by MrBunzy » Sun Jan 20, 2019 6:28 am The main problems with the siege system that I have identified are as follows:
THERES NO REASON TO DO IT
One of the biggest problems is that there is very little incentive to siege. Valuables can very easily be ported away, and outlawed characters can sneak out to hide in vaults or other villages. Animals can be moved, most crops grow quickly enough to be harvested before a siege finishes, and even trees can be chopped down and replanted elsewhere with minimal downside. The only real consequence of a siege is that the besieged are forced to spend some time to ferry out valuables and replace mundane objects like cupboards and storage buildings.
The obvious solution, In my opinion, is to create some type of static objects worthy of being destroyed or defended. The closest thing we have to this at the moment is realm buff statues and pave-art, and I think it is no coincidence that all the serious sieges this world has seen have been on villages that had both. One simple solution could be to make workstations like anvils and potters wheels immovable. Top quality anvils are by far the most valuable object in the game (i know of multiple occasions where they were privately traded for hundreds of $) and it is silly that they can be tossed into a boat and ported across the map in an instant. If top q anvils were stationary, some of their value would be transferred to the area around them, and it could actually be meaningful to siege a village to destroy their crazy anvil.
However, under the current metal spiraling system, anvils and forges are actually being replaced constantly as better materials become available. This means that even the stationary forges may as well be movable, because they can just be built in a new location during an upgrade. It would be cool if there was some system in place that forced players to upgrade a pre-existing forge/anvil/whatever rather than simply building a better one and selling/destroying the old. I'm not sure what the best way to go about this is, but i'm sure there are plenty of ways to incentive upgrading over replacing by tweaking the spiraling system, which I believe is already on the agenda for the reset. Maybe structure quality would begin lower than the q of materials used to make it, and q could be improved by putting in additional resources.
Another reason to siege could be to kill an outlawed character. Hearth fire summoning was a thing for quite a while, and I don't see why it could not be so again. iirc summoning was removed because people abused it to teleport around the map or trap people with summoned alts, but abuses like this can pretty easily be patched with small mechanical tweaks. One thing that would need to happen is making a reason for people not to rebuild hearth fires elsewhere while outlawed, but if this could be done then it would be perfectly viable to siege a village just to kill the outlaws living in it. Could just flat out prevent people from building hearth fires while outlawed, or add some nasty wound like 'cowardly guilt' that made a character useless for a long time if they rebuilt hearth while outlawed. Or maybe make it only impossible to remake a hearth if someone makes a nidbane on a scent (new use for desperately neglected nidbanes??). However it was done, hearth fires could easily be made into a fixed point that would incentivize siege.
The obvious solution, In my opinion, is to create some type of static objects worthy of being destroyed or defended. The closest thing we have to this at the moment is realm buff statues and pave-art, and I think it is no coincidence that all the serious sieges this world has seen have been on villages that had both. One simple solution could be to make workstations like anvils and potters wheels immovable. Top quality anvils are by far the most valuable object in the game (i know of multiple occasions where they were privately traded for hundreds of $) and it is silly that they can be tossed into a boat and ported across the map in an instant. If top q anvils were stationary, some of their value would be transferred to the area around them, and it could actually be meaningful to siege a village to destroy their crazy anvil.
However, under the current metal spiraling system, anvils and forges are actually being replaced constantly as better materials become available. This means that even the stationary forges may as well be movable, because they can just be built in a new location during an upgrade. It would be cool if there was some system in place that forced players to upgrade a pre-existing forge/anvil/whatever rather than simply building a better one and selling/destroying the old. I'm not sure what the best way to go about this is, but i'm sure there are plenty of ways to incentive upgrading over replacing by tweaking the spiraling system, which I believe is already on the agenda for the reset. Maybe structure quality would begin lower than the q of materials used to make it, and q could be improved by putting in additional resources.
Another reason to siege could be to kill an outlawed character. Hearth fire summoning was a thing for quite a while, and I don't see why it could not be so again. iirc summoning was removed because people abused it to teleport around the map or trap people with summoned alts, but abuses like this can pretty easily be patched with small mechanical tweaks. One thing that would need to happen is making a reason for people not to rebuild hearth fires elsewhere while outlawed, but if this could be done then it would be perfectly viable to siege a village just to kill the outlaws living in it. Could just flat out prevent people from building hearth fires while outlawed, or add some nasty wound like 'cowardly guilt' that made a character useless for a long time if they rebuilt hearth while outlawed. Or maybe make it only impossible to remake a hearth if someone makes a nidbane on a scent (new use for desperately neglected nidbanes??). However it was done, hearth fires could easily be made into a fixed point that would incentivize siege.
SHIELDS ARE DUMB
The next problem with siege is the shield nonsense. It is overly complex, incredibly un-intuitive, and prone to all sorts of abuses. The blaringly obvious problem, in my opinion, is that there are two types of claims that both generate shields. Why are there two different types? Why is one expanded in a rectangle through LP investment, while the other is expanded in small segments by building cloth banners? Why do they begin at difforent shield sizes and regenerate their shields in different fashions? What purpose are they even supposed to serve?? Having both personal and village claim shields, while also allowing them to overlap, just invites all sorts of abusive shield designs and siege prevention systems. Just pick one to have a shield and take it away from the other, and I think a lot of problems would vanish. P-claims could be nerfed to no longer provide shield, and instead would just force people to leave scents when interacting with them. Then, siege would at most become a siege on a village, and p-claims could be relegated to early game theft deterrents or permission-granting tools for village management. Better yet, merge personal and village claims. Personal claims could perhaps be upgraded into a village claim at some point to allow oathing (or whatever the purpose of village claims is supposed to be?) once sufficient resources were dumped into them. This way, there would not be a significant distinction between multiple types of claims, and there would be no need to worry about claims overlapping.
The unintuitive part about claim shields is how they interact with walls. I cannot count the number of villages I have seen raided because they either did not claim a small section of wall, or did not extend their claim 1 tile past the wall, allowing their shield to be bypassed with cascade. Even just allowing multiple claim shields to interact with the same wall segment can be confusing and annoying. I propose that walls should be constructed just like village authority objects. They should only be build-able on the claim, by members of the claim who have permissions to do so, and should become defunct if they are ever no longer on that claim. If a wall was at some point not covered by its claim, it should become permanently hand bash-able and turn red or something like that. Unclaimed walls should simply not be a thing, and walls should be directly tied to the claim (and claim shield) that they are built on. This would make walls and shields much more straight forward and easy for new players to understand, and prevent pretty much all of the shield abuses that I can think of.
It is also dumb that all shields have identical capacities. Larger claims are intrinsically more difficult to defend than smaller ones, and it makes perfect sense that a shield would be larger for a claim that covers a larger area. More importantly, tiny sized minimal effort claims should not be that hard to siege down, and it should not be as trivially easy as it is to create secure hearth vaults with just a small palisade (its literally a few minutes of effort to set up a 'safe palisade' with all the security of a huge village). Maybe the number of claimed tiles surrounded by walls could be some basis for shield size, up to a cap. It would at least force people to put some time into making longer walls for their disposable hearth vaults. Maybe claims with brick walls around them could have bigger shields. Maybe smaller claims could have much smaller authority pools, forcing the owner to fill them up with curios much more often to maintain presence. This would at least make the vaults require some maintenance. I'm really not sure how to solve the problem completely, but it really is a problem and some effort needs to go into fixing it.
The unintuitive part about claim shields is how they interact with walls. I cannot count the number of villages I have seen raided because they either did not claim a small section of wall, or did not extend their claim 1 tile past the wall, allowing their shield to be bypassed with cascade. Even just allowing multiple claim shields to interact with the same wall segment can be confusing and annoying. I propose that walls should be constructed just like village authority objects. They should only be build-able on the claim, by members of the claim who have permissions to do so, and should become defunct if they are ever no longer on that claim. If a wall was at some point not covered by its claim, it should become permanently hand bash-able and turn red or something like that. Unclaimed walls should simply not be a thing, and walls should be directly tied to the claim (and claim shield) that they are built on. This would make walls and shields much more straight forward and easy for new players to understand, and prevent pretty much all of the shield abuses that I can think of.
It is also dumb that all shields have identical capacities. Larger claims are intrinsically more difficult to defend than smaller ones, and it makes perfect sense that a shield would be larger for a claim that covers a larger area. More importantly, tiny sized minimal effort claims should not be that hard to siege down, and it should not be as trivially easy as it is to create secure hearth vaults with just a small palisade (its literally a few minutes of effort to set up a 'safe palisade' with all the security of a huge village). Maybe the number of claimed tiles surrounded by walls could be some basis for shield size, up to a cap. It would at least force people to put some time into making longer walls for their disposable hearth vaults. Maybe claims with brick walls around them could have bigger shields. Maybe smaller claims could have much smaller authority pools, forcing the owner to fill them up with curios much more often to maintain presence. This would at least make the vaults require some maintenance. I'm really not sure how to solve the problem completely, but it really is a problem and some effort needs to go into fixing it.
NIDBANES ARE CANCER
Seriously. People have said it before but I will walk through it again here. If you can kite a nidbane, either by running on a horse or going up and down stairs in a house, they become trivially easy to kill with no risk involved. If you cannot kite a nidbane and are forced to fight them standing, they are extremely powerful and can fuck up just about anyone (especially people with nice stats because of the way they scale). The fact that a typical pvp combat deck is horrible for fighting nidbanes makes it even worse. During a siege, players who want to contest catapults do not have access to either horses (because rawhide) or houses, and are usually using pvp combat decks, which makes nidbanes extremely dangerous in these situations. As is to be expected, using nidbanes on sieges has become a common strategy. It creates a silly predicament where all players involved are afraid to leave scents for fear of being nidbaned, which incentivizes the use of alts for pretty much everything. It is not fun, and certainly does not involve any aspect of skill or tactics, and is generally cancerous. The obvious solution is to remove nidbanes, because they serve no meaningful purpose in the game, but the devs seem reluntant to do this. Something something sunk cost fallacy over the time they spent implementing them in the first place. Anyway, at the very least nidbanes could use some nerfs so that they are not so devastating during sieges. There could be a timer between when a fetter is built and when the nidbane is spawned, so that it was more difficult to coordinate attacking with nidbanes (maybe a somewhat randomized timer?). There could be a notificaton for players who had nidbanes summoned on them that they were being spooked or something (maybe only if they were summoned within a certain radius, so it would not work for the "intended" nidbanes that were not spawned directly ontop of their target). In conclusion, nidbanes are cancerous, esecially so in sieges, and i hate them please make them go away.
There are plenty of other little problems, but aside from the stuff I mentioned I really don't think siege is so bad. Please feel free to suggest any other critiques on how the problems can be fixed, so hopefully jorbo can get some good ideas for not messing things up with his rework.
