Infiltration/theft/sabotage

[Sollar]

Re: Game Development: Castles in the Sand

Postby loftar » Thu Nov 12, 2015 2:55 am

because claim+gate provides total safety

Is this complaint intended to say "it's impossible to infiltrate a village anymore"? Because it's certainly not "total safety", since you can still bash the wall as you've always been able to.

In that case, please feel free to start a thread in C&I discussing possible and reasonable infiltration mechanics.

The post above in the latest patch notes got me to start this thread.

So as you all know, due to the latest patch, infiltrating an alt into a village is no longer an option to have him open the gates and hand in the city. Personally I love this change, since it was a filthy techique anyway, and did a lot of damage to the social part of the game. Factions and villages becoming a closed circle, everyone suspecting every other person of treason, hermits and new players not being accepted into villages, and so on. The punishment on having an infiltrator inside was also to harsh for the infiltrated part with little to no risk for the infiltrator - see Rlyeh - that village is no more.

Still, the option to have an alt infiltrated into another village is still viable, with a little less damage for the faction being infiltrated and a little more risk to the infiltrator. You can still spy on their development and playing schedule. As an infiltrator - if you are the only player logged in, no one is stopping you to hand over cupboards full of loot to your allys outside of the walls, and then disappear into the night (Not without therisk of being caught - but hey - that's the life of a thief/spy)

Finnally - the idea I had and made this whole post for - The new visitor mechanic could make us of a somewhat useless aspects of the game - Stealth/Charisma. Since we already have stealth, I wonder if the devs can implement a way so that a character with high enough stealth, can go ahead and steal stuff from visited claims, with the risk of course of being caught and killed on the spot.

I have a lot of ideas around this topic -
- The thief would leave scents for the high enough perception rangers to find
- For a theft to be succesfull the thief should have a higher stealth value than the Lawspeaker or Claim owner Charisma - this way charisma becomes a usefull stat.
- When stealing, there should be a visual specific animation on the thief, so that everyone seeing the act could sound the alarm, stop the theft, this should stop thieves on acting in everyone sight.
- After stealing, while carrying stolen items, the thief could have a visible icon over the head or portrait, visible only to the characters with higher perception than the thief's stealth value. This could make perception a nice stat to raise for the village guards, while having the thief to plan carefully on his escape plan.
- High enough stealth and strength could allow the thief to destroy stuff around when no one is looking - hence turning the thief into a saboteour.

There are I think interesting ideas around this mechanic. I'd like to know eveyones opinion about it - especially the devs.