by Reeyfer » Sat Nov 13, 2010 5:46 pm
If you log off in the wagon can't you log back in and still be in the seat?
If so that makes the solution for this rather simple. Travel once or twice a week. Take half as many wagons as you have people, and at each location you build a palisade big enough to park all the livestock to have a work area. As for the wagons themselves, you have two options. The easiest is to build a timber house for all your containers and equipment (cauldron, meat grinder, etc). The not-so-easy option is to park the wagons inside and build the palisade around them. It's been a while since I used a battering ram, but the wiki says you need 121 strength (which I assume it means combined, otherwise it doesn't make sense) to beat the soak on a palisade with a ram. The ram does 20, and I thought the palisade only had 30 soak, so I would think it should be 100 but I guess not. Anyway you would destroy three blocks of the palisade to get your wagons through or maybe just the gate and one cornerpost (or does the gate go away if you destroy the cornerpost? not really sure). You could supplement this with bear capes and talismen (there are some in the market stalls in nople, you'd probably be best trading for the best quality you could find personally over the forums if you had new people, together they could give you all the strength you need to do it easily unless I'm wrong about the wiki meaning 121 combined strength to beat the soak) and you could supplement even further with alcohol, or forge and thane's rings if you could make or trade for them (boar tusk snuff really seems to be too short lived to be worth the effort).
That way would probably be safer, but it would require you to get together the strength to destroy the walls at each move in addition to having half your people for a couple hours at least to the destination of the next camp. If you only did it once or twice a week and your people were semi-reliable or if you traded for some real good strength boosters (maybe you could get one of the cities to sponsor you on a mission of exploration? Dunno how since they aren't really wanting for resources, maybe they'd be interested enough in exclusive rights to whatever maps of the borders you could give them but I doubt it) so it only took one or two of you. Alternatively you could just build a timber house inside each palisade (not a ton of extra effort with a couple of people (one to run the wagon for timber and one to cut it up and build it) and hide the wagons. Oak trees make them completely invisible, the swamp trees (forget the name) will do in a pinch, and if you're stranded in pine and fir you might just have to make do with partial concealment. THe problem here is even if you have good oaks (which will hide a wagon and a cow fenced against it with signposts for an individual traveller in a pinch) is that with gilbertus' client and others with x-ray being popular and raiders being raiders there's a good chance someone will see right through the tree and steal your wagon. If you've got all your stuff out of it it might not be a big deal - most people probably wouldn't even steal it because they wouldn't feel like taming a cow for the effort and even if they had one in their nearby village to use they'd probably only take one. Replacing one wagon wouldn't be a huge problem occasionally if you had someone to trade for the cloth and were already set up as a roving band like this accustomed to throwing up temporary fortifications quickly. Of course you might just as likely run into a d-bag who would destroy all the wagons just for the heck of it. You could also just park the wagons outside the palisade and rely on a claim to discourage most and give you scents to follow the thief and take the wagon back, but they coudl either take it very far away or they could put it on their own claim and then use the scents to kill you when you took back your property.
Either way you did it, this roving exploration life style would be possible, you'd just have to accept from the beginning that you would be doing a lot of replacement, that you might get one or more of your people killed from time to time, etc. Around the borders of the map it might even be quite safe - I'd imagine you could very easily go at least without ever having your temporary fortification breached (obviously a ram outside is a sign that you should make your next move as soon as possible), with a bit of luck. Obviously there are plenty of people who can punch through a palisade, but you're not likely to run into a ton of them out there and you're highly mobile. It could be a lot of fun too, and just the mapping of those mostly unknown territories would be a boon to the community if you didn't trade them for expedition support to some big city who was curious. The most critical factor would be assembling a good team - not as horribly difficult with only five or six people. But you'd have to give out keys at each location, unless you really wanted to go to the trouble of setting up villages and signposts and all that mess. And the people would have to be pretty regular players obviously - even though they could sleep in the wagons indefinitely (unless I"m wrong about that? I remember someone talking about a journey using them with a friend right after they came out who said they did, and I did while roaming when i parked it behind an oak but i've never tried it on a moving wagon) they would just be a burden and each new camp or breaking of camp (if you park inside the palisades) would require at least somewhat of a group effort. not to mention you're not going to get much done if its only a tiny fraction scouting and hunting for supplies (most of your critical supplies would for each camp other than lumber are animal products so you might want to leave one wagon outside behind a tree even if you put the rest inside for safety)(if only they had wagon gates).
Might be a lot of fun actually man. I'm not doing much but roaming with my newly dead player now, he's not got terrible stats compared to a complete noob either. If you're really interested in doing this I might well sign on, I'm kind of interested in seeing what's out there in all those unmapped edge territories. Plus I'd sort of like to take a look at world's end if that's still up and running, it sounded promising. I'm hanging out around nople right now, mostly hunting to get my lp back up and foraging for trade materials. If you'd like to come into the area I'd like to give it a shot even if it was just a two man one wagon deal, though it wouldn't hurt to find the crew at least for one more wagon. I'm not horribly interested in settling down permanently but if you find a place that looks good I guess I'd help with the building at least and maybe stay around later (really waiting on world four, but this sounds like a fun way to pass time until then). But yeah if you'd like come around and we'll start drawing up the supplies until then. It probably wouldn't be a bad idea to find a village that would recruit us around here to store the supplies until we're ready and as a teleport link to nople so we could get the supplies we couldn't reproduce. I definitely like the sound of it though.
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