Some thoughts on Siege

[Kaios]

And so you're what, trying to poke holes in a reasonable idea with random images of vaults in Salem rather than proposing your own solution or improving upon mine?

Description of Trial by Fire on the Salem wiki:

"Construct a Stake to begin conducting a Trial by Fire against an enemy Town and/or Claim. The Trial begins 24 hours (instant if the village is less than a week old) after the Stake has been constructed.
Once constructed, the Stake is impossible to destroy until 4 hours before the Trial begins, (i.e., 20 hours after the Stake was first constructed). If the Stake is destroyed, the Trial ends.
While the Trial is underway, crimes of Waste -- destruction of property -- can be committed against everything under the area of influence of the Stake.
The Stake is a Town specific building and drains your own Town of 20 authority per hour.
NOTE: The Stake projects its entire area of influence forward and to the sides, so make sure that it faces the intended target area."

Now drop everything regarding time-gates, make the stake a movable object (Siege Tower), give the siege tower a static area of influence and decrease the area of influence to a point where it is required to move or build multiple siege towers.

Then discuss on how to improve.

[Kaios]

Perhaps I need to explain my thoughts a little better because you guys really suck at giving constructive criticism and/or feedback.

In any case, I feel quite strongly that the solution to this predicament is to relate siege warfare to claims. I'd also like to state that the only reason I am presenting this suggestion in the form of one that helps to prevent total destruction of a base, or at least make it more difficult, is because the majority of players seem to feel this is large concern. So, Forget the "Trial by Fire" name I am just going to go with Siege Tower.

Let's start from the beginning. You are a raider and you are out and about scouting the lands when you come across an unknown brick walled settlement with what appears to be juicy loot inside. Steel is cooking, a large stockpile of metal bars sits ready for the taking and there might even be a decent silk production going. You decide you want their stuff.

So what do you do first? Well, it would now be impossible to damage the walls or any objects, containers, etc. on their personal or village claim without having access yourself. This means you'll be required to create your own attacking claim which is where the Siege Tower comes in to play. The siege tower could require resources similar to what the recently implemented tower requires, except rather than stone it would likely be made of wood. The only purpose of the siege tower is to create a claim for which you have authority over, thus allowing the attacking party to damage walls and objects. The siege tower is a mobile construction, meaning it can be moved in the same way that a ram can be moved, likely at a similar or slower speed, and it would take its area of influence with it.

The purpose behind the Siege Tower is to create a siege machine that is required to be moved so that the claim covers the portion of the wall you are going to break in to and at that point must be moved inside and throughout the village in order to continue your theft/destruction. This does not mean you still wouldn't be able to attack players as that is related to the visitor debuff. Also, if this were to be linked with the Kingdoms mechanics, depending on who constructs the siege tower, its area of influence would become one that is linked to the attacking party's village. Then, moving the siege tower drains the authority of the attacking party's village until it is destroyed or they run out of authority. This means that Defenders could even move unattended siege towers themselves to drain the authority of a village foolish enough to build the tower and leave it unprotected.

Obviously this suggestion has holes and it is incomplete as I haven't even touched on the actual mechanics to break in to the village such as the ram, or catapults or whatever the hell you guys want, but please give this some thought and consideration and if you have an appropriate response I am eager to hear it.

[Asgaroth22]

stuff

And what if one village built a siege tower, then moved it inside their own walls, and left it there covering the village claim? Unless multiple villages can put up a siege against the same claim, it would be easy to be invulnerable to raiding?
Or the siege tower would drain attacker's authority even if it stood still, and to that extent to prevent it from exploiting. But then, it'd negate the purpose of prolonged sieges, as they'd have to be finished quickly to maintain the attacker's village authority.
But I like the overall idea. Breaking a wall shouldn't let you ravage the whole place. The defenders should have better chances to defend inside their own walls.
My vision of sieging is like that: it should be stretched in time, and interspersed with quick skirmishes to gain more ground. These skirmishes could happen while moving a siege tower, so it would give the attackers the opportunity to quicken the assault, and the defenders to fend it off.

Also, i'd like sieging to have some touch of strategy to it, planning, timing and approach, but I need to think of it more to come with some worthwile ideas.

[Kaios]

And what if one village built a siege tower, then moved it inside their own walls, and left it there covering the village claim? Unless multiple villages can put up a siege against the same claim, it would be easy to be invulnerable to raiding?

A village creating a siege tower over their own claim if implemented the way I suggested would essentially be putting their own village claim on top of itself, it would be redundant and would offer no extra protection. I don't think the siege tower claim would prevent a defender from doing anything on it, it shouldn't even leave scents for defenders to smash the siege tower for example, its only purpose is to allow for damaging a claim not the same as its own.

Or the siege tower would drain attacker's authority even if it stood still, and to that extent to prevent it from exploiting. But then, it'd negate the purpose of prolonged sieges, as they'd have to be finished quickly to maintain the attacker's village authority.

Yeah, I'm still not sure on how this should work. Maybe the siege tower doesn't begin to drain authority until it is actually moved once, then while standing still it has a passive drain rate and moving uses more.

Also, i'd like sieging to have some touch of strategy to it, planning, timing and approach, but I need to think of it more to come with some worthwile ideas.

I agree, but not in the form of time-gates. I don't want to play an RTS game.

[Drevar]

It wouldn't have to be the actual authority that takes damage, but could be a snapshot of the Authority when the siege banner/whatever is placed and the claim targeted. That would allow moles to get recruited into the village and leave right before the siege to undermine the starting Authority, or simply to report when the Authority is lowest.

Once the stat falls to 0 the attacker is victorious and we can move on to whatever "reward" mechanic we would like to see...all gates unlock, timed free loot window, X amount of points to spend on looting or vandalizing, etc.

The primary point is to get away from outright total destruction as both the means and goal.

As someone said before, the devil is in the details. There are layers and layers of mechanics to add for upkeep, multiple sieges on a single claim, active and passive defense, edge cases for personal claims, and on and on.

As to time-gates, yeah I don't like the idea either, aside from perhaps an initial period to negotiate, extort, etc. People can barely manage steel production which has a set and 100% predictable timer. Eve Online has a 24-hr wait time before war is formally started and seems to work well.

[_Gunnar]

I think Kaios idea seems pretty cool, but authority needs to be changed for it to work properly, likely when kingdoms are actually implemented...
At the moment authority costs absolutely nothing, I feel like it should cost actual LP to maintain it like claims, probably, and there should be mechanics to "tax" subjects a certain amount of their lp. So levelling some small place is no longer worth it since you have to, effectively, spend actual LP moving the tower around. And actually razing a large town is pretty expensive, and you only do it to people you hate rather than just for the lulz.

I would say theft should probably still be allowed outside the tower radius so that "raiding" for loot isnt expensive, but we need to be able to nail down certain things like anvils since they are absurdly valuable, possibly. The thing that is no fun is people breaking everything and killing the poor animals.

There is some sort of hoohah in salem about people exploiting the trial by whatevers, but i can't understand most of what those people talk about tbh, maybe someone can explain that.

[Asgaroth22]

Once the stat falls to 0 the attacker is victorious and we can move on to whatever "reward" mechanic we would like to see...all gates unlock, timed free loot window, X amount of points to spend on looting or vandalizing, etc.

The primary point is to get away from outright total destruction as both the means and goal.

This is a sandbox game. Players make what they want of the base devs give us. I think we should be able to raze a base to the ground if we want to, given enough time, resources and will. Certainly not in the way jordancoles did in that recent video, it's unbalanced and exploitable.
The point is to give defenders the possibilty to prevent total destruction by all means possible, not to remove total destruction as a goal.

I would say theft should probably still be allowed outside the tower radius so that "raiding" for loot isnt expensive, but we need to be able to nail down certain things like anvils since they are absurdly valuable, possibly. The thing that is no fun is people breaking everything and killing the poor animals.

Yes, I too think some sort of thieving and minor sabotage (poisoning water/wells/animals etc for debuffs) should work without throwing all resources into an actual siege.

[CMDR_Salient]

The last thing you should inject into haven are game mechanics that don’t really make sense. You can knock out an animal but can't kill it for 4 hours? That's just confusing, and pointless. That should be on the player anyway to protect their animals. You always see these raids where all the animals only have little stick fences around them. Hey here is an idea, use something stronger if you like your animals.

Anyway, If you want a back and forth it should happen outside the walls, not inside the walls.

It’s important to always follow the KISS principle, or else your solution to the perceived problem will be convoluted. To be clear , this is a perceived problem. I’m not entirely convinced there is a problem, which means you will likely create real problems trying to solve this perceived problem…

However, let's say we had a longer back and forth outside the walls. Here’s my thoughts on how that would play out.

First off, we need a new game mechanic for village v village pvp. Lets call it: War. If you build siege equipment near someone else's village wall, you will be required to declare war. Once you do, all members of that village are notified in and out of game. Also a global system msg should appear saying X has declared war on Y. Any allies of Y that see that msg can then start rallying even if all the members of Y are offline.

The second mechanic we will need is a 'war camp'. These should be like temporary pclaims that are very LP expensive to deploy. However you can claim enemy territory temporarily outside their walls to set up defenses around your siege equipment. Any siege equipment inside the warcamp will only take ½ the normal time to prepare. As in a ram will be ready in 12 hours. I know, we are trying to extend sieges, which leads us too..

We need another level of walls. It doesn't matter what it is or called or how it's ordered, let's not derail on how brick should be stronger than stone or some nonsense.

So let's say wood < brick < stone. Stone should be even harder to build than brick in this example. Its a level of wall that likely only villages can deploy. Now, each level of wall should require a higher level of siege weapon to break. Wood = Ram , Brick = Catapult, Stone = Trebuchet. As in a Ram is now worthless against Brick or Stone. Each higher level of siege equipment should take twice as long to ready than the last. 1 day for Ram, 2 for Catapult, 4 for Trebuchet. Those timers can be reduced with a war camp (my thought on this is to help hermits, no one will want to waste LP on war camp for a hermit). So an unprepared village with wood walls can be attacked quickly, also this will promote a lot more early game war. Which is good since there is less to lose early on. Later in the game, you'll need a larger coalition to defend your Trebuchet war camp 24/7 for 2 days. Most wars will be declared friday night, and finished sunday. That gives you time to rally your allies.

Defensively, i think archery towers need to become a thing. If only 1-2 guys of a village are online, they should be able to do something to defend their land. At some point, if you keep adding to this, you’ve essentially created a new game. Might as well go copy something like Stronghold.

Or better yet, work on real problems.. like letting my survival determine if a firebrand goes out quickly or not.