Remove Brimstone as Siege Component

[SnuggleSnail]

I'm pretty sure the winner is solely determined by who is able to get the most brimstone

Under ideal conditions, ye. In practice so few people have engaged with siege mechanics that even people you would expect to be competent make really basic mistakes & the current system can actually be pretty punishing for making mistakes, especially as the attacker. I remember sieging freedom last world I made something ~15 catapults, and they made like double or triple that and I didn't lose a single catapult even though they had the archery tower advantage.

For major sieges attackers get a kindof big advantage in that they get to start collecting brimstone before the defenders even know anything is going to happen. It's very balanced out, or moreso super outweighed by the fact every major village is super compartmentalized with curtain walls... So you functionally have to win like 10 consecutive cata fights in a row, while still defending the ram during the not-cata-fighting time period.

For small scale/pleb sieges you gotta factor in incompetency, but also archery towers/catas are low key extremely annoying to deal with, mainly because of randomness. There have been times where I have had a 24h dry ram 29 tiles from somebody's wall, built 6-7 catapults and had them all be lower range than archery towers, and just given up because I didn't want to go to the effort of getting more materials... Especially when it often means your schedule is fucked, and your ram is going to start taking decay hits before it gets to the second or third wall.

I think there are a lot of minor changes that would be a huge improvement to siege, mainly reducing randomness & timers between shots/movements - but it would be a waste. The core issue behind the lack of sieges in haven is a social one. There are like 1,000 players, and everybody knows somebody. Inevitably somebody from both factions will find out, and it'll just turn into bored faction members fighting each other.

This kinda ruins pleb sieges IMO, because neither the attacker nor the defender really has an effect on if they win beyond the cata fight, and that only matters if they're attacking. If one side calls a faction and the other doesn't, the side that didn't call a faction loses. If both sides call a faction it may as well be random for them.

For major sieges, it's basically impossible for the attacker to win vs. large faction willages. Even if their side is stronger generally, the disparity needs to be RETARDED for them to win because they don't get to choose when the fight happens. Obviously the side that's like "hey, everybody show up at X time for an hour during the enemy's off peak" is going to have a higher portion of their guys come than the side that asks "haha everybody be on call to fight at any time of day for the next week".

With the above in mind, I would be pretty against any major changes to siege because I highly doubt they will affect the core issue with siege that is the two-factions-dominate-nobody-else-even-exists paradigm, so it would be a waste of dev time.

[Sevenless]

With the above in mind, I would be pretty against any major changes to siege because I highly doubt they will affect the core issue with siege that is the two-factions-dominate-nobody-else-even-exists paradigm, so it would be a waste of dev time.

That's a good point.

I'd also like to add as a secondary: Due to the fairly binary situation of "you're completely fine" vs "nearly everything you've built is gone" accidentally making sieges too easy will have a devastating effect on the population. Dying isn't nearly as bad as having your village gutted.

I think the current situation is acceptable enough given those two issues. I also don't really miss building brickwalls.

[Zampfeo]

I think there are a lot of minor changes that would be a huge improvement to siege.

Any change has a good chance to be a huge improvement . I'm genuinely interested to hear the details of changes you'd like to see. I don't trust Loftorb to come up with improvements on their own.

As a pleb, I don't necessarily mind that most of our sieges devolve into faction fights. It's pretty exciting to get thrust into such action suddenly. What's disheartening is neither faction is usually interested in the actual siege, so the big fight becomes a distraction and an opportunity for the defending village to destroy rams. The attacking plebs are better off avoiding the fight entirely because they'll need to be healthy to continue the siege after the fight is over and cross their fingers the factions leave in time for them to save their rams.

Preparing and defending a siege as a pleb is extremely difficult because most of us work irl. It can take a week for us to prepare materials. A lot of times we need just as many resources as a faction would because it takes very little effort for a pleb village to make defensive curtain walls. Then, for the actual siege, getting player schedules in order to defend rams for 24+ hours is a tall order. Especially when a lot of our smaller villages are single nationalities in one time zone. Then, after managing all this, it can all end suddenly when the factions decide to come. The defenders don't even need to fight. They just need the attackers distracted long enough to destroy the rams.

I have played other sandbox games where the battle is basically scheduled ahead of time. The attackers pick the day (often sat/sun) and the defenders pick the hour(s) on that day. I would expect that would make factions even more involved, but I don't necessarily see that as a problem (y'all need more reasons to fight anyway) and it would at the very least make sieging more accessible and common.

I'd also like to add as a secondary: Due to the fairly binary situation of "you're completely fine" vs "nearly everything you've built is gone" accidentally making sieges too easy will have a devastating effect on the population. Dying isn't nearly as bad as having your village gutted.

This is true, but I do think in some cases the safety provided by a village gets extremely abused. There are some groups of players that will only fight one sided fights and it's a giant pain in the ass. For example, spending time traveling in a group just to get easy picks off of people hunting alone, but they will run back to their village at any attempt for revenge. So, sieging them becomes the next logical step, which itself rarely becomes a fair fight because factions get called in.

[Sevenless]

I'd also like to add as a secondary: Due to the fairly binary situation of "you're completely fine" vs "nearly everything you've built is gone" accidentally making sieges too easy will have a devastating effect on the population. Dying isn't nearly as bad as having your village gutted.

This is true, but I do think in some cases the safety provided by a village gets extremely abused. There are some groups of players that will only fight one sided fights and it's a giant pain in the ass. For example, spending time traveling in a group just to get easy picks off of people hunting alone, but they will run back to their village at any attempt for revenge. So, sieging them becomes the next logical step, which itself rarely becomes a fair fight because factions get called in.

Realistically speaking, anything that makes raiding a competant village possible (using the absolute best defensive planning) will almost certainly make raiding hermits trivial.

I don't think there's a way around this issue we've been grinding our teeth over for a decade now. Not with how the game works otherwise :/

[SnuggleSnail]

Well, the main thing that makes raiding big willages difficult is compartmentalization and how far the furthest wall is from the vidol. It doesn't feel like sieging one village, it feels like sieging 10 villages consecutively before you achieve anything, and if you lose one of those sieges you lose all progress. In my opinion world 10's system got around that almost completely, and would've been way better to iterate on than the current system. Needed some revisions to be less abuseable, but the base for the system was really good, IMO.

At least late world when you're in the "winning" faction and everybody quit, so nobody or very few people are going to try to gank you it's actually REALLY easy to siege plebs with this system. Late last world whenever I had some time off I would set up rams at 10 or so different bases with scout alts & just not start destroying their catas/archery towers until everybody from that group seemed to be asleep. Worked 9/10 times, and usually the 10th guy wouldn't have enough resources to rly do anything if I started spamming catas with the thousands of materials I bought at market for what is essentially nothing to me. 1-3 hour ram destroy time makes it really hard for plebs to be able to defend themselves in my experience, because it's really reasonable for one guy from your village to port over for 5 minutes and KO some guy who's building an archery tower than leave.

haha to reiterate tho pls don't waste dev time on siege

[Southpaw]

i'd rather die a hundred times than lose my village once

i'd also rather the devs do literally anything other than spending time on mechanics that most of the world doesnt use