The whole "buy horse to level up troops to horsemen" thing is illogical

[GrandiousBrain]

I can get an imperial recruit and level him up to a legionary that has juggernaut armour for the cost of a pack of arrows.

But upgrading to horsemen requires buying horses twice. Why? All this does is to annoy the f out of players. I think that should be removed and horsed troops should get their 300 denar horses themselves, just like legionaries get ther +200k denar armour themselves.

Its somewhat logical that you need to get a horse for an upgrade to cavarly unit,it shouldnt be removed just tweeked made more in depth.

Your suggestion will bring more problems,hate,frustration if they removed it bcs then players would then bi***ing alongside yourself how it takes way to much time to upgrade to cavarly and how player has no control over upgrading but relies on npc having money to buy its own equipment(even thou personaly i owuld love that realistic rout of upgrade let soldiers ammas their own money from payments and buy their own coded eqipment).Then players will flock and say how they want full control over upgrades and how they want to dictate who and how many gets upgraded to cavarly and so on.

As i mentioned i would love to have system/way of recruiting and leveling/upgrading a unit that is more realistic and units buying their own equipment from their own earned pay and if needed pay for food from their own unit personal money if they are hungry and the leader istelf cant cover it itself for a price of morale loss and maybe even some low tier peasant desertions BUT many of players that want it all fast and finished especialy certain youtubers would flock and say how its not good at all bcs then player istelf wont have full control of who gets what/who gets promoted also most importantly it would take much more time for individual units to ammas needed money and buy their own gear that peole would start saying ist grindy as f and how it wastes huge amount of their time waiting for units to individualy slowly ammas their own wealth and individualy uprade their own equipment.Then not to mention on devs side it would give them a huge headace bcs all that would cauuse lots of individual calculations running all over the place and what not alongside system requiring to put into calculation each individual soldier and their personal different money stash in check all the time running in the backrgound that may cause issues or even break calculation system in the game.

 

[kisstraszi]

I actually like this horse upgrade stuff. But we should get the horse back of a dead troop or just give the towns and (horse breeding) settlements more horse with a bit reduced prices.

 

[cadadr]

Need of horse to upgrade horseman troops is a good feature in many ways.

If this rule was not be there most players would try to reach horseman troops all the time because they have several advantages compared to infantry troops both at combat and at map (speed bonus). By this rule we made reaching horseman troops a bit harder.

You can say why we are not paying other equipments of troops and answer of this question is making that kind of system needs so much work and balance. To allow this high tier equipments needed for one troop should cost 2K at most. First we need to make these equipments so cheap and player will be able to buy them from 10th day of game with first quest earnings (which is not good for gameplay). Also as player we should pay this cost to upgrade each troop and maybe we can get 1-1.5K as return from old equipments. Still in this case you need to pay about 1K per troop. This can be a design choice another game can try something like this but this system make Bannerlord completely different game. As player you need to earn 10Ks denar each day to be able to pay these upgrade costs if this is the case. Maybe in this scenario we can give all equipment from killed troops without applying a ratio as loot. However doing this make winning a battle totally a very profitable action then you will not need any trading actions or tax from settlements and also kingdoms lost several battles will left so weak aganist winners which would make snowballing problem worse.

As I said some other game can try this but it will have completely different gameplay from M&B series and it will have different dynamics.

Well I can only reply regaring my playstyle but I'm mostly an infantry oriented player. I like RPing ranged foot soldier mercenary units or imperial legions. When I do play a all-horsemen, I find it pretty easy too: just start with aserai or khuzait players and it won't take more than 100 in game days to build up a 100% horsemen army, even with realistic recruitment.

My thing here is horses, war horses esp., are hard to find, especially if you're not playing mostly in aserai or khuzait territory. I generally like to hang out around the northwestern parts of the map (east is sometimes too difficult for early game, northwest is very dense with settlements which is what I like), and there finding horses requires a lot of travelling. It's that chore part of it that I don't like. If you said e.g. upgrading to horsemen costs +500 denars for normal horses and +1k for war horses, I'd be totally fine with it tbh. Or an option like "pay 1k extra to level up without buying a horse", and if you do chase after horses in towns, you end up paying way less.

tl;dr I'm fine with paying for horses. Personally going and buying them is what bothers me, esp. in regions where there aren't many (war) horses.

 

[Berzerker Jay]

I like it the way it is, and would rather removing it be either a mod thing or else a toggle in the campaign settings. I actually do agree that upgrading to high-tier troops is a little illogical, however. Some time spent outfitting them in cities might make more sense, along with higher costs.

The idea that warhorses should appear out of thin air considering their high value and rarity would bother me if implemented. I always thought that part seemed hokey in Warband. The armour and weapons thing is less so, though still hokey, too.

 

[Vandicus]

Perhaps upgrading troops should be made possible only in cities where is ironmongery where they get new gear for price not teleporting itself to the field anytime.

And also some ppl wanted having soldiers in accord with culture then their gear might be dependant where they got those upgrades from so their appearance (gear) would be not up to faction they are from but where they got upgraded.

I like this idea, except the ironmonger requirement. There are weapons/armor merchant and in theory a unit can wear armors from other cultures, it's just a game limitation that they fall under unit trees. The horse upgrading should ideally be an abstraction, not part of inventory micromanagement.

Another thing I would like to see is unit upgrades being made more expensive but loot values being substantially increased(maybe auto-convert 90% of things into cash so it doesn't cause inventory bloat). Current ratios to other prices are jarring, though not necessarily unbalanced. I'd like it to feel like when we kill many noble/wealthy enemies we're really getting their stuff(plus any war funding and supplies they were carrying) and for it to feel like we're really equipping our troops when we're upgrading them.

To clarify, it's fine that cavalry costs more, it's not great having to micro inventory for it.

 

[yehrom]

Probably we can add using cheapest suitable horse / war horse during upgrade. I noted it.

@mexxico ,
I would suggest a more manageable way for the player : Remove locked horses from the available list of mount for upgrade.

 

[9yearsago]

Will horse breeding become a feature?

 

[Midnitewolf]

I actually like it but I do hate that lords don't need to worry about providing horses. I get that if TW didn't do it, it would really screw with the economy. But imo lords should have to pay extra to cover the cost of the nonexistent horse. That way they have some kind of restriction when leveling up a troop to a cavalry unit, just my 2 cents.

My biggest issue is the cost and availability of Warhorses. I have quite literally made an entire circuit of every town and village that sells horses and maybe only found a dozen warhorses and they are 5 times as expensive as a regular horse. I mean my entire armies wages are less than the cost of one horse. Still this doesn't surprise me because the entire economy is out of wack. I mean toward the midrange of armor you end up paying 5 times the cost for an armor that only gives less than 10% more protection.

 

[JoeyJoJoJrShabadoo]

Cavalry is actually pretty sucky

This is what gets me.

For all the hassle involved in making a full death stack of Vlandian knights they really don't perform that well. Historically the value of heavy cavalry was the morale shock. Watching a horde of armored monstrosities thundering towards you would make most men piss their pants and run. I don't know how well morale is implemented in the game--some troops do flee while others stay and fight--but that's the key to making a cavalry army awesome.

If a well-disciplined infantry could withstand the initial charge, the cavalry usually got chopped up. So just making them numerically superior isn't the right fix.

 

[Ananda_The_Destroyer]

This is what gets me.

For all the hassle involved in making a full death stack of Vlandian knights they really don't perform that well. Historically the value of heavy cavalry was the morale shock. Watching a horde of armored monstrosities thundering towards you would make most men piss their pants and run. I don't know how well morale is implemented in the game--some troops do flee while others stay and fight--but that's the key to making a cavalry army awesome.

If a well-disciplined infantry could withstand the initial charge, the cavalry usually got chopped up. So just making them numerically superior isn't the right fix.

Moral only exists(works) when units die as far as I can tell. You can go into a fight with super low moral but until a unit dies the others won't rout.
So this is a big problem for Cavalry missing it's attacks. If 20 heavy Cav would hit and kill 15-20 enemies when they charge, it could have moral impact, but 1-2 getting killed, then 5 cavalry getting killed and the other 15 riding off and taking a long *** time to charge again, doesn't really help much.

Very often Cav do get caught by infantry and killed after riding strait into them, however some also will magically ride strait through a SW, then through 100 archers and HA and out the other end, all around and then back through again.

The combat AI is just incompetent on both ends and it's very frustrating.

 

[HalfMetalJacket]

Will horse breeding become a feature?

That's a perk already isn't it?

 

[niekdegrijze]

I like the history discussions on these forums. my basics take away for gameplay would be:
- more impact for cavalry charges, more knock back
- more cost for mounted units
- horses count towards unit count.
- horse archers ai like it was (effective) but with an enemy tactical ai that uses terrain and counter cavalry charges against them.
- owning horse producing villages could be a huge benefit for a noble and be reflected in their party composition. (like a bonus to cost and troop count)

 

[Kyias]

When the game was first released, cavalry did not need a warhorse to upgrade to highest tier, just the normal horse.
They added the upgrade requirements to slow down players from creating an all cavalry force too quickly. It exists to have an artificial lock on just turning all your cav into max tier too fast.

 

[Apocal]

When the game was first released, cavalry did not need a warhorse to upgrade to highest tier, just the normal horse.

Are you sure about that? I recall threads where people had trouble telling the difference between the various types of horses and which could be used to upgrade different troops, along with having trouble finding enough war horses to upgrade their units.

edit:
I found a post from week 1 of EA:

But could we maybe make War Horses more common in towns? I'm checking town to town to get War Horses and it's difficult to upgrade my units into useful ones when playing as Khuzait.

 

[Kyias]

Are you sure about that? I recall threads where people had trouble telling the difference between the various types of horses and which could be used to upgrade different troops, along with having trouble finding enough war horses to upgrade their units.

edit:
I found a post from week 1 of EA:

Yes, I am sure about that. It was an early change. During my first campaign, I was rolling with 200 cavalry. After that change, finding the proper war horses made it very painful and changed my troop ratios.

 

[Apocal]

Yes, I am sure about that. It was an early change. During my first campaign, I was rolling with 200 cavalry. After that change, finding the proper war horses made it very painful and changed my troop ratios.

I'm certain you're misremembering, considering people were talking about war horse upgrade requirements within hours of EA starting on March 31st.

At any rate, it doesn't even work to stop a player character from going all-cav fairly early, considering how easy it is to get cav from prisoners.

 

[Kyias]

I'm certain you're misremembering, considering people were talking about war horse upgrade requirements within hours of EA starting on March 31st.

At any rate, it doesn't even work to stop a player character from going all-cav fairly early, considering how easy it is to get cav from prisoners.

Look, perhaps I am mis remembering exact details..what I do remember for a fact is horsemen were able to be recruited to Max tier without a care or thought, then finding war horses to upgrade them to max tier were much more difficult after a patch. It was done for the express purpose of making max tier horsemen more difficult to obtain.

Yes, you can get them from prisoners NOW more often, but that largely is because of the decision by Taleworlds to include higher cav ratios within the AI parties to offset the Khuzaits in autocalc battles. Unintended consequences and all that.

What you have said doesn’t change the core concept that I was trying to share and is still true to the current design concept.

 

[Apocal]

Yes, you can get them from prisoners NOW more often, but that largely is because of the decision by Taleworlds to include higher cav ratios within the AI parties to offset the Khuzaits in autocalc battles. Unintended consequences and all that.

It isn't that. Those changes haven't even really gone into effect yet. (Or if they have, they've been ineffective at increasing cavalry ratios in my playthrough). But they did add a new prisoner recruitment mechanic and boosted the number of nobles you can recruit. You were always able to snag infinite war horse equipped mounted units by blackbagging steppe bandit raiders. And they dropped tons of war horses too.