This game is broken at a fundamental level

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Just to avoid any misunderstanding regarding the AI cheat.
Source
The confirmed cheats are:
  1. 1 extra slot for recruitment
  2. They don't need horses for upgrade
  3. Daily small xp for their troops
  4. respawn with several (10-15) initial troops near them
I am sure these are not exhaustive.

On the topic of the need for cheats to fix snowballing:
  • I prefer no cheats at all.
  • If bandits cause problem to newly spawned lords, modify bandit rate/speed, improve lord AI, etc... The player can survive. Lords should be able to, too.
  • No daily xp gain for lords. They should earn it too.
  • Lords should require horse for cavalry upgrades, if this depletes the horse stocks at villages etc, either increase the stocks, expand the world, or reduce lord population.
I know BL improved on cheats compared to WB but still there are a lot of cheats.

It is understansable lords recruit faster because the player joins an already established world as a newcomer while everyone else has built up relationship with notables. However, lords should not have extra hardcoded slots for recruitment.
 
I am sure these are not exhaustive.

On the topic of the need for cheats to fix snowballing:
  • I prefer no cheats at all.
  • If bandits cause problem to newly spawned lords, modify bandit rate/speed, improve lord AI, etc... The player can survive. Lords should be able to, too.
  • No daily xp gain for lords. They should earn it too.
  • Lords should require horse for cavalry upgrades, if this depletes the horse stocks at villages etc, either increase the stocks, expand the world, or reduce lord population.
I know BL improved on cheats compared to WB but still there are a lot of cheats.

It is understansable lords recruit faster because the player joins an already established world as a newcomer while everyone else has built up relationship with notables. However, lords should not have extra hardcoded slots for recruitment.
IMO the corner stone of the AI cheating problems is that the AI doesn't SPEND CAMPAIGN TIME doing anything but war! And TBC, I mean walking around on the map doing things in parity with all other parties in the game world. This ties directly into the popular player complaint that the AI seems relentless and like AI doesn't suffer at all from defeats and AI doesn't give the player enough time to do side-work like villages issues and such.
AI doesn't have to walk to the store for money: AI gets loot turned to gold everyday.
AI doesn't need to buy warhorses, this too means no trips to the store and no competition for warhorses with other parties. I hate this so much. It also negates a huge part of the eco as it doesn't matter if a faction is in wars that would cut off it's prime warhorse supplies.
AI doesn't care/know to do it's fief issues and clear hideouts and such. They deserve to be captured when they spawn if nobody in thier clan is
pulling thier weight clearing this stuff out. They clear issues randomly while recruiting but that's a cheat too, they don't really do anything or expend anything. IMO any clan with a fief should have 1 field party doing issues and hideouts and NOT able to join any armies.
AI knows magically what fiefs have food or recruits, it will change it destination instantly if you deprive them of these. Wandering around wasting time is part of the game.
AI doesn't have to find clan leaders on the map to recruit clan/merc or make marriages, this is Bull ****. I can take a week to do this stuff and the AI does it via magic instantly. Also, I doubt they pay the going price for new clans or spouses, but I actually don't know for sure.

I want the AI to spend lots of time walking around on the map to do everything. Time should be the primary resource. I want them to have to do actions for money and spend the money to have troops. If they don't have money I want them to suffer immediately with dramatic results such as being stranded in enemy territory with no troops and a huge cargo malice. I want the AI to **** up sometimes. Some players complain when the AI starves itself, but this is one of the only good things in the system. It's good they starve and fail sometimes, I wish they would actually lose the troops too not just KO them.

I kinda like that there's more t2+ troops now and it is noticeable on the battlefield (for about 5 seconds...), however I think the "AI has recruit armies" complaint would be much better solved by making the AI defeat looter/bandit parties so simply level up the troops and increase the threshold of power needed for them to join an army or take a hostile action so they just CANNOT show up with recruit armies at all. This also helps other player complaint because it means less armies and raids because the AI parties are SPENDING MUCH MORE TIME building up thier parties between defeats.
 
@Ananda_The_Destroyer alot of the things above can't be solved at the moment as every time AI want to do something, they are dragged into an army. I think the army-mechanism is to blame for alot of issues in the game.

I think huge armies should cost alot more to assemble! I think for each member beyond the first, it should cost +25% more influence to hire another. For a king, it could be 10%. There could be a marchall-title too for the king to hand out, doing the same to that vassal clan-leader.

This would give less doomstacks, more armies with 1-2 members and could make AI more picky in who they invite. THis way the armies prioritize quality over quantity and likely cause conquest a thing for the royal/marchall army rather then something anyone can do on their own.

More AI parties would be left to act from their own agenda. Their agenda can easely be influenced by developers to prio guarding demesne over raiding villages. The latter can be prio 3, should they have 2 or more non-warmongering parties(Ofc a greedy/cruel partyleader disagree and go pillage anyway!).

The 2 potential downsides I can see is
  • Less huge epiq battles. But honestly, how epiq is it to battle 1500 enemies led by a simple vassal just to 3 days after the vicory face another one? Epiq battles for me requires 2 kings on the field :grin:
  • Less successfull sieges. For me this is an upside too.
Other upsides:
  • More small armies. Small assault armies that hunt alone enemy parties etc
  • More alone parties that parties their agenda rather than just idly following.
  • Influence matters! Influence becomes something imfortant for lords to not waste away. It´s not "Who invites all parties first" but "Who can make the most inpact with the army they can afford?".
 
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Agreed. Everything you mentioned are just different examples of AI cheating that are not talked about much.

Just to add something on AI lords completing quests. Of course they cannot be expected to enter "mission scenes" for quests but they can at least travel from place-to-place, doing what is necessary for the completion of the quest:
  • If it is a quest to travel from City A to City B, then they should make that travel.
  • If it is a peasant training quest, then they should wait at that village for some time.

The time spent inside the "scenes" is irrelevant because for player involved scenes, time just stops anyway. The same will be valid for AI when they finish quests, provided they do the campaign-map logistics work that affect time.
 
Just FYI for everyone else:

The AI is granted a very small number of free troops on spawn, not a complete army. Anyone else they get is pulled from their garrisons or recruited. Bannerman Man broke it down last year. The actual code behind has changed but the gameplay impacts are still (mostly; it seems like they don't get free troops if spawning at settlement their clan owns any longer?) the same.

StewVader has been told this before and ignored it.

Ok sure, I may be partly wrong about the size of troops they spawn with. Maybe they are given 10% of the troops when they respawn - but it doesn't really matter now does it? They still repopulate their armies in no time at all because of other cheats. I mean, we all see it during a siege. Before the siege is done you will be attacked by the same generals 2-3 times.

Again, even if it is only 10% it really makes no difference. Defeating the AI does very little damage to them because of the variety of cheats they rcv. And if they didnt' rcv these cheats, the game would be over in a few hours. There is no middle ground.

Also, @Apocal Bannerman's post was not confirmed by TW and it was his own analysis, which he caveats may be incorrect. Also it was a year ago and things very well have been changed by TW.
 
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Warning: If you steal my post for a crappy video without my permission please learn to read and actually play the the current version of the game so you can take your foot out of your mouth for once. I don't want anything I ever write associated with you in any way.
I say this because somebody harvests @StewVader recent posts and milks a lot of crappy reaction videos out of them. I'm sure nobody in this thread would ever want to contribute willingly to supporting that person who doesn't even play or understand bannerlord but just uses forum posts for click bait content-less garbage videos.

And also with these cheats too! It's just pointless, it make the AI annoying and relentless yet they're still unable to stop the player. It actually accelerates the players desire to crush them thoroughly because they're so obnoxious. Oh I can't do my villages issues because people keep trying to raid me? Oh okay I'll just defeat every single party of the faction and use the little red button to make them go away permanently. Oh no the useless incontrollable NPCs don't like me? Oh no what will I do?


Yay! Yes I like this! They should get beat up looters sometimes ( they still do too lol), they should take out their garrison troops, oh no garrison" Well then they're a bum and deserve to be caught by looters!

Good! The middle and late game is boring, end it in the early game!


Yes, they need to make the AI do "Other things" besides looting and joining armies. This is the core of the problem.
One or more parties of clans should ALWAYS be doing village issues and hunting bandits and hideouts.
Clans should raise troops and garrison fiefs intelligently and use them as a resource to re-build parties ("Oh but they do" do it better then), not just some number that goes up and down because of some other number that goes up and down.
There should be Less armies in general.
Armies should have an objective, no wandering.
Also, I think some gamey stuff like +auto calc bonus for fiefs further in a factions territory( bonus from near by fiefs)would help them last longer as the enemy would need to build more and more power.

They did make a point in dev blogs, to say the AI will compete with player and do more what the player does (I assume in comparison to WB), but after EA they have backed off of this it seems. I know "snowballing" and "recruit armies" were the excuse, but I think TW should still do all they can to make it more of a sandbox war game and less repetitive, relentless and no-options battle gameplay.
Who? Reduntant?
 
IMO the corner stone of the AI cheating problems is that the AI doesn't SPEND CAMPAIGN TIME doing anything but war! And TBC, I mean walking around on the map doing things in parity with all other parties in the game world. This ties directly into the popular player complaint that the AI seems relentless and like AI doesn't suffer at all from defeats and AI doesn't give the player enough time to do side-work like villages issues and such.
AI doesn't have to walk to the store for money: AI gets loot turned to gold everyday.
AI doesn't need to buy warhorses, this too means no trips to the store and no competition for warhorses with other parties. I hate this so much. It also negates a huge part of the eco as it doesn't matter if a faction is in wars that would cut off it's prime warhorse supplies.
AI doesn't care/know to do it's fief issues and clear hideouts and such. They deserve to be captured when they spawn if nobody in thier clan is
pulling thier weight clearing this stuff out. They clear issues randomly while recruiting but that's a cheat too, they don't really do anything or expend anything. IMO any clan with a fief should have 1 field party doing issues and hideouts and NOT able to join any armies.
AI knows magically what fiefs have food or recruits, it will change it destination instantly if you deprive them of these. Wandering around wasting time is part of the game.
AI doesn't have to find clan leaders on the map to recruit clan/merc or make marriages, this is Bull ****. I can take a week to do this stuff and the AI does it via magic instantly. Also, I doubt they pay the going price for new clans or spouses, but I actually don't know for sure.

I want the AI to spend lots of time walking around on the map to do everything. Time should be the primary resource. I want them to have to do actions for money and spend the money to have troops. If they don't have money I want them to suffer immediately with dramatic results such as being stranded in enemy territory with no troops and a huge cargo malice. I want the AI to **** up sometimes. Some players complain when the AI starves itself, but this is one of the only good things in the system. It's good they starve and fail sometimes, I wish they would actually lose the troops too not just KO them.

I kinda like that there's more t2+ troops now and it is noticeable on the battlefield (for about 5 seconds...), however I think the "AI has recruit armies" complaint would be much better solved by making the AI defeat looter/bandit parties so simply level up the troops and increase the threshold of power needed for them to join an army or take a hostile action so they just CANNOT show up with recruit armies at all. This also helps other player complaint because it means less armies and raids because the AI parties are SPENDING MUCH MORE TIME building up thier parties between defeats.
Yeah there's a lot of fundamentally broken mechanics in this game. I'd also agree with @Tryvenyal that armies forming too easily is a big issue. You see armies running around all the time even when a faction isn't at war. I mean what's the point in forming an army if it's just going to wander around. Another issue I have is the distance between settlements is far too close. There were times in Warband where you might have to travel the better part of a day to go from a town in your faction to even outlying village in a neighboring faction but in Bannerlord settlements are so close the map feels way too full. It makes raiding villages way too easy and armies don't have to overextend to capture a town. There should be less settlements or the map should be bigger.
 
Before reading the topic I want to say you expressed my thoughts. One thing I thought was making cities and castles support more garrison and miltia. Let's see what people said about it, now.

edit:

Having bigger garrisons doesnt mean anything if lord just get soldiers from them everytime they lose

A big factor for this broken state of the game is influence and army system and #23 says well about it
 
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this issue is due to every battle being a meat grinder and all troops basically die or get wounded and sold as slaves.

real medieval battles are more like what Crusader Kings 3 battles are like. if you are not overwhelmingly stronger than your opponent, then there will be limited casualties during combat. and then one side loses and routs, the winner has a chance to cut down some fleeing troops. and most of the deaths happen during this phase like in real life. once again, unless you are out numbered 5 to 1, routing will still preserve like 70% of your army, especially the men at arms.

but in bannerlord. battles are over before you finish blinking, there's no time for a seperate "rout/chase phase". if people start running away before they all get killed then the battles would be over in 10 seconds instead of 30.
 
Ok sure, I may be partly wrong about the size of troops they spawn with. Maybe they are given 10% of the troops when they respawn - but it doesn't really matter now does it? They still repopulate their armies in no time at all because of other cheats. I mean, we all see it during a siege. Before the siege is done you will be attacked by the same generals 2-3 times.

Again, even if it is only 10% it really makes no difference. Defeating the AI does very little damage to them because of the variety of cheats they rcv. And if they didnt' rcv these cheats, the game would be over in a few hours. There is no middle ground.
They get their troops because they have them in garrisons and pull them out when rebuilding, same as the player. The one thing they get is +1 recruiting slot.

You're right that defeating them in battle doesn't matter much but that's just because defeating anyone in battle (player or AI) doesn't actually do much to them. You lose troops, you can just go strip mine villages and towns for new ones and have a new party up and running in only a few days. Most people don't play that way though. Even if they created a population debuff, it would just mean the game world is constantly debuffed because the AI is constantly losing troops in a way the player almost never is, due to autocalc being harsh.
Also, @Apocal Bannerman's post was not confirmed by TW and it was his own analysis, which he caveats may be incorrect. Also it was a year ago and things very well have been changed by TW.
It was confirmed, multiple times:
We do not give lots of free soldiers to AI, only about 10 free soldiers when they first spawn.
Are you sure it happens? They should be able to take troops from only their clan's fiefs. So your clanmates can take troops from your garrison but other clan parties should not.
I did not understand. What do you mean by AI is cheating? What AI is doing that you cannot do? When they escape from prison they start with 10% of party size filled with troops only and as @scarface52 mentioned they can get troops from 2 slots ahead for now (means that if normally they can get 1st slot only they can get from slots 1-2-3, its like they are playing at easiest recruiting mode. It will be removed when initial lord-notable relations are set). These are the only cheats AI have in your scenario. If you see AI lord with hundreds of troops they probably took them from garrison or recruited from villages.
 
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Would you mind explaining how OP seems off base?
@Apocal already did. Plus, recruiting is not the foundation of the game. Fighting is. Anything wrong with the recruitment system is relatively easy to fix, the combat system not so much. To me the game is fundamentally broken, but the way lords recruit troops has nothing to do with it.
 
@Apocal already did. Plus, recruiting is not the foundation of the game. Fighting is. Anything wrong with the recruitment system is relatively easy to fix, the combat system not so much. To me the game is fundamentally broken, but the way lords recruit troops has nothing to do with it.

From what I see, nothing he says explains away what I asked/why OP is "off base". The way lords recruit troops is surely not the major factor why the game is a giant, ugly mess, but calling it "off base" is absurd when these sorts of important workings of the game AI changes the way people play and or enjoy it.
 
In my last playthrough (e1.6.2) I kinda had the impression that was army after army after army of enemy lords, reinforcing the 'ai cheats problem'..
But after some time, I'm guessing it's the huge number of nobles everywhere and the annoying minor factions, there is so much nobles in every faction, that it doesn't matter if you defeated 2, 3 or 5 of them, there are 52 more to go (i'm exaggerating a bit lol) I think this contributes to both 'never ending wars' and lack of 'meaningful battles'..
If the ai don't cheat and every time I defeat a 900+ army, another is down the corner, then it's the number of nobles..
I could be talking bs though..
 
They get their troops because they have them in garrisons and pull them out when rebuilding, same as the player. The one thing they get is +1 recruiting slot.

You're right that defeating them in battle doesn't matter much but that's just because defeating anyone in battle (player or AI) doesn't actually do much to them. You lose troops, you can just go strip mine villages and towns for new ones and have a new party up and running in only a few days. Most people don't play that way though. Even if they created a population debuff, it would just mean the game world is constantly debuffed because the AI is constantly losing troops in a way the player almost never is, due to autocalc being harsh.

It was confirmed, multiple times:

So they did. I stand corrected.

I disagree with your assertion about loses not really mattering to AI or player. Player loses can be catastrophic depending on the difficulty your playing. The player may not have a developed clan with lots of fiefs and garrisons to pull from.

I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure i've observed the AI recruit from villages that had no available recruits as well. Not sure if this is a known AI cheat or not.
 
From what I see, nothing he says explains away what I asked/why OP is "off base". The way lords recruit troops is surely not the major factor why the game is a giant, ugly mess, but calling it "off base" is absurd when these sorts of important workings of the game AI changes the way people play and or enjoy it.
I mean you are welcome to disagree if that's what you want to do. When I give you multiple reasons why I said that and you answer by basically saying "nah ya wrong" without building any argument of your own, I am not really sure what you expect me to say to that :smile:
 
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