Balance Mod 13.0 Final Changelog, Part 1:
Tournament weapon selection changed (much better spear for example) and expanded (1.5 handed swords in ireland), and weapon loadouts are now faction specific. Each faction's tournaments should feel unique. There are spear vs sword tournaments, Irish champion sword only tournaments, spear tournaments, no spear tournaments, all different mixes of 1-5 weapons looking to faction flavor. Only 2 factions have ranged weapons in their tournaments (1 mounted no shield javelin, other foot shield javelin), the other 19 factions have no ranged weapons in tournaments. A handful of factions have 100% mounted tournaments (Picts, some britons, some irish), rest are 0% mounted. In doing this change, also fixed a Vanilla VC bug with tournament weapon assignments (it wasn't that noticeable because vanilla VC had all tournaments set the same, with every weapon, but even then the bug was subtly shifting the weapon loadouts to be out of proportion from what was set).
Tournaments now have 50 prizes (up from 4), each with an individually tailored text message for the award. Includes some unique items not otherwise obtainable elsewhere. Tournament prize acquisition tweaked. If you don't get a prize, you get a small extra purse of coins now. Chance of getting an item is slightly smaller (16.6% vs vanilla 20%) to reflect increased quality of some of the nicer items on the list.
4 Norse gods (Freyja, Odin, Thor, and Loki) can very rarely visit you after a tournament victory. Each raises a different attribute point by 1. (note, Odin also appears to grant an item, when he does that, he does not raise attributes)
General moderate tweaks to soldier abilities, loadouts, and economic effects
Bandits no longer more expensive than normal troops. Big discount for low honor players
Bandits no longer have higher upgrade costs (handled in levels being higher than they should be already, due to quirks of warband upgrade system having xp to upgrade determined by troop upgrading from's level, rather than troop upgrading to)
Mounted troops now have a flat increase to their wages to account for maintaining horse, not a multiplier
Threshold of damage to interrupt melee attacks increased
Several AI lords have abilities, relationships, and personalities tweaked
Switched married/unmarried for two Norway lords to create better courting conflicts, adjusted several ages
AI courting heavily tweaked, now occurs less often. Initial courtship assignments less likely, more addition over time
Reworked bonuses from special conditions and abilities
Berserk now gives somewhat smaller speed bonus, but gains damage bonus. Wears off periodically, can be restarted, but does not give penalties from base even when it wears off (wearing off simply prevents you from reactivating for a while)
Removed damage penalty for ambushes
Text added to alert new players why they aren't getting recruits from opposite religion fiefs: "You may be unknown or unlucky, or perhaps religious differences are at work. Pagans and Christians rarely join each other, unless a leader is well-loved by locals. Some lands like Northhymbre and Frisia are a mix of Pagan and Christian, generally more Christian in villages and more Pagan in castles."
Lots of explanatory text popups to guide new players, tell them about features, and guide them to where they can get help
Wrote a lot of new tooltips to explain difficulty levels and their effects for various settings
New Difficulty Type Preset: Balance Mod Recommended Settings, available from dropdown when starting new game
Tweaked Lord Personality distribution on world gen, now finely tuned on a hundred point scale to generate an interesting mix (probably, but it's random after all)
Arena weapons changed and weapon loadouts altered. No ranged weapons. Arena now rewards less gold, more XP
Renown gain tweaked. Now renown gain decreases less in mid and late game (falls off by 1 point for every 300 existing renown, instead of vanilla 200), but there is a slight general reduction. This will extend the early game a little bit, but allow mid to late game to have more actions grant worthwhile renown, speeding renown gain there and allowing rewards from more actions. It is hoped that this change will pace the game better, and allow late game to feel more rewarding.
Tournament renown gain given a further scaling effect, so that it has base renown gains partially countering the general Warband renown decay mechanic, preserving it as a useful renown tool even for famous players
Assorted dialogue and text changes
Fixed some inconsistent handling of scotch musician
Added some explanatory text to help players understand trait effects
Increased time scale to .5 (was .25). This is a little like holding down the fast travel button to speed map movement (though not as dramatic, and you can still do that yourself to make it very fast). This should hopefully eliminate the need to use the Alternate Vanilla Travel Speeds version for most players, as it cancels out the effect of balance mod slowing down speeds. In general, map movement shouldn't "feel" slower to you in any appreciable amount now, just the day/night cycle will tick by faster. This also eliminates the need for the timescale optional add-on.
Standard bearers now use bodyguard type armor, not noble type armor, in many cases, and in a few cases cloth armor, to further differentiation.
Several small tweaks, like Pictish bodyguards getting elite shoes, irish bodyguards getting slightly increased skills, glove assignment tweaked, weapon assignment reworked, etc.
Standard skillsets for troops now give more agility (affects every tier)
Veteran and Elite catagories get added riding (this ensures that the top tier cavalry has at least the same riding skill as lower tier cavalry)
Horses removed from almost all AI Lords. Riding skill of AI lords increased for the few cases where a lord did retain a horse. Should help the AI lords perform better, and fits better with the time period anyway. Only Glywyssing, Alban, Mumain have lords who ride horses (these are also the same three with noble oriented mounted tournaments, ie mounted swords or spear)
Norway's Guthorm name changed to remove "Haraldsson". This seems to be a confusion in vanilla VC: Guthorm Haraldsson was the son of Fairhair with Asa, but this is much too early for that. The devs seem to have intended instead him as the Guthorm who was an uncle to Fairhair, and who Egil's Saga tells us was the son of Sigurd Hart. I experimented with doing a broader rework of him, but in the end opted to just drop the Haraldsson from the name, and solve it that way
Tier 5 horsemen now use heavier javelins (more damage, less ammo). They are mailed and have great combat skills, so this will allow them to do damage a little faster and then begin running down enemies (though more likely, they will inadvertently end up in combat before running out of ammo anyway)
Saxons and Angles now have a chance of mail armor with their tier 4 swordsmen and spearmen
Restored norse standard bearer, as well as gave its function back from huscarls. Since new troops are being added anyway, rationale for using it to create dane axe warrior gone, save compatibility will be broken anyway. Dane Axe Warrior still remains of course, just now has its own slot
AI recruiting party templates adjusted to reflect changes (including those occurring later in the changelog). However, not all troops are open to direct recruiting by AI, or are limited, as for example the elite Briton cavalry are more a "what if" if a great player king arises to restore the Britons, rather than a current reflection of their AI situation, except for a few lords getting them in special bodyguards (mechanic later in changelog).
Ship captains upgrade stats a little bit, given chance of war axe, upgrade paths created from elite vikings to it (though these are very unlikely to happen, as elite vikings are high level, and xp to upgrade is determined by the unit upgrading from, not upgrading to)
Cap for ship speed boosts from sailors raised. Ship captains now count 4x, vikingr count 2x (for reference, sailors count 2x, norse lvl 23 and above count 1x). This doubles the effectiveness of vikingr and ship captains for this purpose
Speed bonuses now require a minimum of 20 troops. No more 3 sailors in a boat being faster than a fully crewed ship
Alliances and Truces now last much longer
Both regular troops and companions now get much more XP from combat kills. This should shift the balance a little more to combat being effective for training troops (and therefore a little less dominated by the safe passive training)
Cost for AI to recruit troops significantly increased. Should make losses inflicted against them hurt a little bit, and further shift the money side of things to making for fewer, more epic battles (rate of recruitment was already slowed previously, but now their hiring costs are also higher). With the more elite AI lord armies in Balance Mod, this should fit well
Vastly raised bandit spawn size threshold. This is the mechanic where VC blocks bandit party spawns when they become large, by making the number of parties per spawn point reduce down to few or 1. Now, it should go ahead and spawn them anyway. Should work well with the Balance Mod random bandit party sized spawns in particular, and give a good variety throughout the game
Basic Vikingr buffed a bit. Some adjustments to viking troop stats. Reavers and Highwaymen buffed substantially.
Multiplayer strength template increased to 18. Multiplayer weapon changes by Muirhied, further work on multiplayer assignments by Samot0423
Ulfhedinn made into spear users to differentiate from standard Berserkers (nothing wrong with spear using berserkers, from Haraldskvæði: "Wolf-skinned they are called. In battle They bear bloody shields. Red with blood are their spears when they come to fight.")
Ulfhedinn and Berserker stats and items tweaked somewhat (bersekers lose gloves, axes upgraded, some stat changes, etc)
Basic attributes (for lowest level NPCs) lowered a bit. New templates for certain npcs
Added Tier 4 and 5 Briton Cavalry units
Adjusted lord equipment (example, getting the other frisian noble mail on one of the frisian nobles)
Svear Warrriors, Ulfhedinn, and Berserkers now give sailing speed bonus (set at 1x, the same as high level norse troops) (for berserkers this will mean they upgrade from a better sailing unit, 2x, but this seems justified by their refocusing of priorities, and creates a better tradeoff in the two upgrade paths between them and ship captains, with their lower combat ability but 4x bonus) (this involves new upgrade paths edited a few lines down)
Size of speed bonus changed a bit
Assorted troop adjustments (example, Frank horsemen and old captains get guarantee ranged flag, old captains get guarantee polearm)
Integrated vikingr and bersekers into the norse troop tree. Some words of explanation: none of the faction troop trees are a "regular" army, so the norse troops should be capable of "going viking." Introduces interesting choices for player, as the viking upgrades often offer quite a lot of immediate return of combat ability, as well as a better (2x compared to 1x) ship speed boost, and potential for slightly lower wages for a low honor player (standard wages for normal player), but poor long term potential, as they have high levels relative to their counterparts, and warband XP to upgrade is calculated by unit upgrading from, not unit upgrading to, as well as generally having worse upgrades available to them (namely, a choice between a berserker path, which is better offensively, or a ship captain upgrade, which has solid armor and gives an amazing 4x sailing boost, but none measuring up to the regular upgrades)
As for berserkers, I decided on them being upgrades from elite vikingr, rather than normal norse troops. The reasons are mostly gameplay: first, they wouldn't compete well against tier 5 norse troops, but do compete well against ship captains, and fit with the generally worse elite vikingr upgrades, that in turn create the tradeoff at the tier 3 norse upgrade choice. Second, the berserker units both end up with very high stats, seeming to indicate they should take longer to train, and the higher level of the elite vikingr (29) compared to the tier 4 norse (26 and 27) ensures that the upgrade takes longer, reflecting this.
Moved Norse warrior archer to tier 4, standard for its level, modified it a bit, altered name
Added norse tier 3 archer unit beneath it, with old name
Added at tier 5 two norse archer units taking different paths
Reduced level of tier 2 norse archer to create standard xp requirements
Mercenary finn archers made substantially better, cost increased
Better arrows made slightly stronger in ammo to damage (base arrows left unchanged), quiver assignment in units tweaked
New bow added (repurposed unused bow) for activating heaviest powerdraw without item modifiers (for troops)
Archer troops slightly tweaked in skills and equipment
Made single enclave village in Northymbria of pagan norse settlers with 100% chance of norse recruits
Lord of Bebbanburg renamed "Aelfric Uhtredson" (one additional reference to Saxon Stories/Last Kingdom to add to the list)
Added special bodyguards to over 30 lords (Harald Fairhair gets berserkers, Alfred the Great gets elite saxon spearmen and veteran captains, etc)
All three age choices on character creation now equalized in total attribute points (but different distributions). Previously, I eliminated all Vanilla VC differences in total attribute points between character creation choices like virtue and personality, but left age having 'adult' as somewhat better because it made sense. But I decided that from a gameplay perspective, leaving in what is essentially a trap that will permanently handicap players roleplaying older characters (who get a massive -4 attribute penalty, equivalent of 20 experience levels in vanilla VC) is not a good idea.
Text added to help better explain character creation
Removed vestigial code related to gender differences in attributes (the differences themselves were already removed in prior versions)
Reordered some code to be better for performance
Removed some aging effects, including chance of attribute loss
Elite Frisian units added.
Throwing axes added. Added to units connected to Frankia and a few vikingr units (Danish elites, Ship Captains). I realize there isn’t good evidence of throwing axes used in this period, but they were in extremely common use about a century earlier in Frankia (of the type of the model used, a Francisca model), so I think there isn’t much harm in putting them in some Frankish units, as well as a few vikingr units that might occasionally adopt weapons used by a people they had a lot of contact with.
Frisian units tweaked in abilities and equipment
Frisian noble mail repurposed as additional Norse mail (they were not being used currently outside of a single lord each, which is a total waste of a wonderful armor model, as Frisians lacked noble units, and they fit well with the other Norse noble mail)
Norse bodyguard (bear or wolf pelt) and Orm’s Lorrica now weighs more and stats tweaked slightly.
Player relations with hostile factions now restored at expiration of mercenary contract
