Prelude: World 12

[mvgulik]

... "The assumption games" part 3, now in a cinema near you. Flashlight not included ...

[SnuggleSnail]

[*] Village's can no longer extend their authority over claims with a "Power Level" of 1 or more, unless the owner of the claim is either a Founding Father of the village, or a member of the village.

Given you can spawn a new character and make a 3x3 claim in under 10 minutes pretty comfortably, I feel like this is pretty abuseable. Is there really that much of a problem to not counting Pclaims as being relevant? Forcing people to have a Vclaim or maybe get revoked doesn't seem too unreasonable to me. Even if it was 1 minute to siege, just making the ram is a lot of effort when 20 Pclaims could be made in an hour.

Siege stuff

Some points about siege nobody is mentioning:
1) There is absolutely no penalty for the attacker losing. There is no death. Losing some steel armor is not at all significant, and with the suggested UA/MC scaling, I doubt anybody will even care that much about gilding. It seems unfair to put people in a situation where if they lose, their base is lost, and if they win nothing happens.

2) The people that want sieges to be decided mostly on who wins a fight, I feel, are also the people who want a more balkanized Hearthland. If you can lose your base over losing one fight, that's probably one of the biggest motivators of allying with a lot of people.

Can we make credos less cancerous maybe?

This a million times. Please just remove all of the powerful perks from credos.


All of the power gamers hate credos, and the vast majority of people who like them seem to not like them for their power. Removing most of the quality related stuff, speed bonuses, study speed bonuses, etc seems like something that would leave most people happy.

[shubla]

Maybe good idea:

There is a vulnerability window in each claim, chosen by defender for example, every 2 weeks. Vclaim overlaps pclaims under it etc.

Vulnerability window is publicly known by inspecting the claim with character that has siegecraft, so there is no need to spam alts, it's duration would be 1-2 hours.

Attacker must now build some 1x1 buildable building during the vulnerability window within range of 5 tiles to the claim. (one, or multiple). Building would require siegecraft and some a bit hard to get(but not too hard) materials, like brimstone.
Now attacker must defend the building(s) (prevent it from being destroyed) for some amount of hours, for example, 6 hours. It could be destroyed by any character, but it would have enough hitpoints to last ~5 minutes of destroying with fresh spawned alt.

If the attacker fails to defend the building(s) and they get destroyed, nothing will happen.

If the attacker succeeds in defending the building (even 1 of them remaining, if rest of them are destroyed), there will be a timer, 24 hours (counting from the beginning of the vulnerability window, so actually less than 24 hours after the defending of the buildings). After this 24 hours, the claim will become siegeable for 1 hour.

When a claim is siegeable, the attacker can build a special building (1 or multiple, they could be destroyed, and would collapse by themselves after 24 hours from building) within vicinity of the claim (5 tiles), as long as one of these is remaining, the walls etc. in the claim can be destroyed by siege engines. Drying times to destroy walls would be somewhat similar to OP (level 0), brickwalls would take a bit longer, palisade not that long.

After writing this idea I do think that it is actually quite good! Please do tell if you have something to ask about it.

So with this idea:
- Defender can choose times to defend
- Raiding requires a lot of effort (attackers must defend the buildings twice, buildings cost materials that are a chore to get) thus, noobs probably wouldn't have to suffer too much
- Plenty of time to defend
- Raiding is still certainly possible

Exact timers and durations in the preceding are only examples, actual times could be tweaked to make the effort .

To answer some problems with this idea that I see:

Problem: Surround village claim with another village claim

example:

Solution: Ban usage of them. Building them is not fast and people will notice it pretty quickly, ban people who build them and nuke their place, they probably won't build it again. One could even automate detection of them? Periodic scanning of the map to see if some vclaim is "inside" another.

Problem: People can just evacuate their characters and items when being sieged
Answer: This applies to pretty much all possible siege solutions, and there is no way to fix it. Infrastructure is still valuable, and moving all items and characters of big villages in event of siege, rebuilding the village etc. is a lot of work. Of course, attackers could block anyone trying

[Undefined]

the only question I have here is "Why didn't you ask?"
This system is the most flawed change I've ever seen from w8. You guys really don't know your playerbase.
when you implement something like "8-hour windows for 20-mins ramming" there is no way it brings thought like "Oh, new rules? we need to adapt to it and use it in a way they thought". NO WAY.
And I bet most of the factions were spending the day (it needs 5 mins in reality, but let's say it was harder this time (no)) after you posted it in the creation of "how will we abuse this new siege-mechanics". And obviously it leads to "how not allow enemies to get to your core in 8 hours" and "how to distract enemies for 20 mins while the ram is drying".
Literally NOONE will even say a word about "setting up a proper window to bring the proper sieges as devs think we should".

This change is so unrealistically out-of-space.

I want to echo this sentiment. Literally no-one is going to look at this system with the intent it's provided with. People will simply try to figure out the best way to cheese and game it to make their claim unsiegable. The amount of work that goes into setting up the amazing villages you teleported around in the stream yesterday is hundreds of hours and no-one wants to risk losing that. I get it, people need complete safety but also people shouldn't have complete safety, it's a very tough balancing act, but, I know for fact everyone I've ever played with in the last 10 years will look at this system and either decide it's not worth their time this go around or attempt to bypass it in a way that gives them complete safety.
The people who suffer, as with a lot of systems, are the genuine casual players who can barely defend a claim let alone deal with the hassle of micromanaging it's vulnerability.
I'd also echo, despite suggesting more layers of complexity, that the system is overly complex and opaque to any newer player, especially as it deals with something as foundational as claiming and building.

I think claim mechanics have a lot of scope for change, right now people can easily claim massive swathes of land for a one-off cost and be totally immune to attack, there's a lot of room to use claims as a way to drain resources from the economy, to limit the scope and increase the expense of them. I think the playerbase has come to accept that sieging just isn't really a thing.

[snapko]

Maybe good idea:

Isnt this just makes siegeing so convoluted that noone will even bother doing that, like it was before? whats the point in changing siege mechanic then.

[shubla]

Maybe good idea:

Isnt this just makes siegeing so convoluted that noone will even bother doing that, like it was before? whats the point in changing siege mechanic then.

basically yes. Except big villages against each other sometimes maybe.

[eliminoid]

I propose this:

1) Remove this vulnearability windows completely. No one likes that, and there are workarounds already to not lose your stuff, so why bother with this system at all?
If you can inspect the land to check its level, bullies will just use bots to check your claim every now and then to tell when you can do your free siege. I know because this is what I'll do.

2) Remove random quests for credos. Instead, make them static and meaningful, like the one you get when you create your character. I dont want to cancel the mother pearl quest 3 times in a row again, but i dont mind collecting one if its a part of a static pearl diver questline.

3) NERF QUESTS. Remove LP, remove hunger. Or make a reasonable cap on how many quests you can do in a week.

[jorb]

So. Basically, with the siege and combat changes being proposed, Hermits are not welcome in the Hearthlands. Thanks. (not)

How do the combat changes make it harder for Hermits? They have every chance of being more relevant there, no?

[jorb]

And obviously it leads to "how not allow enemies to get to your core in 8 hours" and "how to distract enemies for 20 mins while the ram is drying".
Literally NOONE will even say a word about "setting up a proper window to bring the proper sieges as devs think we should".

This is, of course, our own assumption in discussing these systems. We do not at all imagine that people will somehow play nice with our implementations.

[PastTime]

Why even have cosmetics and visual fancy things if raids will be so easy to do?