A few irritations with Horse Lords

[Aries666]

I just got Horse Lords and I am having a good game as the Khagan of Uyghur, however, a couple of things don't seem quite right to me.

First, the overthrow Khagan faction will fire at 55% of liege power, what this means is that one unhappy reasonably powerful Khan will attack you and obviously lose allowing you to lock him up for life rendering that clan powerless.

The button for special settlement actions needs to be split so that you can cycle through pillage and settle separately, the button is useless when you have just conquered a kingdom and are forced to cycle through all the settle options.

Pillaging doesn't work very well, it takes way too long to raise a settlement completely and the revolts for doing so are painfully weak. Instead it should either be fast (2-3 burnings per settlement) but generate massive revolts or slow (10-20 burnings) but generate no revolts, less money, prestige + tech and reduce your population. At the minute you need only leave 1500 troops on the province and mindlessly keep and eye on and cycle through the settlement options button.

After your first/second generation there is no reason to make anyone a tributary, you make more gold and prestige in the short term by pillaging and conquest is best long term for increasing your population and therefore your horde strength.

There is no point in having vassals because you need to pillage for grazing land to increase your population and you need to revoke titles in order to do this making all other vassals more and more unhappy, the result being you can't keep many vassals as they will rebel. This is probably an intended design choice though and I only have a problem with it because pillaging doesn't work very well.

What do other people think am I being unfair?

 

[Djaevlenselv]

The button for special settlement actions needs to be split so that you can cycle through pillage and settle separately, the button is useless when you have just conquered a kingdom and are forced to cycle through all the settle options.

Agree 100% with all of this.

There is no point in having vassals because you need to pillage for grazing land to increase your population and you need to revoke titles in order to do this making all other vassals more and more unhappy, the result being you can't keep many vassals as they will rebel. This is probably an intended design choice though and I only have a problem with it because pillaging doesn't work very well.

Well, you need to have Horde vassals or you'll get constant minor clan uprisings, but I'm guessing you meant non-Horde vassals in which case I agree with you, they're not very useful and probably by design. I'm not quite sure I agree about pillaging being bad the way it works though.

Your first alternate suggestion of quick pillaging with massive revolts, looks too risky to me as it seems like it would be far too easy to deal with for a player and easily lead to Hordes being OP again.
Your second suggestion being 'have it work basically like now, but trade revolts for less benefits and a population hit' sounds better, but I still have some problems with it. I don't really think population hit makes a lot of sense, seeing how the people of the holding are not supposed to be your Horde population; rather clearing away the land is to allow your population more space. As for the 'less benefits' part, pillaging seems to me the primary means to get money and tech as a Horde, and trading a big portion of that for no revolts doesn't really sound appealing to me. Small constant revolts might be tedious, but I think it makes sense that that's just what you get for wanting to expand into settled land. Having to constantly park 1500 men on your current pillaging spot means you need to devote part of your army to manage revolts if you don't want them to catch you unaware at a bad time, which appropriately hamstrings your ability to war and raid elsewhere.

If there's one thing that bothers me about Hordes it's the sieging the capital gives 99-100% warscore thing. It just doesn't make any sense that a Horde with a fully combat ready army should consider themselves beaten the second some random asshole rides into their camp and kills the guards, when the specific point of Hordes is that they aren't really tied to settled holdings.

 

[Thrake]

After your first/second generation there is no reason to make anyone a tributary, you make more gold and prestige in the short term by pillaging and conquest is best long term for increasing your population and therefore your horde strength.

Tributaries give you research point. And hordes barely get any point. So, having tributaries is the only way not to be a terrible backwater.

 

[Mudcrab]

Did you additionally purchase conclave in addition to Horse Lords? If so, do you think conclave mechanics has had a part to play in your play-through?

 

[Mudcrab]

Tributaries give you research point. And hordes barely get any point. So, having tributaries is the only way not to be a terrible backwater.

Terrible backwater? Eh? This is no Cornwall, this is where you'll rake in thousands of coins regularly and up yours, Amalfi and Venezia (similarly without a trade fleet between them). : /

Khiva (Samarqand and Fergana) are your personal mints of choice. And with that income, the Horse Lords experience becomes trivially easy in that part of the world, with the usual care and common sense in the repertoire.

 

[Aries666]

Agree 100% with all of this.


Well, you need to have Horde vassals or you'll get constant minor clan uprisings, but I'm guessing you meant non-Horde vassals in which case I agree with you, they're not very useful and probably by design. I'm not quite sure I agree about pillaging being bad the way it works though.

Your first alternate suggestion of quick pillaging with massive revolts, looks too risky to me as it seems like it would be far too easy to deal with for a player and easily lead to Hordes being OP again.
Your second suggestion being 'have it work basically like now, but trade revolts for less benefits and a population hit' sounds better, but I still have some problems with it. I don't really think population hit makes a lot of sense, seeing how the people of the holding are not supposed to be your Horde population; rather clearing away the land is to allow your population more space. As for the 'less benefits' part, pillaging seems to me the primary means to get money and tech as a Horde, and trading a big portion of that for no revolts doesn't really sound appealing to me. Small constant revolts might be tedious, but I think it makes sense that that's just what you get for wanting to expand into settled land. Having to constantly park 1500 men on your current pillaging spot means you need to devote part of your army to manage revolts if you don't want them to catch you unaware at a bad time, which appropriately hamstrings your ability to war and raid elsewhere.

If there's one thing that bothers me about Hordes it's the sieging the capital gives 99-100% warscore thing. It just doesn't make any sense that a Horde with a fully combat ready army should consider themselves beaten the second some random asshole rides into their camp and kills the guards, when the specific point of Hordes is that they aren't really tied to settled holdings.

I forgot about the WS issue and yes agree it's a massive problem it makes putting down horde revolts trivial. I understand were you are coming from on pillaging the current set up just needs tweaking away from highly repetitive 500 man revolts though I agree this does function to tie you down a bit.

Tributaries give you research point. And hordes barely get any point. So, having tributaries is the only way not to be a terrible backwater.

I haven't done a comparison but pillaging provides tech and it's now 920 and I am ahead of tech despite not using tributaries.

Did you additionally purchase conclave in addition to Horse Lords? If so, do you think conclave mechanics has had a part to play in your play-through?

No I haven't got Conclave yet some of its changes don't really appeal to me.

 

[Aries666]

Terrible backwater? Eh? This is no Cornwall, this is where you'll rake in thousands of coins regularly and up yours, Amalfi and Venezia (similarly without a trade fleet between them). : /

Khiva (Samarqand and Fergana) are your personal mints of choice. And with that income, the Horse Lords experience becomes trivially easy in that part of the world, with the usual care and common sense in the repertoire.

Income is particularly funny, I have over 5000 gold and nothing to spend it on.

 

[Thrake]

I haven't done a comparison but pillaging provides tech and it's now 920 and I am ahead of tech despite not using tributaries.

Yeah, that must be it. I couldn't set myself into pillaging seriously; I just conquered until I got bored eventually and settled down in my horde playthrough. Burning it all to the ground felt... wrong back then. But suboptimal it seems

 

[Aries666]

Yeah, that must be it. I couldn't set myself into pillaging seriously; I just conquered until I got bored eventually and settled down in my horde playthrough. Burning it all to the ground felt... wrong back then. But suboptimal it seems

I should say that I have gone max pillage, a brutal tyrant that has burnt everything from Khotan to Sarai. I wanted to embrace being in control of a ravenous horde

 

[indika_tates]

The settle button next to pillage is the most horrible thing devs ever did to this game. You know what face you get when playing an ironman game and misclick settle as feudal? It has been suggested on forums to make it a decision but they never did. I hate it. First off you have to click pillage, then wait to "recent burned land" to end, then click again. An auto pillage button is needed. Just click on it and as soon as a pillage is available pillage again. Then in one of the millions times you have to click on pillage you accidentally click on settle as feudal. Game over. I want to be a horde, im happy with it.

The amount of ducats you get pillaging makes no sense. It's ever 25-50 ducats no matter if it's a rich holding or a poor one. Later on the game you have more ducats than a merchant republic. And you have to pillage the same holding 15 times. The reason of this is to slow horde expansion. But there are other ways to slow player expansion better than have to click a button twenty times next to a "commit suicide" one which is settle as feudal. I searched for mods on the workshop to do this but all change the checksum of the game, so there is no way to play an ironman game without going through this annoying mechanic of endless clicking pillage.

If someone is interested there is a way to avoid it. Imprison a feudal vassal until he rebels. You can't settle as feudal while at war, so as soon as the notification becomes available you can pillage without the risk of settling your horde.

 

[schondetta]

The pillaging mechanic does need some major work. There's no reason for pillage to do just two buildings at a time. Your either going to raze it all or not at all. They should just do one click raze per holding and increase the negative modifiers to compensate the drawback . I need a bottle of Tylenol if I want to play nomads. And of course the button itself needs to be better.

I'd like to also add in tributaries. Unless it's a huge realm and your both young rulers it's a waste of time

I fear these issues will never be addressed though. Conclave is too busy being awful

 

[szmik]

The button for special settlement actions needs to be split so that you can cycle through pillage and settle separately, the button is useless when you have just conquered a kingdom and are forced to cycle through all the settle options.

Even worse when you temporarily disable, it doesn't go back up when pillage is available again!

Pillaging doesn't work very well, it takes way too long to raise a settlement completely and the revolts for doing so are painfully weak.

not quite, I got 7-8k uprisings eventually, problem is multiple weak ones fire every couple weeks, before revoltrisk rises

After your first/second generation there is no reason to make anyone a tributary, you make more gold and prestige in the short term by pillaging and conquest is best long term for increasing your population and therefore your horde strength.

Feudal tributaries are useful, until you're big and get huge threat

There is no point in having vassals because you need to pillage for grazing land to increase your population and you need to revoke titles in order to do this making all other vassals more and more unhappy, the result being you can't keep many vassals as they will rebel. This is probably an intended design choice though and I only have a problem with it because pillaging doesn't work very well.

Well, you can give them to your clans, then it's their problem. But you need to keep them happy, cause their feudal vassal count towards warscore. But by then your 7k horde just assaults everything in sight, so....

 

[Aries666]

Well, you can give them to your clans, then it's their problem. But you need to keep them happy, cause their feudal vassal count towards warscore. But by then your 7k horde just assaults everything in sight, so....

This is why I don't give Khans any vassals because it's better to be able to defeat horde revolts fast and with no losses, additionally those vassals are making your khans richer and give them a levy and finally you miss out on the prestige, tech and gold of pillaging that land. One useful thing though is to leave 1-2 baronies in your capital county to protect yourself from instant defeats.

 

[indika_tates]

If someone is interested I've created a simple mod on the workshop to remove the irritating notification of "Settling as feudal" or "Settling as republic". Then as soon as the notification appears you can pillage without having the risk of settling your horde.

I've tried to create an auto-pillage trigger but without success. If someone know how to autoactivate a decision by triggering I would appreciate it a lot.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=655582638

 

[Bernard95]

Pillaging should probably just be a decision- "Pillage [insert Kingdom name here]" which then automatically spawns in some rebels and sends the revolt risk skyrocketing. Doing it by decision takes out the tedium of going holding by holding in every single county, plus it makes it less exploitable (since the way it is now you pillage a county or three at a time and leave an army in each province to instantly crush any rebels). Additionally you avoid that dreaded "settle down" button, which I'm sure many of us have clicked by accident at least once. At the very least though, Paradox could probably stand to give us a keyboard shortcut if there isn't one already for the pillage option which solves the misclicking problem.

 

[Aries666]

I have just realised something quite funny and probably unintended. If you burn down all settlements you capture your realm size stays nice and low meaning that having conquered whole kingdoms very few people join coalitions because you are too small. This is also despite the fact that I have the largest army in the world too.

 

[szmik]

This is why I don't give Khans any vassals because it's better to be able to defeat horde revolts fast and with no losses, additionally those vassals are making your khans richer and give them a levy and finally you miss out on the prestige, tech and gold of pillaging that land. One useful thing though is to leave 1-2 baronies in your capital county to protect yourself from instant defeats.

Tell that to my khan, who subjugated Bulgaria and Hungary (Pannonia) by himself

Well, pillaging is so tedious I'm happy to give out feudal vassals instead, when I'm unstoppable anyway. Also I found out how to keep my khans happy (no conclave). They don't seem to start overthrow factions, unless they have more land than other khans, not counting feudals. So having 3-4 khans with equal lands for 3 generations now, I've seen no overthrow faction. I also gave them some feudal kingdoms to see how much trouble I'd have. None so far. Or I'd say I don't have to conquer anything, because they do enough of that.

 

[Aries666]

Haha that's awesomely cheesy.

 

[Silversweeeper]

Pillaging should probably just be a decision- "Pillage [insert Kingdom name here]" which then automatically spawns in some rebels and sends the revolt risk skyrocketing. Doing it by decision takes out the tedium of going holding by holding in every single county, plus it makes it less exploitable (since the way it is now you pillage a county or three at a time and leave an army in each province to instantly crush any rebels). Additionally you avoid that dreaded "settle down" button, which I'm sure many of us have clicked by accident at least once. At the very least though, Paradox could probably stand to give us a keyboard shortcut if there isn't one already for the pillage option which solves the misclicking problem.

Agreed. Changing the "Pillage settlement" button to "Pillage kingdom/duchy" would be very easy (and you could write in an exception for temples/holy sites so you don't destroy them needlessly). A confirmation event before settling would also be relatively simple to add and would cause less frustration.

 

[Hiiri]

Very good points here. Gosh, I wish dev would accidentally drop by and give input.