Realm expansion brainstorm

[Scilly_guy]

With the speed at which DIS expanded once their realm claim was up people have started disussing this mechanic, I have started this thread to have a politically neutral place to discuss game mechanics. If you want to bitch and moan about other players take it somewhere else.

Ideas for realm expansion (unordered):

• Timegate on building cairns
• Increased upkeep on cairns
• Localised resource maintenance for cairns
• Enclaves are destroyed
• Enclaves are ignored
• Enforced dimplomacy
• Soak/hp of cairns are too high, the soak raises too fast.
• The cost of last minute diplomacy should increase with stacks.
• Cost of cairns is too low.
• Naked alts with stones shouldn't be able to repair cairns, it should take at least local resources or a skill.

Timegate: Quite simply a realm can't build a cairn until x amount of time since the last one was built. This is IMO a crude fix, it is (I would assume) easy to implement and adjust however.

Increased upkeep: The easiest solution to implement require no extra coding.

Localised resource maintenance for cairns: Each cairn requires regular attention, this could be seen as a tax, in addition to the upkeep requirement which is automatic across the realm. A cairn would require visiting and some form of tax paid to it, probably in the form of experience, if the local population are happy with the realm then they would be willing to maintain the local cairn, otherwise the government would have to visit and either extract the tax or pay it themselves. Of course this would require much more dev attention and would then need balancing, but provides an increased incentive for interaction between government and the plebs.

Enclaves are destroyed: Any cairn in a portion of a realm that isn't contiguous with the coronation stone quickly decays. This encourages realms to have more than 1 cairn adjacent to each other meaning snaking borders is risky.

Enclaves are ignored: Less drastic than enclaves are destroyed, any cut off portion of a realm doesn't generator authority or receive bonuses/bonii. It would be relatively easy for a realm to repair this and rejoin the disconnected part, without the urgency of the decay from the other suggestion.

Enforced diplomacy: You shouldn't be able to build cairns in a zone where a border was contested, perhaps even further if you use last minute diplomacy.

[ninja_yodeler]

there needs to be way more incentive for kingdoms to actually get people in on the kingdom, rather than making it about claiming the hearthfires of total strangers who are just as much of an enemy as they were before.

Also relevant here. I've no issue with being claimed over, but I feel like the mechanic itself is flawed in that there is no real reason for people other than the initial village to bring people into the actual real, rather than just claim them, and never interact/don't change their hostility outlook. Not that I can think of any suggestions for that, I'm not totally up to date with the mechanics of it all.

[dafels]

viewtopic.php?f=48&t=51526&p=697584&hilit=Realm+Claim#p697584

here are some ideas

[Scilly_guy]

(yes I know I am replying to my own post, I am trying to keep the first post as a summary leaving personal opinions out of it)

Personally I would like to see a more interesting mechanic than the current border expansion (cairns), its a tried and tested system sure, the same as villages, but it leads to tendril like snaking expansion. I realise it would be much harder to program and potentially isn't possible depending on how the game works behind the scenes but perhaps a system of moveable border posts enclosing the realm could be interesting.

Upon creation of the coronation stone 16 border posts appear, these can be lifted and carried but must stay within x tiles of others (this needs more thorough definition, ultimately the border posts should form a loop, perhaps numbering is required). When the posts are in position they can be anchored perhaps requiring some basic materials, metal, rope, stone. If they are not within range then they cannot be anchored. The realms border is calculated between border posts (not sure how possible that part is with server), this is crucial to this implementation as it discourages long thin expansion and favours circular expansion. If someone wishes to challenge the border they can remove the anchors, (by "destroying" the border post) they can now carry the border post away, if taken too far from the other posts, outside of the realm, it will quickly decay and the government can rebuild it at quite low cost. The idea is to encourage enemies to move border posts and anchor them somewhere else rather than destroy them altogether, meaning borders move slowly rather than in leaps and bounds.

In order to grow the realm will need more border posts, these could be limited by time or by authority but the item itself should be cheap to build, requiring minimum materials, however it must be built at the coronation stone and transported to the border to be of any use.

If a border post is removed leaving a gap in the loop the realm receives a debuff to notify government and increased authdrain (that continues to increase until the border is repaired). Time to patrol your borders!

Summary

• Border extends between border posts
• Enclosed area belongs to realm (no snaking)
• Border posts must be within range of one another (further=easier expansion, closer=harder expansion)
• Realms can increase their border post cap through some mechanism
• Border posts are materially cheap to build but must be anchored
• Border posts decay quickly outside of realm
• Gaps in the border cause increased authority drain
• Enemies are better off moving border posts and anchoring them than destroying/removing them

[abt79]

there needs to be way more incentive for kingdoms to actually get people in on the kingdom, rather than making it about claiming the hearthfires of total strangers who are just as much of an enemy as they were before.

Also relevant here. I've no issue with being claimed over, but I feel like the mechanic itself is flawed in that there is no real reason for people other than the initial village to bring people into the actual real, rather than just claim them, and never interact/don't change their hostility outlook. Not that I can think of any suggestions for that, I'm not totally up to date with the mechanics of it all.

Yes

Maybe crimes between realm serfs send scents directly to the authorities? That would at least give some assurance of order within the realm, whether you sent a brigade of dhelms or a bunch of nids against the nasties under your control

[stya]

Some more ideas I had or have read:

You shouldn't be able to build cairns in a zone where a border was contested, perhaps even further if you use last minute diplomacy.
Soak/hp of cairns are too high, the soak raises too fast.
The cost of last minute diplomacy should increase with stacks.
Cost of cairns is too low way too low, if you are a faction and have built a realm, you should be able to put a little more effort in the realm exapnsion?
Naked alts with stones shouldn't be able to repair cairns, it should take at least local resources or a skill.

[isdel]

Something similar to your border post idea: it would work much like roads do. Each cairn is built off of another cairn (the first ones are built off of the coronation stone). The maximum effective length of these chains (in terms of links in the chain) is dependent on the realm's average authority gain. The further down the chain a cairn is, the higher sustained authority gain it requires to be effective, otherwise it starts losing its power, becomes easily challenged and eventually disappears. This makes it fairly easy to claim circular areas, but claiming a tendril across the map would require astronomical amounts of authority generation.

I think it might be slightly more understandable than your suggested border system since it maintains the easily understood system of a banner that claims an area, instead of drawing polygons by dragging points around. However I can't say I'm familiar with the realm metagame since they were added after I stopped playing in W9. Maybe this is a terrible idea, but from an abstract game design perspective, it seems workable to me. It does nothing on its own to encourage cooperation with realmed players, though.

[ricky]

Perhaps a cairn's authority drain should increase the further away from the coronation stone its this would incentivize circular/whole realms instead of snaking to each village.

or alternatively: any non-realm territory within the radius of the coronation stone to the furthest cairn should increase authority drain.

[isdel]

Another thought: radius-based systems (both mine and the one suggested by ricky) encourage placing your coronation stone away from the world edges, since you're limiting your potential expansion area for a given authority level. This may or may not be an undesirable side-effect.

[Granger]

Regarding mechanics for Realm area:

1. Upkeep
The old prayer interface could be recycled for Border Cairns (with some slight changes) and items have to be sacrificed to the Cairn to activate it (=enable to receive Influence) for a certain time, I think an activation time of a RL week would be reasonable. It would ask for 3 different items, the first slot will give double the time, the 2nd the normal amount and the 3rd slot would trigger a reroll of the slots (as there is wouldn't be a button for that). The quality of the sacrificed objects should not matter.

2. Influence
Once per interval (every 4 ingame hours) the Coronatinon Stone would generate a certain amount of influence (most likely tied to the amount of XP 'tax' collected) and radiate this as a wave into the active Border Cairns (or Menhirs/Idols) within it's range (= on the realm area it creates). Cairns can only absorb a certain amount of Influence each wave, they do that till being saturated (=reached max stored Influence) and then radiate any excess further toward eligble (active, not saturated, not having received Influence from this wave) Cairns (etc) on their area. That process is repeated with any Cairns just saturated until no new Cairns are found to project to. In case there isn't enough Influence left in the wave to service all Carins in the current iteration it'll be evenly distributed among them, in case there is exces influence after no firther Cairns are found it'll be credited toward the Real as Authority.

Border Carins will use the stored Influence over time to project Authority onto the area they cover, they should be able to store enough Influence to keep this up for a RL week. Mehirs/Idols use the same mechanic but don't project Influence onward and only have a short term storage for Influence (like 1RL day).

3. Expansion
Building new Border Cairns should only be possible on the area of a saturated Cairn, leading to draining a part of the Influence of that Cairn. Freshly built Cairns should only gain soak when they're activated and have accumulated Influence.

Consequences of this would be:

• Cairns would require upkeep and are no longer 'drop and forget', this would give the rulers the incentive to give realm members (and peons) incentives to do it for them and the incentive to keep them alive.
• Tentacle expansion would give problems when the chain breaks, as the then cut-off portion of the realm wouldn't receive new Influence.
• Expansion would be slowed, both on tentacles (as new Cairns would need to charge up) and on total area (as expansion would require enough Influence being generated).
• More natural feed of authority