incas said:
bring cargo to X, bring amount of X
Quest time limits are extended to 2x vanilla, so those should be just as easy as vanilla VC even if using the realistic travel speeds version. Check your journal after accepting the quest, you should always have enough time.
Also, Balance Mod makes those quests pay a lot more, so they should be more profitable to do.
incas said:
It also makes it much harder to find adequate bandit parties.
Let’s talk about bandit parties:
Vanilla VC: bandit party size for spawns is based on the player army size when the spawn occurs. Hence, travel with a lot of soldiers, bandit parties are huge, drop the soldiers in camp, the world will start filling up with small parties. This is a subjective, leveled world meant to always offer the player a fitting challenge level, never too hard or too easy. (it doesn’t work well at that though, as player army size is constantly fluctuating with use of camps and garrisons and bandit spawns survive long and block new spawns. There is also a lot of gamey behavior and weird incentives around manipulating spawn sizes to get the world you want, or avoid filling it with tiny parties that make bandit hunting unprofitable, which can happen if the player uses the camp feature and tends to last a long time because of spawn limits. Vanilla Warband instead used player experience level, which I think works a lot better for creating a more consistent leveled world)
Balance Mod: initial bandit party sizes are small at world generation and when the player first starts. Shortly afterwards, they become fully random, weighted towards small sizes being more likely, but having no connection to player army size, experience level, or anything having to do with the player at all. The world is objective, and the player must rely on their judgment to seek out and select appropriate challenges.
So, yes, Balance Mod is certainly harder, but I would also consider it a lot more fun. The world feels dangerous and interesting—you must avoid the parties stronger than you, while seeking out the targets you believe you can handle. It requires more thought and I think is more rewarding than simply having appropriate parties fed to you.
incas said:
You make the point that you want to give more scope to stuff like being a merchant. The thing is, it already is basically an early game grind in vanilla and the mod change to travel and weights just penalize it
The realistic travel speeds don’t affect the early game for merchants too much. Being a merchant is still INSANELY profitable. So little of a merchant’s costs are wages/food as they travel the dorested wine/jewelry - wool trade route, instead basically all the costs are the investment in goods and ship purchase, which are fixed, so that really for a given investment of human effort progress is basically the same (except for on the map, but as mentioned quick travel keys or changing timescale can change that if desired). Now, in game time twice as much time will have passed, so the months will tick away more quickly, but that shouldn’t feel bothersome to the player, on the contrary, it should feel more immersive.
And for the player whose early game is instead based on warfare and looting? Well, the Balance Mod loot changes (primarily, fixing the Warband kill order loot glitch, which means the better swords and armor will not be crowded out by peasant gear anymore when loot is plentiful), the guaranteed ship capture chance, and Balance Mod raising the sale price the player gets from prisoners should make looting more profitable in terms of player time, more than counterbalancing the wages when measured against player time, while again, only slower when measured against the in game calander.
On troop training? I increased the Xp player soldiers get for kills (+50% if I remember correctly). So again half as many battles in game time, but more progress per battle for leveling up your troops, so faster from the player perspective in real world time.
So in the end, from the perspective of real world player time investment, things in the early game should progress at similar or slightly faster speeds than vanilla VC.
From the perspective of the in-game calander, things will be slower, but that is irrelevant to the sense of “grind”, and indeed creates a more immersive result.
incas said:
You often bring the argument of equality between player and AI (lords). Isn't that superficial? So many mechanics in the game are player only or AI only.
AI lords pay wages to their troops based on a scale almost identical to the player, and receive income from fiefs + base income to pay these wages.
So for wage/income matters the balance between player and AI lords is quite linked. It is also quite critical, as the essential late-game challenge is based on the results—the balance between AI lord army size and composition and player army size and composition. That is the central balance of late-game Warband.
Now, to clarify, the point is not anything like “equality.” The player will make far more money than the AI, and is supposed to, as Warband is essentially the 0 to hero story of the player’s rise.
The whole purpose of this wage/income balancing act, together with the balance of other aspects of AI recruiting, is achieving the most fun late-game challenge. So all of the changes are about the relative benefits to player vs AI in order to nudge the balance to the most fun result.
Specifically:
Balance Mod: late-game the player will be able to field slightly less elite troops until he has more fiefs. The AI will still largely have armies made up of recruits, but will get many more elites than vanilla VC, and so be able to pose a greater challenge. However, they will recruit slower, so you will have to defeat them fewer times than vanilla VC. The result is fewer, more decisive, more challenging and fun battles.
Every economic change is in the service of nudging to that result. So when I say __ change shifts the balance in ___ way, it isn’t about some idea of abstract equality, it is about the relative effects on player and AI that achieve the desired result for fun and well-matched late-game battles.
incas said:
You nerfed e.g. unique items with the argument it's unfair to the AI.
I nerfed Orms lorrica, and the ability to improve gloves to hardened, because they meant that player armor rating became much higher than the AI, unduly reducing the challenge by putting passive armor rating rather than player skill as the central determinant of personal combat success.
That has nothing to do with any idea of fairness to a computer program of course. Balance between armor ratings achievable by AI and player is about preserving challenge, nothing more.
Now, I actually strengthened a ton of unique items, especially several of the unique swords. Because I wanted them to be nice rewards for a player who earned them, and so in Balance Mod every unique sword is competive with the best weapons in some way (usually with tradeoffs to others, like higher speed vs damage). In vanilla VC some unique swords were plain bad, and most of them were inferior to the better Irish swords.
The result is a player that through work can earn moderately better weapons and armor than any AI troops can. But gone are the hardened gloves of vanilla VC where a few hundred gold gets a significantly higher armor than AI troops, or the Orms Lorrica that essentially operates as a serious reduction in the combat difficulty with no real tradeoffs.
incas said:
Your mod isn't a balance and fix mod anymore. It's really a collection of some fixes and all sorts of tweaks.... Perhaps you can split the parts up or make more changes optional?
Balance Mod’s scope has always been pretty broad, at least since version 2.0, when I made bandit party sizes independent of player army size. Since it was discussed above, let’s keep using it as an example:
That change was certainly a gameplay tweak, and it was driven by a particular gameplay preference—dislike of “leveled worlds” where difficulty of enemies is always based on player strength, to prevent anything from being too challenging or too easy. I much prefer an objective world, where the player must intelligently pick and choose their battles and where a more real sense of progression is possible as the player grows in strength.
Now, many players agree with me on hating leveled worlds—for example, elder scrolls Oblivion received very popular mods aimed at deleving the world (and many jokes about bandits wearing daedric armor), and in response to the criticism the world leveling was toned down greatly in Skyrim.
But other players prefer to have the game hold their hands more, and tailor challenges to all be just right for their strength. Hence why leveled worlds are popular in game design, especially among more casual players.
But every game or mod must be driven by a design philosophy, and can’t aim to please everybody. Leveled worlds is just one example among dozens of important and debatable game design issues on which Balance Mod has had to pick a side.
That process has been done with massive community feedback, ranging from discussion here, at nexus, at reddit, and over private messages. Nexus has around 250 messages in the Balance Mod discussion, here there are almost 500, and reddit has even more (just the Berserker changes thread at reddit was nearly a 100 messages debating various aspects if I remember correctly). Now, that community feedback skews to veteran players, and the result is a harder game than vanilla VC, but I’d imagine that is ideal in a game that has been out as long as VC has. As for optional versions—I maintain 3 main versions and several optional add-ons. That really is the limit of what is feasible. But even Balance Mod users who like hundreds of the changes probably all can point to a couple they personally don’t like, and while I’ve tried to maintain alternate versions and optional add ons for some of the more controversial changes, that reaches a limit of feasibility. Balance Mod has always been a mod rather than a “community patch”, and while I’d love to make everything modular, it really isn’t practical.
