The real current problem of this game in terms of balance

[Soldier93]

The game is not balanced at all in terms of factions strengths, I mean: it does not matter how many battles you win, if your kingdom does not have enough heroes to compose an army, you'll be always weak. This mean that the enemies never gives up because they will come back to you with giant armies rebuilt in no-time, just because they have more heroes. If you want to increase your heroes so you have to attract other clans or wait ages for kids growing up. So, the only way to balance the situation in an effective way is to execute a lot of enemy heroes when you capture them, but of course this is not a great way to play and it brings negative effects Obviously it could be the opposite in your favor, but the point is that this is not realistic in terms of strategy and frustrating in terms of gameplay: The war balance should be based for example in terms of resources, technologies, population, experience etc, instead of how many npc heroes we have. In particular, the number of soldiers of each faction should be based on the population available and maybe investment in weapons and training too. Instead the logic here again is just how many heroes are available to farm and lead new recruits.

Another connected balance issue is that this game is a continuous warfare, I know that this is the main part of the game but it is so pointless and frustrating running up and down through the map to push the enemy back from a previous position that you cleared just few moments ago... The game should be more difficult for the enemy as for the player to conquer a territory and keep it, and in particular to build an army. At the moment, again, it does not matter how many armies you destroy, they will come back even bigger than before in no time, just few minutes later! My suggestion is that there should be more balanced and realistic periods of farming, management, organization, and then warfare.

 

[Ananda_The_Destroyer]

In current versions you can raise a new clan from a wanderer, you just need 500 influence, a fief for them, 20k and to be a ruler. So, you can start out as just Clan at rank 4 and make a kingdom and then each new fief you get raise up a new clan, you may even accidently lose a fief and re-take it to make a new clan and you'll get a lot of influence from beating all those enemies, so in not very long you have enough field power that they make armies on thier own. I know this only addresses part of you complaint, but it is an improvement.

Another connected balance issue is that this game is a continuous warfare, I know that this is the main part of the game but it is so pointless and frustrating running up and down through the map to push the enemy back from a previous position that you cleared just few moments ago... The game should be more difficult for the enemy as for the player to conquer a territory and keep it, and in particular to build an army. At the moment, again, it does not matter how many armies you destroy, they will come back even bigger than before in no time, just few minutes later! My suggestion is that there should be more balanced and realistic periods of farming, management, organization, and then warfare.

Yes, it's annoying how fast they recover and how oblivious your own vassals are about it. They will gladly vote to release a faction's worth of enemies for a few days peace, only to be faced with thier full force again. Using my onw character to hold many prisoners (with zero escape chance) and bull doze all the armies is the only defense, but this is ruined by the vassals wanting peace at bad times, never pushing the advantage and often even wanting peace (release massive prisoners) then voting for a new war the next day anyways.

The whole system was made to keep the AI from expanding too fast on it's own at the start of the game, but it seems really ill-suited for late game and especially for a very large faction. With many vassals and influence the AI just doesn't use the system effectively anymore. Plus you have additions like the increase in level and amount of units notables have, so the AI can bounce back even faster, but this is not reflected at all in thier peace calculations.

 

[Soldier93]

In current versions you can raise a new clan from a wanderer, you just need 500 influence, a fief for them, 20k and to be a ruler. So, you can start out as just Clan at rank 4 and make a kingdom and then each new fief you get raise up a new clan, you may even accidently lose a fief and re-take it to make a new clan and you'll get a lot of influence from beating all those enemies, so in not very long you have enough field power that they make armies on thier own. I know this only addresses part of you complaint, but it is an improvement.


Yes, it's annoying how fast they recover and how oblivious your own vassals are about it. They will gladly vote to release a faction's worth of enemies for a few days peace, only to be faced with thier full force again. Using my onw character to hold many prisoners (with zero escape chance) and bull doze all the armies is the only defense, but this is ruined by the vassals wanting peace at bad times, never pushing the advantage and often even wanting peace (release massive prisoners) then voting for a new war the next day anyways.

The whole system was made to keep the AI from expanding too fast on it's own at the start of the game, but it seems really ill-suited for late game and especially for a very large faction. With many vassals and influence the AI just doesn't use the system effectively anymore. Plus you have additions like the increase in level and amount of units notables have, so the AI can bounce back even faster, but this is not reflected at all in thier peace calculations.

Raising a clan from wanderers is a great feature, one of the best so far, but this not solve the problem that the game is run by the logic of how many heroes each factions have in order to be strong. This makes everything no sense and quite pointless to play.

 

[CalarTheMerciless]

Could be helped if the ai was more weighted to care about bandits as well as just declaring endless wars. As it seems there isnt enough clearing large bands of lots at times to allow yours and the ai caravans to function unmolested.

 

[Earth Dragon]

Some of these issues are actually caused by the fact individual wars are way too short right now. You have wars that last a single season and it’s over, then there is a single season peace, and then another war.

This feeds into the fact that all your captives go to waste and there is no time to actually take some territory, and then because there is an understandable system in place allowing for fast replenishment to help prevent snowballing, they rearm and immediately declare war again.

Wars could be programmed to not come to votes for peace until 2 months after they started and force a 2 month minimal cease fire period before the war can be reignited. Maybe there is something like that at play, but I can’t really notice.

Wars are short and sporadic right now, and my best guess is that sweeping changes to prevent snowballing have some collateral damage that needs to be cleaned up

 

[CalarTheMerciless]

Some of these issues are actually caused by the fact individual wars are way too short right now. You have wars that last a single season and it’s over, then there is a single season peace, and then another war.

This feeds into the fact that all your captives go to waste and there is no time to actually take some territory, and then because there is an understandable system in place allowing for fast replenishment to help prevent snowballing, they rearm and immediately declare war again.

Wars could be programmed to not come to votes for peace until 2 months after they started and force a 2 month minimal cease fire period before the war can be reignited. Maybe there is something like that at play, but I can’t really notice.

Wars are short and sporadic right now, and my best guess is that sweeping changes to prevent snowballing have some collateral damage that needs to be cleaned up

I agree some hard coded lockouts in terms of war declarations and cessation of hostility would be good.

 

[iimstevo]

The game is not balanced at all in terms of factions strengths, I mean: it does not matter how many battles you win, if your kingdom does not have enough heroes to compose an army, you'll be always weak. This mean that the enemies never gives up because they will come back to you with giant armies rebuilt in no-time, just because they have more heroes. If you want to increase your heroes so you have to attract other clans or wait ages for kids growing up. So, the only way to balance the situation in an effective way is to execute a lot of enemy heroes when you capture them, but of course this is not a great way to play and it brings negative effects Obviously it could be the opposite in your favor, but the point is that this is not realistic in terms of strategy and frustrating in terms of gameplay: The war balance should be based for example in terms of resources, technologies, population, experience etc, instead of how many npc heroes we have. In particular, the number of soldiers of each faction should be based on the population available and maybe investment in weapons and training too. Instead the logic here again is just how many heroes are available to farm and lead new recruits.

Another connected balance issue is that this game is a continuous warfare, I know that this is the main part of the game but it is so pointless and frustrating running up and down through the map to push the enemy back from a previous position that you cleared just few moments ago... The game should be more difficult for the enemy as for the player to conquer a territory and keep it, and in particular to build an army. At the moment, again, it does not matter how many armies you destroy, they will come back even bigger than before in no time, just few minutes later! My suggestion is that there should be more balanced and realistic periods of farming, management, organization, and then warfare.

There are vast issues with the game and how it plays currently. I'd love to mod the game to make a unique game mode, but honestly, the game files are a mess as well, and creating your own mod isn't even self-contained when resources from Native/Mount&Blade are mandatory to be amended.

This is what I'd have;
- Personal relations (not clan relations)
- Player and AI both have the same recruitment requirements (Just yesterday, I beat a guy, released him (for the relation bonus) and the second I moved, he came out of the settlement we fought next to with 83 men - you can't even get 83 recruits from a single settlement)
- Advanced bartering that isn't locked behind trade skill level
- Kingdom types (Not all Kingdoms of old gave regions away to lords and all paid tax to their monarchs)
- Advanced tactics (Like assigning infantry to charge at specific infantry, ignore retreating units etc etc)
- Clan missions/assignments (Like instructing your own members to take out hideouts, looters etc)
- Messengers (Adding in a single unit on horse back to reach lords (which AI also have to use) to convey messages which can be intercepted and sold)

 

[Soldier93]

There are vast issues with the game and how it plays currently. I'd love to mod the game to make a unique game mode, but honestly, the game files are a mess as well, and creating your own mod isn't even self-contained when resources from Native/Mount&Blade are mandatory to be amended.

This is what I'd have;
- Personal relations (not clan relations)
- Player and AI both have the same recruitment requirements (Just yesterday, I beat a guy, released him (for the relation bonus) and the second I moved, he came out of the settlement we fought next to with 83 men - you can't even get 83 recruits from a single settlement)
- Advanced bartering that isn't locked behind trade skill level
- Kingdom types (Not all Kingdoms of old gave regions away to lords and all paid tax to their monarchs)
- Advanced tactics (Like assigning infantry to charge at specific infantry, ignore retreating units etc etc)
- Clan missions/assignments (Like instructing your own members to take out hideouts, looters etc)
- Messengers (Adding in a single unit on horse back to reach lords (which AI also have to use) to convey messages which can be intercepted and sold)

That's a good insight too

 

[Beau Vine]

Even the introduction of names showing helps. Maybe with good scouting we could see the heroes we tagged as favourite?

I got to equal clans with other nations, but then chasing indovidual noble house leaders gets a bit much. Then again - if you poach them while at war - you get their cities for free, which is nice.

 

[SaltyNacho]

Just yesterday, I beat a guy, released him (for the relation bonus) and the second I moved, he came out of the settlement we fought next to with 83 men - you can't even get 83 recruits from a single settlement

If that settlement was a village there'd be no one left! Just an abandoned village, a ghost town.

 

[iimstevo]

If that settlement was a village there'd be no one left! Just an abandoned village, a ghost town.

lol no, it was a town - but still, an instant respawn with 82 men (I forgot the number obv includes the lord/noble) is seriously OP when your own clan members just trot out there on their lonesome to get captured by 8-man looters.

 

[Apocal]

- Player and AI both have the same recruitment requirements (Just yesterday, I beat a guy, released him (for the relation bonus) and the second I moved, he came out of the settlement we fought next to with 83 men - you can't even get 83 recruits from a single settlement)

They have almost the same requirements:

In the same patch that the drift mechanic was implemented, 1 of the 2 bonus slots that AI lords had access to was removed. They still have +1 slot with all notables, but the other extra +1 slot that they got for notables within their own faction was removed. Essentially they are now playing on "Easy" recruiting difficulty, where before they were playing on "Easiest."

The default amount of recruiting slots a lord gets for a neutral notable (player included), is 1. If a lord has any amount of negative relations with a notable, they get -1 slot. With the +1 slot all AI lords get with all notables, this means that even with -100 relations, an AI lord will still have access to the first slot of a neutral notable (because 1 + 1 - 1 = 1), unless they are at war. With certain perks, they may get access to even more slots despite negative relations (Combat Tips being one of them). You can see how the number of recruitment slots a lord gets works in the MaximumIndexHeroCanRecruitFromHero method.

The extra slot that AI lords get also works for the player's clan parties (since they are AI), which explains why your clan parties can recruit from notables that you yourself cannot. Them having certain recruiting perks that you do not can also affect this.

If an AI pops out with 83 dudes from a settlement after respawning, that means he pulled the majority of those guys from his garrison or had like nine notables with full racks.

 

[iimstevo]

They have almost the same requirements:

If an AI pops out with 83 dudes from a settlement after respawning, that means he pulled the majority of those guys from his garrison or had like nine notables with full racks.

The likely scenario would be he pulled from the Garrison.
The problem however is that he was literally just released. He basically teleported to that settlement, pulled them out of the garrison, and started camping near my siege again (I was sieging Rhesos castle, he came out of Marunath) all in the space of about 5 minutes in-game time and 0.2ms real-world time.

Yet... when you tell your AI clan member to form a party, what do they do?
Stall for about 5 seconds, leave the town on their own... Slowly, and Painfully walk to the nearest village to recruit some troops, and 90% of the time, get instantly captured by looters unless you waste two days in-game escorting them, or give them your own hard-raised troops (for them to get killed by stupid decisions).

 

[TheWigglyTapeworm]

Yet... when you tell your AI clan member to form a party, what do they do?
Stall for about 5 seconds, leave the town on their own... Slowly, and Painfully walk to the nearest village to recruit some troops, and 90% of the time, get instantly captured by looters unless you waste two days in-game escorting them, or give them your own hard-raised troops (for them to get killed by stupid decisions).

Yup, so sick of this bug, asked for it to be solved already..
Sooo painful watching them spawn outside the city they was in and not go back in it to recruit

 

[froggyluv]

He basically teleported to that settlement

Is this true? Does the AI really cheat like this?

 

[Ananda_The_Destroyer]

Is this true? Does the AI really cheat like this?

Yeah, if you release them after battle they teleport and have their spawn party immediately and get to work re-filling their party. I'm not sure it's different if they escape or are ransomed, I think they may have cool down in when this happens though, as they are often un-findable after being ransomed/escape. If a party already has max field parties they will become a bench warmer, but this doesn't seem to happen if you release them after battle, presumably the AI hasn't checked to make another party yet.

 

[Apocal]

Is this true? Does the AI really cheat like this?

Yeah, they instantly get teleported to one of their owned settlements, if they have one. If they don't have one they get teleported to a faction settlement (village right outside of a town). I don't know where lords respawn if their faction is entirely landless.

Yet... when you tell your AI clan member to form a party, what do they do?

Usually just recruit from the settlement they are in because I don't have them form parties from my own unless I'm going to dump 100 troops on them. They'd act exactly like the other AI if there was automatic party raising for them.

 

[iimstevo]

Yeah, they instantly get teleported to one of their owned settlements, if they have one. If they don't have one they get teleported to a faction settlement (village right outside of a town). I don't know where lords respawn if their faction is entirely landless.

Usually just recruit from the settlement they are in because I don't have them form parties from my own unless I'm going to dump 100 troops on them. They'd act exactly like the other AI if there was automatic party raising for them.

1) Landless lords spawn in any town they're not at war with that matches their culture.

2) That's not what happens. They spawn in the town, walk out of the town on their own, and instantaneously get captured by looters on their way to the nearest village.
Its impractical to have to travel to go meet your clan members, to give them your troops you've spent game time training and developing, for them to go and get them killed by poor decision making. They should simply recruit their own troops before exiting the settlement - but they don't do that.

 

[Sweynforkbeard]

1) yes, eventually it does suck with more or less instantly respawning armies. But there is a point in the game where you basically want the map to be populated with as many parties as possible (to farm).

2) It is a terrible idea to replace clan relationship with individual relationship. Atm you can at least build relationship with a clan by handing in captured lords to one of the clan´s holdings. With individual relationships you would basically be reduced to capture and releash (and forced to do so a truckload of times more).

 

[CrazyElf]

This mean that the enemies never gives up because they will come back to you with giant armies rebuilt in no-time, just because they have more heroes

I don't think this is as big a problem - in fact I'd rather have the enemy be able to quickly build up an army.

Otherwise after 1 major battle, the entire faction is pretty much finished.