New Siege Implementation: Siege Claims

[boshaw]

Without accounting for different claims for the siege claim it seems like even having just one extra wall 100 tiles out makes sieging a base only slightly better than current system (factor in sieges being tied to claims and then it's probably worse).

Also in my picture above, how would you fuel the 2nd ram if the defenders built no walls around it for it to attack or is the idea that you would just immediately have to build the third ram and use that @ a quarter of the auth from the 1st one? You could just keep extending this to make attacking even harder by simply building big buffer gaps.

[Kaios]

I've no idea what you're getting stuck on, but how about this?

claims.png

Let the upper-left pclaim be your forward base claim, if you will.

What I'm still confused about is the nature of the siege claim and what Ysh brought up regarding defenders damaging walls and other objects within the siege claim and providing authority to that siege claim. What happens if they get inside and get a key to a gate and now a gate has to be taken down by defenders that also falls under the siege claim, or some other scenario in that regard in which defenders are required to fire at objects under the siege claim. My confusion lies in what will happen during all the possible scenarios because of a claim that is essentially ownerless or has no link to any object that could for example be destroyed by defenders to remove the claim.

[Potjeh]

It's still an unintuitive process because it is entirely rooted in game specific mechanics and has zero analogy to real world processes.

I don't disagree. Feel entirely free to look at the problems we're trying to solve, and suggest something better.

How's about this: adventure->destroy can't be used on claims without permissions, instead you have to burn down whatever it is that you need destroyed. Burning things down requires fuel, which can involve all sorts of resources like wax, lard, linseed oil, bone glue etc. To burn down an object you need fuel of greater quality. Things take time to burn down, and you can put out the fire to save the object. Burning time is proportional to ratio of fuel q and object q, capped at both ends. This way cost of destroying a base scales with investment in the base, so walls can be made weaker since they're no longer the only obstacle to razing the base to the ground. Yeah, it doesn't make sense to burns down some objects like smelters, but do we really want multiple destruction mechanics?

This is more intuitive and representative of the real world, and it's still not something that'd be elegant enough for me to implement if I were Haven's game designer. Yes, coming up with simple and elegant solutions is hard. Much harder than coming up with convoluted systems in fact. But just because it's hard doesn't mean you should give up on it a priori. Stop just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, take a step back and approach the problem analytically. First discuss what are the design goals and desired outcomes of siege system, without considering any concrete mechanics. Think long and hard about implications of those goals and outcomes. Distill them to the absolute minimum. Then and only then try to come up with concrete mechanics. Game design documents are a thing for a reason, maybe you should consider using one. Like, what I'm suggesting here is maybe 30 manminutes of effort. For something as important as siege, you need to invest dozens of manhours at the minimum.

[Granger]

It's still an unintuitive process because it is entirely rooted in game specific mechanics and has zero analogy to real world processes.

I don't disagree. Feel entirely free to look at the problems we're trying to solve, and suggest something better.

The problem you seem to try to solve is that players are not on 24/7.

The problem you should also try to solve, while at it, is that siege (or whatever one calls it) in the history of H&H always had a boolean outcome: either it failed (and nothing of value was lost - or gained, depending on perspective) or it succeeds and the target is completely leveled (plus, most times, the ones leveled take a break till the next world).

Regarding the siege claims: could we get a little more time to think this through (like not pushing this tomorrow, but next week) so we can analyze all the scenarios how this would play out to suggest changes before we end up with something broken because we all overlooked something that in hindsight would have lead to another trip to the drawing board?

[Ardennesss]

Tbh shields were fine, all that needed done was to fix moving banners and pclaims, toggling vandalism, and layering them with alternating vclaim/pclaim/vclaim.

[jorb]

Tbh shields were fine, all that needed done was to fix moving banners and pclaims, toggling vandalism, and layering them with alternating vclaim/pclaim/vclaim.

That is pretty much what this suggestion attempts to do.

[Malke]

Disagree with that, fam. You can build a new wall around your base.

Typically I am not one to bitch but this has fucked us pretty good. We chose a small island because we were just going to fuck around and larp some and stay out of the larger factions way. So I suppose we should just go ahead and accommodate for this change by either breaking all our structures to place a wall inside of our small base or we could potentially bust the walls down on our outer perimeter and open ourselves to the wolves.

Don't feel particularly for or against the changes otherwise. We picked an island because you now they were new and looked cool. Guess that was a mistake.

Here is our island so you can see what I am talking about https://imgur.com/a/o5kHRZR

I don't see any problem with letting us upgrade our walls and give it half soak or something or have the siege claim treat it as a palisade if there was one previously there before the upgrade. Actually I think this is the only game that actively makes you destroy your walls before you can upgrade.

[iamahh]

make siege claims possible only on weekends

QoL would improve, playerbase could last longer with a more wholesome approach to work and study

[Burinn]

make siege claims possible only on weekends

QoL would improve, playerbase could last longer with a more wholesome approach to work and study

I don't think we should punish NEETs just because they're NEETs.

[xdragonlord18]

How's about this: adventure->destroy can't be used on claims without permissions, instead you have to burn down whatever it is that you need destroyed. Burning things down requires fuel, which can involve all sorts of resources like wax, lard, linseed oil, bone glue etc. To burn down an object you need fuel of greater quality. Things take time to burn down, and you can put out the fire to save the object. Burning time is proportional to ratio of fuel q and object q, capped at both ends. This way cost of destroying a base scales with investment in the base, so walls can be made weaker since they're no longer the only obstacle to razing the base to the ground. Yeah, it doesn't make sense to burns down some objects like smelters, but do we really want multiple destruction mechanics?

This is more intuitive and representative of the real world, and it's still not something that'd be elegant enough for me to implement if I were Haven's game designer. Yes, coming up with simple and elegant solutions is hard. Much harder than coming up with convoluted systems in fact. But just because it's hard doesn't mean you should give up on it a priori. Stop just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, take a step back and approach the problem analytically. First discuss what are the design goals and desired outcomes of siege system, without considering any concrete mechanics. Think long and hard about implications of those goals and outcomes. Distill them to the absolute minimum. Then and only then try to come up with concrete mechanics. Game design documents are a thing for a reason, maybe you should consider using one. Like, what I'm suggesting here is maybe 30 manminutes of effort. For something as important as siege, you need to invest dozens of manhours at the minimum.

While I mostly agree with the rest of your advice, this mechanic would not be intuitive. What about fire is not destroying? If I am an ignorant noob and I want to siege someone then I would sooner look at `Destroy` than `Burn`. It's also not how things work in real life. If you're sieging someone you don't burn down their wall like wtf? It also in no way accounts for time requirements. Theres nothing about the description that would imply I cant just go and light every wall I see on fire and hope one of them doesn't log in on time. This is a terrible half baked solution that could use a LOT more man hours. It sounds like you're severely underestimating what it takes to design something well.