Well, I don't think any of my mid-game and opening games would work for you, but one thing I enjoy about this game is meeting new characters. If I meet them from different levels of development, as noobie, as midrange player, as established player the relationships that develop are very different, and this means a whole series of different types of interactions. I suspect you would not enjoy being the settlement noobie however, and would harly see interest in watching the way other people play and their priorities towards you -do they try to help? ignore? exploit? include? and then playing with those same people from a different position -approaching them with a different character, one that for example can meet their needs because of being a rather higher level hunter/farmer, and then comparing how they interact with the second character compared to the first. (The conclusion I have had reinforced from this is that most people are fairly nice to anyone/everyone.)
Another beginning game I enjoy is salvaging from abandoned settlements. That challenge is in part if you can't find it in the pillaged broken pallisades you do with out it. This means doing things like coming up with workarounds for not having any source of strength food. The constraints in this case are artificial because of course all I would have to do is getting hunting and go clobber a few boars, but using my imagination to come up with other ways of getting the str food uses a lot more of my mind than eating all the boar and bear I can lay my hands on.
I once had a little character who had spawned at RoB and decide to salvage a deserted settlement called "Helm's Deep". After a two or three day absence he came back to discover a stone mansion, all his crops removed and the land paved, and the pallisade he had almost finished repairing now sealed against him. He decided against confronting the interlopers. He thought they might not take it amiably!
Another variation I enjoy is constructing things. It's fun designing a settlement in a different way with different priorities, fun playing games like hiding high q fir trees in a wood full of ordinary wild q10 fir trees. It's also fun creating nice looking things like gardens, and mazes and knot gardens and models of the Cerne Abbas giant. But of course the important thing about this creation is to keep moving and not look back, as in a game of griefers and decay, to try to keep anything would mean getting very much tied down to its defense.
Another game I play is being griefer bait, to see if I can entice thieves to enter my claim and do certain things. It's all the funnier if I can track a relatively low level player to his unprotected hearth fire and try to befriend him afterwards. This is going to get harder, not easier now that hearth fires come with names.
One significant advantage to your style of play is that you get to associate with more persistent players. My style of moving on every few weeks means that I have no guarantees that the next set of people I start interacting with are likely to keep playing, where as you kinda can predict that someone who has put 900 hours into their character is likely to log on at some point during the weekend.
And a disadvantage to my style is that I tend to roll up new characters a lot, and there is a different tedium to that first half hour of getting them the skills they need to thrive. What, build another lean-to? But happily once they are launched they are launched and at least it only takes about half a playing session.
by burgingham » Fri Apr 23, 2010 7:54 am That's why I threw the gentle gibe in your direction. Seriously though, there are a lot of other paths in game that do not require you to build a town and then get stuck maintaining it. However they are probably all a lot less competitive paths than you would prefer.
