Take out the "sprucecap penalty" entirely and war would be interesting. Ideally, if you tweaked the system around death being less penalizing to non-warrior (I've been talked down from not penalizing, at least the death wound could be actively worked on so no one could say the game was unplayable for them) it shouldn't be the end of the world for a beginner. If the penalties were % base, and something on the order of 20% for non-combat stats a newbie could continue to function despite death, while a developed character would need to care about it.
That said, to make war less abusable I'd think we'd need to add in border length penalties (encouraging rounder kingdoms instead of kingdom snakes), and only being able to declare war on kingdoms "touching" your border cairns. Aggressive kingdoms would obviously expand out to declare war on neighbours, but there should be some limit to how much they can snake.
dafels wrote:Sevenless wrote: However, permadeath pvp makes haven pvp both appealing only to a notably small niche, and also an activity that can't be engaged in frequently due to the costs of preparation time.
This game will never succeed to have decent amount of players until a balance between death penalty / stat grind and pvp is not found, pvp is locked to only small part of community right now that can play more than few hours every day and grind like an autist. But is a important feature like in every sandbox/mmorpg game. Permadeath is too hardcore for most of the community to handle, but it also brings some meaning in death. I think it brings more bad to the game player count, pvp activity wise, than good.
I know quite a few people think this (types that tend to keep quieter since pvpers dominate the forums usually), but do you think this proposed system offers that? What flaws do you see?
I don't think we could simply remove permadeath without replacing it. Which is why "lets try not permadeath" needs more conversation.