https://preview.redd.it/o0bygi3c051d1.png?width=1299&format=png&auto=webp&s=f86c1a5f0faee68b7b957aae561b261c134b9ab9 350 vs 800 guys and get 100 kills alone :D submitted by /u/Kindly-Assistance-80 [link] [comments]
I made this post on the steam forums as well. I know it's unlikely but here's to hoping - and buckle up, it's a long ride.
Many of these ideas will tie together between trade and diplomacy, and could even tie into more expansive and useful criminal mechanics (esp. for traders). Please share your ideas as well, especially if they complement or even totally contradict these.
Economic Victory
Selective caravans: Add a new window that shows your caravan destinations, what resources it's trading, and how much it's making from those resources. Here you can alter the stops and choose to turn off resources that are taking up inventory space and not selling very well. This may change over time as the game's economy shifts. The route will remain as currently coded by default.
This way you could choose to play it very safe and only have them run within your empire for smaller + quicker profits as well as added safety. Or, you could choose to have them target and/or avoid certain kingdoms which could pair nicely with my upcoming diplomacy suggestions.
Customized buy/sell screen for each resource with the ability to supply to workshops: I imagine a spreadsheet tab with each individual resource the game offers, listed along with a number of boxes you can check/uncheck, such as:
- Buy (obvious).
- Sell (obvious).
- Supply to workshop (if checked, it will prioritize filling your resources before selling the rest, or only buy enough to supply workshops if sell is left unchecked).
- Supply to stash (with the purpose of delivering food to starving settlements)
- Supply to warehouse (see below).
Gain the ability to turn off buying/selling for individual resources, and to add a stop on the caravan route to your workshop towns for deliveries of the cheapest materials. This way, you could also have caravans deliver food to your fiefs' stashes which currently improves garrison morale and could also be a reprieve for towns on the verge of starving, esp. when you're busy fighting across the map.
If you are very rich and choose trading as your main profession, you may now begin to manipulate the entire game's economy by hoarding resources by not just your own hand, but with caravans as well which would increase your overall buying power/market share more quickly. However, if you read on to diplomacy there will be (and should be) consequences.
Caravans get access to stashes/warehouses: Let's say you have 2 separate caravan routes and link them at a shared point in a settlement you own, or one where you own a workshop or perhaps a new feature: a warehouse. Your caravan from Route A can deliver cheap goods to the warehouse that the caravan on Route B can pick up because it cannot access, or at least not as affordably/safely/quickly.
Caravans provide increasingly accurate trade rumors: Sometimes the trade rumors are just that. As your caravans trade more and more successfully, it would be great to see more accurate pricing as time goes on so that you can sell goods from your own inventory at the best prices. Essentially, if you manage successful caravans you will benefit from their trade lines such as showing you the market average, etc. If your caravan gets captured you will then of course lose this advantage, unless you have more caravans.
Successful caravans now provide small relationship gains with the clans who own settlements that are destinations/stops on your trade routes. It may take awhile, but soon enough they will like you for increasing the prosperity of their towns. This could tie into the point below.
Figuring out the resources that other caravans carry can help you choose which to attack if you choose to play dirty. Players may choose to attack caravans with competing resources to further monopolize specific markets. This will significantly decrease your standing with the owner of the caravans. The more caravans you attack, the harsher the relationship penalties will be with the target clan(s) and faction(s).
The player will need to have a significant income / clan to be able to do this without getting completely stomped out.
As a merchant, choose to supply specific factions in exchange for more money: If you are not tied to a specific faction in this play through, you may still bargain with faction leaders to only supply specific resources to their kingdom. Gain small-medium boosts of positive relations with ruling clan of the faction over time.
This way, you could even still supply velvet to one faction while supplying pottery to another. Perhaps you bet it all on one faction and help their prosperity grow a ♥♥♥♥ ton. This essentially opens the door to a sort of "economic victory."
Assign your own parties to patrol and protect your caravan routes: You may now assign your own parties to secure your routes to (nearly) ensure the riches will keep flowing.
Hire factions to protect your caravans: If you have specifically agreed to supply resources to a faction (or one faction entirely), pay them a weekly % to guard your caravans. This will significantly decrease the chance that bandits and other factions will attack your caravans, increasing the chance they will survive. The faction's armies/parties will still prioritize defending its military and economic assets if they cannot do both.
And finally (for now)...
Monopoly: Once you reach the point of monopolizing a resource, (or perhaps in late-game the entire economy), significantly gain influence and positive relations with factions you supply and significantly lose relations with factions you don't. The more resources you supply/prevent from reaching specific factions, the greater the impact will be on relation gain/loss.
With your choices to aid specific factions will make other factions hate you in the long-run for not making agreements with theirs. Alternatively, you may choose to monopolize the market and provide different factions with different resources to offset this hatred.
Diplomatic Victory
Positive diplomacy between kingdoms would add so much value to this game. In order to secure enough votes, both factions must be in good standing, meaning you will have to do a bit of relation grinding to have a shot at the votes passing. The more enemies the faction leaders have within the target faction, the less likely they are to succeed and the more friends, the more likely.
Trade fiefs with factions: You acquire a fief in the middle of enemy territory. The normal option is to open up the fief tab in the kingdom window and choose to give it away. Why not sell it back to the faction you took it from for loads of money? Or, better yet, trade it for a fief that's in a better location so that both factions benefit?
This would be a great option to see, as it'd be a way to make a lot of gold and/or gain settlements in more favorable positions. Negotiations can work much like they do, where you could offer a fief and some money for a better one, perhaps a couple hundred horses? You get the point.
If the ruling clan of a faction has more enemies than friends within a specific faction, it will be extremely unlikely to accept positive treaties . Especially non-aggression pacts. It may still accept trade agreements, although less so, it's still unlikely. This should not be a % chance that can be abused by save-scumming, but rather like diplomacy currently works where you need to secure votes. (To clarify, I think any faction that has more enemies than friends should be unlikely to vote for positive diplomacy - and it should be up to vote as all other issues. Friends/enemies would simply be another factor along with faction strength, desire to expand or reclaim lost territory, etc.)
All accepted treaties between factions come with boosts in relation to clans within, depending on the severity of the treaty. Ie temporary treaties would only grant 1-5, whereas permanent ones would grant 5-10, perhaps capping at 15 for defensive alliances.
The more friends the ruling clan of a faction has with another, the less likely it is to declare war based on other factors. It should not be impossible, though, and the current factors such as desire to expand, desire to regain lost territories, and overall strength will play a bigger factor than the amount of friends. The idea here is to simply buy the player enough time to gain and spend influence on enough enemies to spark positive relations, which will be easier the earlier you get started. The player may still need to spend more influence to secure the vote if other clans have a lot of enemies within the faction. Starting positive relations should be difficult but attainable with focused efforts.
Spend influence to improve relations between clans within your faction and AI clans: As described. This will be helpful and important for the next few suggestions. I imagine the cost would be about the same as any other kingdom decision, such as declaring war, which is about 100-120 influence per clan, per enemy. (It would take quite awhile to get your AI clans a lot of friends, and by doing war crimes etc. they would lower as they currently do, so it's up to the player to decide if it's worth spending influence on. Would get easier time goes on and you don't have anything to spend influence on).
Non-aggression pacts: (with votes, of course). Two kingdoms agree not to attack each other, and perhaps gives a small relation boost to the clans of that faction (5?). You will incur large penalties (-30?) with all clans in the specified faction and smaller penalties (-15?) with all factions for either ending the treaty within 100 days, or breaking it with hostile actions (including village raids, attacking caravans, etc.). Applied to player and non-player factions.
The longer a non-aggression pact lasts (or any *permanent positive treaty, for that matter), the more likely it is to set in stone. You may just find yourself with one of these an entire play through, although it may take spending a lot of influence initially to help it get there.
Trade agreements: Caravans sent between the factions in agreement get boosts to income. In addition there should be something like an initial -5% tax income to settlement owners (for, say, 30 days) in return for increased prosperity over time. The longer the trade agreement lasts, the greater the boost to prosperity (capped at maybe 5 per fief?)
This way, people who don't care about trading themselves can still feel the benefits from TAs over time. Initially you will suffer a small loss of tax revenue, but over time the boost to prosperity will significantly outweigh the initial loss. The key will be keeping relations positive and hoping that the agreement stays in place.
Trade embargos: Vote within your kingdom to not allow trade with another faction. It can help prevent enemy (and player) factions from snowballing if they expand without having good standing with the rest of the world.
Pay/hire neutral factions to attack others: In conjunction with other agreements like offering land and loads of money, it would be an interesting mechanic in the game. It would of course take a lot to succeed, but it would be a really fun way to spend millions of gold and perhaps a fief or two in the late-game. This would also a fun mechanic if you're playing as a merchant and want to keep factions busy while you're monopolizing the resources out of their economy. Lots of potential here for diversion and strategy. The same, of course, can be done to the player's faction/clan.
Faction agreements impact the willingness of other factions to make agreements. To prevent total steamrolls from powerful alliances forming and crushing everybody, factions (both player and NPC) will be more willing to make agreements based on other factions making agreements. See below.
Temporary non-aggression pact: A bit easier to obtain than the following, a temporary non-aggression pact could offer different options (30 days, 90 days, 6 months 1 year) with increasing likeliness to succeed based on # of friends in target clan and how many wars they are currently in, and whether or not the two share enemies.
Temporary alliance: Two factions may agree to help each other for the duration of 1 war. If, for example, 2-3 factions make an alliance and beat down on one, that one has a very big increase to success chance of a temporary alliance with other factions. Clans will be highly likely to approve of this when they share rivals, or see a world threat forming in a large and powerful alliance, or even if one faction snowballs too greatly (this would help give players who snowball a challenge late game as well, as this already tends to happen but could become more challenging when AI kingdoms work together).
Defensive alliance: Short of a full military alliance, this is an agreement to join a war only if it is initiated by an enemy/attacker. It will be uncommon and require a lot of positive relations, friends, and previous treaty-building to succeed. Having common enemies will also help negotiate defensive alliances.
Military alliance: Tbqh, I don't know if this is even desirable in a game like M&B. The idea is self-explanatory: one step above defensive, military allies will even join wars even when their allies initiate. But I just don't think it's necessary or even desirable in a game like this where war is constantly waged from everybody all the time. You tell me. It's such a hard maybe for me that I'd leave it out and be happy with defensive alliances only.
Crime
Tbh just hire the guy that made Fourberie. That mod is easily one of the best in the game, and by far the best criminal one. I forget if these are in that mod since I haven't played it in awhile, but since TW likely won't actually hire him:
Pay/hire bandit groups to attack caravans: with a % chance that the faction will find out who hired them and declare war on your clan. If you are part of a faction, you will be kicked out and lose standing/relations with all clans in the faction, and maybe even with all factions in the game.
The higher your Roguery, the less likely you are to be linked to the crime. To make roguery/cunning a more useful line, there could be a new perk that allows you to do this without ever being linked to the crime.
Pay bandits to allow waiting in their hideouts: Especially useful if you're a fugitive and get kicked out of your faction. You may need a "safe" place to stay.
Bandit hideouts allow black market selling: After you pay to use bandit hideouts, you can sell goods and gear. Equipment would sell for slightly more than average while goods would sell for significantly more. There is a % chance your criminal rating increases with a faction while buying/selling in the black market in their territory.
Owning an alley allows you to sneak into a town without failure: Maybe that's too OP on its own, and this would be enhanced by a new perk in the Roguery line - but currently I feel like alleys are totally useless and basically a waste of a companion. It was a feature many players were excited about. They need a boost imo.
Every owned alley provides a 10% boost to black market sales. Considering every alley currently requires a companion to manage, I think they need huge boosts to be viable late game. One way to do this is perhaps adding perks that enhance alleys, which this could be if not a standalone feature.
You will lose relations with good-standing merchants if you are a known criminal. Keyword being known. Don't get caught and you're fine, but if you don't play it smart and work your way up there will be consequences.
As your crime rating grows within a faction's territory, goods from merchants cost more and sell for less. If you reach 80+, they will not sell to you at all. The more infamous you get, the more you suffer by the good folk.
Pay bribes for temporary crime immunity in territories. This should cost a lot of money, but the idea is that you can buy time to commit crimes within a certain territory (attacking caravans, raiding villages, etc.).
Bribes have a 75% chance to fail. The success % increases with every point you gain in Roguery. At 100% the cost of bribing officials raises by 100%. Once you are a well-known, powerful criminal, the royals will accept to work with you (I mean, they just accept the thugs in the alley when they have garrisons of 300+ right?) but the costs will be greater. Why destroy you when they can make money themselves?
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Alright... I may add more but for now I'm tired. This is a good game already and expanded campaign mechanics could turn it into an amazing one. Please add your suggestions to the thread as well - battle mechanics/features excluded.
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