by tremlingrendel » Tue Aug 06, 2013 9:11 am
Seeing as how it was revived, my thoughts on such a system:
- Change the system for how walls are constructed, as a four-tier system where you have to build all four wall types, upgrading the least effective to the most effective (Pole->Earth->Palisade->Wall). Require Carpentry for Poles, Stone-Working for Earth, Yeomanry for Palisade, and Masonry for Wall.
- Each piece of the wall has to be constructed from it's lowest grade first (the scaffolding), all the way up to the highest (the foundations, the supports, and then finally the many layers of beef).
- Apply new, more expensive costs to construct each of the four:
-- Sticks and String for Pole
-- Stone, Water, and Dirt for Earth
-- Blocks, Glue, Leather, and Rope for Palisade
-- Brick, "Mortar", Boards, Iron, and Steel for Walls
- Change the effectiveness of the walls altogether, where Poles have slightly better defense, Stone and Palisades split a large range of defense between them, and Brick remains the only type that requires rams.
- Each tier decays into it's next lowest tier, requiring more time to successfully smash a section of wall down, for you have to break every barrier (though each barrier is obviously easier than the one before).
Now, my favorite bit where I toss out the present meta and propose ideas that stretch the game-play beyond it's current state of development in an effort to make the game immensely more difficult to play in the future (or "more fun" as I would say):
- Have barriers track a quality rating that determines their effectiveness. An extremely high-quality earth wall could potentially hold better than a shoddy-quality brick one. Though the brick one still holds the advantage of requiring a ram, a ram that easily destroys the brick wall may struggle with the high-quality earth wall.
- Barriers decay over time, and from assault, and have to be repaired. However, they have a "Current Quality" that decreases over time/damage and "Max Quality" that was set when constructed. You require materials that are of equal/greater quality than the max quality to repair a high-quality barrier completely, otherwise, you can only repair it up the quality of the materials you are using.
- Barriers can have their quality upgraded to a modified value based on the initial starting Max Quality, as long as you have appropriately high-quality materials to do so. So, a Q20 Palisade could be upgraded up to a Q30 Palisade, for example. To upgrade it further, it would have to be scraped and reconstructed from the beginning with better materials.