Time "cost" of buying provisions

[De-Legro]

What i try to say here...
It sucks when there are unnecessary time limitations. It slows the game, were you having small or big units. This game desperately needs dynamics.

But ofcourse this is same to all, but this is one reason why i could imagine people get bored for this game. There is too much sitting and waiting.

You are deliberately pushing the limitations of the game though. It is DESIGNED to limit the unit size of noble. How does it do that? By making almost everything the unit does take longer thus providing a soft cap. The game is also designed to discourage keeping old characters for ever, in a similar matter. If the wait time is as onerous as you say, then why the hell is everyone dead set on recruiting such large units.

[jaune]

Because we have to. Because enemy does it. Because everybody does, because everybody has tons of gold, because there is so little players to use that gold, because game is so slow that new players get bored of it... We have circle here that game gets bored cause there is not enough players... or there is too much gold, you choose which.

I want this game to become more dynamic, to be more enjoyable for new AND the old players. I have made few suggestions... bad i guess cause all them got shot down pretty quickly...

Do you slowly starting to get the picture i try to paint?

Anyway, i see your point and understand the idea behind it. If it is really what people want this game to be... i can live with that... i just wish new people can do... but for now, it looks like they dont. Not saying this is The Reason for loss of players, but i can say it could be one reason why i would not play this game.

[De-Legro]

Because we have to. Because enemy does it. Because everybody does, because everybody has tons of gold, because there is so little players to use that gold, because game is so slow that new players get bored of it... We have circle here that game gets bored cause there is not enough players... or there is too much gold, you choose which.

I want this game to become more dynamic, to be more enjoyable for new AND the old players. I have made few suggestions... bad i guess cause all them got shot down pretty quickly...

Do you slowly starting to get the picture i try to paint?

Anyway, i see your point and understand the idea behind it. If it is really what people want this game to be... i can live with that... i just wish new people can do... but for now, it looks like they dont. Not saying this is The Reason for loss of players, but i can say it could be one reason why i would not play this game.

If EVERYONE does it, which is not my experience, so perhaps it is a continent thing, then perhaps it is not as boring as you suggest. What quality of troop are people fielding with such large units?

There could have been a hard limit to unit sizes to prevent this sort of thing. There isn't because in theory a choice is provided. Field efficient units (For example Arcaea aims for units of about 700 CS as standard) or choose to field a massive unit knowing full well the disadvantages in doing so. Take away those disadvantages and the larger/richer realms are at a even greater advantage then they already possess.

[jaune]

Well, in this particular case, there is 1 rich realm vs. 3 large realms and one smaller... none of them poor.

Its been like this for.. hmm... 2-3 years or so. There is few battles every 2 weeks, then both go home, refit and then we sit and wait them come again.

I have had impression that there is a lot gold around everywhere, atleast the realms i'm playing (Darka AT. and Ar Agyr BT). There is more gold than people can recruit. And looking sizes of our enemy units, its pretty much continent wide thing. Seeing 100+ men units arent rare.

About the quality, usually building army only from high quality troops is not possible. There simply is not enough recruits for such thing. After battles Darka needs about 25-30kCS recruits in week. So i doubt we ever are able to build so many so big elite RC's.

[De-Legro]

Well, in this particular case, there is 1 rich realm vs. 3 large realms and one smaller... none of them poor.

I don't get your point? You want us to modify the code so it adjust everything based on what wars are occurring and the relative strengths? The fact YOUR current battle has the forces they do doesn't change the fact that larger/richer realms would benefit more from easing large unit penalties.

Its been like this for.. hmm... 2-3 years or so. There is few battles every 2 weeks, then both go home, refit and then we sit and wait them come again.

So the war is stale. Again this is something the players can sort out, but are probably unwilling to because this game demonstrates a general lack of willingness to quit a conflict unless there is a clear winner. Also just imagine if we gave your island WINTER to deal with as well :)

I have had impression that there is a lot gold around everywhere, atleast the realms i'm playing (Darka AT. and Ar Agyr BT). There is more gold than people can recruit. And looking sizes of our enemy units, its pretty much continent wide thing. Seeing 100+ men units arent rare.

I play on FEI and Dwilight. Most big battles will have several units of 100+ troops, yet I've never experienced massive wait time for them to refit. I rarely recruit more the 60 men myself so I couldn't tell you how they manage it, perhaps they fire them all and recruit afresh. If I understand the conflict on AT properly a good portion of the time between battles is spent marching by one side.

About the quality, usually building army only from high quality troops is not possible. There simply is not enough recruits for such thing. After battles Darka needs about 25-30kCS recruits in week. So i doubt we ever are able to build so many so big elite RC's.

You have had 2-3 years of supposedly too much gold to give it a shot.

[jaune]

Made a quick look to Atamara.

CE is having about 70-80KCS army, Darka 60-70KCS, Suville about 60KCS, Tara 50-60KCS...

These numbers are quite huge if you divide it by characters. So definately there is gold per character much more than there used to be -> Time needed to move/repair/get provisions/recruit has increased  A LOT from 5-6 years ago. Which is bad. Its away from the dynamics and action.

[De-Legro]

Made a quick look to Atamara.

CE is having about 70-80KCS army, Darka 60-70KCS, Suville about 60KCS, Tara 50-60KCS...

These numbers are quite huge if you divide it by characters. So definately there is gold per character much more than there used to be -> Time needed to move/repair/get provisions/recruit has increased  A LOT from 5-6 years ago. Which is bad. Its away from the dynamics and action.

Gold is being rebalanced, this has been mentioned several times on the board, and quite a bit recently. It is not trivial and there are more things to balance then just gold. I won't use the CS of FEI or Dwilight for comparison, since those islands seem to always have fielded smaller armies.

[jaune]

Good.

[Indirik]

Gold is being rebalanced...

Indeed. We're going to get MORE of it. Across the board. So... how will that help with this problem? IMO, it will just make it worse.

Our repair times and costs were set years ago, when the game situation was different. Back then, if you had a 50 man unit, you were doing pretty darn good. If you had more than that, people would start accusing you of wasting gold, or being selfish for spending so much on yourself. The only people that had more were dukes, and the 2 or 3 people fielding the TO units.

These days, 60-70 is practically the standard for people not limited by honor. Many realms are shooting for 100 or more per noble.

The landscape has changed. Maybe it's time to think about changing the way various unit "costs" are calculated to keep up with it.

[Charles]

I would say this seems like a great possibility for a solution to the blob problem.  Make large units travel at a MUCH slower pace.  A unit of 70-80 troops would travel at half the pace of one 30-40.  The nature of the relationship can be determined later.
In addition to this the interference between multiple nobles attempting to move all at once is increased.  So if you had 20 TLs attempting to move from region A to region B, 5-7 would be told at the turn change "because of the number of people on the road you were unable to leave region A."  Then make it so that a three turn move does not solve the problem. They are all still on the road after all.
I imagine this would make defending a much easier thing to do.  So perhaps moral loss should be increased with number of nobles sitting in a region as well, especially after a few turns. 
I imagine there would need to be a number of other changes that would need to take place at the same time so that offence or defence don't get a huge bonus.
I really did not think much of this through before reading this thread, so this may have been suggested elsewhere or simply be crazy.  If this is an option that should be flushed through I can set up a separate thread and actually do a proper feature request.

[Indirik]

I would say this seems like a great possibility for a solution to the blob problem.  Make large units travel at a MUCH slower pace.  A unit of 70-80 troops would travel at half the pace of one 30-40.  The nature of the relationship can be determined later.

This already happens. (I don't think the travel time doubles, but it does increase significantly with larger unit sizes.)

In addition to this the interference between multiple nobles attempting to move all at once is increased.  So if you had 20 TLs attempting to move from region A to region B, 5-7 would be told at the turn change "because of the number of people on the road you were unable to leave region A."

A version of this is already implemented. Too many troops traveling along one road introduce the possibility of additional travel delays.

We don't want to make coordination impossible. We don't want to make things overly frustrating. We don't want to make attacking too difficult. If anything, we want attacking to be as easy as defending. (It would be interesting to see if we could make attacking *easier* than defending without making things completely ridiculous.)

And above all, we need things to still make sense. The penalties and bonuses need to make sense, and not break immersion.

[Jaden]

Back then we didnt have to buy provisions, have smaller units, and more players. Even for new nobles, you will have enough gold to recruit to max which is around 40 men, and if you participate in a few battles, you will have enough honour to recruit 60 + men.
I think we will just have to accept that units are bigger, and that refit times need to be cut down, even if its just for player experience.

[De-Legro]

Well there are two issues to be sorted

First do we WANT larger units to become the norm. If the answer is yes then we would need to look into hour usage. Provisioning isn't a huge problem compared to the hours that large units require for repairs. If we don't want to see such large units become dominate in the game, we may need to look at what to do about that.

Right now the code is working as designed, which is to make large units a pain. The changing situation of the game may have made them more desirable, so we need to work out if the way forward is to rebalance things so units (and thus total army size) is reduced down, or if we want the larger armies and units.

[trying]

One way of solving this would be to slow down honor gain. Older characters have 1000+ honor which I'm pretty sure the devs never expected to see so they can recruit giant armies. Maybe the amount of honor you get should slow down as you get more and possibly hit a hard cap?

[Anaris]

One way of solving this would be to slow down honor gain. Older characters have 1000+ honor which I'm pretty sure the devs never expected to see so they can recruit giant armies. Maybe the amount of honor you get should slow down as you get more and possibly hit a hard cap?

Honour gain was slowed down, a number of years ago. The old characters with 1000+ honour are from before that time. They just didn't get their extremely high honour removed.