companions in their own formation, if you think there's a chance for them to suffer defeat, and then order them to retreat right at the start of the battle, but that wouldn't have helped in my case. All of these battles were ones where I was part of an army, and wasn't commanding all the formations myself.
