Gameplay issues in Blue Lotus

Greetings, all. Let me first of all say that BL is a true modding accomplishment, and enormously fun to play. I've been having a blast in the last few days, except for some balancing issues that I feel could use a second look. There are two major issues, which are in some respects related:

1. Rampant population growth, with resulting squalor and rebellion problems.

2. Not enough trade income.

I've only played as one of the Chinese factions, so it is possible that the very high growth rate is isolated to them. However, I've had cities that had over 34.000 citizens, and even with a full stack, were totally impossible to keep happiness over 60%.

The lack of trade income was compounded by having to maintain full stacks in each of my cities (even if they were only peasants), which meant that I simply had no money to maintain any field armies, or to build happiness buildings (which give a health bonus, further compounding the population growth problem).

I've noticed that a lot of the coastal cities only have one trade route, despite having a dockyard. They might be too far apart or have nothing to trade. With 11 of 13 provinces having dockyards, owning the sea-trade wonder, and all the cities over 20,000 people, I should be making cash like a Harlem pimp, but I'm barely breaking even. Obviously, I'm falling behind everyone else technologically.

Any suggestions?

The two I noticed were the lack of Javelinmen, making the Elephants overpowered and the pirates.

I found flaming arrows to be efficient in making elephants go amok. Just two volleys often does it for elephant archers, and four for those big white ones (royal, or such). Doesn't kill them, but I just move everyone way back til they run off the map.

Not a lot of use to someone like me who ambushes them; great in field battles, not so great in ambushes

I'll take this all in to account tough I don't think we'll be adding units soon. But we'll see. Tough I was already thinking about improving naval trade. Tough I don't want to do this to much as that would make factions like the mongols or demons have a big disadvantage.

The Mongols have a veritable horde of HAs at their disposal. As soon as they can conquer demon (Fozuo?) rebel towns and not get CTDs, I think they could easily grab China for an early trade start.

Or alternatively, if you reduced Mongol unit upkeep (their major beginning problem), then that would be a great way of keeping them balanced. IMHO, the Demons could do with a disadvantage... those Wang Liang... so good...

Mongol unit upkeep should be very small. Mongol horse warriors were expected to fend for themselves during campaigns. No food or fodder was provided to them whatsoever. That's one reason they were so destructive. Also, any city that did not surrender was entirely put to the sword and burned to the ground. Maybe Mongols should only have an "exterminate population" option available, no capture or slave-mongering. Or, if that's not actually possible, just a massive trade penalty. In general, they should be a low-income, low-upkeep type of faction.

Also, are shaolin monks supposed to have 30 defence, including something like 20 armor? The export_descr_unit file states leather armor, which should give you about 4 armour. I don't think I've seen even elite units with an armor rating that high. Their defence skill is only 9, though, which is the same as elite imperial guards. I think that should be a bit higher, like 11, to account to their insane close combat prowess.
This only applies to the monk island shaolin monks, not the mercs.

As to the naval trade issue, without more trade, the Chinese factions are completely handicapped in the second half of gameplay. To get the same balance of income/spending as in vanilla Rome, I had to cut unit costs almost in half.

I may just be halucificating, but it seems like Khannate Light Spearmen positivly chew through anything that gets in their way. I put a single KLS against one Zombie Ashigaru in my demon campaign (managed to lure it off from a battle, which I lost), and the KLS chewed it up and came back to the battle with enough men to route my general.
Those same units are quite capable of mowing down various rebels and Indian troops, I even managed to route an entire Indian army through the clever use of a single Zombie Ashigaru and ten Beast Riders.

Also, although I realize it may be a balance issues, wouldnt undead units have insanely high moral? I mean...what have they got to lose? I dont think ANY story has reports of zombies fleeing from the field of battle in panic :P
Im not sure about Basket Ronin, but wouldnt they have fairly high moral as well, since they have 'nothing to lose'?

As another suggestion, perhaps for Demons it would be possible to impliment a system where you lose control of your units if your general is killed, representing the fact that a large portion of a Demon army consists of units that dont seem to have free will. And it would balance the Demons against other factions by giving them a sort of 'One Ring' type weakness.

Ayyyynd lastly, I love the AI on those rebel units, Im not sure if youve changed it (I never bothered to update RTW before this), but its refreshing to see rebels actually attacking things on occasion. No more wandering generals setting up watchtowers for me :P

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Originally Posted by Sheogorath

I may just be halucificating, but it seems like Khannate Light Spearmen positivly chew through anything that gets in their way. I put a single KLS against one Zombie Ashigaru in my demon campaign (managed to lure it off from a battle, which I lost), and the KLS chewed it up and came back to the battle with enough men to route my general.

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KLS have a ridiculously high armour value. I hope this is adressed in the next patch.

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As another suggestion, perhaps for Demons it would be possible to impliment a system where you lose control of your units if your general is killed, representing the fact that a large portion of a Demon army consists of units that dont seem to have free will. And it would balance the Demons against other factions by giving them a sort of 'One Ring' type weakness.

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Not possible, I am afraid.

Hah, didnt think the bastards were dying fast enough. Next time I shall bring catapults ;)

Here's another thing that's a bit odd: the some of the south-eastern cities in China don't have roads connecting them. Specifically, Zhuanshi, Guanghi and Tian Hai. Tian Hai is almost completely isolated with mountains, and there are absolutely no roads in the province, except for the short one leading to the port. Zhuanshi and Guanghi have no connections to each other (or Tian Hai), meaning moving troops between these close neighbours takes 4 turns. Considering that south-east China is the most densely populated part of Asia, roads should be plentiful.

I already touched on this in my last post, but I think I should mention it...

Wouldnt it make sense for the various undead units (Zombie Ashigaru, Undead Samurai and maybe Basket Ronin) to have insanely high moral? Considering that the undead units have nothing to lose, or at least, dont have a mind to care if they lose anything, why would they route?

Well okay sorry foàr the late respons but I've been kinda away the last few days.

Most monk units for the monk faction are indeed overpowered. They'll have the smae stats st the normal ones with some small bonuses. Tough the monk masters will be kept overpowered. As they are kind of supposed the be battlewinning forces.

About the so high zombie units well I don't think that's a good idea for gameplay issues. They might be dead, but they have a "zombie live" they might not one to lose. Tough I'll have a look at them to see if we can give them perhaps some more depth.

The ideas, about the mongols. Well I like them. So I guess I'll have a look into our Mongols.

About unit balancing, I know we've heard about. But please keep posting about them. Tough or major concern atm are the bugs. When they're fixed we'll have a look at all the stats.

Anyway, please post all the gameplay issues/balancing issues tough they might not be in the first patch (which will mainly resolve most (hopefully all) bugs) I will take them in consideration for the (patch/new version) after it.

I don't suppose you could quickly mod in a map with the road connecting the Chinese cities?

I've never mapped before... ~;p

We'll look at it. But first thing first.

I agree with Opeth666 about the whole economics system. I played about 40 years as the Akagi Clan and I found the economics to be very difficult, if not impossible. Population grows way too fast, and its almost impossible to keep the towns happy for long. After restarting several times to see if I could find a workable progression, I started to resort to cheating (add_money 20000) so I could have enough money to build public order buildings and try to develop my economy. Even when I had the cities quite built up, I was in a hole almost every turn. This made it impossible to field more than two full stacks at a time.

Just a few suggestions:

1) Reduce unit upkeep by half. With the existing economics system, this should make it feasible to field more than a few armies without going bankrupt every turn.

2) Add Academies to the building tree (please!). If we can develop the management capabilities and traits of the family governors, it might help offset some of the squalor problems that come with such rapid city growth.

3) Add more public order buildings...Perhaps some more shrines and temples, or some symbolic buildings (such as "Introduction of Confucian Philosophy", "Cultural Expansion of Confucian Philosophy", etc) to help keep the masses under control. Another possibility is increasing the degree of happiness provided by the current buildings.

On a different note, how about making the battlefield ninja available as a recruitable unit with the legendary ninja dojo building? The invisible trait of the battlefield ninja does come in handy (and they look cool as hell), but their numbers are so few that their inolvement rarely has much of an impact. At least if they could be recruited, one could load up several units to set up a good trap for an aggressing force.

With all that said, GREAT JOB! This mod is a lot of fun and the tremendous work you put into it is very evident!

1) I'm not going to halve the recruitment costs, they might get a bit more tweaked later but the economy will be increased.

2) we'll see, lower priority. But there are no BL ancillaries/traits yet anyway. (we're making the mtough)

3)There has been much debating if ninjas should be included or not. I always prefered them more as assasins and not battlefield troops. Others really wanted them in their armies. Hoggy has choson to make them Mercenaries to keep them rare and keep both parties somewhat happy. I find this to be a rather good descision. But I'm willing to change that if most people want it. Maybe I'll do a 'lil poll?

For normal soldiers, the graphic armor doesn't seem to correlate well with armor satistics.

There's quite a bit of unit balancing to be done still. Part of that is making sure armor ratings are correct. No worries, we'll have it all sorted out by the next release.

Or the release after it, depens how things will flow. But normally it should already been changed by he first release, though it will probably not be a final version yet.

For squalor, I reckon the best solution would be a building tree which reduces pop. growth by 1%, 2%, 3%.

So has anyone found out what is causing CTDs when seiging Demon cities? I can't find what is causing it.

We haven't found the exact problem either but we have a solution but it's kinda time consuming. It's a needle in a haystack.

I had to mod the governor's buildings and the market to stop giving health bonuses to keep my cities from revolting. I think I also reduced the health bonus of the happiness buildings and increased their happiness bonus (by 5% each, I think). This worked well to stabilize population levels around 30,000 in most cities. Otherwise, even full stacks of peasants wouldn't keep some of the Chinese cities happy.

yeah, but we'll change bonuses and stuff. Maybe we'll do it your way opeth666. Could you post the exact change at the group? Then we can tweak that later?

I'd just add buildings which reduce population growth.

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Originally Posted by Opeth666

Also, are shaolin monks supposed to have 30 defence, including something like 20 armor? The export_descr_unit file states leather armor, which should give you about 4 armour. I don't think I've seen even elite units with an armor rating that high. Their defence skill is only 9, though, which is the same as elite imperial guards. I think that should be a bit higher, like 11, to account to their insane close combat prowess.
This only applies to the monk island shaolin monks, not the mercs.

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I think youre right when you say they shuld have higher defence skill.
As for the insanely high armor value... mmm, I think it must be some magical protection... dont you think? ~;)

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Originally Posted by Sheogorath

Also, although I realize it may be a balance issues, wouldnt undead units have insanely high moral? I mean...what have they got to lose? I dont think ANY story has reports of zombies fleeing from the field of battle in panic :P

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You do have a point there... ~:)

[QUOTE=Im not sure about Basket Ronin, but wouldnt they have fairly high moral as well, since they have 'nothing to lose'?[/QUOTE]

Basket Ronins are quite demoralzaed beacuse of ebing ronins... they feel its a big dishonour not be a samurai anymore... but if they have not commited harakiri obviouslly they have a courage problem and prefer the shame... which is why they cover their faces... ~:)

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As another suggestion, perhaps for Demons it would be possible to impliment a system where you lose control of your units if your general is killed, representing the fact that a large portion of a Demon army consists of units that dont seem to have free will. And it would balance the Demons against other factions by giving them a sort of 'One Ring' type weakness.

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I like the idea but I doubt it can be implemented... but then we can say that the demon army, since it hasnt got free will, will keep on fighting cause it didnt receive an order to stop... they only stop magically when the leader dies i the movies... to provide for an happy ending ~;)

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Originally Posted by ikon

I like the idea but I doubt it can be implemented... but then we can say that the demon army, since it hasnt got free will, will keep on fighting cause it didnt receive an order to stop... they only stop magically when the leader dies i the movies... to provide for an happy ending ~;)

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Not really possible, indeed.