Raiders return to ships too slowly

[rumblebelly]

I have noticed that playing HIP raiding as a norse pagan is much more difficult to make a profit. In vanilla I can afford maintenance costs of levies and ships without bankrupting me while sailing to england from Denmark. In HIP I cannot. I have to ensure I have at least 50gold stockpiled just to be able to send a raiding party out to hit multiple counties.

More importantly to me I have realized that with HIP my raiders are unable to retreat to their ships fast enough to avoid battles. For instance I landed my raiders on Northern Zealand and clicked to withdraw them to the ships as soon as I saw Zealand levies being raised. The Zealanders combined their armies from southern and western zealand and marched to northern zealand before I could return to my ships therefore I lost the battle.

If this is the case I can no longer raid because I can only see one province away so as soon as an enemy comes into that bordering county I am guaranteed to be faced with a battle.

Is this purposefully designed this way? I don't see anyone else complaining of this problem. But I have tested this thoroughly compared to Vanilla and raiders can almost always escape in vanilla. I find this more reasonable since that was classic viking strategy- hit and run tactics before the enemy can muster and meet them in the field.

 

[myrt]

Just put ~30 troops on the neighbouring counties as scouts

 

[Toa Kraka]

With HIP my raiders are unable to retreat to their ships fast enough to avoid battles.

Go to common/defines/emf_defines.lua and delete the ARMY_LOAD_MOVE_COST line. EMF sets this value to 40, which is twice the vanilla value of 20.

 

[RhaegarTelcontarTargaryen]

To be fair, I do find raiding in vanilla way to easy, as well as those handy 2500 pagan troops. Not saying that I do not miss them, but it does make game more fun. I would however suggest reducing the cost of moving troops onto ships, since you know, historically norsemen were actually known for their fast hit-and-run (or hit-plunder-and-run) tactics.

 

[Erilaz]

I wonder what prompted the decision to double the ARMY_LOAD_MOVE_COST value. Any word on this?

Raiding is not very profitable when you tend to lose most of your troops to the slow embarkment speed. Especially if your army is too small to loot the holdings as well. It seems a bit too harsh.

 

[G.Strategos]

I wonder what prompted the decision to double the ARMY_LOAD_MOVE_COST value. Any word on this?

Raiding is not very profitable when you tend to lose most of your troops to the slow embarkment speed. Especially if your army is too small to loot the holdings as well. It seems a bit too harsh.

Αgreed.

 

[Ese Khan]

I wonder what prompted the decision to double the ARMY_LOAD_MOVE_COST value. Any word on this?

Raiding is not very profitable when you tend to lose most of your troops to the slow embarkment speed. Especially if your army is too small to loot the holdings as well. It seems a bit too harsh.

IIRC mostly because it's too easy to manipulate AI with base land-to-ship movement value. In other words, it's one of those things where human vs. AI imbalance makes it such that it's easy for a human player to do hit-and-run but it's not for AI.

That said, anyone is welcome to suggest an alternative value to make hit-and-run more viable.