Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord

Tuco said:

I'm pretty sure this is all false.

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How is it wrong?

Tuco said:

The structures for the game are there, they just don't work or aren't tuned.

You're going to have to be a lot more specific about problems thatp layers are encountering and why a lack of gameplay structure is responsible.

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A proper breakdown would take.... a while. A quick example to try an illustrate my point would be the skill tree. It isn't just unbalanced, it was clearly created in a slapdash manner without considering what kinds of decisions players would be making and why they would make them. There wasn't thought given to the different paths and how they interacted with the other pieces of the game world.

When you create a comprehensive design structure you create the hooks in other systems that the skill system connects with. In Bannerlord this was done is a few cases, but obviously not in any systematic way. You can contrast this with something like the XCom skill trees, which while suffering from balance issues (and some minor bugs) were clearly designed with intent to interact with the tactical layer of the game in clear and deliberate ways.

Structuring design properly also creates models for regression testing that you can use for the game. Concrete indicators that something is wrong allow you to catch tons of mistakes very quickly (sometimes even using automated tests) because you know exactly what should be happening when it isn't. Sometimes the model is wrong or the test is written badly, but at least then you can track down the discrepancy and fix the problem which is usually some code or a design oversight in the game.

To me one of the indications that they lacked the structure they clearly needed was how the skill system turned out, and in what ways it failed. It isn't dissimilar to a mechanic being able to diagnose what is wrong with a car just by knowing how it broke down. I've seen it so many times it hurts my soul, but I get especially annoyed when it happens to a franchise I think has a lot of potential.

Tuco said:

So when I was ready to join a faction I picked the one that was getting beaten the worst, the Northern Empire, who was at war with the Khuzait and lost a few fiefs to them.

After I brought them to parity I said goodbye, married the Khuzait princess and then leveled athletics by marching across the land while I leveled my dick and grew my clan. My plan was to wait until the snowball starts again on another victim and join them. I set an arbitrary threshold of a faction getting down to 2 cities and just fast forwarded while marching on the map till that happened. About 4 kids later the western empire was down to two cities so I joined and now this is my map.

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They are at war with ALL the factions Both the western cities are under siege and I'm pretty sure this faction is turbo fucked but I'm going to do my best...

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ouch. the true power of a nation is not how many cities they own, but how many vassals they do. I noticed this, when I decided to fight the Southern empire in mine. fuckers had like 19 clans. And the losing factions were down to 1 or 2 at best.
and of course in practice as I noted, when I would declare war on them, it was like a hornets nest. I'd get hit at 3 locations at once, and/or see that ball of 1k troops with 10 parties in it coming.

vlandia in mine is holding on. were at 6k, till southern empire went to work on them. knocking them down to 4k. But, they lost like 6 cities, in only losing 2k power. still have like 12 clans themselves.
Vlandia is also at war with southern empire, asarai, sturgia, and Battania.. (and even me lol.) while doing this..
granted, I've also been going to work. Took 3 Southern empire cities. And, have 2 900 man armies atm, going to lay waste to southern empire held northern/khuzit territory. Giving it back to the Khutizt clan that joined me.
but the large number of clans is letting them hold on.

got Southern empire power down to 9.5k now.
Asarai is also at war with them. I think they are officially broken now. I can just march across and take every city/castle on the way back home.

Mario Speedwagon said:

Those locations being tracked, notice they have a white circle too. You can click the circle on any settlement to track it and it will always show its location on the map. I use this feature a lot to track settlements that provide noble troop recruits.

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yeah, that is exactly what I use it for too. Also occasionally, a reminder which castle to take next, or if Im looking for someone of course.

Tuco said:

I think the fundamental problem with the skill system is that they DID consider how the skill system would hook into the rest of the game but did not consider how much fun it'd be. They clearly pursued an elder scrolls "you get better at what you use" system, which enables players to git gud at roguery if they did roguey things instead of letting players level hard in combat and dump points in roguery stats to get good at that.

The focus/stat points are a huge whiff, of course, but aren't really integral parts of the system. They could remove skill caps from the game entirely and the system would be both better and largely unchanged fundamentally.

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That is definitely one of the major problems, but I see it as an indication of deeper issues and lack of good design competence in general. The comparison to Bethesda is a very good one as well, their games are rife with the same kinds of mistakes for the same reasons.

Tuco said:

I think they patched something around ~1.0.5 that made vassals less likely to defect to factions they are at war with to stop faction depletion. The western empire isn't in too bad of shape lord wise.
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I think this is a bandaid fix because I'm pretty sure the reason the western empire is at war with ALL the factions is because some lord would defect to a rando faction and take their town with them, then the western empire would declare war to get it back. So they lost a town to the sturgians and the khuzait, who are no where near, and now both of those factions are raiding them, lol.

A big thing that's missing is the ability to push to declare peace if you're a lord and not a monarch. I'm pretty sure that's impossible? I don't know how the peace mechanic works or if it's even possible to declare peace at this point.

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not possible to declare peace or declare war via influence yet.
you have to attack a farm, caravan, or party to start a war.
and you need to find a lord, and pay them off to declare peace.

Also, how do you have 34 members? mod so you can have governors? (thats def what "ruler" in Steward is for. +1 companion for each town. how convenient.)

I am admittedly not very savvy with how the mods work. Would I be able to employ mods on previously saved versions of the game? The best two hander I can buy that I have found is 2.3k denars. I know there is a mod that opens up all of the multiplayer loot as well, I just don't know how to go about implementing that stuff.

I attached my main character and a remake of a previous post that I found hilarious with the max speed and two hand capabilities...which was suprisingly fun (until you have a lot of horse archers).

autoplay, wont pause. oh, god not again with that vid!

is it reddit posts here or something?

I figured out how to siege properly finally.

so you click to build things. ok obvious enough. as soon as something is done building of course, it starts attacking, and getting attacked. clicking on it and removing it. saves it.
I was, then holding them, until I entered, and auto placed them back in, while attacking. This is fine enough for some support. but to do it right. pick them up, and then place then back down while still on the map screen. when done multiple at once, they will fight back better and take out the opposing seige weapons, and then start hammering the walls too.
destroying them even, before you even start the battle. so you can start a battle, with a giant whole in the wall.
This does take time on the map, which often is more important then saving troops. (wish I could HOLD my troops in the seige map itself. letting the siege weapons do their work.)