The end result of nerfing ability to gain troops

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This may seem like a meme but this is unironically how i fight now. The gain of fighting and defeating an army in a field battleis so heavily outweighed by the cost of losing troops that it isnt even worth attacking them at all anymore.

My current strat is to get all the boys together and if i have to engage an army i just alt+click them and starve them as much as i can. If i am able to starve them down to <700 men then i can fight them in a field battle and lose <10 men which is a good enough trade to make imo. Like you can see in the vid, they sometimes corner themselves and then you can just capture them.

The real point i want to make here though is to show what the end result is of nerfing passive troop xp gain and increasing upgrade xp cost (in general making it harder to get troops). At least for me it has reached the point where i see no reason to attack an enemy in open field which imo is pretty .....

Edit: Removed homophobic remark.
 
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Takes too long, just attack and position soupier (superior) fire power to thin them out as they approach and move when they get close or retreat, because troops are wonky at shooting HA still/again, I find just moving my Khans guard directly on top of the enemy HA will wipe them out because unlike other Cav and HA KG can use their glaives effectively. I Only lose a troop if I try to use a cavalry in the intended way of attacking with it, so silly. If I use them as a mobile shield wall between my HA and the enemy they usually live.

But yeah I agree with you point, the cost of loosing good troops totally outweighs the spoils of victory, so much so that it's not worth loosing a single noble troops. The counters are just not using good troops, use t2-3 troops you can replace easily, OR as I do aim to not lose any t6 troops ever by brutalizing the AI in every way possible.

I mean I still have my Khans guards I forced recruited in the first months of the game (they're very are now), if I lose them I really can't replace them, unless I grind up leadership by playing a way I hate playing.
 
I agree. Especially annoying if you play Vlandia. Your land is far away and horses are expensive. It's really painful when a knight dies, and they die rather easily. If you don't play cav, your casualty will be even higher.
 
High medicine skill + various troop hp perks help a lot. Unless you're entering an absolute blood bath of a battle, you shouldn't lose more high tier troops than you obtain by upgrading.
In other words, get good and so on.

Noble troops are still a problem though, but then again, you're not supposed to have a lot of them.
 
Upgrading troops is fine, there's plenty of ways to increase troop exp. Some combat skills give you more exp for troops, leadership gives a lot of exp when you recruit units (200?) making more than half the recruits instantly upgradeable from the get-go. Vlandia culture bonus which is arguably the best gives 20% more troop exp so play with that and problem is even more solved. Also, you don't need to upgrade troops up to the max level for them to be effective.

I've had plenty of vlandian sergents by just fighting a couple of bigger looter battles (so the only thing that could use improvement is we need more, bigger looter parties to farm exp. Small looter parties = bad for caravans etc and just plain annoying, they're like lots of cockroaches plaguing the map later on, so if we had bigger looter parties instead that would just give us, and lords, more opportunities to upgrade troops actively, which would be ideal imo). Anyway, like I said, you don't need all your army to be tier 5-6 troops, they're just flavor. I want vlandian sergents because they have cool capes and look bad-ass to me. But in reality all you really need is a decent party size (have a steward if you're not into leveling that), and tier 3 troops which are a good middle ground are totally fine and easy to get.

Then, just doing quests will eventually make you hire tons of troops at once, some even higher level, pretty quickly. I dislike using the emissary system since to me it feels like an op mechanic, so I just solve some quests and I'm fine.

This is absolutely NOT the "end result of nerfing passive xp". The end result is actually playing the game and fighting to level-up your troops instead of just waiting around doing absolutely nothing; + having a balanced amount of lower to higher tiered troops, and this should definitely be the case. Also it leads to making the player choose the right perks for the job (if you want higher quality troops then get more exp gain and more troop hp perks so that melee troops are easier upgraded with less losses).

What you're showing is just what you personally choose to do because you perceive the game as "slightly more difficult/grindy than it was" and it's making you lazy and you'd rather cheese than play the game properly and immerse yourself... I don't understand what the point of this is though... you might as well cheat and give yourself some high tiered troops at this point, or play on a lower difficulty because losing a couple of units feels like too much work for you to get them back apparently. Reduce difficulty and you will lose fewer high tier troops and you can still do 1000 vs 1000 battles and not use this cheese. Sounds logical doesn't it? Why would you want the game to be easier (when it's already not that difficult), when you have the option to choose an easier time for you? Passive exp and passive money in too big of an amount make gameplay trivial because then it becomes more efficient to just wait into towns to gain things rather than play the game, which is really bad imo (when caravans and workshops gave way too much money it felt like a waste of time to even do tournaments because waiting in a town provided faster money). So, it's best to leave passive gains on the lower side just as a bonus and to still promote playing the game, and devs already explained why they nerfed passive exp - so that lords don't upgrade their troops so much that they go broke, if I'm not mistaken (bigger wages etc), so it was just a good change in general, including for gameplay imo.

Anyway, options are plenty, and passive exp gain feels fine to me atm. And from the video you're showing, economy is still unbalanced - you have too much money and receive too much money, and late-game there is too much influence to be had, that's pretty much all I'm seeing here. Also a cheese mechanic that could use some fixing.
 
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Whenever I hear of "metas" in a SP game I cant help but ask myself... Is that fun? Why bother? If you really are playing "to win", even though the AI is so braindead, instead of doing for the experience and fun of it, I have to wonder about the point of even playing the game...
 
Whenever I hear of "metas" in a SP game I cant help but ask myself... Is that fun? Why bother? If you really are playing "to win", even though the AI is so braindead, instead of doing for the experience and fun of it, I have to wonder about the point of even playing the game...
For some people, winning is fun. I know, crazy.
 
IMO the biggest problem is that TW forgot "the carrot on a stick". Many people enjoy ARPG´s despite being mostly grind. BL is the same way but unlike in other ARPG there is no epic item waiting for you at the end. you just grind to grind more. up to a point where it simply becomes tedious and not fun. so people look for a way to avoid it. Make the grind at least slightly enjoyable and less people would cheese on their own. Cheesing is just a symptom of a bigger problem.
 
IMO the biggest problem is that TW forgot "the carrot on a stick". Many people enjoy ARPG´s despite being mostly grind. BL is the same way but unlike in other ARPG there is no epic item waiting for you at the end. you just grind to grind more. up to a point where it simply becomes tedious and not fun. so people look for a way to avoid it. Make the grind at least slightly enjoyable and less people would cheese on their own. Cheesing is just a symptom of a bigger problem.
hmm maybe sometimes this is the case, but there are people that cheese and cheat no matter the game, and no matter how grindy a game really is. You just can't cater to the requests of such kind of players and always give them the benefit of the doubt and give them easy things that ruin the game experience overall, because generally a game is more fun when there is also a challenge, no matter what the challenge is. Even for cheesers and cheaters it will feel more like an accomplishment if they beat a difficult game than an easy one. Imo cheesing is not always a symptom of a bigger problem, but sometimes can indeed be. Like, just above you you can see someone saying "winning is fun", and not thinking further ahead. Some people will do anything to win, even cheat in video games, even ruin other people's experience by cheating in multiplayer games, and I don't want to hint at what kind of people those are but, it's simply not the people you want to listen when changing things in a game. I personally don't see how winning by cheese or cheating is fun in any way. For me winning is fun when there is also a challenge and I overcome it, and for many people it is the same, because the sense of accomplishment is what is very fun for many people. That is why games like Dark Souls are even popular at all. So in that sense, we do need bigger challenges in the game, and also bigger rewards for those challenges, of course. That would make sense.

But it's easier said than done. This is not an mmorpg or something else (even though there will be mods that definitely make it so). Mount and blade is not a game about epic overpowered loot... there are no weapons that use the strength of the gods and deal lightning damage and what-not, erasing armies. Mods will create that though for sure. But there are still things that can be introduced in the vanilla experience of course. For example, smithing was supposed to introduce an interesting system of "you lose your weapon, and a bandit or lord might have it later or something". But instead the shops just get spammed with the weapons you sold (I would completely remove this as a thing...). If the game had more unique weapons and smiths that you and npcs can pay lots of gold (that is another thing money can be used for), to give lords unique weapons, and also introduce bandit heroes with unique weapons as well, that would at least be a cool little reward system (not op, just interesting, you can keep the weapons you find on lords/heroes as collectibles in a chest somewhere or something, especially if we had a hideout, and it would say the previous owner on the weapon's description written in a goldish/brownish italic writing, very cool). We basically need more things to invest in and more cool little systems like this. There is a lot of money to be gotten in the late-game, but there is nothing to invest that money into, so paying a smith like 100k for a very good weapon could be a really nice idea. If we had a thing like a hideout that we can upgrade for lots of gold then it would be more meaning for the money as well, making the grind and time spent in the game make more sense.

Because I do agree that grinding can feel pointless at one point, since some things are missing from the game. The same problem comes with the leveling system and how it's harder and harder to level skills the more you level, it basically becomes more and more grindy (with artificial exp reduction from level-ups as well), and it's less and less rewarding because you get perks very rarely even after lots of grinding, and many times they aren't good perks either. So this argument about reward system is overall a good point that needs improving on multiple facets.
 
well, you can´t get everyone but if you get at least most that should be enough. besides the attempt was there. called "noble Units". just the implementation was a little cluncky. in regards of character progession. not going to touch, there are more then enough threads on the forum.
 
I guess really I just want noble troops to spawn more or to have a way to directly bolsters the notables so they can have more of them. Depending too much on the "simulation" of BL, noble troops start to seriously dry up. I don't view "Veteran's respect" as a solution because if requires leading armies, which requires vassalage or rulership.... and really leading armies negates the need for elite troops outright, if you have your clan parties in and army you can just use 100s of t2-3 xbow men and khuzait raiders and beat the **** out of every one and easily replace losses. Only without access to army mechanic does 100 expensive Khan's guards become a viable (sometimes necessary) idea. And also, Veteran's respect is kinda silly and the disparity between "rare limited units" and "endless mass production of noble units" is very unbalanced and I'd be surprised if the perk stays this way forever. Maybe they should become a normal units but have a %chance to become a noble unit.... no never mind would just be save-scummed.....

Also, the down time between defeated enemy parties and those parties returning to hostile actions/armies is really not enough, IF the player needed to actually rebuild a force they can be in a sucky situation. This happens often as a vassal when your fief is in a bad spot and you kinda strained their playing tower defense with only a limited radius to recruit and train troops on looters, as enemies keep conga conga at you. Of course if you're a free clan and pick your fiefs and wars you can prepare to circumvent all these problems, but this doesn't seem to be TW intended line of play.
 
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