While it is true that leadership is the primary skill of TLs, weapon skill is required not only for self defence, but to gain the confidence and respect of their troops.
At the risk of diluting the above point, some possible solutions:
* small chance of gaining appropriate skill during a training session, which is gold and time inefficient compared to academy.
* tweak battle skill gains. I think a character who fights a reasonable battle every week should have the appropriate skill around 50%, not ~20 as it is now.
I would love it if the skills of characters in combat oriented classes would actually advance more rapidly by doing their job (fighting in battles). Many other classes, as I understand it, do this.Skill advancement is related to two things:
The combat oriented classes (Warrior, Cavalier, Hero) seem to be at a disadvantage here - as it stands real skill development for these classes require academy time!Academy or tournaments. Constant battles helps, though.
I am not just referring to the percentage chance of such a skill rising from a battle compared to the percentage chance of the same skill rising from time at the academy. Unless these values are significantly different of course. Simply put a character can engage in a whole lot more academy training sessions that they can engage in battles over the course of a month or what not.You sure can. There are two benefits to doing it on the battlefield, though:
I do not really have a good suggestion regarding how this could happen. Anything that would allow the soldiering classes improve their class specific skills at a reasonable rate by just doing their job would be great. Something comparable to the rate at which other classes cat increase their class specific skills would be ideal!Unlike the other skills, swordfighting doesn't really have that much of a direct impact on your character. Off-hand I'm not really sure how much effect raising your swordsmanship has on battle performance. After all, you're just one person in a unit of ~50 soldiers, in a battle that has potentially thousands of soldiers. The effectiveness of courtiers and diplomats is directly related to their skill level every time they use it.
Unlike the other skills, swordfighting doesn't really have that much of a direct impact on your character. Off-hand I'm not really sure how much effect raising your swordsmanship has on battle performance. After all, you're just one person in a unit of ~50 soldiers, in a battle that has potentially thousands of soldiers. The effectiveness of courtiers and diplomats is directly related to their skill level every time they use it.
Swordsmanship, though, is mostly used in tournaments and duels.
Unlike the other skills, swordfighting doesn't really have that much of a direct impact on your character. Off-hand I'm not really sure how much effect raising your swordsmanship has on battle performance. After all, you're just one person in a unit of ~50 soldiers, in a battle that has potentially thousands of soldiers. The effectiveness of courtiers and diplomats is directly related to their skill level every time they use it.
Swordsmanship, though, is mostly used in tournaments and duels.
As above.
Trumpets (Europe) and drums (Asia) as well.
These are tools with great limitation.
They don't allow the same kind of micromanagement that radios with private channels allow. They also compete with each other for being heard and understood, on top of all of the other noises caused by all the metal equipment used on the battlefield.
These are tools with great limitation.
They don't allow the same kind of micromanagement that radios with private channels allow. They also compete with each other for being heard and understood, on top of all of the other noises caused by all the metal equipment used on the battlefield.
I'm not sure where the idea of radios came from... What I'd suggested was more like 30 feet (10m) behind the back of the troops. Easily heard, easily seen. Imprecise, yes, but what other way did they have?
Also, still very much in an area to be easily wounded.
I can not possibly imagine that a group of soldiers in the heat of battle, fighting for their lives using things like metal weapons and armor (that make quite a racket when banged together) are likely to even hear the commands hollered by a nobleman standing THIRTY feet to their rear and think it even less likely that they would much care.
Herman stumbled as one of the Evilites bashed their sword against his shield again. Somehow, Herman thought he has heard Sir Noisy yelling something about "left". Move left? Face left? Herman did not spend much time thinking about it either. Herman had more immediate problems. The damned Evilite before him was skilled, strong and determined. It would take all Herman had to not die in the next few moments. Unless Herman heard the unambiguous horn blasts that signified retreat, Sir Noisy could worry about "left" all he wanted while the rest of us just tried to stay alive.
I think 90% is going to be far too much. In a week just fighting rogues that means I might be able to gain 5% or more. That would completely destroy the achievement of high skills. I assume that this is also supposed to scale with skill level, just as skill gain does currently throughout the game.
As far as how realistic it is that nobles gain skill in swordfighting/jousting by being in battle, I am not sure it is really all that important. Though I feel it is historically feasibly, the truly important part is how it fit's into the game. I think that having a roughly 90% chance that a noble will gain a skill (swordfighting, jousting or leadershipp) just for having their unit engage another unit in battle would be a positive change and make for better game play.
I even think that the odds I proposed in a prior post (with a few adjustments listed below) would make for a good starting point. I went ahead and wrote them out again with said adjustments and would like to hear what others think of the system.
I personally think that it would make participating in battle a more attractive option that going to the academy is, especially at higher levels.
I think that it will make battles more important to characters as they would be a great way to develop your character.
I think that it will help ensure that the best warriors (in terms of weapon skill) and leaders are the nobles that participated most in battles.
I think it will decrease the likely hood of nobles sitting in the capital spending mountains of gold at the academy instead of joining the rest of the realm in war (not saying that this is a real problem but will admit that I have had the temptation to do so myself on occasion).
I think that the progression rate is good. The chances of skill increase would raise dramatically but is still low enough that the academy still retains some value and that it is unlikely that someone could "game" the system. In a scenario in which a player tries his best to optimize his characters skill gain in a single skill (hero, leading infantry, trying to up his swordsmanship), that it would take an average of 143+ battles to max out their swordsmanship assuming their unit engaged another unit in every battle (167+ battles for non Heroes). A character participating that many battles deserves a maxed out skill in my opinion.
I think that it also models the idea that training + experience leads to the best warriors as training at the academy would still be lucrative in the beginning while real world battles might prove more, or at least equally, profitable as skill levels become high.
Also don't look at how many battles it takes to "max" a skill, because by default we want very few people to max the skill, we probably want only a small percentage of the characters to even have "high" skill, otherwise it devalues the entire point of calling them skilled. Look at the amount of battles required to gain whatever is deemed to be the "Average" skill.
Feels kind of wrong, though, that the elite swordsmen will be those that will have spent their lives at the academy, doing little of anything else, and (more recently) ex-advies (though even then, my own ex-advies who had done nothing else than hunting for years did not end up with the high skills ex-advies are often reputed to have).
Maybe it makes sense realism-wise (debatable)... but gameplay-wise, it doesn't. The academy should be for peacetime when there's nothing better to do, it shouldn't be the most efficient way of achieving anything.
Characters who end up being badasses with swords should be made so only by playing as badasses with swords. And that means by taking risks. Either by allowing "prudence" settings for battles that allow nobles to lead their units' charges for high chances of increased swordfighting skill and wounding, dramatically increasing swordfighting gains by heroes, or attributing swordfighting gains and risks with other activities, such as looting (a warlord who plunders a village is likely to get his own hands dirty as well).
Academies should be the slowest and least efficient paths to high skill levels. As they work now, too many are content to have long periods of peace, or indeed work towards quelling all attempts to liven things up, because they want to sit on large revenues just to train their infiltrators or the like. This egoistical behavior does not create fun for others.
Think it through. If mere battles was all that it took to make master sword men, then the common foot solider would fast become a master. I'm not against some sort of tweak to to the battle/academy system, but I'm not in favour of the proposed system of making academies much slower, since they will soon become irrelevant and might as well be removed from the game.
I'm not convinced there is some sort of epidemic of people doing nothing but training, and I am certainly not convinced that the few that do this are actively attempting to maintain peace. Even if they were GREAT, that gives you someone within your realm to rail against. If you can't motivate a realm to override the desire of peace by one or two characters, then game mechanics to "fix" it is not the solution.
Game mechanic restrictions have their place, but we seriously need to get away from trying to dream up mechanics to fix every perceived "undesirable" activity.
Academy whores are de facto peace mongers. They pour huge resources into their training, and thus very little into units or military infrastructure. What do rulers look at before starting a war? "How strong is our army and what are our capacities?". It doesn't matter if there isn't a huge number of people doing it, the resources training suck up has great impact regardless.
That is their choice, instead of seeking game mechanics to punish them, use the existing tools to rally the realm against them and prevent them from doing so. If you can't convince the realm to act, then its simply not a problem the realm cares about enough.
Why is it seen as a punishment? You want people to punish them for doing that, not me.
Honestly, the more this goes, the more I have a simple solution: abolish academies altogether. Training is not fun. Having others spend huge resources on training is not fun. Infiltrators aren't even as meaningful as they used to be. Gameplay-wise, there's no reason to have academies around. People who want to train should pressure their leaders to hold more tournaments.
Training is not fun.
Having others spend huge resources on training is not fun.
Gameplay-wise, there's no reason to have academies around. People who want to train should pressure their leaders to hold more tournaments.
If you are changing mechanics to make their style of play either pointless or greatly reduced in efficiency, then yes you are punishing them through mechanics, simply because they aren't playing in the way you have deemed acceptable. There are player driven methods to resolve this, which not only allow for different play styles between realms and individual choice, but also the possibility of political and other conflict and interaction within the realm. I don't particularly want them punished at all, I was simply pointing out that for realms where this is a problem and the consensus exists that it is not acceptable within the realm, mechanics exist to correct it, which in my view is much better then a game wide system to stamp it out.
So don't train. What is the worst that can happen? Duels will actually be risky? You won't win that tournament that was so important to you having fun?
I'm not having less fun because my neighbor likes to watch baseball. I don't understand how that could happen to you.
If you don't like academies in your realm, destroy the academies there. It'll save you maintenance money.
If you've got a continent with five realms, three allies on one side and two on the other, and for various reasons four of these realms are led by peace-loving rulers that maintain the status quo against restless nobles that would like for something to happen. Now say that one other realm, with a single ally, is the only one ruled by a ruler that wants to shake things up. So that ruler tries to prepare his realm for war, he orders recruitment of troops and investments in recruitment centres. But, despite how wealthy his realm should be, none of that seems to be happening. His army remains small and the infrastructure remains poor, because those with gold have other priorities. He can't ban them, they'll just switch to one of the enemies, and he'll just be less able to go to war. And so, because he can't mount a reasonable army, he puts off the war again, and again, and again. Just because one or two douchebags wanted to use that gold to train their skills, the whole continent is at peace. Had he been able to divert all of these resources to a war effort, he could have launched a surprise attack on one of his enemies, their two allies would probably have come in to defend him, and then his own ally would probably have come in to even the odds. That single ruler could have brought the whole continent at war.
Academies are detrimental to the game as a whole, not just to the realms that use them.
The math may not work out (it's a complicated equation, too, so I don't see it being done for a while), but Leadership training in academies does have an impact on how well your troops perform and therefore how often you win. Leadership, of course, is also gained during battle, but when I started, I was told that getting it higher via the academy would be a smart move. So it would actually be pretty interesting to see an academy realm vs. a no academy realm, from an... academic standpoint. (Thank you, thank you.)
Inputs to such an equation would be:
- Time spent training
- Gold spent training
- Average Leadership level attained
- Impact Leadership has on combat
- Time committed to engage in battle
Essentially, you'd look for a common ground: How much does Leadership % translate into combat effectiveness vs. throwing in real gold and time. Input #5 would need to be finagled to determine how the time resources "lost" to training could be used in combat effectiveness... Assuming you need a minimum of 4 hours remaining to reach any destination on a single turn, you could maybe count that input as "hours beyond 8 used per turn".
Sorry I just like these math things sometimes.