What do you think about current influence costs at proposals ?

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I think increasing the amount you spend would be really great. I'm not really a fan of the voting system at all and anything that improves the players ability to achieve their desired outcome is greatly welcomed. I feel like there's a huge disparity between different playthroughs. Sometime a faction will just give you endless fiefs and sometimes no matter how well you do they just keep giving them to someone else and you 100 influence will never change it.

I also feel like it's too dependent on proximity and that being able to spend more influence could help get around this. Currently, you have to take every castle you can or you risk getting permanently cut off from being up for fiefs due to proximity.
 
For me a good approach will be having a vote council where you can speak and spend influence with lords before the vote and then proceed, only lords assisting the council (or sending a representative like his wife) can vote. It will be immersive, will add some politics layer to the game, will give you a reason to enter into a scene, etc and ... it is not going to happen, anyway thks for reading and I really appreciate your effort to get feedback from the forums. :wink:
IDK if you really want to inundate people with what's effectively two rounds of voting.

Reality is Clans should vote with/for their friends. I feel like Relations are currently very underutilized. If you join a Kingdom you should inevitably be making Friends/Enemies within that Kingdom.

Get awarded a Fief? That's going to anger the losers, and more so build animosity to anyone who voted for you (including yourself). Truthfully it'd be a lot more interesting if Kingdoms effectively had their own in-fighting. It's very rare in history that everyone agreed unanimously. Right now it's way too easy to become the "Rock Star" of your Kingdom where everybody just loves you. Achieving that should be very difficult and/or require the use of Charm to really butter everyone up.

Though for Policies in particular it would be nice if we could influence Clan's leanings. So there a a Vote Council may be a good idea, where you can spend/donate Influence to get Lords to come around to what you want. Obviously this should be expensive, but if there's a Policy you just don't care for - and you have enough Influence - you should be to sway things.


Would it be asking too much to have a scale of Influence we can spend? Maybe I have crazy a amount of Influence (like 2000+ or something), and I really want to make Peace (like you're being sieged and your Party is so small you can't break out). Wouldn't it be sensible for me to spend 500 maybe even 1000 Influence in such a case?

I feel like fixed values will never be any good since you either screw newcomers by making the costs too high for them to vote or you effectively neuter the powerful long-term Clans by not allowing them to use their Influence. Something from 10 to 500 (increments of 10) would be nice.

But if we are stuck with fixed values I say it should be 10 50 and 250.
 
This is a step in the right direction Mex, but it's only a solution for the first few hundred days or so, by day 1000 it still will not matter because of all the passive influence policies that give far too much to the Vassal clans. I feel your solution is a bit more on side of treating the symptoms; not the disease per se. I could be wrong, but I believe the core of the issue is everyone simply has way too much influence. So here's what I believe needs to be done to avoid there player and ai clans from amassing too much influence.

-Remove or change all passive influence granting policies for vassals -- nerf sacred majesty to 1 influence per day (in the end the liege should almost always have the most influence unless they are entirely inept)

-Change influence gains to a flat rate instead of scaled (who cares how many looters you killed with x amount of men, all -
we care about is how many of those damn vermin are now dead!)

-Influence degradation similar to warbands renown degradation (In short, amass up to around 1k but after that, you start hitting a steeper and steeper treadmill of diminishing returns -- additionally -- degradation only significant if the player/clan is reaching the DR treadmill -- or inactive from faction contribution ie waiting around in a town or castle for weeks on end)
 
This is a step in the right direction Mex, but it's only a solution for the first few hundred days or so, by day 1000 it still will not matter because of all the passive influence policies that give far too much to the Vassal clans. I feel your solution is a bit more on side of treating the symptoms; not the disease per se. I could be wrong, but I believe the core of the issue is everyone simply has way too much influence. So here's what I believe needs to be done to avoid there player and ai clans from amassing too much influence.

-Remove or change all passive influence granting policies for vassals -- nerf sacred majesty to 1 influence per day (in the end the liege should almost always have the most influence unless they are entirely inept)

-Change influence gains to a flat rate instead of scaled (who cares how many looters you killed with x amount of men, all -
we care about is how many of those damn vermin are now dead!)

-Influence degradation similar to warbands renown degradation (In short, amass up to around 1k but after that, you start hitting a steeper and steeper treadmill of diminishing returns -- additionally -- degradation only significant if the player/clan is reaching the DR treadmill -- or inactive from faction contribution ie waiting around in a town or castle for weeks on end)

+1, specially your last point. BL has that with town/village/castle wealth and the available militias. Good job man! @mexxico, this is gold.
 
This is a step in the right direction Mex, but it's only a solution for the first few hundred days or so, by day 1000 it still will not matter because of all the passive influence policies that give far too much to the Vassal clans. I feel your solution is a bit more on side of treating the symptoms; not the disease per se. I could be wrong, but I believe the core of the issue is everyone simply has way too much influence. So here's what I believe needs to be done to avoid there player and ai clans from amassing too much influence.

-Remove or change all passive influence granting policies for vassals -- nerf sacred majesty to 1 influence per day (in the end the liege should almost always have the most influence unless they are entirely inept)

-Change influence gains to a flat rate instead of scaled (who cares how many looters you killed with x amount of men, all -
we care about is how many of those damn vermin are now dead!)

-Influence degradation similar to warbands renown degradation (In short, amass up to around 1k but after that, you start hitting a steeper and steeper treadmill of diminishing returns -- additionally -- degradation only significant if the player/clan is reaching the DR treadmill -- or inactive from faction contribution ie waiting around in a town or castle for weeks on end)

Yes you are right. Currently there is an influence inflation in game and this problem has connection to policies as you stated (policies are not only reason of course). You know policy system is broken currently and kingdoms are having more and more policies as time passes. They do not remove existing policies anytime and most of policies are unbalanced and some are giving too much influence.

Why you suggested changing influence to flat rate? Yes it is more logical but it does not solve any of existing problems. Isn't it or I miss something?

Yes I also agree we should have influence degradiation. We talked it with @SadShogun about 3-4 weeks ago already. We will suggest it otherwise it become too hard to balance influence and having a degration is also logical because you do something and you gain influence but it should be forgetten by time pass, at least for above a limit (something like 1000+). Only problem here is kings should have a way more influence than others and if we have a degradiation kings will suffer most (because they have highest influence general). We need to think something to this because we should not make kings have less influence than current situation, they are already less effective at game.

I will make some more detailed research tomorrow about influences and will share you results.

By the way I was away from forum for about one week because need to spend too much time at dentist in last one week (because of covid was delaying these operations but cannot delay more), now I will catch up things here.
 
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My only concern is that I wouldn't want us to be able to effectively buy any election by overruling the low influence votes of several lords with one huge influence vote of our own.

Would this have any other inflationary costs to the value of influence anywhere else?
 
Considering proposals tend to very much be a dogpile sort of situation. I don't think changing Influence would affect that much since you'd still get half the kingdoms nobles just vote on it and if you only vote. .It's not going to help.

I think what may need to happen is that a sort of factional system is created within the kingdoms. Each with different goals and desires These factions might then create less dogpile voting as different leaders of different factions may then vote according to their factions goals. So you may have an expansionist faction that really wants a certain city or set of castles and will always vote for going to war against that faction and also vote against peace until that is secured as an example. or you may have a royalist faction that always votes for things that benefits the ruling clan.

You could then have a system for the player interacting with these factions and so on. Creating a game within the game and also giving the mid to lategame a bit more fleshing out as suddenly kingdoms get more internal structure as well.
 
Yes you are right. Currently there is an influence inflation in game and this problem has connection to policies as you stated (policies are not only reason of course). You know policy system is broken currently and kingdoms are having more and more policies as time passes. They do not remove existing policies anytime and most of policies are unbalanced and some are giving too much influence.

Why you suggested changing influence to flat rate? Yes it is more logical but it does not solve any of existing problems. Isn't it or I miss something?

Yes I also agree we should have influence degradiation. We talked it with @SadShogun about 3-4 weeks ago already. We will suggest it otherwise it become too hard to balance influence and having a degration is also logical because you do something and you gain influence but it should be forgetten by time pass, at least for above a limit (something like 1000+). Only problem here is kings should have a way more influence than others and if we have a degradiation kings will suffer most (because they have highest influence general). We need to think something to this because we should not make kings have less influence than current situation, they are already less effective at game.

I will make some more detailed research tomorrow about influences and will share you results.

By the way I was away from forum for about one week because need to spend too much time at dentist in last one week (because of covid was delaying these operations but cannot delay more), now I will catch up things here.
maybe passive influence gain should be removed entirely and influence from actions buffed?
maybe certain actions should give much more influence than others such as saving a lord currently in battle, capturing the king, breaking sieges/winning a defending siege, taking settlements, etc...

i hope you got well. dental pain is a b****.
 
Yes you are right. Currently there is an influence inflation in game and this problem has connection to policies as you stated (policies are not only reason of course). You know policy system is broken currently and kingdoms are having more and more policies as time passes. They do not remove existing policies anytime and most of policies are unbalanced and some are giving too much influence.

Why you suggested changing influence to flat rate? Yes it is more logical but it does not solve any of existing problems. Isn't it or I miss something?

Yes I also agree we should have influence degradiation. We talked it with @SadShogun about 3-4 weeks ago already. We will suggest it otherwise it become too hard to balance influence and having a degration is also logical because you do something and you gain influence but it should be forgetten by time pass, at least for above a limit (something like 1000+). Only problem here is kings should have a way more influence than others and if we have a degradiation kings will suffer most (because they have highest influence general). We need to think something to this because we should not make kings have less influence than current situation, they are already less effective at game.

I will make some more detailed research tomorrow about influences and will share you results.

By the way I was away from forum for about one week because need to spend too much time at dentist in last one week (because of covid was delaying these operations but cannot delay more), now I will catch up things here.

Hey Mex, honoured to have your reply. I hope you and everyone at TW are doing well.

To answer your question -- The reason I think influence should be a flat model is -- scaled models are always avenues of player manipulation. It's very easy for me to get a large horde of looters to attack me and slaughter them with relative ease -- I believe the player should be incentivized to effectively neutralize armies or striking decisive blows to the enemy to gain influence. [referred to as example 1]

Let's take another example. I begin to raid a village causing two or three other lords with squeamish troops to attack me with good, but meager odds. I eviscerate them with veterans and clever tact, but still, take a medium to high level of casualties. I am given a large amount of influence even though this result is still not very helpful to our kingdom. Winning battles you probably should not have fought should not be considered an impressive use of force or a victory to your allies. I understand this sort of encounter should give a lot of renown, but not influence [referred to as example 2]

Let us look at one final example. I am leading an army of 1k (for the sake of argument 200 of the 1k forces are mine). We ambush the enemy army of 800 sieging one of our castles and defeat them without taking substantial losses. I gain less overall influence than in example 2; even though I defended a fort and said victory can change the tide of the war -- also my usage of troops much less wasteful than in example 2. In the end, if I were a bot with the aim of farming influence, it would still more ideal to repeat example 1 or 2 over and over.

As it stands, influence is essentially renown. Influence needs to be equal to exactly (or mostly) how valuable the player's acts are to the kingdom not only for logical sense but to avoid the player from gaining too much influence from mundane activities like looter slaying or raiding but most importantly of all -- successfully defending themselves from situations they probably should have avoided -- let's leave renown for that, I think it's important for them to be gained differently. In my perfect world influence would be gained by calculated use of military force, renown is mostly fine where it stands; gained from uncanny victories or acts of valour, etc. But that's a story for another day.

Perhaps there is some wiggle room to have some amount of scaling that I may be overlooking. But, hopefully, this helps you understand why I think influence should be adapted into a flat model or a mostly unscaled model. So in short, influence gain should be a value-based model more in line with clever usage of troops.
 
22 party vs 18 looters -> 2.2 influence (similar for renown)
1200 army (all my troops) vs 900 army -> 4-5 influence (around 6-7 renown iirc) ... WTH?!?

The current influence/renown system has to be rebalanced
 
What if you make it a slider with no limits? But the more influence you pay, the less effect you gain for 1 influence. So an influential clan can spend a lot of influence for a decision it really needs.
 
22 party vs 18 looters -> 2.2 influence (similar for renown)
1200 army (all my troops) vs 900 army -> 4-5 influence (around 6-7 renown iirc) ... WTH?!?

The current influence/renown system has to be rebalanced

Well, at 1200 army you have all your clan parties? Not any other party from another clan?

At the end of battle you see only how many influence / renown your party gained. Gains of your clan parties probably not shown there but they will be added to your clan's variables (that screen needs a development so player can see how many renown / influence you get through your clan parties at that battle). So for best results please note somewhere your renown / influence before battle and check it afterwards.
 
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Here is my suggestion:

Passive influence gain and deterioration based on your rank within the kingdom. (Not clan rank) Each rank would give you a "base" amount of influence, and if you're below it, you gain some passively, if you're above, you lose some passively.

Example (with purely rubbish numbers for illustration purposes)

King - base influence 1000. If they are at for example 500 (due to recent expenditure) they will passively gain X influence a day until they get up to 1000. If they get above 1000 due to other passive sources of influence as well as victorious battles, they will start losing X influence a day until they go back down to 1000.

A powerful vassal could have a base of 750 for example.

A regular vassal could have a base of 500.

Important note: This system is NOT meant to work instead of other sources of influence, but alongside them. Which means that the point of this system would be to make the characters hover around a base amount of influence, but other factors still being able to bring the actual amount of influence the clan has above or below that base amount.

So for example, if there are a lot of policies in place that give the ruler influence, they would effectively hover above that base amount of influence of 1000. However, the further away you are from the base amount, the bigger loss/gain you get. As an example, if you are at 500 influence as a ruler, you will get 5 influence a day for some time. When you get back up to 750, you will get 2.5 influence a day. Then, when you get back to 1000, you will be without loss/gain.
Conversely, if as a ruler you are at 1500 influence, you will lose 5 a day. When you get down to 1250, you will lose 2.5 a day until you get back to 1000.
In short, the further away you are from that base amount, the faster you gain/lose influence.

Allow me to note again, other sources of influence gain/loss could offset this system and make you effectively hover above or below that base amount of influence.

There could be further national policies that could shift these base amounts of influence up or down as well.

I believe that this simple system would pretty much completely fix the issue of some clans not having enough influence, while others have too much. It would also completely get rid of the influence inflation problem, as the more influence above the base you have, the more you lose passively, to the point where that loss would offset any other sources of gains, and effectively soft cap the amount of influence you can reasonably accumulate.
 
Currently in proposals player and other clan leaders can spend 10 influence (slightly favor), 40 influence (strongly favor) or 100 influence (fully push) for favoring any outcome. However it seems in most cases player cannot change what will be chosed even he / she spends 100 influence because lowest & highest limits are so low (10 influence / 100 influence) and clans mostly vote on same outcome all together (another problem, we are trying to differentiate selections of npc clans more however in most cases this is hard to achieve). So this making proposal feature is mostly not used by player (because it is useless in %90 cases).

I think making these amounts higher (especially lowest one) can result in better gameplay because more clans will stay abstain and player will be able to spend higher influence if he / she really wants to change current situation. What do you think about this? It can be good to collect more feedback about this issue from you.

Here is an example for comparing 10 / 40 / 100 vs 20 / 60 / 180 vs 30 / 75 / 200 for same cases :

rwHQz.png
Third option seems to be the best.

But there is another big problem, specifically when castles and town ownership is decided, the candidates seem to be random. I think there should be at least 5 candidates:
ruler
most deserving guy - the guy that gained most influance from actual assault of that town or maybe one of the top 3 guys
most powerful guy in the kingdom - the guy with most combined influance + prosperity + army, or again one of the 3 top guys
most needful guy - the guy that have less than he should have according to his clan level (I think this is currently being used in some form)
random guy - well randomly chosen guy

This kind of system would be good foundation for future intrigue system, etc. You could really turn good friends into rivals this way, or maybe discusss voting upfront with the most powerful guy (like in Roman triumvirates).

Finally voting of lords should be based on relations (so there is incentive for improving them) and if you spend lot of influance to give your friend some keep / town, it should make him reallly loyal to you in the next elections - I help you, you help me. Also stats of the given town / castle like prosperity, culture, security etc should play a big role on the friendship meter - if you support some homeless lord with 300 influance in a voting for 3000 prosperity town against everyone else it should matter a lot, it should matter even more if he actually wins the election.
 
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Well, at 1200 army you have all your clan parties? Not any other party from another clan?

At the end of battle you see only how many influence / renown your party gained. Gains of your clan parties probably not shown there but they will be added to your clan's variables (that screen needs a development so player can see how many renown / influence you get through your clan parties at that battle). So for best results please note somewhere your renown / influence before battle and check it afterwards.
Would it be possible to seperate influence and renown gains from each other? At the moment it seems they are closely tied together with the player getting similar amounts of both no matter the battle.

The situation right now is something along the lines of:
Win 5v50 - 20 renown, 15 influence (high/high)
Win 200v100 - 10 renown, 5 influence (low/low)

What's happening here is both values are mostly being based on the "impressiveness" of winning the battle (overcoming the odds). If we were to seperate them and reward renown for the "impressiveness" and influence for consistency/fighting big battles instead it would look something like this:

Win 10v10 - 5 renown, 1 influence (low/low)
Win 5v50 - 25 renown, 3 influence (high/low)
Win 200v100 - 10 renown, 25 influence (low/high)
Win 200v500 - 50 renown, 45 influence (high/high)

I think this would make sense as it rewards fighting in big battles even if you have the number advantage and won't get much renown. It also makes sense roleplay-wise, as the guy going around taking on groups of 50 men by himself may be more popular, but he won't hold more influence than the lord with 200 men in his army.
 
I would like to see Renown become a currency instead that you spend to upgrade your clan (companions, workshops, etc passives AND quantity) and raise opinion of Town and village notables.

It would be nice to have that level of customization for your clan rather than a flat generic level up we have now with clan tiers
 
Would it be possible to seperate influence and renown gains from each other? At the moment it seems they are closely tied together with the player getting similar amounts of both no matter the battle.

The situation right now is something along the lines of:
Win 5v50 - 20 renown, 15 influence (high/high)
Win 200v100 - 10 renown, 5 influence (low/low)

What's happening here is both values are mostly being based on the "impressiveness" of winning the battle (overcoming the odds). If we were to seperate them and reward renown for the "impressiveness" and influence for consistency/fighting big battles instead it would look something like this:

Win 10v10 - 5 renown, 1 influence (low/low)
Win 5v50 - 25 renown, 3 influence (high/low)
Win 200v100 - 10 renown, 25 influence (low/high)
Win 200v500 - 50 renown, 45 influence (high/high)

I think this would make sense as it rewards fighting in big battles even if you have the number advantage and won't get much renown. It also makes sense roleplay-wise, as the guy going around taking on groups of 50 men by himself may be more popular, but he won't hold more influence than the lord with 200 men in his army.

Yes, your and @Edward the Bastard 's points are right. However there is already a difference between formulas of influence and renown gains. As you see below two formulas have different usages of strength ratio. Renown uses ^0.5 (square root) and influence uses ^0.25 (square root of square root). Also as you see 25% of influence gains are from battles and 75% are passive influence gains (half of passive influence come from supporters - see influence sources graph)

f5rDR.png

I will change ^0.5 to ^0.45 for renown gain and ^0.25 to ^0.15 for influence gain. So renown gain and influence gain of battles will be tied less and differ more. Also will try to increase influence gains at battles general (by making 0.6 constant -> 0.75, this will increase influence gains at battles by 20%)

Also currently there is influence inflation at game here are clan's influences at 1086 (2nd year), 1094 (10th year) and 1104 (20th year) :

fPBTy.png

-vDNw.png

JJwhP.png

Here is graph for average clan influence & year :

4rzO6.png

Here is also source of passive influence income, here as you see too much passive income gained by supporters (will try to reduce this by 50%). We also need to make some adjustments so player can get more supporters at game, currently it is nearly impossible :

o5hpV.png
 
On the other hand, we could allow lord traits to influence their choices much more than mow. Some lords may be more hawkish than the others, for example, and may be inclined to keep the war going. When in comes to policies, some lords may be more conservative than the others.
 
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