V0.5.4 Bug (and Balance!) Feedback by Odysseus

[Odysseus]

Huzzah! New patch! The anticipation was killing me. 

Before anything else, let me say that the physical map is lookin' pretty gorgeous.

I want to start with some general observations, because so many little details have been successfully hammered into place recently. First, I have noticed a lot of Essos stepping in against different factions in Westeros because they "fear" their "growing might." Typically, this means the Lannisters and the Tyrells. I can't yet report on any successful landings by forces from Essos, but the implication is that if any faction even came close to uniting Westeros again, they'd never be able to have normal relations with Essos. From one standpoint, this isn't so bad, because it

is a wargame. On the other hand, I for one enjoy the creative elements of the game as well as the destructive ones, and the prospect of never being able to forge peace betwixt the sides of the Narrow Sea is a slight downer. Perhaps it is politically possible, however. I suppose I'll have to conquer it to find out, but this whole notion was bugging all the while last night.

Next, the sovereign relations with the player are broken. Very broken. Most of the gains and losses in relation don't make sense. Joining a faction yields a very tiny gain with that same faction but drives everybody else to either extreme, +1000 or -1000. Your newfound fellow bannermen feel no differently about you for it, either. Other events seem to have strange results. Last night I got a random event I had never seen before, and decided to loot and pillage the Old Warlord's Tomb. Now, I can understand the reputation hit, but it seems to be unrealistic overkill that even the faction I was sworn to took on a -100 "Vengeful" attitude towards me. I plundered some nameless plunderer's own grave and suddenly I'm a fugitive from the Sunset Sea to Volantis. Ouch. At any rate, I suppose this to be not bugs so much as an element that just needs overhaul. Consider this a vote for attention to foreign relations for an upcoming patch. If you like, I will report specific bugs related to this, but I will hold back for the moment.

Finally, and this is as much an open-ended question as it is a comment on balance, because I don't know what the modder's intent is yet (other than that other things needed to be smoothed out before adding more locations), but the dearth of castles and villages to plunder creates a kind of underwhelming element to the warfare after a short while. A lot of the villages currently in-game are castles of varying make and quality in the ASOIAF universe, and a goodly deal of the smallfolk settlement still resides under a fog of ambiguity. We know from the books the names of many settlements, but surely not every one that is implied to exist just by the known populations of other places and the armies the different regions can field. I know that restraint is essential in building balanced gameplay, but I'm wondering what the final design is imagined to look like. Will some of these villages be gradually upgraded and new villages added? Where do such changes fall on the priority list?

At any rate, onto some of the bugs!

Vassal, Fief Issues
[spoiler]

• Beric Dondarrion is a vassal of House Stark, and rides about the North with troops as well as appearing at Hollow Hill. His Hollow Hill incarnation will recognize the player from encounters elsewhere.
• Old Oak should be a fief of House Tyrell / The Reach at the start, instead of a fief of House Lannister / The Westerlands.
• Construction times and costs seem to be low for a Westerosi economy. For example, with 0 Engineering Skill within the party, a Manor costs 4000 Stags and only takes 16 days. Other projects, in general, feel equally cheap.

[/spoiler]

Graphical Issues
[spoiler]

• Vardis Egen of the Westerlands is wearing a helmet which floats in front of his face.
• Every time I hire a Whore for my fort, she's bald!
• Speaking of Baldness, most of the participants of tournaments in both King's Landing and the Dothraki Camps are bald, in every round. Occasionally, someone has their hair for a random round.

[/spoiler]

Quest, Combat Issues
[spoiler]

• After completing a quest to train and give him 7 Northern Hunting Archers, Robb Stark offered a quest to capture a nobleman from "Northern Hunting Archers."
• In the scene for the Ironborn Pirate Landing near the Barrowlands/Stoney Shore in the North, several Ironborn spawn outside the boundaries of the map at one end of the beach, making them impossible to kill by legitimate methods.
• When having a practice fight with the peasants in the "Train the Peasants" village quest, everybody is wielding spears instead of staves.

[/spoiler]

Immersion, Localization Issues
[spoiler]

• The poems taught by the wandering bards are still VERY obviously European in origin. Lo, praise the prowess of the people-kings, indeed. 
• Likewise, the book merchants are selling very obviously European texts.

[/spoiler]

Item Issues
[spoiler]

• Greatswords are dual 1-Hand/2-Handers, which seems only realistic if you're Gregor Clegane...who in turn probably deserves a frickin' huge one-hander that requires a lot of strength.

[/list][/spoiler]

Seafaring Issues
[spoiler]

• Can't dock at Oldtown with your own ship from the adjacent waters.
• Can't dock at Dragonstone with your own ship from adjacent waters; can't even beach it to come ashore.
• Can't dock at Sunspear; really, Plankytown should be nearby with the dock.
• Some Sea Raiders appear to be getting stuck on cliffs

[/list][/spoiler]

A short list of actual bugs, but I was eager to throw up some feedback now in case it's a few days before I'm able to report again. Stay motivated, guys!

UPDATE June 13th: I've added a few more bugs, and given an in-depth analysis of the faction relations issue in a new post below.

As an added note, and perhaps I'm just paranoid or unfortunate, but is there some coded proclivity for the AI to raid the player's village over other AI villages?[/list]

[Produno]

I can have alook a the relations and see how they can be tweaked to offer the best compromise.

Again , i shall check the relations for the player, but it certainly shouldnt be so extreme.  If you could make a note of the times relation changes are a little haywire, i can go through the code and check them one by one to see whats happening. At this time im not sure if this is a bug or just the way Brytenwalda worked.

Most villages will be changed to castles with new villages taking their place. I shall probably revamp this after the next update when ive started to get some new scenes in.  So you can expect this for v0.7.0.

[Odysseus]

I've played a few games now with the intention of looking at how the faction and player relation numbers are working. This is what I have to report:

At the start of the game, as an almost universal rule, factions at peace with one another have a relationship "score" of ten thousand (10000), and factions at war with one another have a relationship of negative ten thousand (-10000). There are plenty of exceptions. The Starks and Greyjoys have a relationship of negative five thousand (-5000), and the Wildlings have only a relationship of one thousand (1000) with everybody in Westeros (except the Night's Watch), and ten thousand with the factions in Essos. The Greyjoys have zero (0) relationship with Tully, Baratheon, and Tyrell, -5000 with Stark (their only war), and ten thousand (10000) with Lannister.

That all seems well and fine, though I'm surprised that the scale is so huge. By some comparison, anyway, Brytenwalda's factions all start at 0 with each other, though from that point on the diplomacy is a scramble. I've seen logical agreements arise in one of my longer WOIAF games, where the Arryns joined the Tullys and Starks in a three-way alliance, and the Greyjoys and Lannisters made a non-aggression pact.

The dissonance arises when the player swears fealty to a particular faction. The result seems to be inheriting the numbers from whatever faction is joined. For example, in my test game joining House Lannister, upon my oath I received a +8 in my score with the Lannister faction, bringing my total relationship with them to 12. With the Starks, Baratheons, Tullys, and Tyrells my relationship after oath was -100 (Vengeful). The numbers recorded in the log actually show adjustments of -10000 (-1000 for the Tyrells), but the player relationship with factions appears bound to a range of -100 to 100. With the Essosi belligerents, Braavos and Lys, the player relationship changed to -40 (Resentful), identical to the relationship those factions had with Lannister. As for every other faction, the new player relationship was 100 (Loyal). This doesn't seem right, and certainly doesn't feel it. In reality, a player's relationship probably shouldn't change with any faction but the one being joined.

My second test game, in which I swore fealty to House Greyjoy, backs all of this. Interestingly, by joining I gained +12 with Greyjoy...not the same gain as with the previous Lannister experiment, but it brought me to the same relationship score with my new liege. As Greyjoy has 0 relationship with Tully and Baratheon, my relationship didn't change with them at all, while I got 10000 points with everybody save the -5000 with the Starks. Even here, I don't think that if faction A and B are at war, that I should lose points with B just for joining A. I should have to take the field to accrue love or hatred. So I gave that a test too. As a vassal of Greyjoy, I went to plunder Bear Island. The villagers rose to challenge my very small party, and as battle's start my Relationship with Stark went "from -100 to -120" and with Maege Mormont "from -15 to -30". I won the battle, then razed the village. At the end of the pillage, my relationship with Stark went "from -100 to -103", and with Lady Maege Mormont "from -30 to -31" and "from -31 to -36". Other than the pointlessness of the losses to the Stark-player relationship, I gotta say, Lady Maege ought to hate me way more for killing all her smallfolk, stealing their stuff, and burning her home down.

Being released from an oath, incidentally, doesn't affect faction-player relations at all.

I leave final discretion up to you, of course, but I will reiterate my recommendation that joining a faction only affect the relationship with the faction being joined. It seems the simplest solution (though maybe not the least labor-intensive; I have only recently begun playing with the code, but I can imagine the potential difficulty).