Equipment crafting difficulty increaser: Invention

[Sevenless]

With the lightening of permadeath in pvp (leech shenanigans aside), it's been mentioned by a couple people that "Equipment needs to take more effort to make". Right now, equipment is a rather slam bam thank you mam affair, where you take the best quality stuff you can make and slap together new gear. The difficulty in getting gear is, for the most part, achieving high quality not achieving volume. Once you get a new quality height, it's relatively little extra work to print out enough copies of said gear for your soldiers. To address this general concept, I'd like to propose invention, a mechanic where hearthlings create unique blueprints that are limited in use.

Invention desk:

A claimed desk, like a study desk, that each hearthling may use one of. It acts as the focal point for all invention activities.


How to create blueprints:

Invention would work similar to the numen system (at least how I remember it from legacy), by requesting a random set of ingredients although I don't feel quality should be required. However, invention would allow hearthlings to select a category for their invention based off which items they have discovered in the world. This could include cooking and tools as well, not just combat equipment. Once the requested muses are delivered to the desk, a hearthling would have to ponder for a time before a blueprint is created. In order to aid in the concept of "active advancement" which haven can lack at times, additional ingredient sets (randomly generated each time, to make botting or mass farming difficult) could be delivered. Potentially this could increase the number of runs a blueprint receives or the positive RNG factors on the result for creating a more powerful item. These two should probably be mutually exclusive, meaning you can mass produce or create really good items but not both at the same time. For combat equipment, very limited runs seem most appropriate (1-5), while for cooking a single recipe could reasonably produce 100-500 units of food before running out. I'm mentally eyeballing the length per invention to be a bit under 24 hours, so you'd get one go per day (while choosing how much effort to put into it). Hearthlings could choose to reroll the starting ingredients on the first slot, but as soon as the first slot is accepted the desk would be locked until the invention is completed (meaning you'd need to get the next set of items if you wanted to advance it, or just leave it). There could be some concept of scaling rarity of items as well, with rarer forageables/items not showing up in the earliest stages.


What blueprints do:

I think it's important to make blueprints a resource that is effectively timeless. A good blueprint should be good no matter when it is created into a world, be it on day 1 or on day 300 of said world. As such, they should lack quality, but instead provide the base values for a freshly created item. I think for combat gear that % bonuses are going to be required to keep gear attribute/ability bonuses relevant into end game, especially with the current attribute bloat we're seeing (5 months in, 1k in multiple stats not at all unusual). But that doesn't mean regular + ability/attribute bonuses need to be left out, % bonuses would just be the rarer finds. Which abilities/attributes an item can have could be purely random, or could select from a pool of available options.

Example of a good experimental leather armor:

8/1 AC base, +5 surv, +2% agility.

Example of a very rare experimental leather armor:

12/10 AC base, +5 agi, +5% surv, +3% agility.

I don't think it makes sense for the % bonuses to be impacted by quality. If they did, it's not hard to get 4x multipliers on some items which would mean an insane % bonus if anything more than 1-2% was allowed as a base value. It makes me lean towards saying % bonuses are static, since they already benefit from your character's progression by giving more bonus the higher your base is anyway.

As for cooking I'm a bit more uncertain what benefits could be created without putting too much strain on the current system's balancing. Unique buffs from food certainly seem like a possibility. Like the miner's song, but for various activities: The ability to produce more than 1 item per set of inputs per craft action (with different buffs for different activities), or the ability to produce bonus boards when woodcutting. Bonus % quality on food/curios (keeping this away from anything that could influence quality spiralling is my intention). An extremely rare recipe that somehow positively impacts the fate formula for a character would certainly be loved by foragers the whole hearthland over. As for base stats, I'm sure many players would appreciate recipes that are single FEP type giving and would put in the extra effort to get them as a result. Low quality recipes would have low mixed base stats of unrelated groupings (dex + str for example), while better finds would include properly paired stats (str/con/agi) or mid tier buffs, and rare foods would be strong single FEP type foods or the rarer buffs.


Impacts on Trade:

Obviously keeping this concept quality free means that villages the world over will potentially have a revenue source of selling high value finds to larger factions. It's been lamented by at least one or two people that lacking access to good localized resources limits your trade options to fate based items quite significantly.

As an additional thought, the experimental items could require additional "unorthodox" ingredients. Off the top of my head, I would say it makes the most sense to tie this to forageables, since many of them aren't considered particularly valuable in the current system. This could mean that q50 puffball node might actually have use after all, and also increases large faction's dependance on trade somewhat due to there being a huge potential variety (as well as a fluctuating one) of required items for their good gear that they'd be unlikely to be able to self source in all cases. I don't think it makes sense to tie it to items that can be garden potted or grown though, because this just encourages factions to manage a farm for those items due to their quality being so much higher. This of course could mean the introduction of new herbs/flowers/mosses purely aimed at inclusion into the invention system for this purpose if so desired.

[qoonpooka]

I smell a fellow EVE player.

Actually this seems like a solid system, perhaps not as written, but the general idea of making equipment more unique in general would be a very nice addition, I think.

One of my favorite parts of the original SW:G crafting system was that materials had limited spawns with certain product-effecting qualities. The result of this was that crafters had to make trade-offs as materials that were just good up and down the stat bar were exceedingly rare (and often only available for a single 48h window).

I'd love to see some ability of a crafter to put 'english' on the final product, perhaps even through regional material types. Under such a system, locals could produce a certain kind of sword, for example, which was favorable under certain conditions. Materials would sculpt gameplay decisions as well as crafting outcomes, and regional villages and realms could become renowned for 'the most <adjective> <nouns> anywhere,' etc.

all sorts of possibilities are workable if equipment is more one-off as proposed here.

[sMartins]

Yeah I like the general idea too, more unique tools/weapons/equipments is something i'd like to see in the game.

[2d0x]

I apologize if I misunderstood something. I'm exaggerating: in the game you need to add a lot of trash, necessary for a lot of quests, to get the same items in the end, only with gilding, which will initially have a random quality?

I open the window with a relatively large list of available items. I find what I want and run through the quests. I collect a bunch of trash. Waiting a day. The goal is to get the maximum. Chance is small. I'm doing quests until I get what I want. Then I move on to the next thing and everything repeats.

Is it not easier to execute a chain of quests to just get one additional random gilding a la Gilding Leaf? Or a temporary blessing of a thing.

[Sevenless]

This is a framework not a final solution. All numbers/details/what have you are up to the devs/community to tinker with. I'd hope if anything along these lines gets implemented they tinker with the idea for more than a couple hours like I did before writing this

@goon oddly enough I only realized the similarity to eve invention about half way through writing this. The idea sparked with concept of creating limited use cooking recipes while I was farming, and I realized how well that system would translate to equipment and started writing. About part way through I realized it was pretty close to eve invention, although with a lot more variation in the product.

@2d0x I was thinking that this system would be in addition to gilding, not instead of gilding. Which means you could use your special gilding leaf on it, and have the equipment bonuses. Also, it would include bonuses that are much stronger than gilding leaves if it's implemented as suggested due to the +% stat bonuses. And finally due to the potential for increased base AC/damage it gets benefits that don't exist in the current system. Base level equipment will still exist as well, so this is more aimed at end game. As for trash items, we could still use trash items (or items with pretty limited use) that exist ingame already instead. To reference back to Goon, eve actually did this. They implemented entirely new sets of items only used for their version of inventing, but due to the power of invention in that game they became very valuable.

The idea here is that a lot of "getting what you want" will involve trading. Large factions usually have everything they need except for some annoying to collect items. This would change the power dynamic, large factions would probably be better at invention, but the sheer volume of normal players will mean a lot of what they want will need to be obtained via trade. Now that we have things like the CF (or, for future worlds, all the tools needed to create something similar), I think there's few enough barriers to trade that this is reasonable.

In retrospect: I did not include any alt control mechanics, although I'd toss in a "Only subscribed players can use it, 1 invention table per subscribed account" as a hackjob way of preventing factions from firing up 20 accounts per day per player to run as invention batteries.

Also, thanks for the +1s

[2d0x]

...I was thinking that this system would be in addition to gilding, not instead of gilding...

I understood that. But in fact it will be the same gilding (originally random, and then cloned).

...Which means you could use your special gilding leaf on it...

Not a gilded leaf, but a la (like) gilded leaf. I mentioned the gilded leaf only for an example, since a gilded leaf can have different bonuses. And the bonus is pseudo-random: http://ringofbrodgar.com/wiki/Gilding_Leaf

... Also, it would include bonuses that are much stronger than gilding leaves if it's implemented as suggested due to the +% stat bonuses...

But it will still be the same gilding in its essence.

You want to add unique trademarks on items that give additional bonuses. Is not that right?

[Sevenless]

You want to add unique trademarks on items that give additional bonuses. Is not that right?

That's a good summary of the concept.

Sorry, I do my best but sometimes I find it hard to understand you. Maybe I should ask more questions to clarify rather than trying to answer when I'm slightly confused by what you mean. Thanks for showing interest either way

[2d0x]

Sorry, I do my best but sometimes I find it hard to understand you...

The problem is that I don't know English.

[Sevenless]

Sorry, I do my best but sometimes I find it hard to understand you...

The problem is that I don't know English.

I know english isn't your first language, I wasn't making fun of you. I just don't like pointing it out to people because I feel it's rude y'know?

Either way we're both doing our best at the whole communicating thing.

[2d0x]

...I wasn't making fun of you...

I did not even think of such an option O_o In any case, it does not bother me. I just explained that not everything I read is clear to me and I do not know how to clearly express my thoughts in a foreign language.