5.0 changes part 5
Well, opened up to new changes to look into Zeqe's request, and that led me to start doing 20 other things...
10 hours later and it's only a couple of hours before dawn, so no release tonight. I will try to finish up tomorrow, in the meantime, here is the 5th edition of the evergrowing changelog for 5.0:
1) Archery changes (which benefited a great deal from Tuidjy's feedback over at the Steam forums)
- Slight boost to damage, but remains cutting to keep ineffective against armored troops. 30c/31c/32c across the three bows.
Archers should now be balanced with slingers--better against unarmored troops, worse against armored ones.
- Bow PowerDraw requirements lowered from 2/3/4 to 0/1/2. The AI has about 4 in PD in the best archers. There are accuracy penalties if you do not exceed the PD requirements by 3.
This is both more realistic and more balanced--the AI troops will no longer be using bows that are too strong for them, but instead have drawweights that match their own limited skills.
- Masterwork is enabled as a modifier for bows. This means the player can get a masterwork featured longbow with a PD requirement of 6, allowing him to make full use of 10 in powerdraw (since bonuses for damage stop at +4). Featured Longbow is enabled for shop sales.
No other accuracy or speed boosts for bows. The PD lowering should help the AI, while not making player archery overpowered.
2) Rolled back all previous town recruiting changes. Instead,
- a modifier to number of recruits if the 3rd tier is rolled, based on relationship. So now, you will either get a large number of lower level troops, or a smaller number of higher level troops, with the reduction based on how high your relationship is.
- Recruits start lower in number
- Min result is now 0 troops instead of 1
- smaller growth from renown
- prosperity provides a boost to the random roll, not absolute amount, and is adjusted by religion, but the boost is slightly higher
- Charisma and leadership boosts are adjusted by religion
Several boosts to recruiting:
- High center relations provides double the number of bonus recruits as before
- chance of negative relations blocking normal recruiting lowered to 90% from 100%
- Much higher bonus for being lord of the town (x5 vanilla value, 0-10 extra instead of 0-2 extra, and applies after religious modifier, meaning a lord can recruit well even if he doesn't share the town's region)
This should result in a much more logical recruiting structure overall, and make relations much more important in getting high level troops (rather than having a hard cap of 30 after which it doesn't matter)
The value of higher relations and being a lord to recruiting has increased substantially. This is realistic, and encourages developing good core recruiting centers, rather than around-the-world type circuits of recruiting.
3) A tournament balancing change--ponies instead of horses as a reward.
This is the same issue as the earlier switch for norse armor to a generic armor--many cultures in Viking Conquest do not use the full-sized horses, and would not give them as rewards (not even their lords have them).
With this, tournament rewards should now be balanced--a reasonably expensive and useful sword, armor, mount, and the useful cow--but not the potentially best armor in the game and a full horse, right from the beginning, as a skilled player can win tournaments with a starting character.
4) Previous change of x2 cost for mounted unit wages changed to 1.5x. Still more expensive than vanilla, and offering more strategic tradeoff in lines like the Frisians and Britons where the mounted units are low tier and compete with underwhelming units.
5) Merc changes:
Dorested now gets full chance of all mercs for tavern recruits. The limitied list seemed motivated by storyline, but wasn't limitied to it, and wasn't needed in any event. Norse towns can now attract the full range of recruits, including frankish cavalry.
Sailors no longer appear as tavern mercs. They were 10x too expensive (over 400 vs 40 from old captain by docks), and they are now replaced by spearmen, making spearmen more common than the fancier mercs (as is realistic)
Meanwhile, frankish cavalry is now 1/4 as common as other mercs. and is otherwise replaced with the spearmen.
So we have
Spearmen, 2.75x as common as other mercs.
Frankish cavalry, 0.25x as common as other mercs
Should be a more sensible system, better fitting the rarity of high level cavalry in VC. Combined with the merc wage changes especially, it no longer strains belief all the AI lords aren't running around with frankish cavalry as well, and no more instant, cheap 300WP player armies wearing heavy mail.
7) Player leadership skill no longer magically makes more mercs available in tavern. Instead, they simply roll over a larger random range. (ie, rather than 3-9+ leadership, it rolls 3-19, giving same avg results as 5 leadership)
8 ) Village recruitment now generates very large numbers of troops if you are a lord:
- doubled growth by relations, halved growth by renown. Villagers care more about your local rep, they don't read newspapers.
- charisma and leadership bonus now are modified by faith
- charisma and leadership are now about 2.5x as effective at increasing recruits
- base recruits start lower
- Rolling a tier II recruiting session now gives about 1/2 as many total recruits. Vanilla was about 3/4. They don't have many experienced men--but a lot of men you can train.
- Higher tier recruits become available for a player much earlier, 30 rather than 60, but have a 50 percent fail rate on that (they still get another check after though)
- Being lord of a village gives +0-60 extra recruits, not reduced by religious diffeences,. Vanilla was basically +0-2 extra guys. The lord now has a 70% chance of upgraded tier even if the peasants dislike him
So there is a serious advantage to keeping a village under your control--huge numbers of men can be pressed into your service rapidly. May be a viable strategic choice despite the lower money now.
9) Per Zeqe's request, some faction troops will now defend villages.
It will be about 1/3 each of basic farmers and 2 kinds better troops.
Also changed how number of defenders are determined, instead of adding a number to low prosperity (which in vanilla meant you would get a discrete cutoff where increasing prosperity suddenly dropped number of defenders by 20), a min is just set.
10) Fix for vanilla VC bug reported by Maluxorath--hardcore finance used to actually reduce upgrade costs compared to normal. Now hardcore is the same as normal
Now, hardcore is +25% normal costs.
11) The final tier is no longer such a huge discrete jump in upgrade costs, instead is just a 1.5x modifier over normal cost from being the final tier. The old huge jump was making it a seriously questionable move to upgrade to the last tier--they were stronger, but not quite warranting the close to 2-3000 peningas it could get to, especially when top tier mercs hire for much less, prisoners hire for much less, etc, and you are essentially paying 2500 pengingas + a tier IV unit in exchange for a tier 5.
Note that hardcore finance setting will see a net very slight increase in final tier upgrade costs, because of bugfix plus this
12) Major change to upgrade costs for mounted units.
If the prior troop is level 23 or below, ie you are upgrading to a tier IV or below mounted unit, the cost is now 2x normal price
Why? First, because of realism--horses and ponies cost a lot in VC.
Second, because of troop tree strategic alternatives. Most mounted units of a low level compete with a very underwhelming, low level unit for upgrades (briton horsemen vs briton archers, frisian horsemen vs frisian warriors, etc). The mounted line often has much better skils, equipment, everything.
So let's make it cost something to pursue that line.
13) However--if the troop is upgrading to a final tier horsemen, then the cost is only increased by 25% (less than vanilla VC 33% increase).
This is because final upgrades are already very expensive, and frankly the horse units at the tops of those tiers are not really that much better, or better at all, than the extremely well equipped foot top tier units. If you decided to forgo just hiring frankish cavalry and train your own, no need to punish you with a huge cost increase. It isn't justified by realism much anyway, as if you look at the equipment upgrades hapening along those lines, even with the mount included there isn't much of a difference in tier iv to tier v jump compared to some f the infantry lines of other factions. Note that since base upgrade costs are doubled here and level is higher, often you will end up paying around the same premium as at lower tiers.
14) Some very slight reductions in ai lord troop wages at the high end, and additional 500 penningas per week given to npc lords as part of their base income, to support:
15) Improved reinforcement templates for NPC Lords.
Vanilla VC wanted to feel historical, so NPC lords walk around with tons of tier I peasants.
The problem is the player doesn't generally do that. And the NPC lords suffer hugely for it.
We don't have to have an army of elites for NPC lords, but we can and should shift their recruiting to better resemble what the player gets--Much less Tier I, more Tier II and III units.
Elites remain rare, but competent fighters for the npc lord shieldwall are now the general rule, with a few skirmisher peasants in much lower numbers.
The historical feeling of mixed peasant armies is still present, but with the greater number of tier II and III the ai lords will pose a much better chance of challanging players and their more elite armies.
It will take awhile for your saved game to adjust to this.
16)
Campaign AI level changes now affects player kingdom AI lords as well as other AI lords (thus ensuring consistent realism in how the world operates). Thus the setting determines the player's position vs the world, and AI lords don't become worse just by joining the player. This will slightly buff player kingdom ai lord armies
EDIT Leaving this unfixed for now, not enough playtesting time so reverted changes to hard
This is especially important because the AI behavior code for collecting rents added by VC did not take account of this distinctions.. Meaning player kingdom AI lords were making their finance decisions on the basis of incorrect costs before, so this also counts as a bug fix for a vanilla bug.
17) AI Kings now get 2000 instead of 1000 additional base income, which should be closer to matching what the player can achieve from a midsized kingdom tribute.
AI marshalls no longer recieve free money.
1
No more cheating in favor of player marshalls on normal difficulty, forcing AI lords to join their campaigns even if they wouldn't have joined an NPC martial. The prior script to do this was justified by this comment to the code: "#Because players become confused when they see very less participation from AI lords to their campaigns."
I will leave it on for "easy", but if you are playing "normal" I assume you want a fair game and won't be confused when things don't go your way.
19) tax efficiency no longer has a maximum. No more gamey keep taking centers until you hit the limit--this is the dark ages, you are a feudal lord, not an emperor. Well, it will cap at 99, but that won't help you.
20) merc contracts now pay about 6 times as much (should cover close to your wages plus some profit). I didn't have time to deal with the relationship issues of all your faction enemies hating you after contract concludes yet, but at least you'll be sufficiently compensated if you decide to explore this oft-neglected aspect of Viking Conquest.
21) Special tournament participant chance of joining reduced. They were traveling the world just a little too fast at 50%
22) No more "camp defender" female npc tournament participants.
Hordes of female tournament fighters never fit into the spirit of a realistic look at the dark ages.
What was worse is that the camp defenders had terrible stats, so Vanilla VC wasn't throwing great female fighters into the mix, it was instead using them as low-skilled filler troops to be soundly beaten by the male troops tournament after tournament.
Female heroes should be special in the 9th century--rare, but very powerful. As they were in the sagas, and as represented by Brunhild, Solveig, the female tournament special fighter "the pict", and the female player character.
23) Slightly less reductions to tax inefficiency available.
In vanilla VC, you could get bonuses to fiefs without inefficiency really easily--+2 if your minister likes you, +6 for hiring tax collectors, meaning even on the hardest difficulty you could have 10 center points without inefficiency.
So 5 towns or 10 castles without any tax inefficiency on the hardest difficulty in vanilla.
They in combination would also reduce inefficiency rate to (x-2)/2, meaning you could get it a point below native.
The end result was far less inefficiency than other mods, and the costs of increasing relationship with minister and hiring the tax collectors wasn't really high enough to justify this, especially in a player kingdom (where the tax collectors also double tribute)
So, let's separate it out both game mechanics wise and conceptually.
The tax collectors already double tribute, so let's make them have the scaling effect only here as well, leaving in place them multiplying inefficiency by 1/2, while reducing their straight bonus down to 2/3 the vanilla value, making it +4 center points.
The minister liking you bonus one can understand as them not skimming off the top from wherever they happen to be located, probably a town, worth 2 center points. So let's leave them with their vanilla +2 to center points without inefficiency, and
remove their reduction of -2 to the magnitude of inefficiency per center. Added back since normal is going up to base hard levels
Now the player can get +6 center points, and subtract 2 and then divide his inefficiency by 2 (bringing it down 1 below native rate).
That means with both the player can hold 3 towns and 1 village and 1 castle without any inefficiency on the hardest difficulty level, which basically entails controlling a region of the game. That seems about as powerful as these should be (remember, in a player kingdom , the tax collectors fee will be in large part covered by the doubling of tribute payments as the kingdom gets larger---and the hiring decision should require weighing some things).
This may still be too powerful. Let me know if you think so, and we can examine nerfing it further.
24) Player religion no longer reduces tax income. I can think of a number of ways a pagan lord could ensure his christian subjects pay their taxes, and in-game dialogue from Frisia seems to confirm this is the general order of things. Besides, it only applied to the player, which is the sort of mechanic best removed.
25) Campaign ai setting no longer reduces tax income. Too important to keep it as a balanced source of income vs other sources.
EDIT: removed some of the above to save playtesting time
Some credits so far (if I'm missing you, please let me know, I am falling asleep at this point:
Steam users Windrider and Pode for consultation on second outfit vanilla VC bug (fixed in prior portion of the 5.0 changelog)
Steam user Adabr Brcol for bringing my attention to the vanilla issue with Odin's cave and high athletics (fixed in prior portion of the 5.0 changelog)
Taleworlds user Zeqe for requesting village defense changes
Talewords and Reddit user Maluxorath for reporting the bug about hardcore finance
Reddit user EricAKAPode for frequent consultations on a range of topics, including throwing weapons
Taleworlds user Cokjan, Reddit user Peppiping, and Steam user Windrider for discusion on archer issues.
Steam user Tuidjy for lending his expertise as both a real-world and in-game archer to the bow rebalance
Taleworlds user EvilSquid for Vikingr upgrading to danish and norwegion elites
