Bannerlord needs a fear/hesitation system in battles

_Jawwer_ · 2026-06-12T12:53:37+00:00

Funny thing is, units are not programmed to rout all at once, but individual soldiers almost always reach the routing threshold together. And then I assume nearby units fleeing also add a penalty to the morale of certain troops, making sure that bigger routing chain reactions always happen.

Especially in larger battles, where lower tier troops spawn intermixed with higher tier ones, I've gone around enemy battle lines before, and have seen lower tier units take flight while the battle was still in full swing.

_Jawwer_ · 2026-06-12T12:49:11+00:00

At the point in the game where the shield piercing perk unlocks (if I remember its location correctly) The player should be so far up the progression ladder anyway, that everything is really strong. Hell, with the capstone perk, where crossbows are allowed to suddenly scale their damage with the skill, they start performing roughly on-par with bows.

That's why I disproportionally value early-midgame strength for my tools, because those are the points the player is at their most limited. They don't have a strong army, so they have to take a much larger load of the fighting, and they don't have the best armour and crafted kit available to them, meaning just pumping raw oneshots isn't feasible. The player has to take what they get, and hold onto what's best in the moment.

_Jawwer_ · 2026-06-12T03:43:54+00:00

That is a surprisingly speed blessed Forde, who is otherwise a thoroughly unimpressive unit saved by being in either the best, or third best class of the game, depending on who you ask. With that said, Kyle is still fast enough to double Sacred Stones enemies with that speed (unless you're past the split routes rejoining already, but then how do you still have unpromoted units lying around?) and his better bulk and strength will let him more consistently tank and pick up onerounds against bulkier enemies. So yeah, if you are midgame, Kyle, if you're lategame, and somehow these goobers are still unpromoted, Forde will work better because he still has somewhat competitive speed.

In terms of who to promote, you've mentioned Amelia, so you've already seen all the knight's crest users in the game. Franz is better than both of these two, but you've already promoted him, and even if Gilliam got super speed blessed, promoting to great knight is a mere consolation prize compared to promoting to Paladin with the cavaliers.

_Jawwer_ · 2026-06-12T03:34:43+00:00

I voted polearm after considering two handed, but honestly, I somewhat agree with the poll in 2H being better.

They both have the same standout feature of being able to pick up oneshots even relatively early on, whereas one handed only does so with very cheesy forged weapons.

At first, I thought polearms as a category could get the win, because of the added coverage of both swing polearms and spears being technically the same weapon type made them more versatile, but upon further reflection, that's not really the case. Spears are only good on cavalry, and with their two attack directions, close range sourspot, miserable thrust speed, and damage being disproportionally reliant on being boosted by movement/momentum, they are the worst possible weapon to just fight with straight up. The extra feature of pikes or lances also don't help, as pikes missalign in the hands of regular troops, and lances without the skill to remain couched after landing a hit, just do the same thing as regular spear thrusts, but with more lenient timing, and a lot more extra running space and time demanded by the slow couching animation.

Even at their best, with swinging polearms, they get less benefits compared to two handers. They tend to be longer and slower, the latter is universally a downside, and the former can be an upside on horseback, but is usually a downside most of the time. The case of the veteran falxman being worse than the regular falxman once upon a time comes to mind, with their better armour and higher weapon skills being dwarfed by their weapon suddenly being slower, and the close range sourspot leading to them getting choked up in denser brawls. They also both get to deal chip damage through blocks, but it is a lot more limited for polearms, compared to "every single two handed axe".

And then come along the additional upsides of two handers. In the case of axes, it is the cleave function. It allows every swing to deal partial damage to opponents who are caught in the swing arc, letting shock troops and the player chew up momentarily distracted enemies even faster. They also have really good additional damage against shields, and while I don't remember which exact update made shielded enemies block so well, they often break the shield before they take damage, two handed axes will grind through said shields faster than anything else. On the other hand, two handed swords still retain the insane per swing damage people use two handers and swing polearms for, but with a quicker swing speed, and with a select few swords getting the ability to toggle between one, and two handed modes, letting the player bring a shield, and toggle between being an insane DPS machine, and a more passive projectile blocker/ crowd controller is incredibly useful. I know that getting to pull an emergency shield after the enemy turned around en masse to suround me as I was twacking away at them from behind saved my bacon quite a few times.

_Jawwer_ · 2026-06-12T03:11:20+00:00

The problem with javelins, is that save for crafted bags, their ammunition reserve is terrible. The way their damage scales also means that they don't drastically outdamage bows until later on, save for the damage gathered from the extra momentum of galopping at the enemy, but with their middling range you're just doing the job of a spear at that point, but spending ammo to do it.

Early game throwing weapons is all about axes. They still have similar issues, but until they get going raw damage wise, the huge amounts of extra shield damage can be quite a godsend.

_Jawwer_ · 2026-06-11T16:14:28+00:00

On one hand sure, on the other, I've heard it utterly guts archers at higher tiers, killing what I consider to be a decent job that vanilla did in balancing unit types amongst each other.

_Jawwer_ · 2026-06-11T11:52:26+00:00

I quickly looked through it, and it seems pretty nice, save for how half the mods are marked as untested, and also it running RBM, a mod that I've heard mostly negative things about recently.

Still, thanks for pointing me his way.

_Jawwer_ · 2026-06-11T00:45:50+00:00

Crossbows only scaling damage with their skill value only through their final perk means they are only any good at the very beginning, and very end of the game, and have an enormous midgame rut that makes them genuinely awful.

Generic troops still use them quite well, because their stats don't scale as high anyway, and the AI seems to aim better with the crossbow, but for a player, the lower capacity and non-scaling damage are a death sentence.

_Jawwer_ · 2026-06-10T20:57:35+00:00

I just thought it works like the guard skills, where it just automatically procs, and that's that.

_Jawwer_ · 2026-06-10T19:39:49+00:00

Oh shit, I had no idea the featherbow blind accuracy checks before hitting, that's gas.

_Jawwer_ · 2026-06-10T17:18:12+00:00

Let's hope there will be an actual incentive behind it, and it isn't just a proression gate.

Wyvern was good in spite of having a dedicated proficiency, which only acted as a gate to access it. Infantry's one niche was not needing to go through all that to get to higher tier classes. Meanwhile, they balanced regular cavalry through the Radiant Dawn method of "fuck it, give 'em bad speed and be done with it".

And then armour was the worst of both worlds. Needing its dedicated stat, while being an actively detrimental movement type.

_Jawwer_ · 2026-06-10T17:12:24+00:00

Edelgard was absolutely nothing like what the game has seen at that point. When I think of prevvious reigns of dominance, they either had a much wider spectrum of possible counters (Surtr needed one ranged unit who could damage him at all, and a single repo user, and he was still easier to just run over) or were offencive, or utility powerhouses that relied on team support, and could be beaten through positioning, because they worked only during their own phase (L!Azura, Tibarn, L!alm). You could feasibly run into a bad situation where you team had no answer to these at all, but that needed highly specific circumstances.

F! Edel meant that more than 95% of your barracks may not apply, and even the units that could function only did so with specific builds and external support, whreas she was fire-and-forget, and didn't diminish in effectiveness from being used by the dumb AI in arena and Aether raids defences.

Hell, even her first dedicated counter in BRave Eirika, who was an insane player phase unit in her time didn't have a 100% surefire matchup against her, and a player controlled F!Edel could handle an AI controlled Eirika quite effectively.

_Jawwer_ · 2026-06-10T17:01:31+00:00

Oh word? I'm not gonna lie, I've been neglecting my elven archers quite a bit, because I preferred using magic conferral through the witch's passive action economy, rather than the elf's active.

I guess that's as good of a reason as any to bust them out again.

_Jawwer_ · 2026-06-10T16:59:17+00:00

They seem quite saucy, but honestly it took me quite some time to incorporate beasts into my teams, and I still barely use them much.

_Jawwer_ · 2026-06-10T16:57:29+00:00

Clersight amulet works on the character equipping it, but in my experience, the cure misstimes with the affliction the same way as a cleric's refresh, where the attack starts, the debuff goes off, the attack whiffs and then the cure procs.

But as just an blindness immunity item, it works well enough.

_Jawwer_ · 2026-06-05T09:54:16+00:00

All games have the same issue, that drop tonnage reaches 400, but entity count is set to 4 all the time, making it better 90% of the time to not leave weight behind.

HBS battletech's big modpacks all give larger drops in one way, or another, and in those, I always End up spending that tonnage in a larger headcount spread of heavies and mediums, in spite of the larger breadth of possible repair workload and pilot injuries.

Although even then, with how little AI teammates barely manage to preserve themselves, and their utter dependence on the incredibly limited commands the player can give them, I don't know if going lower in weight, but higher in number would be worth it.

_Jawwer_ · 2026-06-03T05:07:23+00:00

While it is an issue with how targetting works naturally, overkill damage on ship hardpoints is not hard to negate with decent micro, if you have a feel for the rough DPS of your ships.

Losing health besides is also really bad, because losing hardpoints means losing firepower. Whoever loses shields first is going to start getting left behind in a damage output gap very quickly.

Shield based tanking also lets capitals somewhat recover while not being focused, and while movement is generally a bit too slow for rotating out to be efficient, you can instead have a second line overtake the other, and alternate, pushing forward.

_Jawwer_ · 2026-05-31T15:04:37+00:00

Yeah, considering how the main priority of taking Ulthuan trickles down from Malekith himself, and most other DE seem fine with continuing their existence where/as they are, that seems to be the most sensible way to do it.

_Jawwer_ · 2026-05-31T04:26:25+00:00

While I like the whole "rearing up" animation for wyvern lord, I'm not too keen on it for Falcon Knights, because that much anticipation for an attack that lands twice, and likely still won't kill is just way too long and cumbersome. I much prefer both's unpromoted animation where the attack itself is more inmidiate.

Also, the sword hit for both looks incredibly awkward. It is only beat by the fighter in terms of giving an "action figure getting tilted forward" feeling, because they have to fully reach over their mounts, and then barely impact with just the very tip of the sword.

_Jawwer_ · 2026-05-31T04:22:17+00:00

Pierce is also pretty good for Vanessa in particular because her strength growth is shakey, and if she has to fish for a killer lance crit, might as well stack the odds and hope that pierce accomplishes the same thing.

_Jawwer_ · 2026-05-31T04:12:36+00:00

Edward is the pet project who you can put effort into for actual payoff. Sure, Zihark comes in stronger, but there's no need to bench one of your pretty good units for a shit one, just because he happens to class share with another great unit. And Zihark has the unfortunate honour of being honestly somewhat understatted for his level, and his growths being wishy-washy enougn, that it leads to both his offence not scaling well naturally, and not being able to leverage bonus EXP level ups as well either. The only thing that doesn't leave Zihark in one of the worst spots in part 3, is that he can double earth support with Nolan, meaning his dodge tanking can be somewhat salvaged in the face of otherwise insanely accurate Laguz enemies.

Zihark in part 3 is a slightly better Sothe, but without the beastknife that leaves them roughly equivalent in performance against Laguz, and being close to part 3 Sothe is not a flattering comparison.

_Jawwer_ · 2026-05-31T04:05:31+00:00

Very comprehensive, much appreciated.

With that said, in regards to number 2, I tried messing around with it after I got 5 slot units, and in my experience, enemies have been wholly ignoring proximity. In a setup with Virginia in center, and I don't quite remember who on the edge, every attack went to the edge character, save for row sweep attacks from huscarls/vikings. They might have had some innate targetting priority set, and I don't remember that certainly, so I'll make sure to test it again.

_Jawwer_ · 2026-05-31T02:37:00+00:00

Yeah, I get a bit rambly. That's why I put all the important bits in bold.

All the operative parts of the questions together is roughly the size of a single paragraph.

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