A summary:
Core Concepts highlighted in RED are related to SIEGE
Core Concepts highlighted in BLUE are GAMEPLAY.
SIEGE: Right now people view siege as stale. Honestly, I agree, but for different reasons than I feel most people would agree to. Right now, I feel like people see Sieging as the end-all be-all of the game. Rather than pushing past endgame - because you can't - you're finding other people at endgame and wiping them out, so that you're made comparatively stronger as a faction because competition is dead. That's only silly to me because it speaks only to the limited nature of the game. There's no endgame once you've hit layer five, found or traded for good clay/soil/water, and built a wall and claim, besides interacting with others - But at that point, there's maybe one or two things you could trade for. In that scenario, why trade with them when you can wipe them and take their resources without putting yourself at risk or detriment to trade? Every person with a Rock Crystal source claimed is either not using it, or is not selling the rock crystals, and it shows. They're worth REAL MONEY now. Actual human currency for a regenerating, theoretically infinite resource.
As it is, there's three problems with sieging.
- A1. Sieging takes resources with no other use than sieging. There are unique siege-specific resources that have no use beside that. Brimstone is self-blighting. It is useless on it's own. There's no reason to trade for it, or store it. Rip it out of the ground and throw it at whoever you want in the amount of time it lasts, that's your only choice. It's shoveled from one spot to another. It has one use, and decays.
- B1. Sieging is incentivized over trading because only sieging can be used to take resources that would otherwise sit idle. What's more, you are as safe sieging - generally - as the person inside the wall is defending themselves. Either because you made a wall to defend your rams, or are against their walls and away from their doors. Unless flanked from every side at once in a lockstep that prevents escape, chances are you won't lose anyone if ambushed, just the Siege Equipment.
- C1. Sieging is defense-sided to a high degree. If you are being sieged by more people than are in a settlement, your options are finite and absolute. You have to either leave - denying the siegers resources, or stay and fight - denying yourself your character if you lose, and their characters AND 12 hours time if you win. If you're attacking, you are immediately at more risk than the defenders despite being in a situation where you should radiate risk onto others. You should be the threat. Despite this, as an attacker you will probably get a fraction of the resources in the wall at the time of the siege being initiated because most will be taken out or ALT VAULTED and safe.
So my solution is a three-part. Sieging is a big deal, it'll always be an amazing part of the game and every single siege should always rock both factions involved.
- A2. Give Brimstone and other regional resources more uses. If all of them are freely available for trade, didn't decay, and had more expendable uses then trade would be incentivized quite more than it is now. I would suggest directly that Brimstone - rather than decaying and disappearing entirely - be given a decaying quality instead, and make its quality matter for siege. The same could/should be done for all decaying regional resources. People would trade for high quality brimstone (in a world where it had more uses) and if they didn't use it, it would become bulk garbage that still had some uses, but was useless for siege.
- B2. Incentivize trade in a way that makes players choose it over siege. Player interaction is a risk to some and a tragedy to most. Outside of safe areas (that even then still recommend trading via alts), free trade is a non-compete. It doesn't happen in widespread fashion. It's a risk. Regional resources are the only thing - besides higher quality versions of things everyone has access to - that most people would trade for.
- C2. Sieging, being the ultimatum that it is, should be rewarded. No sieging party should leave empty-handed unless they get a right ass-pounding outside the walls. Alt-vaults should be punished, fleeing at the first sign of trouble should be punished, defending shouldn't be impossible if you're outnumbered, and not all sieges should require the victims to be hard-reset. I'm going to go ahead and just write a paragraph about what I think should be done about this under Gameplay, because there's some unifying stuff that could happen here.
So sieging's problems need some radical solutions. I'll put some stuff here now, and then flesh it out later in Gameplay. First, I think that taking shield damage past a point should disable the A3: Town Charter. Second, I think that once a claim shield is below a certain point, all characters living and standing on that claim should be logged in. Alt vaulting is a blight, sieging is a danger. If you are in an area that should/would be sieged, that place being sieged should put you at risk whether or not you're online. Nidbanes and Forced-Login threaten thieves who have violated the Hearth Law, but if a thief can fight a Nidbane, there is no threat to thieves once scents have expired, and there is no way to threaten a peaceful player or long-ex thief who logs off besides hurting his possessions. See C2. If all of his valuables alt-vaulted, you have literally not hurt this person by blasting his wall down, bashing his house and all his materials and claim with an ARMY. That's stupid. Most other ideas pertaining to this involve me talking about the Town Charter, so I'll do that here in a minute.
GAMEPLAY:
Earlier we talked about dead-ends and why sieging happens. There's no progression once you've got everything - besides quality-grinding - , but the quality grind is capped hard now, and the alternative is siege. Everything could be tied together pretty well with the systems in place to make the quality grind go a little further, but not make it the only thing in the game. Here's a few ideas to loop everything back on itself, and make the quality grind feed into trading feed into the quality grind feed into trading etc.
Citing above A1 and A2, regional resources currently have one use per resource. Citing B1 and B2, Trading currently SUCKS next to siege. The only resource people really use as it spawns is salt, because FEP grinding is the current name of the game. Please note that these ideas are considering the idea that quality of localized resources would go up, and that they would decay to Q10 rather than vanish entirely. They would also decay faster while kept in a player inventory, to demote alt-vaulting them. Everything needs to have a use, and everything needs to be expendable. This is an ENTIRE LIST of ALL LOCAL RESOURCES and their potential uses. It's spoilered for a reason. Prepare to read. If you don't care to, a summary: Make regional resources into more curios, more gear, and give them more general uses. Make some of those uses also decay. Single-use items are self-blighting. Make them feed into the quality grind in ways other than Salt for Food.
An exhaustive list. Certainly those things aren't all that's possible. However, even given all those uses, most people probably still wouldn't trade the resources. If they were easy to dispose of as one or two people, they'd just feed into one settlement's quality grind. So, here's where stuff gets silly. There's no doubt 1000 ways to do what I'm about to suggest, but this is the core of my idea to fix Siege and Trading both at the same time. Here we go. Take a breath. I'll put a summary at the bottom.
A3: Town Charter / Village Heart / Village Registry
A Village Heart/Village Bonfire would be placed at the bottom of every currently existing Village Idol. They would be fueled with brimstone or other regional resources, and slowly start burning authority as well, requiring replenishment. If authority was below the point at which an additional drain would lower the shield, the Village Heart would begin smoldering instead of providing benefits.
A Village Heart would radiate a stat bonus to all village members on the village claim. This stat bonus could raise or lower based on:
- A. The fuel level of the Village Heart - Brimstone/Disposable Localized Resources
- B. The current Siege Status of the Village Heart - Weakened during siege/strengthened during siege based on Trade Status or War Status
- C. The current Trade Status of the Village Heart - Trade stalls being used or goods being exchanged in trade areas fill this meter.
- D. The current War Status of the Village Heart. - Bashed village claims can be linked and drained for their remaining authority / fuel, which fills this meter.
A Village Heart would have four main purposes. These purposes fill in all the holes in Trading and Sieging and bring everything back in on itself.
- A. Stat Bonuses would be provided based on Trade/War status. War Status would increase Strength and Combat Related stats, and Trade Status would increase Int/trade-good related stats. No bar could be maintained over the other - 100% Trade Status would force 0% War Status, and raising the War Status after that point would lower the Trade Status. These bonuses would invert, or change somewhat, if a village were sieged. This would make defense easier statistically, but certain Statuses would make sieging progress faster. This could be done either by lowering the claim shield's damage resist, changing attack windows, or changing max shield health.
- B. The Village Heart could be linked to Regional Resources using a special torch, lit from the Village Heart and walked to the resource. Linking the two would make resources either regenerate more frequently, or regenerate at a higher quality, based on whether or not the resource were trade/war oriented, or the related Village Heart were trade/war oriented. A Trade-oriented village linking a Trade-oriented resource like Salt, would increase the quality of a linked Trade resource. A War-oriented village linking to a War-oriented resource would increase the quality of linked War resources. Inversely, the quantity produced per cycle would increase. Multiple villages could do this to any given resources, allowing the bonuses to stack, and allowing the resources to be more easily acquired, while also hurting those that would directly defend them - if other villages can't link the resource, the resource will regenerate less rapidly. It promotes trade, while also promoting siege, based on what villages value.
- C. The Village Heart, even when destroyed/dormant, could provide Tracking Scents to relevant linked resources, so that resources and their locations could be either shared with other factions, or taken in raids and stolen for gain. This gives every settlement something to lose in the event of Alt Vaulting all their valuables off-site, or using charterstones to flee. You can't take away this source of information, even if you bash it yourself. It also promotes trade specifically over sieging, because if you siege someone and take their scents, there will probably be defenses at any given known localized resource. What's more, this doesn't hurt people who want to link the resources anonymously IE Hermits - they contribute to the well-being of the world, but can not be traced backwards from the resource unless caught harvesting - but that's how it is now anyway.
So there's my idea. A central framework that unifies all the features in the game right now to promote the following:
- Wouldn't hurt hermits. No hermit would contribute enough to these bars alone, even if they had a village claim, to make it easier to siege them. They could still trade for any raised resources, helping non-hermits.
- Would help every village who has ever encountered a Localized Resource. More would be available, trade would benefit them as much as siege would, and alliances would form to raise specific statuses of resources.
- Would add an endgame to work towards as a collective. If given no cap, regionalized resources could be the common core of the quality grind and the quality grind would be more tuned towards trading and sieging rather than sitting in a hole and mining/smelting/farming without interacting with anyone. They're inherently still a time-limited resource in this system, participation simply lowers the time.
- Hurts alt-vaulting because more than currently-harvested resources could be at risk. Also hurts alt-vaulting directly by making them decay in-inventory to lower qualities.
Please, no bully. Any ideas on refinement of this, or specific complaints? Let me hear 'em.
