Prelude: World 12

[jorb]

Your post didn't address most of mentioned problems in this thread, to the point of your changes sounding lazy.

Which problems do you feel are unaddressed? Simply pointing those out again would be infinitely more helpful.

[SnuggleSnail]

Ignoring the specifics of this system, it's a huge mistake to make winning a defensive siege require combat. Especially with the current mechanics surrounding siege, IE: no death.


I live in a relatively small village. There's maybe 12 members, but realistically there has never been a part of the world outside the first month where more than 4 would play during the same week. If you create a system where siege requires we need to win fights in order to not lose our village(which you never will, there will always be abuses we can use to be absurd to siege, but others won't abuse mechanics as hard as us), then the only obvious solution for us is to make a lot of allies that will help us in defensive sieges.

If somebody gets downed, they don't die, so there's absolutely zero risk associated with helping your ally. You could make such a deal every other week, and there's no way you can be punished for it. Given how risk averse most people are, this will lead to massive alliances, blobs of "fighters"(with 1/10th my total LP, and equal weight), generally stale politics, and a lack of conflict.

If you want new people to feel somewhat confident enough to either create new factions, start fighting regularly, or be a member of the glorious utopian concept of haven balkanized states the baseline is probably that they don't reasonably expect 20 guys to show up to their wall one day, and there literally being no sequence of actions they can take to not lose their Vidol/base. I personally really like siege a lot. I think I siege more than anybody else. That said, siege being too easy is way worse for the game than it being way too hard. Not just for the nab population, but for healthy faction balance as well. More siege short term almost certainly means less fights long term.


With that out of the way, a couple of specifics about mechanics:

• 1 Brimstone is not at all cost prohibitive within the context of checking actual villages multiple times a day
• 1 Brimstone is actually somewhat prohibitive within the context of safe palis/resource claims/spam/troll claims
• The vulnerability window being hidden seems to not allign with its mission statement of making it easier to remove junk claims
• Not being able to claim over Pclaims is extremely abuseable, and will result in a lot of griefing. I have personally made Vclaims to block Vclaims, and I know for sure I will make Pclaims to block Vclaims. Nobody searches their walls daily, and needing to ram down 30 Pclaims will be fricken ass cancer, even if it only takes 1 minute of drying time, actually making 30 a ram for each Pclaim is going to be cancer. Keep in mind you can make a Pclaim purely off of discovery LP.

[ghandhikus]

Sure, here are some information I found that wasn't.

You really should address an alternative to refining iron, and honestly breaking farming for everyone. Maybe both could use similar mechanic to refining and selection.

I guess it will go overlooked in the heat of siege discussion but newbs will be fucked again by removing metal spiralling.
It is because now spiralling metal requires hq cast iron to maximize result of q increase. Value of a cast bar lower by 20% than the top smelted q will be some 10 times lower.
There will be no reason to buy iron from lower level players.

Edit:

No one is stopping you, or anyone else, from talking about other stuff.

Here you are.

Jorb, you haven't edited your thread yet, and it has me pretty concerned. The new mechanics you intend to implement aren't really specific enough to understand, for example a world where flaxQ is capped @ 900 is very different to a world where it's capped @ 200.

Plus, all these nerds are too frightened by the new siege system you're not going to implement anyway to rationally discuss anything else.

[*] All crops have a local quality field, which caps their quality growth. However, crops will not lower in quality by being planted in an area of quality lower than their own, meaning that you can still import better crops from elsewhere, grow them in your own lower quality surrounding, without experiencing quality loss. The caps are set high enough that they shouldn't matter at all for a good while.[/list]

can you explain this a bit more?
will it be like some kind of quality per chunk and all the fields in that chunk will have the same quality cap or will it have a base quality and we will be able to increase it as we use the field??

About wild hive raiding: please pay attention to what people ask - it was absolute cancer for ages. People need wax, they cannot progress without it. And with current medicine and randomness of wild bees people use disposable alts for it, as it’s more convinient than healing. Is there a reason to make it like that? Just make it less punishing so people would rather actually get stinged on their mains and cure the wounds rather than abusing altfest. I suggest adding several uses for the beesting medicine, for example. Even if you can craft ~5 of those in the end of the day it won’t be enough to heal from a couple of hiveraids. Same solution probably can help with people collecting homemade honey with alts.
About credos with points: this idea isn’t really that good when you’ll start getting quests you’re unable to complete, roll them back, thus spending your daily points. I honestly like the credos, the benefits they bring. Every credo should have unique features, not just +stats. I honestly see much less reason to do hunters credo now, as the only actually usefull benefit left is collecring more meat while butchering wild animals, and unless it’s some high q meat it’s not usually that usefull. I’d like to see credo tree rework at least, as well as making it less rng based. Some quests are just much harder than anothers, and are worth just the same +1 completed quest, making it easier to pray to rnjesus and roll them completing easier and FASTER ones.
About PvP and hermits islands I’m very opposed to this idea. First of all, powergamers will abuse it a lot. Doesn’t matter how you tweak it, they’ll have main bases on safe continent and use alts to move things. You can’t counter it, because you have to allow new players to move from safe continent to pvp one. Even if you make it permanent 1-way road, powergamers will still have a way to supply themselves with stuff like local resources, rare dungeon loot, equipment and ect. From safe continent via freshly made alts. Even if pvp continent will have much better bonuses for progression and there’ll be no way to deliver high q stuff back to safe continent (imagine throwing high q seeds in the water to fish them with alt in safe continent) it’ll still be abused one way or another. Every penalty you add to this game is countered with alts.
And the main problem that current siege changes were meant to counter pclaim spam with palis, how do you guys play to couner it on safe continent without siege?
About the inspect with matching items idea: Kekw, I wonder how will you inspect some dipshit titan alt pali on high q soil spot if he places 1 nugget of his top q wrought iron in it, if you’re not another titan? Tweaking the game for titans to be even more immune, hm?
About larger world size: It’s awesome and everything, but without better traveling decisions it might be not such a good idea. I mean I hear a lot of “not worth my time going there” on different subjects. Maybe adding some local neutral ancient magical gates, that allow traveling between 2 of such, shortcutting small distances like a 2-5 screens might help? It also will be a point of interest where people can bump into eachother. Should give a bit of travel wearness.

Tbh I think that when people found a village they already have something to lose, maybe villages and pclaims should have different rules in new siege mechanic, making villages lvl 0 stronger than pclaims lvl 0?

Will the map be the same size as W11 or bigger/smaller?

Jorb, Loftar, you know I love you guys, right? And I love the game. But with impeding changes it kinda look like the end of the journey for me. Why? Here we go:

- Pointing out once again: with spiraling removed, quality growth of tools will be defined only by fuel (coal, wood, mulch) and with crops capped it will probably make lower underground levels unreachable. You gotta balance that.
- This siege and claim defense mechanic looks hostile for casual players as it was mentioned above many times. At very least make it obvious for players who don't read every single post on the forum, describe on claim poles or in skill list, anywhere inside the game! As for ideas, I kinda like that one with the inside keep or inbuit layered protection. And you mentioned archery towers, but building them requires, correct me if I'm wrong, siege skill to be bought out. Obviously raiders will have that, what about hermits?
- Credos. People curse them, but still doing because bonuses are tasty and getting them adds meaning to the play. They are good in my opinion, but have to be tweaked for seasons - being unable to progress with for example gemhunter credo due to absence of poppy cap's seeds during winter is absurd. Not to mention farmer's or even forager's credos in winter or spring. I haven't got all life to finish a credo you know. And I know many players who would agree with me.
- Dungeons. Please, remove that epilepsy-igniting terrible screenshake at the end of dungeons - the worst design decision ever. Seriously.
- Fishing. During W9 and W10 I fished out some quality tools from the water or washed ashore and, oh boy, that was a joy! But never happened in W11. What have you done to the loot table? I don't believe people stopped to drop their old stuff in waters - it's your doing!
- PvP. Please, oh, please! don't screw over the majority of player base in favor of those 10-20 who plays for that kind of fun! At least make "blueshielded" (players with murder mode off) victims unlootable!

Instead of torturing that unbalancable siege mechanic, you could add some other activities for no-bots. Events, dungeons, disasters... How about forest fire with wild animals running in waves and fires need to be put out manually and people need to cooperate for that? Or troll outbreak above ground at some mountain cave entrance? Or earthquake damaging buildings and causing caveins... (Don't hit me, they probably will never implement it ).

Also you saw what people can do with current limited abilities, I mean shoe-ball games, chess boards, weelbarrow racing labyrinths, paintings and museums. Why not to add something more for peaceful creativity? I don't know... baskets for hand-ball games? Wearable bags for racing? Fireworks? Breedable flowering bushes? Selective breeding for "just cosmetic" flowers? If you like, I can post those ideas in details in corresponding topic.

[jorb]

Ah, okay, so nothing related to claims/siege, then?

That's funny, because...

We're still working, so there's more coming.

[ghandhikus]

Ah, okay, so nothing related to claims/siege, then?

That's funny, because...

We're still working, so there's more coming.

That's funny, because...

It is yet another generalised statement that speaks about forthcoming actions without specifying which parts will be addressed.

People don't know what you are working on because you didn't address anything besides the siege itself.

[VDZ]

And to people that are afraid that hermits will get raided more :
It's only logical that being alone is more dangerous than being in a group.

Hermit =more freedom, more danger

Village = less dangerous but you have to coordinate with others


But hermit have in general low q stuff so raiding them isn't really worth it anyway

Hermits are not vulnerable per se with the 'drop 2 levels' system; if they're active enough they can keep their claim at a permanent level 3/5, being essentially untouchable. Just newbies, players not sufficiently familiar with the systems and people not playing very actively will be victimized.

And I don't mind 'weaker players' being easier targets. What I do mind is that the game's systems specifically encourage players to harass those easy targets even if there's not much to gain. You say "raiding them isn't really worth it anyway", but Brimstone decays and more active claims take 15-20 hours to siege (when 'vulnerable'). What else are you going to spend it on? Not wrecking newbies is just a waste of Brimstone; it takes less than half an hour and you may get at least something out of it (as opposed to getting nothing by letting your Brimstone decay).

[SnuggleSnail]

[*] The gains from Melee and Unarmed combat beyond the factor 2 range increase more steeply than before to compensate somewhat, using a cube root instead of a fourth root as was historically the case.

I think this is too much equalization. Everybody will wear vaps/hussar wings, and be hybrid UA/MC, so it will probably be very realistic for somebody with 1/10th or less your total LP to have equal UA weight as you. There will still be a huge disparity in combat effectiveness due to strength/con/agi(mainly just str tho), so maybe it doesn't matter, but I already know for sure I will never put effort into a gilding set under this system, and only have anything in my study desk like two days a week and it'll literally be fine.

[*] All crops have a local quality field, which caps their quality growth.[/list]

I feel like your intention here is to make quality botting less powerful, and depending on the upper limits on cropQ I don't think it will work. If it's >600, then it will still take bots give or take a year to get to that quality, and probably the world will end before regular people get to touch those qualities.

It also introduces a _very_ unfun mechanic of having to make safe palis everywhere to plant flax in order to check for a higher quality node. Nobody wants to leak their flax seeds, and anybody remotely serious about the quality grind will do this. By the time regular people have flax seeds high enough to even know if they're on a good spot autists will have surpassed them, so this will not encourage significant trade.

• Hammer and anvil quality no longer provide a positive influence on metal quality when pounding wrought iron. This effectively removes most of the metal spiraling.

I'm not great at binomial probability, but it seems like 2-3 spirals is reasonably possible. I think this is a good way to balance meteorites, since their baseline Q would make them about equal to a once spiraled anvil, which removes a lot of work but doesn't put people inherently ahead by getting meteorites.

I'm kinda spooked we'll get to a point where quality progression via trees/clay kinda stops due to crops getting capped, which would make getting those 1-2 additional spirals more of a requirement. Consider reducing the crit chance a bit further, or adding a back end cap of cast only being crit twice?



P.S: Have you guys considered normalizing animal qualities, so botting single nodes for topQ bones is less of a thing? Esp with mammoths/whales
P.P.S: Please consider making rivers wider(not crossable with roads) in the map gen, with less shallow water to make it a bit harder for people to use horses in combat

[pppp]

Ah, okay, so nothing related to claims/siege, then?

That's funny, because...

We're still working, so there's more coming.

Yeah, once again: Reduce binary outcome of siege.
Add some timer, crime counter, or any other means to measure looting activity and means to stop that activity after threshold is reached.

Any kind of counter of non-villager activity can be abused by defenders by having non-villager alts. So a timer seems most fair approach.

[reticent]

Ignoring the specifics of this system, it's a huge mistake to make winning a defensive siege require combat. Especially with the current mechanics surrounding siege, IE: no death.

That said, siege being too easy is way worse for the game than it being way too hard. Not just for the nab population, but for healthy faction balance as well.

I absolutely agree.
Perhaps operating siege engines, like rams and catapults (including defensive catapults, excluding wrecking balls), should require the murderous rage buff? Not for placing them, but for attacking the walls, so it's something you would only pop when you commit, when your ram has finished drying and the claim is vulnerable.

Both attackers and defenders would have something valuable at stake.

Though I suppose people would only use a single operator to minimize the risk (snipe them with a catapult?).

[SnuggleSnail]

siege alt