Balancing Force

[BattleDrumz]

I am pleasantly surprised by the amount of headway this team has made already. I just wanted to make a brief comment/question.

It seems while reading the books, that the vast majority of battlefield units are levied peasants with for armor and farm tools for weapons. It would follow then, that upkeep and recruitment costs for higher tier units such as royal guards and knights should be almost inproportionately larger than levies and militia. This would allow for large, unprofesional armies instead of the ludicrous M2TW 20 stacks-of-gothic-knights burning town by town without any financial burden... Personally, I feel that a really good unit is more coveted when it is precious instead of ordinary.

Anyways, thats my two-cents -- for now at least.
Cheers

[LordSnow]

I completely agree. This is something that can also be helped by limiting the availability of higher quality units.

[aeoleron9]

I agree with this concept. I remember having played a few mods that drew a nice balance of upkeep/quality/recruitment limit. It encouraged using combined forces in a stack as opposed to one-unit-stacks.

There was also the battle balance from RealCombat, which emphasize the use of cheap cannon fodder to protect the expensive knights and special units until the timing is right. The cheap spears can't beat the costly knights 1on1, but they can swarm them in numbers and slow down charges. Costly dismounted knights are expensive and heavily armored so they deal with lower units easily, but are vulnerable to direct cavalry charges. It was very well done(at least while I was using it) so I'd recommend checking that out.

I like the strategic direction this mod is heading.

[Gampie]

Personally, I feel that a really good unit is more coveted when it is precious instead of ordinary.

I agree. I hate situations where there are more chieftains than indians. Elite units should be rare lest they become the standard unit.

[kaiz]

I'm glad that's the direction this mod is taking. Brienne's chapters in AFFC really emphasized how crappy it is to be your average levied peasant that comprises 75% of the army.

However, didn't Tywin's army that fought the Starks have like 4000 armored horse or something like that? Perhaps the Lannisters and the Tyrells can afford to retain more knights since they have the richest lands.


Another balance change to consider from vanilla is the role of artillery, especially as it pertains to sieges. Either siegecraft is terrible or castle-building is superb (probably both) in Westeros since it's pretty much impossible to storm a castle with ladders or knock it's walls down with catapults (trebuchets don't seem to exist). Riverrun was holding out indefinitely and Storm's End resisted for like 10 years or something. Pretty much the only way to take a castle by force is through spies/magical spies lol.

However, the vanilla game allows even catapults to knock down stone walls like balsa wood. Hopefully you guys will change their damage to walls to be more like ballistas/serpentines.

[TheKingSlayer]

There are catapults in Westeros. The Brothers of the Nights of watch have Three on the wall (at least) and in ACOK, there is talk about how Stannis was going to strap three traitorous Knights to the catapult and fling them over the walls at Mace Tyrells host.

The Lannisters/Tyrells have access to a ton of Knights, nobles, lords, and landed knights alike. I think that the AOR should reflect this.

[aeoleron9]

Hmm sieges. God I hate them.

First problem is spies, but agents probably deserve a separate topic. They definitely should be in, but hopefully much tuned down from vanilla. Second is the siege equipment. I think it's possible to tune down the damage to walls like kaiz said, but I don't think we can differentiate between magical walls like Storm's End and plain walls of small holdfasts. The potential problem being we might not be able to properly siege any castle because of this. Ladders are hopefully an exception, since magical walls can still be climbed...

The third problem is that many aspects of the siege system is hardcoded. For example, I don't think we can change how many turns a castle will hold out under a siege. Auto resolve is another issue, since AIs will have to rely on it to siege each other. In my experience, it gives the besieger a huge advantage since the casualty rates are much lower than one would expect from a bloody siege. So we might see Stannis besiege Storm's End in one turn and take it the next turn by assault, without losing much of his forces(while the defenders were wiped out). Or he just could wait it out by five turns or something. Like I said, I hate sieges.

:I just remembered after reading Kingslayer's post, didn't Joff command three trebuchets aka Three Whores in the Kingslanding siege? Granted they didn't break any walls...

[Gampie]

All too true aeoleron9. The damage of the siege engines and the effectiveness of spies can indeed be reduced. My experiences about Autoresolving a siege battle as the besieger are likewise to yours. You hardly lose men. It's silly. It looks like the defensive bonus is rather small in the autoresolving calculations. I think this is hardcoded. :hmmm:

[kaiz]

The Kingdom's patch improved the auto-resolve a bit, but not by enough.

A better solution to the auto-resolve problem might be to:

a) Disable ballistas/catapults/trebuchets entirely, so the AI can't auto-resolve sieges on the first turn and

b) Drastically increase the time cost for constructing rams/ladders/siege towers. This would make it so even if the AI wants to autoresolve as soon as possible, they still have to wait like 6 turns for the siege equipment to build.

[the_mango55]

I'm glad that's the direction this mod is taking. Brienne's chapters in AFFC really emphasized how crappy it is to be your average levied peasant that comprises 75% of the army.

However, didn't Tywin's army that fought the Starks have like 4000 armored horse or something like that? Perhaps the Lannisters and the Tyrells can afford to retain more knights since they have the richest lands.

Still 4000 knights out of an army size of 30,000+ wouldn't be more than 4-5 units of knights in M2TW scale, and that was considered large number of knights.

[stormbringer951]

My vote is to try to get Real Combat integrated.