Some thoughts on Siege

[Phaen]

I support protracted sieges, but if the defenders are allowed to make constructions, I fear that while the attacker is whittling away at a wall, the defender might have enough time to build a new one immediately behind it. Jorb mentioned splash damage as a way to counter this but it also might be interesting if there existed a siege object that could somehow prevent or slow constructions.

[Satharis]

Diplomacy and established law and order make no sense, since you reveal your position and make yourself vulnerable. Even if you wanted to protect your neighbours from random raiders, you won't do it because that'd just paint a giant target on your forehead. Not to mention the fact that you most probably don't have the muscle to do anything anyway. In old haven there at least was the real risk of a big faction having a brick basher who would breach your vault and kill you if you had scents on.

Maybe the threat of siege can be that muscle, who knows. But I think it should be counterbalanced with systems to support diplomacy and actual non-violent interaction between factions. Truces, white flags, surrender and capitulation. When you overpower an enemy, do you always need to murder them?

I would say crime in general isn't very easy to punish right now, if someone from a big brick wall town does something to you as a hermit or a villager just outside the walls, you can't really do a whole lot about it. Scents aren't worth much when so many people are high stat plate geared tanks with brick walled fortresses to retreat to. You can figure out where they are, but short of stalking them like a hawk and having the ability to kill them they're basically free to do as they please.

Seems rather counter-intuitive when we talk about wanting people to trade lately and form relationships and things, as a hermit player especially I don't even risk standing near other players without a wall between me and them. Not worth the risk. I feel like people shouldn't be drawn to the response of "I don't like how that guy is looking at me, better kill him." Perhaps the gameplay should be modified in such a way that people feel less inclined to actually kill people, at best knock them out.

But I agree with the rest of what you said about how the gameplay likely will need some radical change, either to be more short term and pvp focused or to make deaths much less common or give ways to recover from them.

[Avu]

In old haven there at least was the real risk of a big faction having a brick basher who would breach your vault and kill you if you had scents on.

Old haven was a more innocent time. Bots weren't really the norm like they are today. Reimplement that today without taking care of bots and watch how everyone bots their cheese production to basher levels.

[Grable]

I think the core of the idea is not that bad. But as others have stated repeatedly in this thread, I also believe there's two fundamental changes that need to be implemented before a more accessible, fair siege system takes place:

Getting sieged should not result in losing your entire base
I believe that a part of the opening post already addresses this, but it has to be mentioned again. There needs to be a (severe) limitation to how much the attackers can destroy. You could for example do it like this:
Taking in account the suggested time limitation to destroy buildings (can damage a building every x hours) once you 'destroy' the building it would not be erased from the world, but rather it would be put on 'fire'. While the building is on fire, it cannot be damaged by attackers anymore, but the owners can use water on it every x hours(days?) to put out fire. Put water on it a couple more times and the building is now in broken state, at which point it can be repaired back to full functionality. If you fail to put water on fire a certain amount of times, the building is destroyed permanently.

The purpose of this suggestion is that attackers can cause damage/incapacitate the villages production, but not destroy it permanently. So it's still fun for attackers to cause some damage, and it isn't overly frustrating for defenders because they don't lose the building permanently.

In addition to that, that Kingdoms suggestion needs to be implemented. There needs to be other reasons to not want to only completely destroy your enemies. I think Kingdoms is a good idea for that.


Death should be more forgiving
I have always been strongly against alts. To be honest, I have been against permadeath for some time as well, yet I do not harbor any hopes that the game will lose it's permadeath aspect. However that doesn't mean you should lose everything when you die. I understand the need to separate a combat and a crafter character, but you should not be incentivized to build multiple combat alts. In short, rebuilding your lost character should require LESS effort than building a new alt. That way we get rid of this problem as well.

There's been a couple of suggestions regarding this, but I believe the best would be to:
- For the character to suffer a major/critical wound and be incapacitated/unable to participate in combat for x amount of time
- The character dies, but you can rebuild him faster (multiplier to stats/lp until you reach your old values, like overtyped suggested)



Also a personal note

I think one of the points of the diffused time gates would be precisely to provide a diffused inertia to the claim and everything on it, so as to, indeed, move away from single point of failure.

While I like your fancy schmancy talk Jorb, you should consider to be less cryptic at times, at least when there's important talk going on. Not everyone's mother language is english and even then, not everyone might understand what you really meant.

[shubla]

For me these ideas just seem over complicated mechanics to grief players. Build shitton of catapults and then kill all cows from neighbour. like.. Why..

[Thedrah]

you guys are sugarcoating the core fun aspect
losing is fun

although quality grind is not when it involves months

[Potjeh]

So the overall response from players is: "Permadeath, open PvP, high investment - pick just two"

[MightySheep]

Yeah I dont really understand this sudden whining, the has always been a high risk high reward game, enemies getting into your base was always basically game over for the victim.

Until now it was always just a case of getting away with a lucky ram or backstabbing from within, which are far more lame ways to lose all your shit than if a proper siege system was implemented, so why the complaints?

Can we just focus on how best to implement it rather than crying that it shouldn't be implemented because it might scare people away?

Personally I think the best system would be one where players can constantly fire catapults with no hour long delays, but each AoE (to prevent wall stacking) hit does a tiny % of damage so the attack takes a very long time regardless, and all defending villagers which are online should be notified with an alert in village chat when the walls are hit, so they can arrive to defend/repair, but I dont think 1 villager should be able to out-repair 3+ catapults. Also the catapults themselves should be a big investment of about 10 hardened leather. If raiding was like this then it wouldn't be a common event like simply placing a ram, it would have to be an organized and calculated attack otherwise it would be easily repelled and be a total waste of time.

I think catapult accuracy should depend on perception and have a min strength of like 200 to use it. The defenders repairing skill should scale off something like survival in order to prevent alt abuse, defenders should also be vulnerable to catapult damage.

Raiding should take a lot of effort on the part of the attacker and not be a simple waiting game. The loot needs to be earned.

[Avu]

[quote="MightySheep"][/quote]

Dunno man maybe people look at the dwindling numbers the complete lack of hermits and noobs left and think maybe I don't really want to play alone. Once I've beaten everyone what's the point of the game.

[MightySheep]

dwindling numbers is because this game sucks and it is overpriced, dont confuse the issues here

if you want to talk about noobs and hermits then they are already vulnerable to palibashers and mass murderers either way, this topic isnt really changing that