~~ YOU CAN VOTE FOR ANY NUMBER OF CHOICES IN THE POLL! ~~
Bannerlord gives the player the option to execute any captured lords and nobles. If the player feels so inclined, they can eliminate every single noble in the game and win by default in less than 1 in-game year. Currently there is no way to prevent this, and unless something is done, this will still be an easy-win once missing content is added such as clans intermarrying and having children to create more combat notables (because again, killing everyone may only take a year). To enable freedom for the player but keeping with the challenging nature of the game, I am suggesting some changes that would make executing anyone and everyone to instantly win much harder and with far more drastic ramifications.
For complete disclosure, I know there are other suggestion threads about execution, but they mostly deal with other lords' opinions of the player (such as in this great Grievance thread that deals with relations and the right to execute given various factors), but opinions of other notables only bother players who are executing periodically and trying to do a legitimate playthrough instead of someone cheesing the system by killing EVERYONE (no one cares what the dead think of them). Quite frankly, no amount of negative influence or reputation is going to hinder players who want to do this. My suggestions here are more geared towards making world conquest by execution just as challenging as... well... actual conquest if not more so.
First, a few notes on victory through execution as currently implemented:
- Recruiting is not hindered at all by how much others hate you or who you are at war with. You can still recruit from villages that like you or force conscription (one of the hostile actions) or recruit prisoners you capture. With a maxed rogue skill, you can get all the bandit troops you want.
- As mentioned in this thread, once all clans of a faction are eliminated, fiefs are given randomly to other factions who you may or may not be at war with and even you if you are far enough in the main story to have your own kingdom. This means you do not need to seige every castle and town to win!
- As those of us (me included) who have executed many lords can attest, clans disperse to factions with fewer clans. This initially makes it difficult to eliminate a faction in this manner at first, but once that happens, the other factions are terribly weakened due to lack of lords as you keep executing them.
I think the misconception most people have about abuse of the execution mechanic is the belief that inconveniences that would hurt a normal playthrough will also work against a player who wants to behead every noble. They won't, at all. If the world burns around them, they don't care because they are the one carrying the torch and oil. There needs to be something more, something that creates a direct risk for the player, that way the more they abuse execution, the more direct danger they are in instead of the more damaged everything else is, because they do not care about everything else. That is what we need to figure out, and that is the purpose of this thread.
My suggestions here can be summarized in three main areas:
- Ramifications for the player
- Functionality to prevent the complete elimination of nobles
- Eliminating the default win caused by automatic acquisition of fiefs from eliminated factions
***Note 1: My suggestions here are not to make victory though noble execution impossible but make it a very difficult method to beat the game.***
Ramifications for the Player
Assassins
Bring back the assassins from Warband. In Warband if a lord hated you, when you took and action in a town or village a group of assassins could appear that you had to fight solo. If you won, you learn who send the assassins, but if you failed you would be incapacitated for a number of days. I want to bring this back but expand on it further in light of downright evil players.
If a lord or faction hates you, they can send out an assassin, but if you execute someone, assassins will immediately be sent out by the associated family. Assassins travel invisibly from town to town just like wanderers but their routes also include villages and castles, and their destinations move from nearby location to nearby location in the direction of where a player is. If you take any action in a town, village, or castle, even just using the menu to select the arena to see if there is a tournament, you can encounter the assassin located there.
Battles with assassins initially involve only you and the single companion that follows you into the town (only you if in a village). In towns, if you have companions elsewhere in the town, you can possibly kite the battle near them, and they can help. If you win the battle, the assassin group disappears from the world until hired again, and you learn who sent them. If you lose, you are secreted from the location and captured by the enemy lord. If the lord hates you enough, you could get executed. Assassins create a very real threat to the player, because it means that the player's clan can get wiped out before they wipe out all the other clans, because there are far fewer people in the player's clan that all notables as a whole.
Assassins should come in tiers depending on the amount the lords hate your and your overall infamy to the ruling bodies as a whole.
Tiers:
If a lord or faction hates you, they can send out an assassin, but if you execute someone, assassins will immediately be sent out by the associated family. Assassins travel invisibly from town to town just like wanderers but their routes also include villages and castles, and their destinations move from nearby location to nearby location in the direction of where a player is. If you take any action in a town, village, or castle, even just using the menu to select the arena to see if there is a tournament, you can encounter the assassin located there.
Battles with assassins initially involve only you and the single companion that follows you into the town (only you if in a village). In towns, if you have companions elsewhere in the town, you can possibly kite the battle near them, and they can help. If you win the battle, the assassin group disappears from the world until hired again, and you learn who sent them. If you lose, you are secreted from the location and captured by the enemy lord. If the lord hates you enough, you could get executed. Assassins create a very real threat to the player, because it means that the player's clan can get wiped out before they wipe out all the other clans, because there are far fewer people in the player's clan that all notables as a whole.
Assassins should come in tiers depending on the amount the lords hate your and your overall infamy to the ruling bodies as a whole.
Tiers:
- Level 6: cloth armor, equipped with throwing knives and swords.
- only appear at night
- Level 11: leather armor, some equipped with bows or crossbows in addition to their sword
- only appear at night
- Level 16: mid-tier armor, some appear with shields/spears/2h weapons, stronger bows/crossbows
- appear during day or night (as do all higher tiers)
- default lowest level assassin sent by relatives of those you have executed
- Level 21: mid-tier armor, much higher skills, throwing weapons and arrows are poisoned causing small damage over time.
- When you are poisoned, the melee assassins will fight defensively to slowly run your health out and prevent you from escaping.
- The more times you are hit with the poison, the faster it acts
- This is the highest tier assassin that can be sent without execution as the primary reason
- Level 26: high-tier armor, high combat and athletics skills
- only sent out if overall hatred is high (you have executed many lords)
- sent by factions, not individual lords
- failure to defeat assassins might result in death of the player with a low probability
- if you start seeing these assassins, consider yourself warned
- Level 31: high-tier armor, near-max combat and athletics skills
- at this point, the world hates you, good luck
- if you do not kill them fast enough, they can call for reinforcements from the 4th and 5th tier assassins
- if you fail to defeat them, you die. Capture is not an option. You were warned.
Personal Vendettas
Family of the one you execute can have a personal vendetta against the player. Where assassination involves the player personally fighting those after them, vendettas target the armies/parties/caravans of the player and those in the player's clan. The purpose of the vendettas is to seek out the player's armies/parties/caravans and eliminate them, removing the player's combat strength and making it easier for the player to be captured and face justice. Think of how lords gather to you when they call them to form an army or how when you take hostile action against a town/castle/village they come after you, seemingly knowing magically where you are on the map. Vendettas are the same, only they will not ignore you if your party/army/caravan is more powerful. They are there for a purpose. Vendettas come in 2 levels:
Hunting Party:
Vengeance Army:
Hunting Party:
- A hired party of 50-100 is created with some non-notable running it, similar to caravans.
- Any clan or family member of the executed can hire a hunting party.
- They hunt the player's party, play clan member parties, and player caravans.
- Any player clan member or companion who loses to a hunter party gets captured, and escape is far more difficult because their goal is capture, so they will not be so easily distracted.
- They do not accept ransom, so to release your captive clan members and companions, you must seek out the hunter party and defeat it or wait for the rare chance they escape
- If the player is captured by the hunter party, they have until the hunter party makes it to the notable who hired them to escape. If they cannot, the notable then takes over your capture and might execute you if they hate you enough.
- Hunting parties ignore all war calls and summons from others in the faction. They have a task to complete.
Vengeance Army:
- Functions similar to a hunting party except it is an army of 700-1000 strong.
- Vengeance armies do not spawn unless the player has executed most clan/family members of a particular clan/family.
- The one who hires the army leads it, so if you defeat it, you can execute the leader.
- In addition to targeting your companions, caravans, clan members, and you, they also raid your villages as often as are able while they search you out.
- Any player clan member or companion who loses to an army and gets captured might get executed if they are not rescued or get lucky enough to escape in time, but due to the size of the army, it is easier to outrun them.
- Vengeance armies do not disperse due to low morale, lack of funds, or lack of food. They are risking their lives to hunt you down.
- The player losing to a vengeance army and getting captured results in immediate execution by the noble leading it.
- Because a noble leads the vengeance army, if you want to kill that noble, you have to defeat that huge army at the risk of losing and getting executed yourself. This makes capturing and executing that noble much harder.
Functionality to Hinder Complete Noble Extermination
The idea here is to make complete elimination of nobles far more difficult and take longer but not make it impossible, enabling the player to choose that method of victory if they want.
Extended Family
Don't you find it strange that all these clans and noble families only have 5 to 6 members? If they are long-rooted nobility, their family should extend much farther. This ideas enables clans to pull in their extended family into the main clan. Essentially, it generates random nobles based on tweaks/modifications/and combinations of the appearances/stats/traits of both the dead and living members of the clan.
The wives of many of the nobles are non-combatants, so you should be unable to capture and execute them (easily). This means they have the ability to produce children to continue their clan's name. One of the issues mentioned at the beginning of this post is how fast a player can kill all the nobles. Given some of the suggestions and especially the extended family suggestion, eliminating all nobles might take longer. This could give enough time for children to grow to teenage years where they are able to join combat and lead armies.
Combining these two options, fully eliminating a clan will be much more difficult. It will still be possible if planned correctly and given the right factors, but it will take far more work.
New Clans
Idea initially proposed by xHDxzero.
When clans start to be eliminated, new clans can be generated to fill in with their own leaders, members, etc. This certainly will be a little more difficult to implement than simply adding a new member to a clan like the suggestion above, but it will add more variety to the game. The new clans can follow various cultural templates with randomness added in to make sure there is variety to the clans generated. At times, a few new members could arrive to revive an already eliminated clan, connecting this suggestion to the Extended family one above.
The only possible downside to this idea is that if new clans are generated too quickly, it would be impossible to a player to win by execution (which should at least still be a possibility if a player wants to take that route), so there needs to be some balance in how quickly they appear and to what factions they join. Perhaps they arrive as a neutral faction or no faction at first and a larger faction can then request they join.
Extended Family
Don't you find it strange that all these clans and noble families only have 5 to 6 members? If they are long-rooted nobility, their family should extend much farther. This ideas enables clans to pull in their extended family into the main clan. Essentially, it generates random nobles based on tweaks/modifications/and combinations of the appearances/stats/traits of both the dead and living members of the clan.
- Extended family are not generated until there are only a few clan members remaining.
- Opinions of other factions and clans are based on the general opinions of the clan.
- They join the clan with hatred for those who executed members of the clan.
- Extended family are generated at about the same rate as pregnancy
The wives of many of the nobles are non-combatants, so you should be unable to capture and execute them (easily). This means they have the ability to produce children to continue their clan's name. One of the issues mentioned at the beginning of this post is how fast a player can kill all the nobles. Given some of the suggestions and especially the extended family suggestion, eliminating all nobles might take longer. This could give enough time for children to grow to teenage years where they are able to join combat and lead armies.
- Infants are automatically born to surviving clan women once clan numbers begin to decline.
- Stats, etc. are determined the same as any children whenever that gets correctly implemented into the game (we are waiting, TW!).
- Children of dead parents start with strong animosity towards the ones who executed them, meaning possible assassin attempts or vendettas.
- The stats of the children are higher than normal because of their revenge-fueled training growing up.
Combining these two options, fully eliminating a clan will be much more difficult. It will still be possible if planned correctly and given the right factors, but it will take far more work.
New Clans
Idea initially proposed by xHDxzero.
When clans start to be eliminated, new clans can be generated to fill in with their own leaders, members, etc. This certainly will be a little more difficult to implement than simply adding a new member to a clan like the suggestion above, but it will add more variety to the game. The new clans can follow various cultural templates with randomness added in to make sure there is variety to the clans generated. At times, a few new members could arrive to revive an already eliminated clan, connecting this suggestion to the Extended family one above.
The only possible downside to this idea is that if new clans are generated too quickly, it would be impossible to a player to win by execution (which should at least still be a possibility if a player wants to take that route), so there needs to be some balance in how quickly they appear and to what factions they join. Perhaps they arrive as a neutral faction or no faction at first and a larger faction can then request they join.
Eliminating the Automatic Acquisition of Fiefs
The whole reason that a player can automatically conquer the world through execution is because once a clan/faction is eliminated by execution of all nobles the fief are handed out at seemingly random. The player is just given the property with little work and no sieges. This makes no sense.
Instead of giving away the fief, the fief should go neutral without a banner. The banner on the map turns grey and the visage of the notable with the most influence is shown on the banner instead of a clan symbol.
Towns: the most influential Merchant, Artisan, or Gang Leader becomes ruler of the town.
Castles: the most influential Village Leader becomes ruler of the castle.
All garrisoned troops remain in towns and castles funded by the new leaders. Militia generation gains an increase because now the peasants are fighting for their own town/castle, not for a noble.
Neutral fiefs can be acquired in 2 ways:
Conquest
This is the same as any other siege. You attack the castle or town and have to defeat the garrisoned troops. The main difference is the larger militia and that ANY clan can attempt the siege. If a faction is at war with you, they can disrupt the siege, kick you out of it, and then continue the siege themselves against the garrison you weakened. Of course, you also can do the same if you see another clan/faction besieging a neutral fief. Taking a neutral fief by conquest gives a strong negative relation penalty with the notable of the affiliated villages and town.
Influence
Periodically, the notables of the affiliated villages and town will cast a vote on if they want to be under the rule of a clan. Each vote is weighted by the influence of the notable, and if the majority influence is in favor of a single clan, that clan claims the associated fiefs. If the player is present during the vote (there can be a notification when the vote will happen in a few days), the player can help influence the vote. If the player's clan is liked by the affiliated notables, the player can claim the town/castle. However, if the player is hated by the notables because of pillaging, raiding caravans, etc. no amount of influence is going to sway anyone, so the player will have no other choice but to conquer the town/castle through force.
Instead of giving away the fief, the fief should go neutral without a banner. The banner on the map turns grey and the visage of the notable with the most influence is shown on the banner instead of a clan symbol.
Towns: the most influential Merchant, Artisan, or Gang Leader becomes ruler of the town.
Castles: the most influential Village Leader becomes ruler of the castle.
All garrisoned troops remain in towns and castles funded by the new leaders. Militia generation gains an increase because now the peasants are fighting for their own town/castle, not for a noble.
Neutral fiefs can be acquired in 2 ways:
Conquest
This is the same as any other siege. You attack the castle or town and have to defeat the garrisoned troops. The main difference is the larger militia and that ANY clan can attempt the siege. If a faction is at war with you, they can disrupt the siege, kick you out of it, and then continue the siege themselves against the garrison you weakened. Of course, you also can do the same if you see another clan/faction besieging a neutral fief. Taking a neutral fief by conquest gives a strong negative relation penalty with the notable of the affiliated villages and town.
Influence
Periodically, the notables of the affiliated villages and town will cast a vote on if they want to be under the rule of a clan. Each vote is weighted by the influence of the notable, and if the majority influence is in favor of a single clan, that clan claims the associated fiefs. If the player is present during the vote (there can be a notification when the vote will happen in a few days), the player can help influence the vote. If the player's clan is liked by the affiliated notables, the player can claim the town/castle. However, if the player is hated by the notables because of pillaging, raiding caravans, etc. no amount of influence is going to sway anyone, so the player will have no other choice but to conquer the town/castle through force.
I am also open to adding other players' suggestions to this list.
Last edited: