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Posted 1-15-2024 07:19:27
First of all, props to the developers. We do see the love and effort put into your game and greatly appreciate it. We notice the excitement and animation on the faces of the devs in your dev blogs and it certainly is reflected in your work. With that said, this suggestion is on the topic of pvp balance with a large part to do with NPCs.
NPC WarriorsEveryone loves the idea of NPC warriors in battle. They currently do play a major part, especially in county battles, and they further enhance the scale of the game into the scene of a larger battle. Props to you devs for trying it in the first place and for your first iteration of the mechanic to do so well. There is definitely room for improvement though. I highly recommend looking at how combat AI works for the different units in Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord.
Firstly, the combat AI just needs some expansion upon to make them more relevant in all combat roles. For siege, this could be a way to tell your AI controlling a mangonel what block/location or character to fire upon. Do this and you will really start to see lots of rocks in the air. Melee cavalry AI being able to charge and withdraw from nearby enemies in the direction of their lord as well as then be able to persue enemy cavalry like it already does pretty well, is all that needs. Couching their lance against infantry would be an amazing bonus. AI right now work fine as Archers, the only addition needed for that is to make it so that they do not try to close distance on the enemy as that has led them to fall off of walls and die for me. Horse archers would work great if they retreated to keep a longer distance between them and their enemy near the edge of their effective range. Right now they retreat to late and it's easy to charge them down on horseback even if the warrior is faster. The NPC that has sharpshooter would make a great horse archer if he had the fast riding warrior skill.
All npc warriors would work much smoother and more natural in combat if when they are in follow mode, they will still also attack a nearby enemy within range or the designated target picked by the lord while they are in follow mode. Mount & Blade Bannerlord does this and it works great. One final note on warriors is that they do not follow the lord closely enough when on horseback. If they stay right next to the lord well, then you could charge into an enemy with your warriors right with you or as a horse archer, they will advance and retreat with you responsively enough to make them usable. This is definitely a needed adjustment.
Someone also suggested nerfing the damage, health, and resistance of warriors and I just wanted to add that this is what helps them overcome their shortfalls in not having the skill of a player so I don't think this is a necessary change.
Armor/Weapon Balance
The current balance between weapon & armor teirs make it so that someone with black iron gear is not combat effective against someone in meteoric gear. Lowering the gap between the next tier of gear to something like a 7-12% increase in stats would make previous gear tiers something you can use as a cost effective way of outfitting troops but still provide enough extra stats to where it is worth upgrading for some. I understand some may not agree with this and I understand that. Just a suggestion for consideration.
As for the different weapons in general. A nice feature to make some of the less meta weapons more viable might be to alter certain bonuses given to them. An example being that the Halfted blade is almost never used because while it does more piercing damage, the halberd does more slash damage when swinging with these types of weapons is more utilzed. In this case, you could do something like increase the range of the Halberd but increase the swing speed of the halfted blade.
Archery has proven to be a useful weapon in combat. It's great for apply pressure to the enemy, suppressing siege at close range sometimes, as well as a few other tactical functions. This is a realistic balance. I only would suggest that cost of arrows is slashed or simply increase their output number by about 5x. The the reasource cost for the amount of arrows you expend in a battle is far more than the cost of weapons, armor, and and other equipment a melee soldier goes through during the same battle.
I would also suggest you consider increasing the damage you deal with regular arrows to be about 70-75% of what damage you deal with armor shredder arrows (currently you deal around 50%) because armor shredder arrows are the only practical arrows to use in combat and all the other arrows see almost no use despite the drastic increase in cost of the armor shredder meteoric arrows. I am not completely set on this one though so take this one with a grain of salt.
Horse Stats
Jousting is a good example of how cavalry should perform in my own opinion. They are very effective against lone infantry but are dead if a single horseman charges a group of infantry equipped with polearms. The horses in jousting have around 25k health and no blood oath trait of course. My suggestion would be to decrease the HP cap horses can be bread to have to 40k HP (currently it seems to reach just over 100k) and to nerf the blood oath damage mitigation stat from 70% to 30%. An alternative would be to remove the damage resistance and to exchange it with perhaps something like a horse stun resistance. This might end up being more useful anyways.
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