PoP - feedback on late game, thoughts on balancing Custom Knighthood Orders

Firstly, let me say PoP is one of the most incredible gaming experiences I've ever had, and everyone involved in its development and support should be very, very proud of themselves!

Let me also express what I think everyone is thinking, which is that Custom Knighthood Orders are game-breakingly powerful in the late game. The conventional wisdom would say the right response is to nerf them. To that I say...

NO!

I think CKOs and their ludicrous level of power is a beautiful, unique thing, and it should be retained more or less as-is. They are balanced in the sense that it takes an equally ludicrous amount of time, effort, money, strategy and prestige to get them there.

But they are unbalanced in two other ways:

1. Their costs (upkeep and prestige multipliers) do not scale with their power
2. The AI has no response to them whatsoever

I will address these below:

Costs

I would recommend updating the unit's level based on its calculated auto-resolve values, whenever these are updated. This would mean the upkeep costs scale based on the unit's power, and it will continue to do so in future if somebody makes changes to auto-resolve calculations or upkeep costs by level. The upkeep cost of units is still important in the late game because you've done such a brilliant job of keeping the financial side challenging right until the end.

I would also have the prestige factor (1.3x by default?) scale between 1.0 and open-ended, also based on calculated auto-resolve power. 600 weapon proficiencies really should carry a cost of at least 2x, maybe 3x, and higher should be higher!

I would also change the way honour reduces the prestige costs of upgrading units. At present, at 350 honour, I am paying 10 and 4 for Knights and Sergeants, respectively, and this is hilariously cheap in the late game. I would consider the following:

1. At the very least, apply the prestige factor AFTER the honour reduction, so that 1.3x means I am still paying 13 and 5 at a minimum, and if we're scaling then really great Knights will have a minimum cost of 20 or 30.
2. I would seriously consider scaling the honour required by raising it to the power of the prestige factor divided by two plus one (or something), so that really powerful knights need a vast amount of honour to bring their costs down, and you never stop wanting more honour.

Obviously these numbers are totally up for debate and experimentation, but at the very least here is a model whereby the various costs of the units scales with their power.

Ludicrously powerful units will be ludicrously expensive, giving them a bit of balance. Fielding an army of hundreds of CKO Knights will be much harder to do, and the player will likely remain cautious about throwing them into meat grinder battles because their recruitment costs also remain significant.

AI Response

The late game, if the player has gone the CKO route, devolves into a series of brutal smackdowns - field battles you can F1-F3 like you're swadian knights, and sieges where the defenders charge down the ladder at you because staying in the fortifications means being sniped to death by the hundred. The only challenges that remain are the elf lords, Eyegrim, and to a lesser extent the dread legion. This is utterly awesome, but it would be cool if the remaining kings and lords gave a bit more a fight rather than just being wet tissue paper.

I would consider the following options; some may be relatively quick/easy to implement, once the player's kingdom controls a third or more of the fiefs on the map:

1. If the player has a custom CKO, the AI will attempt to establish a Knighthood Order Chapter in every walled fief it owns that does not already have one. This will mean the player is more often facing Order knights in sieges and field battles, and more of them.
2. Once the player's CKO reaches a certain level, the AI begins buying upgrades to the Knighthood Orders it has chapters for in its walled fiefs. You could scale these based on the difficulty setting, with the hardest setting meaning lords will try to the match the player's CKO power. By the late game, lots of lords have hundreds of thousands or even a million dinars banked, meaning they can afford upgrades and afford to field the more powerful troops themselves.
3. Beyond a certain CKO level, lift the caps on Order Knights and Sergeants generated for both garrisons and for Lord's warbands. You could try tying this to the calculated prestige factor above, with a multiplier for difficulty, as a starting point for debate/testing.

These changes would provide a good deal more of a challenge from rival kingdoms and lords in the late game, while leveraging the existing content and the rainbow of generated CKO orders the AI Lords establish.

Some lords will be able to afford these changes, while it would bankrupt others, but I think that's realistic. Faced with extinction, a Kingdom should be willing to spend its last dinar in its defence.

Submitted September 20, 2019 at 05:17AM by LudicrousIdea https://ift.tt/2LI3u9D