Messages

316

East Island / Re: The War

« on: August 09, 2018, 09:18:20 PM »

Of course, they were free to chose as they willed. Highmarch viewed them as brothers, not vassals.

It remains a poor decision on all accounts, in my books, about the worst they could have made.

Highmarch turned on Perdan, and Perdan only. Vix's decision to stand by Perdan was much more grounded than Fallangard's decision to do the same. Highmarch's new position made Vix vulnerable, but did no such thing to Fallangard. The only way Fallangard could come out losing from Highmarch' flip is by going after Highmarch themselves. They really shot themselves in the foot. They could have went to attack Caligus, draw forces away from Vix and Highmarch, instead of joining in with Vix and looting Winkamus.

And it's not like they'll gain anything from this. They picked the losing side, and put themselves in an extremely vulnerable position doing so.

But anyone that goes against you makes their decisions bad. 

317

Feature Requests / Re: Starting Unit tweaks : Archers

« on: August 09, 2018, 09:15:50 PM »

...I notice you're not even mentioning R2 archers.

I think this is probably a good idea; I have felt for a long time like the tradeoffs of shorter-ranged archers were not worthwhile. I would like to make it more of a strategic choice, such that the shorter the range of your archers, the more damage they deal.

Not sure exactly what the right way forward is on this, but I do agree that something needs to be done in this vein, and making starting archers all R4 is probably a good step in the right direction.

Thought you already do more damage in the shorter range? I mean shorter range is usually bad because how the game is designed. Because you fire before you move, if your target is out of your range, you waste that turn completely. If you have archers with R2, you get to shoot only once before you get hit by cavalry units unless they move from outside of your range. Even worse for R1. R1 is essentially useless. I don't even know why we are even seeing R1 archer options.

I can think of one quick way to change how much damage you do with ranged units. Maybe your overall damage is the same. Let's say you can do 1000 damage across all of your range. If you are range 4, you will do 250 each row. But if your enemies are 4 rows away, you will do 250/4. Maybe you get an option to focus your fire so instead of doing equal 250 damage per row, maybe you can focus 700 damage on row 3 while doing 100 damage per row on your remaining rows.

That way if you have a unit with 1 range, you will do 1000/1 damage to the row right in front of you. If your range is 2, you will by default do 500 damage in each row.

This will make archers attack multiple units like infantry units but they will do more damage on a specific row if you get an option to adjust the ratio of damage. Otherwise, their damage will be spread out across all their range.

Just a quick thought. Numbers might need to be readjusted and with arrows having different ratio across hit or miss you might need to make archers do more damage overall to adjust for that.

318

BM General Discussion / Random red letters

« on: August 09, 2018, 06:12:01 AM »

Got a report just now.

Mortuus Angelo, Knight of Karbala was seriously wounded by Banetal Dragoness's unit.

Why does the city name get colored in red?

319

East Island / Re: The War

« on: August 08, 2018, 08:07:09 PM »

Looks like Caligus will finally be able to kill Edvard and reclaim their city. How long has it been? 5 years?

320

Development / Re: Archer targeting

« on: August 08, 2018, 02:40:15 AM »

Given how rogue prone those continents are, not having effective militias would mean everyone would have to squat their capitals just in case a huge horde comes in. I don't think that's an improvement.

That is what those continents need. They need to achieve 3 noble to 1 region ratio. People are still resisting.

321

Development / Re: Archer targeting

« on: August 07, 2018, 11:22:27 PM »

Maybe militia could get a generic debuff, combined with a buff against rogues? So that they are weaker against human armies than they currently are, but at least just as strong against rogues as they currently are? Mobile troops should always be strongest, though, because otherwise that will incite some realms to dump even more gold into militia at the expense of the players.

They need to be nerfed and that's it. They should be worse against both humans and rogues. Being worse against rogues will help both BT and Dwi to shed some realms.

322

Development / Re: Archer targeting

« on: August 07, 2018, 11:58:28 AM »

In the medium-to-long-term, I'd like to buff both walls and siege engines.

This is all still very nebulous, but I have Ideas about changes to the system that would make it effectively impossible to take a defended city without a significant number of siege engines. One is to make the height of the walls affect archer fire—in both directions. So, for instance, every 2 levels of wall would increase the range of archers atop the wall by 1 line, and reduce the effective range of archers shooting up it by 1 line. This would mean that with range 4 archers on both sides, in a city with level 5 walls, the archers on top of the wall would be able to hit the archers below 4 lines before they'd be able to hit the defenders.

But as I say, that's all still very nebulous, and none of it is in my short-term plans.

I don't mind seeing walls granting extra range but SEs definitely need to compensate for their crappiness. I think infantry should have built in SE that will allow them to scale walls but actually buying one should increase the effectiveness by a lot. Maybe explosive charges should be changed a bit so units carrying those can punch a hole or something. Or at least add a way to damage the walls from a range with trebuchets.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIeAXKAAKv4

323

Development / Re: Can we cut Dwilight some slack now?

« on: August 04, 2018, 11:04:50 PM »

I just did the math and Dwilight is at 2.6 players per region, well above the recommended minimum of 2, yet we're still getting ravaged by monsters and undead. It's at the point where only three realms even share a country border. This will eventually become a huge problem as p2p interaction is severely hindered.

Thought you had to reach 3?

324

Development / Re: Archer targeting

« on: August 04, 2018, 03:53:04 PM »

People used to siege with a lot of siege engines. Now people don't want them at all anymore. I'm not sure what changed the meta, but maybe we should buff siege engines?

Archers changed the meta. It was actually a lot easier to siege a city with archers than with siege engines. Archers could weaken enemy infantry units before the infantry line hit the city wall. Before archers became useful, people would do front infantry to get to the walls ASAP. The problem before was that infantry was too good. Maybe with that armour change on infantry, maybe they will make a huge return since 25% is rather significant.

325

Development / Re: Archer targeting

« on: August 03, 2018, 11:44:21 PM »

You are overlooking the fact how wars were fought back in the days. We are seeing more SFs and higher quality units than ever before. Back in the days RC stats weren't as high as now so CS was lower. Not to mention the number of men you could command with your petty income. Now with less people around, people can field larger units. AT was using the old system for most of its lifespan until few years before it closed down. Other islands got the changes that created the current power inflation on the other hand. The only realm on Dwilight that ever got over 30k was Astrum I think? LN might have done it at some point as well but I wasn't there to witness it so can't say much. Dwilight was different in the regard that it only allowed 1 character. AT on the other hand mostly allowed 2 characters.

As for Oligarch, let's not joke about Oligarch having more than just archers. You guys only had archers when the whole archer drawing out infantry happened. Why do you think I even told General of Sirion to do that in the first place? Only 2 people commanded infantry out of 12 nobles Oligarch had while the rest commanded archers. All your other infantry were militia units.

They already panic and flee when there is no infantry. If you are suggesting that archers need to stay behind infantry all the time you are making one of the most used marshal settings obsolete. I think the game should stick with archers staying on the field until infantry units start to slaughter them.

Infantry units are holding the walls just fine. That is why I used to add an infantry unit or to and put them in the rear while putting all my archers in the front to decimate infantry militia units. The mechanics haven't changed much over the years and people just didn't attack with only archers because archers were utterly garbage.

It is simple really. You just need few cavalry units to counter the whole archer tactic. If you don't have one like Oligarch, that then yeah you are probably forced to do that with infantry.

You can make infantry hold the walls all you want but at the end there are always ways to work around the newly added mechanics. If infantry units hold walls longer, I'd just put cavalry in the front along with archers and shoot the hell out of all your units since they won't leave the walls. When they finally do, my cavalry units will smash what little is left of your infantry.

Like I said, unless we get an option to fully control our unit behavior over 20 rounds - doubt any dev would want to grant people that option since that would be too complicated for most of our players - you will always have an issue with unit behaviors.

You need to see a bigger picture than one incident that broke your realm. You need to understand the whole archer only tactic wouldn't have happened if the city was siegable through different ways. If Oligarch could only put 5k militia units at most, why would they have bothered sending only archers to draw out infantry? It is a result of multiple factors not just people exploiting some broken behavioural pattern of dumb infantry code. It is not that simple. It happened due to multiple factors coming together.

1) Militias playing too big of a role in defense
2) Archers being too strong - To be honest I think archers should be really strong for the first couple rounds then lose their effectiveness as they run out of arrows or maybe we can get WIP Anaris suggested which will resolve most of these old issues 
3) Oligarch lacking cavalry to stop archers
4) Sirion's reliance on archers (Their army was at 7:3 archer to infantry ratio at the time).
5) Sieging with infantry not as effective - sieging with siege engines is probably one of the dumbest way to take a city when siege engines are hard to comeby and you need x2 the infantry to effectively siege the walls.

I just hope we will get more tools to work with. Apparently the tools we have aren't really efficient at getting the job done.

326

Development / Re: Archer targeting

« on: August 02, 2018, 10:01:21 PM »

You are accurate that 60k armies are rather hard to get together.

I've never seen one in all my years.  The largest armies I've ever seen are the 40k armies that Sirion's Northern Alliance has been pushing around over the last year.  And I've been in a lot of wars.  Most large armies in my experience are around 20k, and that has stayed true for the last decade.

40k CS is pretty big but there were ones a lot bigger over the years. If you haven't seen anything bigger than 40k CS, you probably missed few big battles that happened. Here are a couple examples:

http://wiki.battlemaster.org/wiki/Lapallanch_Family/Zakilevo/Epic_Battle_of_Oberndorf
http://wiki.battlemaster.org/wiki/Lapallanch_Family/Kurlock/First_Siege_of_Taselak_City
http://wiki.battlemaster.org/wiki/Lapallanch_Family/Kurlock/Second_Siege_of_Taselak_City

With the game's reduced noble count, it is harder put together 40k CS since we now only have 1 character per continent.

The difference is that those armies are increasingly being made up of smaller numbers of larger units as the player base shrinks.  I remember a time when 30 men was a good standard unit.  Now if you can't recruit to 60 men you are a poor piker.  The income is simply going to fewer people so each unit is getting stronger.  But at the same time, less money is going to the nobles now since regions don't generate as much income for small numbers of nobles.  So a lot of gold is lost to inefficiency.  But it still results in smaller numbers of more powerful units.

What you've failed to notice is that I've agreed that militias are a problem.  They've been a major issue for most wars of conquest for at least the last couple years.  The only way to break a realm is to surround and starve it out, but if it has allies selling it food and sending money, you can't do that.  Oligarch ran into that issue while trying to take the Sirion City near it during the Sirion Civil War.  Oligarch could beat the Sirions every day of the week in the field but couldn't break the city.  Then Sirion ran into it when they tried to break Oligarch.  The Southern Alliance ran into it while they were rolling over everything north of Highmarch.  And Sirion is probably going to run into it soon with Perdan.  Lots of wars over the last couple years at least have seen this problem.

I don't agree that it is unfair for the militias to do what they do.  They've done it for every realm for years now.  That's an equal fairness.  Or perhaps an equal unfairness.

What I want is the game mechanics fixed so realms don't abuse them, while fixing the militia issue so it balances things better for all nations.  I want equal fairness for all so everybody can have fun playing without unreasonable or unrealistic battles being fought that tug at the willing sense of belief we all put into this game.

The game will always have some flaws. When people discover them, they will use it to their advantage. That is just human nature. Maybe I am getting a wrong idea here but you seem to want people to have a very simplistic approach to the warfare aspect of the game. You want people to bring an army and just clash it head on. Maybe once militias(both normal and peasant) are not as problematic as they are now,  we might see new changes.

I don't really see any good approach to the current problem of baiting infantry out with archers. To be honest, it is pretty easy to counter it. You can usually see it coming. The biggest issue was that Oligarch at the time only had archers while relying completely on militia infantry to hold the walls.

With new archer changes, they will no longer just shoot what is in front of them so baiting out infantry units isn't as efficient anyway. Overall, the game needs a better siege mechanic so sieging is not as simplistic and headache inducing. Maybe once that market system change comes, we will actually see cities starve again.

327

Development / Re: Archer targeting

« on: August 02, 2018, 09:45:03 PM »

That's not a year, it's a season or two.

oh right. So 84 days is a year. That is actually decently long. Almost 3 months. Not sure you want people to keep lots of militia units for that long.

328

Development / Re: Archer targeting

« on: August 02, 2018, 10:58:42 AM »

Yeah...I can see an overwhelming army winning.

But..30k defenses versus 30k to maybe 40k attackers does not an overwhelming attacking army make.  Especially when the defenders are behind level 5 walls.

That makes them a suicide squad, not an overwhelming army.

Remember the standard rule of needing DOUBLE the CS to take a city.

If your alliance of four or five nations has to take advantage of weaknesses in the combat AI and rains of magic to wound the defending nobility and stop their players from being able to play the game at all, just to beat a single nation, then you need to find a better way to play the game.

(Though I will grant once again that Oligarch was receiving support from outside which allowed us to work at a higher peak efficiency than a single nation, truly alone, could have.  That did make us much more resilient to the normal attrition of war.  Also, only one of Sirion's allies had a truly impressive mobile force.  The others were also rans which wouldn't have meant much on their own.)

But you are making a statement based on a flawed assumption. You don't need x2 to siege a city. That is to siege a city safely and that tactic was used when people mostly fielded infantry. Like I said multiple times (yet you don't seem to understand why your statement is flawed), we no longer have enough people to field 60k CS. Even with many realms putting together their armies they can hardly field anything close to it. Yet it is easy to put 20-30k CS of militia in a city granted the city is rich enough. That is why we are having this discussion of fixing the problem. From Anaris' comment, he clearly understands the flaw of the current system and will most likely work on a solution that will at least lessen some of the issues. You are constantly talking about how Oligarch's fall was unfair but it is the other way around. It was unfair for the realm to last so long behind the walls relying on militias. It was okay when Oligarch had 20+ nobles, fielding 20k CS army but once the realm was down to 12 nobles with 10k CS, it should have fallen relatively quickly. Yet thanks to the broken militia system and the addition of poorly thought out peasant militia system in an attempt to forcely keep realms alive, it just turned the whole thing into a !@#$ show that dragged on for too many months. I am just grateful that all the problems are finally being recognized and will be worked on. Maybe by the time this year, we will no longer see people relying too heavily on militias to keep them alive.

Oligarch was sending a 10k to 20k army into the field during the Sirion Civil War.
Sirion could normally deploy a 10k to 20k army of their own, which Oligarch handily trounced again and again.

Epollyon could do 10k to 20k as I remember when Sirion called them in and made it a more general war.
The rest maybe provided 5k or 6k each.

It was enough to push Oligarch back, but it wasn't an overwhelming advantage when the city walls were factored in.


Now once again, I do agree that militias need to be toned back.  Right now they are handled, and recruited like, standard military units.  They simply don't have leaders.  They cost a similar amount to train and deploy as noble-led units.  They are...the same.  That makes it easy for a very small realm to deploy a lot of militia to hold city walls.

That is what kept Oligarch longer than it should have. Hopefully this problem will be fixed so small realms die when they should.

What if, instead of treating them like organized, and trained soldiers that simply act like normal military units, we treated the militia as a more untrained reserve?  Remember that the modern militia idea of trained soldiers with firearms that can fight and win against a trained military is...well...very modern American in style.  But in the medieval world, no peasant had the time to learn how to use a bow and arrow.  Only trained men at arms did.  And they followed a noble, or were lesser nobility themselves.

What if we treated militia units more like peasant armies?  Make them based on the population of the region, with each region lord able to increase or decrease the size of the militia by shifting a setting that would increase or decrease their impact on the economy, but with a finite limit to how large they can be based on that population.  And limit them to more infantry-style tactics.  Like the peasant armies.

Also, we already have the peasant armies in the code, so I'm thinking that might not be too difficult to implement as coding goes.

I think units set to militia should be treated like retired soldiers. Maybe they should become weaker every passing weak and after about 21~42 days (which is a year in BM time) they all disappear. But until they disappear, they are paid the same despite them becoming weaker over time to discourage people from putting too many of them. Or maybe there should be something like CS limit based on your mobile CS or noble count.

If devs really want small realms that are active and full of people, basing it on # of nobles will certainly help them survive. But again, militias need to be weakened considerably.

329

Development / Re: Archer targeting

« on: August 01, 2018, 12:41:20 AM »

I think it is just better to make all archers do that instead of just militia units but assign the ratio 3 ways - units closeby, units farther away, and the ground(missed arrows). Depending on training, maybe adjust the ratio so there are less ratio leaning toward missed. I'd just slash militia unit's morale(cap at 50 and set to police) and CS in general. Maybe upon becoming militia units they lose 50% of their stats or something while pay is doubled.

330

BM General Discussion / Re: Discussion on Monsters

« on: July 31, 2018, 10:49:47 PM »

Yeah. Continental density is just too much. It punishes everyone. Realms that can keep high enough density should be rewarded by not getting harassed by monsters to death. Maybe when the continental density is too low, monsters should try to kill off small realms with only their capital remaining.