Some thoughts on Siege

[warrri]

But as Avu said, the problem is fundamental here. Once the wall falls it is game over. There is no coming back when your 10th generation livestock, raised for weeks/months, is killed. When your spiraled tools are destroyed. When your character dies.

What kind of a person will kill another player, knowing fully that they will lose their entire progress and most probably quit the game altogether? Is this your core audience you want to attract?

So remove permanent death entirely?

I think it is a problem that you cannot establish law and order presently. If you wish to avoid punishment for a crime you can just vault it up and hide in perfect safety. Is this desirable?

The punishment right now is that the char is either useless in that time or you take the risk and go out with scents active at which point siege is irrelevant. You need to force out the character during his scented time rather than trying to break into vaults (or towns). No one is gonna bother sieging you if they find you raided a hermit camp and the hermits certainly wont bother doing something about you because they will be dead most likely and quit the game.

Forcing the char out by making towns extremely vulnerable and open to griefing is not the right way. The problem is, anything i think about can be exploited by alts and bots.

Regardless, the siege system shouldnt be taken as standalone but rather in conjunction with the kingdom system. New type of walls (walkable) and watch towers and all that shit.

[overtyped]

Oh, and yes, i can be invulnerable with a single bot, which login every 4 hours to take few bricks from stockpile and repair everything.

? he said ram does 2 dmg every 6 hours, you repair 1 dmg every 4 hour. How is that invulnerable?

So essentially a ram does 0.33 damage per hour while the wall is healing 0.25 every second. I think Archaeologist (Did I get it right this time?) is meaning that you need to be fairly precise about the ram time so you can damage it when it is off cooldown. Meaning you need to have less than a 25% margin of error or the ram damage will not exceed the ram healing speed. But this is assuming that the attack is not botting while the defender is.

However, these number is unimportant since we are talking about concept at the moment and if the concept is sound, then we can apply the formulas and numbers to try to balance it.

So remove permanent death entirely?

I think it is a problem that you cannot establish law and order presently. If you wish to avoid punishment for a crime you can just vault it up and hide in perfect safety. Is this desirable?

The issue is that many people believe that killing the culprit is the best solution and is used casually in a game where people are aware how much of a set-back it will cause the other person. How would you encourage other means especially when it is with rival or even opposing factions when killing is actually favorable.

There is no way to make killing less favorable, the only good way I can see, is to make it easier to get back in the game.

[jorb]

Regardless, the siege system shouldnt be taken as standalone but rather in conjunction with the kingdom system. New type of walls (walkable) and watch towers and all that shit.

What about your fundamental argument do those things change, though?

[LadyGoo]

What kind of a person will kill another player, knowing fully that they will lose their entire progress and most probably quit the game altogether? Is this your core audience you want to attract?

Like... everyone? Even Sodomites (quiet, peaceful, tiny village) went to kill Zox and destroy his stuff, perfectly knowing he would quit afterwards.

As for the siege&PvP systems suggested:
1. I guess there will be no Kingdoms? Therefore, the notion of hermits being useful is lost. This is extremely important. Right now hermits have almost no value for greater factions. I would say, that there should be more options for interactions with the defeated players (capturing for ransom, maybe enslaving, stealing a bit of game time which would work only if the donor is still alive and etc.);
2. Perhaps, catapults should be used for the wall&player damage at a more frequent rate. It could also be for preventing the defenders from repairing the walls.
3. The siege window should be shorter. It should not be a continuous 12 hours long act. If the attackers will fail to destroy the walls within a limited set of time (maybe catapults get damaged as being used), they have to leave and try later + somehow stop the wall reparations until the next phase (when the siege window opens again). Sieges used to be continuous and long historically. Maybe the catapults cost should be great, so that raiding a smaller-scale villages would be too much time-consuming and worthless.

[jorb]

1. I guess there will be no Kingdoms?

That idea is still on the table. This is not either or.

[loftar]

Forcing the char out by making towns extremely vulnerable and open to griefing is not the right way.

Certainly, the goal is by no means to "make towns extremely vulnerable".

[warrri]

Regardless, the siege system shouldnt be taken as standalone but rather in conjunction with the kingdom system. New type of walls (walkable) and watch towers and all that shit.

What about your fundamental argument do those things change, though?

What the goal is and what the balance is between attacker and defender. As i said, the goal shouldnt be to break into a town to destroy everything they have built in months within an hour and this shouldnt be possible if the town is active. That it''s possible -as a side effect- to be "perfectly" safe inside the walls after commiting a crime is something im okay with. It should have a real downside to staying inside for that time period though and the char should be heavily encouraged to go out during that time.

[Potjeh]

You guys still seem to be stuck on this concept of wall breach being the victory condition after which you just raze everything to the ground. What's really needed is to make the effort required to destroy shit equal to the effort that was required to build it. Walls would then be just for protecting actual characters, and in any siege system should give you enough warning to avoid logging in your crafter and log in your fighter instead. Well, for the latter we'd need some kind of anti-camping mechanics so attackers can't just sit in your town all day and wait for you to log in. Maybe some kind of defensive towers, or kennels periodically spawning war dogs or something like that.

[venatorvenator]

Anyway on the siege, what if you implemented the concept of supply lines in some way? For example, maintaining a siege requires constant supplies from the attackers, and surviving a siege depends in part on the ability of the target village to survive a lockdown.

So when a siege starts, both village idols get a new interface which pops a random item at random intervals, representing which supplies you need on the front and inside the city - somewhat like the old numen system -, for example: hides, food dishes, bone glue, common metal bars, ropes, and so on, which would need to be arranged and spent on the siege effort. The required quality for the supply gradually goes up, until one side has to give up, or is unable to continue. And this would be used as a variable to determine wall/ram repair times, thus influencing the conflict directly.

I think this would add a more direct economic factor to the siege, as one party will starve to death or the other will run out of funds. It would make sieges more engaging among villagers too. And it wouldn't be an exclusively pvp mechanic.

[overtyped]

You guys still seem to be stuck on this concept of wall breach being the victory condition after which you just raze everything to the ground. What's really needed is to make the effort required to destroy shit equal to the effort that was required to build it. Walls would then be just for protecting actual characters, and in any siege system should give you enough warning to avoid logging in your crafter and log in your fighter instead. Well, for the latter we'd need some kind of anti-camping mechanics so attackers can't just sit in your town all day and wait for you to log in. Maybe some kind of defensive towers, or kennels periodically spawning war dogs or something like that.

You had me until kennels.