Troop xp gain is too low

[iskar]

I think the recruitment/XP/training system is probably okay in itself. But bigger-picture, different aspects of a game interact and affect other aspects in unintended ways. I perceive this troop recruitment/development model is somewhat over-stressed by the incessant factional warfare of Bannerlord....which leads to the AI lords stripping settlements bare of all troops regardless of tier. Part of the reason that these guys are running around with all-recruit/peasant armies is that's all that's available in the towns/villages. Another factor is the current quick-escape issue, where every Calradic lord is a Houdini. They're never "off the board" for more than a day or two, so ALL lords are running around putting intense pressure on the settlement troop sources; probably more than TW had visualized or foreseen.

Many of the various recurring issues in the forums, like this one, or economy, or garrisons and food-vs-prosperity, or the discussions about execution penalties, etc, I kinda see as symptoms of a more fundamental problem, rather than separate problems in and of themselves. That fundamental problem is the never-ceasing warfare. Quite simply, a faction is never at peace long enough to "catch its breath"; rebuild parties, develop settlements somewhat unmolested other than pesky bandits, allow the economy to prosper for a while, etc. This situation is somewhat distorting to some degree how players (and maybe even devs) are seeing various aspects of the game.

I suspect two very simple fixes would go a surprisingly long way toward helping a whole host of seemingly-unrelated issues:

1. Make captured lords stay captured for a while. Not forever, but roughly as long as they did in Warband; maybe a few escape or get ransomed quickly, but others might stay behind bars for the duration of the conflict. As the war goes on, this would cut down on the number of parties running around raiding, sieging, and recruiting townies/villagers.

2. Impose some period of inviolable truce when wars end. SO many times now, I've seen an Aserai-vs-Vlandia war (for example) "end"...and then another Aserai-vs-Vlandia war flares up again just a few days later. Areas around Charas, Ortysia, and Quraz never get any respite. That doesn't necessarily mean that a faction will have many long periods of overall peace...but at least it will serve to distribute hotspots around the map a little more, and certain areas can sometimes get some more "local peace".

Neither of these are new or complex mechanics; both existed in Warband.

Just to explicitly tie this back to the OP topic: if the overall pace and intensity of factional warfare eases up a bit, then the current process of recruiting and training up troops might not feel so slow in comparison.

This rings very true. The game has a rather "breathless" feel to it so far. There is no time to do proper trading, courting, questing, builiding, etc. as there is always a war around the corner and a snowballing faction to contain.

That being said, I tried the training grounds you can build in castles and they seem to be broken. I upgraded them to tier 3 and in dozens of days they havent upgraded a single recruit so far.

 

[Koshkasa]

If you think that 1 t1 trooper per 10 days is a good enough, i have no polite words to discribe you.

Read the post before pointing your internet lance at me. I think training all of your T1 troops in 10 days is good enough

 

[VanHoven]

I dont particularly mind the leveling speed for player troops, its fast enough for me. Feels a bit more like an accomplishmend to have a large army of top tier troops. What i do mind is fighting enemy armies of 80% recruits all the time. no fun at all

 

[neolae]

XP gain feels relatively balanced to me. I accumulated a glut of tier 5 and 6 units in my first playthrough that made up the core of my army. I started donating tier 5s that felt oddball to me to garrison to make space for more units.

 

[FullbordadGames]

+1 on this. Pretty much all that needs to be done is to fix the leadership training perk as well. It would also be nice to actually get experience in leadership even if you're not running around in an army. (The exp from high morale is either abysmally low or doesn't even exist).

It is? I think it's too fast if anything. I only need to fight a few small battles and my guys are already T3.

Not on realistic. Anything else than looters will lead to some soldiers dying. While you can still get an upgraded army it takes a looooong time to get a medium sized group of around 70 to T3+ and that's for the player. The AI will just run around with 90% farmers after a few wars never getting them upgraded because, well, they all sort of just die by entering a battle.

The first, or one of the first leadership perks gives your 1-3 tier troops a medium XP bonus. It makes training your troops out of infancy trivial. Like I was having legionaries in less than a month of game time at a fresh character.

Bull****. That perk is not working as intended and it takes around 10 days just to get one troop upgraded ONE tier if you're only using the perk.

Only way to get upgrades "fast" is to never auto resolve anything and fight manually with 1/3 damage settings.

There are literally passive training perks

Yes, and they might as well not exist considering they do nothing.

 

[Maximum997]

Not on realistic. Anything else than looters will lead to some soldiers dying. While you can still get an upgraded army it takes a looooong time to get a medium sized group of around 70 to T3+ and that's for the player.

I found the better way. Just never recruit t1 unit. And lack of new troops i compensating with bandits. You can hire a lot of t2-t3 of them, they are good fighters and you can converse them into the noble troop tree

 

[FullbordadGames]

I found the better way. Just never recruit t1 unit. And lack of new troops i compensating with bandits. You can hire a lot of t2-t3 of them, they are good fighters and you can converse them into the noble troop tree

Problem being to get bandits to "regular" troops you need that leadership perk that you get on what, skill 100?

 

[TomaSkTemplar]

10 days from recruit to say a footman that has no shield ? And since 10 days account for 30 days, since 30 days is 3 months, its really lol.

 

[Maximum997]

Problem being to get bandits to "regular" troops you need that leadership perk that you get on what, skill 100?

125.
Even t2-t3 bandits are really good.

 

[Nahkuri]

Bull****. That perk is not working as intended and it takes around 10 days just to get one troop upgraded ONE tier if you're only using the perk.

Only way to get upgrades "fast" is to never auto resolve anything and fight manually with 1/3 damage settings.

Oh? It felt like it was speeding things up, as I am using the perk in combination with fighting looters(on realistic damage settings.) Maybe imperials just level up super fast, then? Though I had the same experience when leveling up my future Khuzait cavalry of about 20 dudes. I think my best was 6 nomads ready to upgrade after a fight.

EDIT: I'm also playing the regular EA, not beta branch.

 

[Maximum997]

Only way to get upgrades "fast" is to never auto resolve anything and fight manually with 1/3 damage settings.

Or you can just install MnB tweaks and forget about pesants v pesants battles.

 

[Wulfger]

I think the rate of troop XP gain is entirely intentional, it makes perfect sense if the intent is to force the player to rely on high-relations notables to gain powerful troops. It shouldn't be easy for a low-renown player to field an expert army, but a player with a lot of connections should be able to recruit troops of a higher level without having to train them up. The main way this system is failing right now is that its incredibly difficult to reliably increase your relations with notables and, as Bramborough pointed out, that the AI grabs all the possible recruits before you can get there more often than not.

 

[Maximum997]

its incredibly difficult to reliably increase your relations with notables

Creating another party is doing really good for that. It increases your relationships time by time with no penalty

that the AI grabs all the possible recruits before you can get there more often than not.

Yes. But best way for that is leadersip 125 perk.

You forgot the main prooblem - AI and his armies of pesants.

 

[CyberianK]

Imho the problem exists mostly from Recruit stage Tier 1 to Tier 2. I have no issue with progression after that but getting recruits up can be pretty tough.

They should probably massively reduce the Tier 1 required XP to something like 10% of what it is now. Basically when Recruits do anything meaningful they lvl up. Also helps with the problem of AI recruit armies.

 

[Mik1306]

I think folk are misunderstanding the problem here. It's not that people expect you to be able to field a tier 5 army off the bat, but losing a battle right now means going around recruiting and ending up with an army compose of 80% recruits, which are utterly useless. It takes you out of the game for several hours, real time, while you rebuild.It's a crazy amount of time to rebuild after a loss which is inevitably going to happen unless you save scum like crazy.

 

[mr_nifty]

I think the experience rate that troops receive experience, and the amount of and level of recruits available to the player according to renown, rank, social relations, is actually good.

Training troops is not difficult - it just takes a little bit of focus. I run around usually with 45-90 people in my personal company at all times, usually having 10-45 of those being T1 recruits. What I do to easily level these up is simply put them in one or two separate groups (such as Skirmisher, and the later one), and then literally using these to inflict as much damage and kill as many enemies as possible.

I will use tactics and try to make sure none of them ever dies - I even assist in the actual field by using my shield, shieldbashing enemies about to hit them, etc, and they receive in general a ton of experience. You can have 10 guys upgrade from one fight alone. That's fast enough for me.

Of course, I cannot take these recruits, run straight into 20 Steppe Bandits and assume it'll be OK. It won't, and it shouldn't. One of your jobs as a leader and commander is to pick and choose your battles. As not to waste lives, time, or resources. The better you become at all of this the easier everything else becomes, simple.

Lastly, the Leadership skill increases from many things. Try doing a lot of different quests, such as rescuing a lost daughter, handling looters and poachers, etc, and resolve everything with discussion rather than the sword. You also get leadership from being in battles, raiding and winning against Hideouts, and many other things I can't remember now.

Personally I kind of like the pace for most skills, as I don't think at all anyone should be able to become the ultimate expert master in EVERYTHING CONCEIVABLE within one or two years... That's just crazy. Go play Skyrim or some **** if that's the kind of game you want.

The feeling of progress, pride, joy and brotherhood is almost impossible to describe, when you have 4 units that reached T4/T5 from T1, and that are STILL with you, as you come round day 100 in-game and see them help you in the battles.

If you want more higher tier units fast, get better relationships where you recruit, and also try and sweep up prisoners to save that you can recruit. And of course recruit from the prisoners you take.

 

[mr_nifty]

I think folk are misunderstanding the problem here. It's not that people expect you to be able to field a tier 5 army off the bat, but losing a battle right now means going around recruiting and ending up with an army compose of 80% recruits, which are utterly useless. It takes you out of the game for several hours, real time, while you rebuild.It's a crazy amount of time to rebuild after a loss which is inevitably going to happen unless you save scum like crazy.

So you want a game with no repercussions, where the player runs around and if he gets defeated he's right back at it?
I understand your frustration and feeling it might take time to re-coup, but depending on where you are in the game it really shouldn't be that big of an issue. If it is, you have been wiped out too early by being too daring with too much of a weak situation yourself, financially and everything else.

I like the fact that getting wiped is punishing. It does not destroy your nor end your history right then and there, but if you are careless, sleepy, unlucky or just a mix of these - you will feel it when it happens.

I think it's part of the charm and experience. If you save scum like crazy you are already robbing yourself of the experience.

 

[Mik1306]

There's a sharp gap between "No repercussions at all" and "Spend the next few hours farming looters". All i want is to be able to quickly get a functional army together, maybe half hour of time, even if it's not but just functional.

Losing battles happens in the game, sometimes you do it on purpose if you've got wider strategy in mind (Reducing armies so they can't take towns, for example). I just want to know whether the developers expect players to lose their army now and then, in which case it can't be a several hour long set back, or if they expect players to jelously safeguard the army they've been building from day 1, in which case it needs to be harder to lose chunks of men in even battles.

 

[Mik1306]

Thing is, warband was better than this because the trainer perk would raise troops roughly 1 per day, even in VC which some folks are mentioned was slow.

If they made the "raise te meek" perk apply to units instead of stacks, and either fixed or boosted (Can't tell if broke or slow) the training fields, i think it would be fine.

 

[karijus]

After finding out that disciplinarian perk works, I am recruiting 90% from bandits I capture, and it's much faster than recruiting from villages. If I run into them with my companion army, even the big stacks surrender more often than not lol. And bandits are better than recruits anyway. Then after a few battles the strongest survive and level up, rinse and repeat. You need a decently sized army though with at least a few parties with troops.