We need more mid level enemies.

Users who are viewing this thread

Currently the scale of enemies goes like this:
Looters and Bandits - Can be Soloed by lvl 1s
Steppe Bandits/Sea Raiders/Deserters - May kill off your recruits early on but unlikely to be a threat once you get past about lvl 5/6 with a decent party
then we skip to:
Lords - Parties of 100 - 150 troops, most of which are at least regulars with a decent amount of elites. Occasionally have less than 100 troops, but will often have allies nearby anyway.
Kings - Parties of 150+ troops

At about level 10 you reach a point where you can't catch those slippery looters, yet you can't actually fight lords armies (unless you shadow your own guys and let them do all the work) until the late teens (smaller parties of 50 - 100) or mid twenties (the proper parties of 100+ guys).

I think it would be a good idea if there were small "Patrols" of 40-60 regular troops (2nd tier at most, not much cav) that belonged to factions (so they don't gank starting characters) and are not lead by Lords. They could just walk around their factions territory and borders and would fill the slightly boring gap between joining a faction and actually being able to attack enemy lords.

Note: I play on the highest difficulty, so this may be a bit biased.
 
Highest difficulty does make a lot of difference. What faction are you playing btw? I tried Swadian on my first character and didn't have too much trouble. Mainly because I spent a lot of time fighting bandits and then working with other lords before I started soloing. You really need those Lord v Lord battles to get your top tiers trained, so you'll probably just have to deal with being Count Clais' ***** for a bit =/
 
Should be mentioned that the Diplomacy mod has stuff like this. You can setup patrols around cities and castles, and rival AIs do the same thing.

Probably not as many as you'd like, though.
 
What about caravans? They usually have just annoying but killable caravan guards and low- to mid-tier faction troops. Caravans are in the gap between bandits and lords, they're just not that common.

A partial way to handle this gap is to keep your party size down (more managable upkeep and decent map speed) and keep beating up forest bandits/sea raiders.
 
Blackfish said:
A partial way to handle this gap is to keep your party size down (more managable upkeep and decent map speed) and keep beating up forest bandits/sea raiders.

This is key. No need running around with a full party unless you're trying to take on lords. Keep party size down, pathfinding high and you should be able to pick on sea raiders, tundra/steppe/desert bandits to your heart's desire until you're ready to fry the big fish.

(Also, there are small 20-40 man faction patrols that are introduced in Diplomacy...though I've never thought of them as suitable training material)
 
CriticallyAshamed said:
Highest difficulty does make a lot of difference. What faction are you playing btw? I tried Swadian on my first character and didn't have too much trouble. Mainly because I spent a lot of time fighting bandits and then working with other lords before I started soloing. You really need those Lord v Lord battles to get your top tiers trained, so you'll probably just have to deal with being Count Clais' ***** for a bit =/

Yeah thats what I usually do, but this playthrough the lords have been really cowardly for some reason and its made the problem more aparent. I hate having to rely on the AI as they will do stupid stuff like call a feast while Dhirim and Uxhal are both under siege from 300+ nords and 400+ saranids respectively.

I'll try keeping my party size down next time, its a bit late now, once you can train Men at Arms by staying in town for a few days the game gets quite easy.
 
I actually switched my Campaign AI back to "Normal" from "Good" because I got bored of only ever fighting top-tier troops. Aside from being difficult, I missed the interesting diversity you'd find with mid-tier armies (spearmen, skirmishers, etc.). Running into forces of 45 Marksmen, 40 Guards and 18 Kngihts got boring after a while.

However when they patched to v1.131 I tried Good again and it's improved greatly, so I'm keeping it for now.
 
Back
Top Bottom