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[Paul]

I don't know if I'd call them lazy, but they do tend to let a lot of things slip by.

Heh, when the final release of M&B first came out it was riddled with simple module system bugs that were just a typo or something simple to fix. I reported some of them, others reported lots others, and I posted fixes to several of the major ones using the text files (module system files weren't out yet for the release version). The next patch fixed some of them, but didn't include several of the fixes that I had posted (which even had a little note showing the exact location of the error - which script it was in and even which operation in that script, a super easy fix). It wasn't until the next patch after that that it got fixed, which IIRC was about a month later. That patch also broke savegame compatibility because it added variables in the middle of the variables list, something that I knew would break compatibility (the game stores them in the save game sequentially, so adding one in the middle offsets them all and screws up everything) - you'd think someone developing the game would have caught that.

After I posted a thread about the issue they did release a quick patch moving the new variables to the end of the list though, which fixed compatibility between the patch and the release version - although it made anyone who played their games or started new ones in the previous version incompatible. It was only a few days though, the day after I posted that thread the patch appeared - so they were quick about correcting it.

Those were some fun bugs though. All the variables being offset caused some very funky behavior. The forums were full of all kinds of strange bug reports for that version.

Some things they seem to just ignore though. Like the whole lack of a battle continuation thing, or some of the terrible AI faults and bad level design in some of the sieges.

They apparently still haven't fixed the food morale bug either, with food losing the morale bonus and causing the party has no food message to pop up (along with horrible morale penalties). Granted, it's a pretty rare bug - but I still get messages on the Taleworlds forum with people wanting a Warband version of the fix I posted for regular M&B. I guess one of these days I might get around to doing that, but meh I never feel like digging in the text files anymore, especially not with the module system available. The actual bug is an engine thing, causing all the items to randomly lose the slot information that was set at the game start - but can be fixed in the module by setting it a second time.

[Rakonas]

Definitely agree on such points, the devs for mount and blade are some of the laziest and half-assed devs in existence. It takes a special kind of lazy to leave bugs in when someone directly shows you how to take them out. It's really a surprise that the game is as great as it is considering the devs it has.

[Sordid]

Some things they seem to just ignore though. Like the whole lack of a battle continuation thing, or some of the terrible AI faults and bad level design in some of the sieges.

And the fact that you can't access your party screen when a siege is in progress.
And the fact that you can't access your inventory during a siege battle.
And the fact that a siege doesn't stop neutral parties coming and going (when the whole point of a siege is to stop people coming and going).
And the fact that if you happen to get sieged by a force that you can't beat there's no way to load a prior savegame until you are completely defeated (which can take multiple battles depending on your battle size setting and skills) because you can't leave the city in between the battles and you can't go into the main menu during the battle.
And the fact that YOU CAN'T GO INTO THE MAIN MENU DURING BATTLE. I have no idea which imbecile thought that was a good idea, but they deserve to have their bollocks skewered by a rusty pike.
And the fact that to access the inventory of a companion you have to go through the party screen and the dialog screen.
And the fact that to access the stats screen of a companion you have to go through the party screen and the dialog screen.
And the fact that you can't import and export companions.
And the fact that your exported character only retains stats and money, not renown, honor, or known poems.

These are just off the top of my head. I can keep adding to the list if you'd like.

Definitely agree on such points, the devs for mount and blade are some of the laziest and half-assed devs in existence. It takes a special kind of lazy to leave bugs in when someone directly shows you how to take them out. It's really a surprise that the game is as great as it is considering the devs it has.

Yep. I absolutely love the game to death, I've spent hundreds of hours with it and it's still fun. Which is why these things piss me off so much. If it was a game I didn't like, I'd just go "meh" and move on. But it's so good... and yet every single aspect of it is just a little bit more annoying than it needed to be. The whole thing could've been so much better, if only they had put just a little bit more thought and effort into what they were doing.

[Grakelin]

Most of these are very good points. I play with Floris's Mod Pack which improves the companions so much (you can set them to automatically upgrade their items with loot from battles, if it is better, so you only have to open the equipment screen if you really want to give them something specific. And they will pick up all the useless loot and sell it for you, without you having to play ten minute leapfrog on the inventory screen). It also lets you buy businesses in towns, which makes money-earning a bit easier.

My biggest complaint with M&B has always been just how much you lose all at once. You can be coasting along, having a great time, building a large army, and all of a sudden your faction goes to war unexpectedly, and the enemy is burning your only fief, and you can't do anything to stop them because they outnumber them three to one. Then they ambush you, effectively spelling doom for all your best-trained men, even if you surrender. Now you have to go find your companions and free them from prison (or worse, hunt the taverns for them), rebuild your army from scratch, and be in ever-constant danger from bandits and lords chasing you (even if you are all alone with no money, because lords have literally no honour). In one instance, a Swadian lord stole my horse when he captured me, and then three more grabbed me while I was trying to get back to a town on foot, and stole everything I had except my lance (presumably as a cruel joke at the upstart who had defeated Count Haringoth while defending Iyindah from an 80 man attack).

It wouldn't even be so bad if the Lords didn't have strange advantages the player does not get. Like being able to run away when they are raiding villages and see a larger force coming. Or being able to instantly replenish their troops, fully upgraded, simply by passing by a village or castle (I figured out they were doing exactly this when I followed Count Reland, the Rhodok Marshall, to Jamiche Castle and watched him go from 20 men to 120, with no change to the castle garrison). I successfully pushed Haringoth out of my village, outnumbered by better troops, in a tense and bloody battle. He returned three game days later with another 80 men to kill me and burn my village. I was so upset that I rode straight into the nearest Swadian villages and killed every single one of the peasants there myself (over 100 peasant kills! Bunduk got 13).

What results is this seesaw game where we shoot up, up, up; until it crashes in the blink of an eye forcing you to struggle your way back up. I've found the best way to get along is to sit in a town, ignore the marshall, and let my assets supply me with money until it is time to move out and collect again.

The best skill, for this reason, is 'Trainer', which I give to me companions when convenient.

[SalmonGod]

Just glancing at the recent discussion here, I'm guessing it can be summed up as "Mount & Blade is a good game that desperately needs some polish to be a great game."  That's my take on it, anyway.

So I gave cRPG another shot lastnight to see if it has changed for the better over the last couple months... and it seems that it has.  I'm actually rather pleased, and will be getting back into it.  I think it will be my steady competitive multiplayer thing again since I seem to have quit League of Legends once and for all.  It's still no where near the way I would do things if I were designing it... but it's actually pretty fun now.

[Sordid]

It also lets you buy businesses in towns, which makes money-earning a bit easier.

Actually that's a vanilla Warband feature added in one of the patches. Other than that you've made several very good points that I forgot about in my initial list. The lack of a "loot all" button is definitely a big one, and speaking of unfair advantages for AI lords, how could we have forgotten their 80% escape chance in case of a lost battle? And what chance does that player have in the same situation again? Oh, that's right, 0%. ZERO FUCKING PERCENT. That's just bullshit lazy game design, that is. Bad designer, no twinkie!

Speaking of the "loot all" button, you know what a really intelligent way to handle this would've been? One in which the "loot all" button wouldn't even be needed. I'd love to have several separate inventories: A personal inventory into which you put the stuff that you want to keep. A loot inventory, into which automatically goes all the stuff that you didn't put into your personal inventory at the end of a battle and which gets automatically sold when you enter settlements. And if it's already full, then a script automatically shuffles the items around so that you're carrying the most valuable ones and leaving the cheap ones behind. A rations inventory, which gets automatically replenished when you enter settlements (there's a mod that does this, and boy is it a hassle saver!). Would it really have been that hard to implement something like this, a clearly organized and user-friendly inventory system?

Just glancing at the recent discussion here, I'm guessing it can be summed up as "Mount & Blade is a good game that desperately needs some polish to be a great game."  That's my take on it, anyway.

Yep, that's a nice way to sum it up in one sentence.

[Grakelin]

I didn't realize the businesses were a Warband vanilla feature! I hadn't played between January and May of this year, and started up again with FMP 2.4 a couple weeks ago. I now own a brewery in nine cities, and threw up the grain as my banner, to represent my enterprise.

I spent a while outside of Veluca (after a brief stint as a Rhodok mercenary, which went fairly well) hunting Mountain Bandits. Matheas and Veluca both like me as a result. While this was happening, the Rhodoks and the Nords went to war with Swadia, pincering them and crushing them almost outright. Now, Swadians live only in the far north, stuck between Dhirim and the Khergits (don't know if they have their own city, though they sometimes take Dhirim), after a brief war between the Sarranids/Nords and Rhodoks, the Nords are now the strongest faction, owning all of the old Swadian cities (though not Praven, which they lost much later). They requested I vassal with them right after they took Uxhal, and I accepted (after rejecting the Swadians, poor suckers). I feel it might have been a mistake, since I don't make nearly as much money doing the Oil trade between Suno and Praven (as well as the massive profits I made off Praven Ale, which drops to tiny rates every time the town is attacked, to be sold for 250 profit each with a 14 base cost), and people keep looting me and kicking me around. Sea Raiders are also harder to defeat. Many of my men are Swadians, so they get a morale loss when I fight the deposed Swadian lords. At least all the Nords love me, except for the flood of outsiders who keep defecting to them.

[Akura]

So wait, is there any zombie mods? Or was all the zombie leftover stuff just in Warband?


Now that I think about it, there was some fantasy mod, I forget which exactly, Chronicles of Talera I think, that had zombies/necromancers as one of the factions, who, if I remember correctly, gave considerable liberty to its (living) citizens, just as long as they didn't try to leave.

[enigma74]

Some things they seem to just ignore though. Like the whole lack of a battle continuation thing, or some of the terrible AI faults and bad level design in some of the sieges.

And the fact that you can't access your party screen when a siege is in progress.
And the fact that you can't access your inventory during a siege battle.
And the fact that a siege doesn't stop neutral parties coming and going (when the whole point of a siege is to stop people coming and going).
And the fact that if you happen to get sieged by a force that you can't beat there's no way to load a prior savegame until you are completely defeated (which can take multiple battles depending on your battle size setting and skills) because you can't leave the city in between the battles and you can't go into the main menu during the battle.
And the fact that YOU CAN'T GO INTO THE MAIN MENU DURING BATTLE. I have no idea which imbecile thought that was a good idea, but they deserve to have their bollocks skewered by a rusty pike.
And the fact that to access the inventory of a companion you have to go through the party screen and the dialog screen.
And the fact that to access the stats screen of a companion you have to go through the party screen and the dialog screen.
And the fact that you can't import and export companions.
And the fact that your exported character only retains stats and money, not renown, honor, or known poems.

These are just off the top of my head. I can keep adding to the list if you'd like.

Definitely agree on such points, the devs for mount and blade are some of the laziest and half-assed devs in existence. It takes a special kind of lazy to leave bugs in when someone directly shows you how to take them out. It's really a surprise that the game is as great as it is considering the devs it has.

Yep. I absolutely love the game to death, I've spent hundreds of hours with it and it's still fun. Which is why these things piss me off so much. If it was a game I didn't like, I'd just go "meh" and move on. But it's so good... and yet every single aspect of it is just a little bit more annoying than it needed to be. The whole thing could've been so much better, if only they had put just a little bit more thought and effort into what they were doing.

If Mount and Blade released a new expansion that fixed all this bullshit, I would pay $60 for that expansion.  It is incredibly frustrating to see what could have been a perfect game reduced to 'just pretty good' by all these problems.

[Thump]

Note: I'm not picking this apart, I'm actually interested in how you'd want this to work.

And the fact that you can't access your party screen when a siege is in progress.

To what end? To level up a companion who leveled mid-battle? Your troops don't get any XP until the end of the match anyway.

And the fact that you can't access your inventory during a siege battle.

As in no chest on the ground? That could probably be fixed with a simple mod.

And the fact that a siege doesn't stop neutral parties coming and going (when the whole point of a siege is to stop people coming and going).

Yes... that's annoying... but generally speaking a neutral party would be allowed to pass, since you wouldn't want to cause another war. What would be nice is an option when sieging to *COMPLETELY* siege (NOBODY enters or leaves) or just siege your enemy, allowing neutrals to come and go.

And the fact that if you happen to get sieged by a force that you can't beat there's no way to load a prior savegame until you are completely defeated (which can take multiple battles depending on your battle size setting and skills) because you can't leave the city in between the battles and you can't go into the main menu during the battle.

I think this is mostly an anti-save scumming thing. M&B isn't really built around quicksaves and loads.

And the fact that YOU CAN'T GO INTO THE MAIN MENU DURING BATTLE. I have no idea which imbecile thought that was a good idea, but they deserve to have their bollocks skewered by a rusty pike.

To what end? To save? AFAIK that can't be fixed with mods, as there's no save system in place for a scene. That would be nice, to save during a scene.

And the fact that to access the inventory of a companion you have to go through the party screen and the dialog screen.

Yes.... very annoying... what would be *great* IMO is to have a 'companion inventory' option. You could select which companion from the dropdown box, and not have to back all the way out to equip another champion.

And the fact that to access the stats screen of a companion you have to go through the party screen and the dialog screen.

I think there *is* a mod for that... it's implemented in several released mods, but yeah, this should be built in.

And the fact that you can't import and export companions.

Yep. Agreed.

And the fact that your exported character only retains stats and money, not renown, honor, or known poems.

Well, I think that's partially intentional. If you import your character to a new game, it's only importing him - he hasn't actually *done* anything in this new world to earn renown/honor etc. It would be a nice option though.


Please do add to the list... I have modded M&B (to an extent) for personal use, and MIGHT consider taking on some of these issues as mini mods.

[olemars]

A lot of those are fixed in mods.

I can spot the following that I've seen fixed or improved:

lack of a battle continuation thing
some of the terrible AI faults
bad level design in some of the sieges.
And the fact that you can't access your party screen when a siege is in progress.
And the fact that you can't access your inventory during a siege battle.
And the fact that to access the inventory of a companion you have to go through the party screen and the dialog screen.
And the fact that to access the stats screen of a companion you have to go through the party screen and the dialog screen.
And the fact that you can't import and export companions.

As for savescumming, if you absolutely have to, just alt+F4. It's very efficient.

[dogstile]

I think what he's getting at is that it'd be nice for it to happen, you know, in vanilla.

Anyway, I get what you mean about not being able to quit out during a multi-battle seige, but just ALT-F4

[Lysabild]

What I wish the most for in Warband is crouch, sprint, shield bash and fatigue, to make those two handed weapon and bow spammers less eligible in multiplayer.

[olemars]

I'd like injuries to hurt combat performance. If I apply my poleaxe to someone's triceps, knee or groin it should be harder for them to fight shouldn't it?

[Sordid]

And the fact that you can't access your party screen when a siege is in progress.

To what end? To level up a companion who leveled mid-battle? Your troops don't get any XP until the end of the match anyway.

They do get exp every midnight if you have companions with trainer skill, though. In late game with high-level companions you can train dozens of troops per day, and the inability to access the party screen while a siege tower is being built can mean that you'll enter the battle with 50 or even more militias instead of men-at-arms. And that makes a huge difference.
Plus there's the (in)ability to re-arrange the troop list, thereby affecting the spawn order (since troops at the top of the list spawn first). Personally I've learned to arrange my armies in a sort of semi-efficient universal setup precisely because of this, but I know there are people who like to strategize (ie. do I use archers first to soften up the enemy or do I send the heavies in first to punch through, that kind of thing) and it's a pita for them.

And the fact that you can't access your inventory during a siege battle.

As in no chest on the ground? That could probably be fixed with a simple mod.

Oh sure, there are mods for that. But precisely because the fix is so easy I think it's inexcusable that it was completely ignored by the developers.

And the fact that a siege doesn't stop neutral parties coming and going (when the whole point of a siege is to stop people coming and going).

Yes... that's annoying... but generally speaking a neutral party would be allowed to pass, since you wouldn't want to cause another war. What would be nice is an option when sieging to *COMPLETELY* siege (NOBODY enters or leaves) or just siege your enemy, allowing neutrals to come and go.

Well the problem as I understand it is that caravans coming and going actually replenish a town's food supply, so you can never starve a town out unless you're at war with literally everyone. I don't think sieging a town would cause wars, merely denying a caravan access is hardly a cause for war.

And the fact that if you happen to get sieged by a force that you can't beat there's no way to load a prior savegame until you are completely defeated (which can take multiple battles depending on your battle size setting and skills) because you can't leave the city in between the battles and you can't go into the main menu during the battle.

I think this is mostly an anti-save scumming thing. M&B isn't really built around quicksaves and loads.

If I didn't want to savescum, I'd have chosen realistic mode at the start. Even accepting that premise, that's still no excuse for the lack of a Surrender button (which you do get in regular field battles).

And the fact that YOU CAN'T GO INTO THE MAIN MENU DURING BATTLE. I have no idea which imbecile thought that was a good idea, but they deserve to have their bollocks skewered by a rusty pike.

To what end? To save? AFAIK that can't be fixed with mods, as there's no save system in place for a scene. That would be nice, to save during a scene.

No, to load when the battle doesn't go as planned without having to waste time fleeing it or getting knocked out.

And the fact that to access the inventory of a companion you have to go through the party screen and the dialog screen.

Yes.... very annoying... what would be *great* IMO is to have a 'companion inventory' option. You could select which companion from the dropdown box, and not have to back all the way out to equip another champion.

Even better way, simple Previous and Next buttons on the inventory screen that switch which character you're equipping.

And the fact that to access the stats screen of a companion you have to go through the party screen and the dialog screen.

I think there *is* a mod for that... it's implemented in several released mods, but yeah, this should be built in.

Well technically you can do that in edit mode, which does exactly what I suggested for the previous point: It gives you Previous and Next buttons that let you swap between characters. The problem with it is that in edit mode you can swap between all characters that exist in the world, not just yourself and your companions.

And the fact that your exported character only retains stats and money, not renown, honor, or known poems.

Well, I think that's partially intentional. If you import your character to a new game, it's only importing him - he hasn't actually *done* anything in this new world to earn renown/honor etc. It would be a nice option though.

He hasn't actually done anything to earn the experience or the money either. That's the whole point of the import. I seriously doubt it's intentional. The export feature predates the implementation of honor, renown, and poems, so my guess is the devs simply couldn't be bothered to update it to include these as well.

As for savescumming, if you absolutely have to, just alt+F4. It's very efficient.

I'd love to do that if only M&B didn't take so bloody long to load.
Also, if you'd kindly point me to the mods that fix the companion inventory and stat screen access thing, I'd be much obliged.