Crusader Kings 2 merged with Mount and Blade: Warband

[Chevaresqye]

Auto-resolve doesn't help. Total War has auto-resolve and they still force you to play out the battles yourself, because if you use auto-resolve you take unnecessary losses, especially in siege battles.
I'd rather have a game without tactical battles at all, instead of a game where I either have to choose between fighting tactical battles myself (which I don't like) or getting somehow punished for skipping the battle.

No tactical battles is exactly one of the reasons why I switched from total war games to CK2.

So how about the "no battle" mode that disallows player to anticipate tactical for the whole play-through? In that case, skipping the tactical battle isn't a punishment anymore since none has the advantage anymore.

Or game time doesn't pause while I'm playing the tactical battle, which would mean that while I'm leading some men on a battle map everything else goes horribly wrong because I'm not there giving orders. Ping pongin between the maps could be possible, but it would be confusing especially if there was multiple tactical battles happening at the same time.

This is the idea that I really want to promote. I want a games where you have to choose between a general and a strategist, not both. There is two distinct option. You can be Hannibal who engages in battle and wins great victory against enemy, but expose yourself to political threat in your backyard. Or you can be a Roman senate who sit comfortably in the court and decide to whom the army should be entrusted, it is politics that matters. Each style has its own advantages and disadvantages, none has a edge against another (although we knew that Punic War called the Romans)

 

[monsterfurby]

If I ever end up with a billion dollars in my bank account, this is the game that I'm going to fund.

 

[InfernalMachine]

I would buy it. I have 240 hours on Mount and Blade Warband.

 

[unmerged(659484)]

Just a quick tip to anyone playing warband single player.
Try Prophesy Of Pendor MOD...

It's like another game, the soundtrack is fantastic, it has voice overs during dialogs, amazing factions, horses, items etc.
It's really amazing, and the dificult level is sky high if you play with vanilla mentality.

 

[rowdyyobbo]

I love Mount & Blade: WB, Total War, and CKII... but they are different games and they have different compromises in place. (compromise isn't bad, it's engineering)
I believe the OP has stated that he's not thinking of this generation of computer , so I will ignore the concerns about computer power.

Mount and Blade: WB has a very thin strategy layer wrapped around a combat simulator. Total War has a board game like strategy layer wrapped around a De Bellis Antiquitatis style miniatures RTS. CKII has all the cruelty of the Sims injected into a Dynasty/Historical sandbox with no tactical level.

It might be fun for a several hundred hour game to have *some* layer of tactical involvement to switch things up, but I don't think present M&B tactical is the right match to CKII. The scale is all wrong. The control you have is simple. The AI is simple. You don't have schiltron formations and aggressive assaults and what all. In addition, 250k doom stacks are large. Vanilla WB handles 150 opponents at a time. Working your way through two 20k doomstacks might stop being fun after the eighth hour. If you were able to bump that up to, say, 1000 (500 to a side) and you had a new feed every 3 minutes, that's a 2 hours for one largish battle. I think I'm underestimating the time. If you are one dude with little battle strategy agency in a sea of a thousand ai players you are watching the game play itself. By having the game feed you random chunks of your army you arrange a series of ad hoc engagements. I would find that frustrating and distracting from my dynastic sandbox play.

I can't quite encompass how to display a 100k man army on a screen without losing track of most of it.

Now there is an interesting line of investigation where you limit the player to something close to the amount of control they would have over such an army. Take Command: 2nd Manassas (which I have regrettably been unable to play) did this. That feature was dropped from the subsequent games (there was a change of direction and name). This would give the player a realistic amount of control and a feasible amount of information while allowing personal charges and what all. You could sit back and try to control what your flanks are doing or you could plow into the center and hope it all works out. Perhaps unfortunately, there is the belief that a player has become used to the omniscient general so it's unlikely we will see this.

Uhm... a bit of a ramble to question the goal of stitching M&B level tactical play into CKII strategic play.

 

[xueyang]

I think too be fair, Paradox might not have enough resources at the moment. Vic 2 DLC, EU4,CK2 DLC....But everyone would hope something like that happen:happy:

 

[Fishman786]

Imagine M&B's strategic/RPG layer combined with CK2's combat. That would be one of the most tedious games in existence...

 

[Chevaresqye]

Imagine M&B's strategic/RPG layer combined with CK2's combat. That would be one of the most tedious games in existence...

+1. Thank you sir, you made my day.

 

[Hector of Troy]

I just don´t see it happening.

I would actually prefer to keep things the way they are. The only small change I would actually like to see implemented in paradox games would be a screen that would roughly describe with some painted squares (or whatever) how battles would develop once started.

In Crusader Kings 2, let´s suppose each colored square would represent 500 soldiers of a certain type (pikes, heavy infantry, archers light cavalry, etc.). Add to that the tactics each troop leader of each flank has chosen, and then show some simple animation (but not as simple as in EU3) of the ongoing battle. The scenario would also roughly describe the terrain, the weather, etc.

I am not talking about something incredibly elaborated, though. But I think that something a little more concrete and less abstract, if added to battles, would make a nice blend. It would suffice a small visual sketch that would show, like in a chess board, troops retreating, being outflanked, etc.

 

[unmerged(659484)]

I don't see this idea coming to life, and I'm not sure I would really enjoy it.
But... It's a really nice exercise of imagination!

 

[brxbrx]

It wouldn't mix together very well. It'd just take too long to get anything done in-game. I mean, try playing Warband with a dozen characters' lives in the same game.

 

[Anenu]

My dream game is a combination of Crusader Kings, Mount and Blade, and Skyrim. Basically you take the world type and beauty of Skyrim give it the Mount and Blade ability to swear to a lord and fight in battles and become a lord and possibly other things and use Crusader Kings to make the world leaders live and breathe instead of following strict or simple structures. I want to be able to climb the ranks like you can do in Mount and Bland and Crusader Kings yet actually feel and see the world around me like Skyrim, once I work my way to High King I want to be able to run around my palace and visit my family and advisers, I want to be able to organize armies and send them to fight each other while riding at the front sword in hand. The best parts of all these games combined would make a game you could easily sink thousands of hours into. Unfortunately while this game would be awesome it is far to ambitious and demanding of developers and computer to be practically made for many years to come.

 

[unmerged(17228)]

If the combat in CK2 were even half as deep as HoI 3's combat, it'd be more fun.

 

[pjnlsn]

M&B is a lot better than total war, as far as realtime combat at least imo: Total war's battles get terribly exhausting if you do too many in a row, whereas no matter how repetitive M&B battles can be, there's always something invigorating about riding around the battlefield and cutting down enemy soldiers it speaks to something primal, no doubt

i don't think CK2 and M&B will ever be integrated but the integration of two different games is always interesting to explore: the MMO Eve online has I think atm linked the MMO itself with a FPS game for PS iirc and they both take place in the same world and events in one effect the other (so there's PC users in ships and play station players fighting battles on the surface of planets and all at the same time). Anyway, just food for thought.

 

[riknap]

necromancers.... @_@

 

[Sforzesco]

This would be kinda nice. For those who think it would mean battle and battles over and over: I think only those battles that your character attends PERSONALLY should be played M&B-style. Others would be just passing in main screen.
Someone could ask: should you not then combat all battles by yourself? Maybe for effectiveness, but if you got killed/damaged in the realtime battle, you would be actually killed/maimed in the game. So quite big risks.

 

[Olaus Petrus]

This would be kinda nice. For those who think it would mean battle and battles over and over: I think only those battles that your character attends PERSONALLY should be played M&B-style. Others would be just passing in main screen.
Someone could ask: should you not then combat all battles by yourself? Maybe for effectiveness, but if you got killed/damaged in the realtime battle, you would be actually killed/maimed in the game. So quite big risks.

Even if it would be just battles to which you participate personally, it would certainly be fun to other players if one or two players are fighting a battle, while they wait game paused on strategic map. Every time I play MP with friends we have discussion if it's all right to use pause or lower speed to slowest possible during the war or if it interrupts the flow of the game too much.

 

[pjnlsn]

necromancers.... @_@

oh.....whoops.

I meant to post in this thread several months ago, but forgot about it till now. Memory's the first thing to go, they say

 

[unmerged(766678)]

I'd prefer if they focused on sprucing up politics, both within your realm and internationally. More events, more political options, more "scandalous" options. More repercussions for decisions you make. Save adding in hardcore military strategy possibly for CKIII (by then someone will have probably figured out how to effectively merge the two mechanics). And just so you know, I actually am a proponent of adding in more tactical military strategy to CKII. I love role playing my kings as generals, and I feel in general that kings should be out on the battlefield with their men to at least heighten morale if they aren't particularly great marshals. Only if my ruler's martial ability was 0 and I was totally inept militarily would I elect to sit my ruler out of the battle. But I feel like shoehorning into CKII would have a poor result.

 

[Scotty the Scot]

Eh, cool idea, but it's not happening anytime soon.