Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord

I had a super painful siege last night.

500 vs 500 or so.
2 towers, no ram. 4 trebs. a 900 man army showed up so I went in.

my personal party was about 200. of which, a solid 50-70 archers. fian-bushwackers, and sturgian archers of various..
And had 4 other parties..

I get in, and hold back my melee. let my archers and the trebs go to work...
after a bit, of personally killing militia archers with my bow. I notice we aren't killing as many as we should be. so I open up the menu.
Astas party(me). 22
fian champs 2, fians 2

other parties"
recruit:47
recruit:39
etc..

total numbers are 200v300

mother fuckers.
with the 500 max, the fucking game decided to load in a majority of my troops from my ally parties. 500 man army, of which 200 were mine personally, and it only loaded 22 of the 200 it gave me, vs the 300 militia it loaded.
my party which was 40% of our troops, was only 10% accounted for. and even then, that was mostly my recruits and shit too. 4 of my fucking archers.

I ended up getting dropped by some weird 200 damage arm shot. (this seemed to happen a few times since yesterday. Im not sure whats up.)
So, A.i. took over. seige ladders broke before they could take the walls, then they hammered on the outer gate for a while, taking a ton of damage.
Then, in the inner courtyard, (balgard) they just stood there doing nothing. but dying, and occasionally killing one back with a jav for a while. eventually 1 guy broke down the inner gate.(just one was attacking it..) and then they finally took it. after losing even more to the inner gate melee..

ffs.. took like 300 losses, 45 from my party directly.


Having your formations broken by the unit cap is very frustrating.

yeah, I keep telling myself to get that one, after multiple A.I. bug outs forcing a retreat and reattack.

Well that's a bummer.

They are redoing the system soon I guess?

I'm not sure on peoples hate of the skill system. I think it has value.

There are sure some oddities for it.

Like, the system is both for PC and for npcs. so some traits are FOR you, some are FOR companions, some are for nobles/governors. I see some bitching directly at things, were are clearly aimed at non-player characters.

The general soft cap system seems decent to me.

I do think there are some god stats, and weak stats.
like, Social. all 3 are useful to all builds. so, you can't go wrong going 7 in social. and then spending 15 focus points on all 3. and all 3 are even PC focused.
While, int is also all 3 useful... but, steward is mixed. steward points effect Quartermaster, which does not need to be in you party for full clan effect. But atm the steward PERKs often are clan leader, party leader focused, so you do want steward personally.
Medicine is 100% party member/companion bait. surgeon is global, and most of the perks in medicine are party member. so you do want the surgeon in party...but doesnt need to be you.
Engineering is same as medicine.

Vigor is split however. if you go 7 in vigor... you basically pick one. 2h, 1h, or polearm. little reason to use the others, ever. what PC would ever invest here?
ctr is similar. bow/xbow are pretty much exclusive. bow/throwing might be an option. my current pc is kindof doing that, since throwing has turned out to be kindof shit. high ctr, is allowing me to invest in bow a bit to back it up.
end similar. horse/foot largely exclusive.. although theres a good deal of places where you are forced on foot, so those att points arent wasted if you go horse, even if you dont put focus in foot as well. Smith is basically 100% companion territory..

so, atm, 7 in social, 4ish in end, 4-7 in ctr... not sure why you would do anything else. Get 5+int companions for medicine, engineering, and steward. and a 5+cng for scout. and one for smith.
I'm not sure the system is wrong. just the balance.

social is currently king due to 2 broken op perks. disciplinarian, and everything has a price..
I'm not sure game changing perks like that, should exist.

BrotherWu said:

Couple of questions for you Caliane .

How do you get companions to do Smithing?

Why do you see Disciplinarian as OP? I just think of the criminal trees as subtrees of regulars.

Are you sure that assigning a Scout, Doctor, etc. has any effect? It didn't seem to me like it did.

It's dumb that you basically can't train up both Riding and Athleticism.

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in the smithing menu, there is a portrait on the bottom left. click on it, and swap to a different character.

scout, doctor, etc. yes definitely. unassigned, the PC acts in all the roles. Assigning a role, passes it off to a companion, and it uses their medicine, engineering, scouting, etc stat instead of yours.

I mean, you can train up riding and athletics. theres quite a few focus points available..
im not sure what the total hard cap on skills is. probably level 31ish. I'm surprised no one has done the math on this. starting focus/attributes, focus per level, attributes per 4 levels. skill points required per level, to level increase. what is the max, at which point, you can no longer level up. and how many focus points/attribute points is that.

btw, 7 attribute, 5 focus is min required for 275 skill points. (itll give like 288.) max skill point is 330. ( via in game stats, can get higher with cheats)

Disciplinarian is crazy good, of course. Its very easy access to high numbers of noble troops, without any respawn timer..
Also, crazy good for turning looters->empire infantry men>legionaries..
Are you missing the fact, bushwackers become Battanian fians?
steppe bandits-khans guard? hill bandits-bannerknights, sea bandits-druhwhatever t6 sturgian noble cavalry.

nobody is fielding 100 man fian parties from making circles around Battania, they are converting forest bandits.

Theres a couple of ways to deal with it in terms of game design. give it to everyone, is one option. something so crazy powerful, probably shouldn't be a specific trait like that.
technically, everyone DOES in game though.. garrisons/companions will rank up these units as if they had Disciplinarian. this does not work with the units that require horses though. hill/sea bandits. If they did, then disciplinarian would just be an ease of use trait, allowing you to do it at any time. no longer needing to use garrisons to do it..

Another way, would just be to give EVERY trait line a similarly powerful perk. probably a break point system. 125, and 225 for the Key perks. I imagine this is the intent. but very few of the other perks even come close to value. (even if they were working)

Some big stuff in 1.4 stable.

Save & Load

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• Players now gain trade XP correctly after Save & Load.
  

Character Development System

• Changed the implementation of 15 one-handed skill perks that are related to combat.
• Companions will now gain trade XP if they are leading a caravan.

Kingdoms and Diplomacy

• Influence gain reduced to 1/20 for donating prisoners to a dungeon.
• Council of Commons policy effect changed so that it now grants 0.5 influence per each supporter of the clan who lives in the clan's kingdom.

UI

• Implemented new map event visuals system. Now map events (Raids, Sieges and Battles) will be shown on the UI compared to 3D icons on the map. This will improve the visibility of map events.

Combat AI

• AI troops can fill up from dropped quivers now.

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some of the bigger stuff imho. alot more as well.


1.4.1 unstable is even bigger.

UI

• Changes
  • User Interface for Sandbox Kingdom creation
  • A new shortcut, "Left Ctrl" (like Left Shift) has been added to affect the entire stack with the action (e.g Transfer, Upgrade etc.)
• Fixes
  • Now non-traded item prices in inventory are updated correctly. i.e. If the player sold a horse, only that horse's price would be updated but the market price for the same category horses would also change but not show. This didn't result in any miscalculation of the total cost of the transaction, it was purely visual and it's now fixed.

Combat AI

• In certain siege scenes, troops would start running between two siege towers instead of climbing. This issue was resolved and major improvements were made about the problems in pathfinding over siege towers and climbing ladders (especially ladders of siege towers).
• Increased distance between friendly troops. This improves the spacing inside combat and reduces friendly troops hindering themselves

Character Development System

• Major changes and fixes have been made for two-handed skill perks.
• Added secondary effects of one-handed perks.
• Fixed charm, leadership, trade & medicine perk bugs.

Clan and Party

• Added 160+ ladies and a few young male lords to the clans.
• Fixed a bug where the player's banner was not visible before clan tier 2.
• Heroes can now marry after age 45.
• NPC parties now also visit neutral towns and villages to recruit and buy food.

Kingdoms and Diplomacy

• Implemented War and Peace Kingdom Decisions that are accessible from the Kingdom Diplomacy Screen. Kingdom Decisions now show support for all types of decisions.
• Implemented Sandbox Kingdom Creation, which is possible through the clan screen and not dependent on the main storyline. Players need to have at least 1 settlement and a tier 4 clan. Then players can select their kingdom's culture (consisting of their settlements' culture or their own clan's culture), select their initial policies (up to 4) and, finally, select the name for their new Kingdom.

Other

• Armours and armour types on faction troops have been redistributed in order to improve unit balance based on tiers.
• Shields were redistributed for faction troops based on their new hit points and values. New Battanian shields have been added to the Battanian Faction Troops. Some units doing too well or too poorly on playtests have been slightly optimized stat-wise.
• Fixed a bug that sometimes allowed the camera to clip into walls in khuzait dungeons.

Combat AI

• Enabled charging agents to move together in formation. Both cavalry and infantry troops in formation now tend to stay in line while charging at the enemy. Cavalry formations will try to regroup before charging back, if the formation is intact.

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Troop gear changelog.

So tons of changes in 1.4.1. several community patches. castle stair fix and unit collision mod may be redundant now.
massively populated non-combat nobles, should make marriage easier.
war/peace buttons inplimented. no longer need main quest to form a kingdom..

1.4.1 looks lke such a game changer, I almost don't even want to bother with 1.4 for a while.

I just bought the game and going to work on my first play through. Is it worth it to just start on the beta branch since there are so many improvements?

stankwoo said:

I just bought the game and going to work on my first play through. Is it worth it to just start on the beta branch since there are so many improvements?

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well, they have been updated frequently. once a week. so that 1.4.1 should be pushed to stable next thursday or so, with 1.5 or so hitting unstable beta.

the unstable beta branch, does often have some bugs that come along with it. So I don't know, might be best to stick with stable.