Invulnerable rams

[Avu]

Before you run along with a flawed idea any further stop and think damnit. The problem is not getting 1 individual to wake up at 4 AM to break the invading ram it's having your entire fighting force wake up at 4AM to defend the dude that is going to destroy said ram because believe it or not the guys that want to take down your town will be there waiting full force ranger bows and all for you to show your noob head out.

[Chakravanti]

As annoying and unpleasantly hateful as Avu is...it's fucking hilarious when you're not the object lesson.

[Potjeh]

It's not 4AM for everyone. Most villages have people from diverse timezones. And even if they don't, they can find allies from different timezones. If they can't, well, small groups are supposed to lose to larger ones. Still, yeah, the attackers are likely to outnumber the defenders, which is why defenders need some force multipliers, stuff like boiling oil, crenelations for archers etc.

Look, let's just ignore if it's done with rams or something else, and go to the bones of this. This is how I think things should be:
- It should be possible to force a battle upon an enemy village, if they don't show up it's a walkover and the village is up for grabs.
- The warning period needs to be reasonable for both the target and the attacker.
- Defender should have the advantage of fortifications, attacker should have the advantage of choosing the time. The latter has room for some flexibility, for example the defender could push the battle a couple of hours forward or backward, or the attacker could offer a couple of sufficiently different time slots and the defender would have to pick one.

Simplest way is to just make the battle an explicit action in the game, ie something declared by authority figures of one village against another village. Make it cost authority, so it can't be spammed. Rams could be made buildable only during battle, so they wouldn't need to dry any more and wouldn't break from movement. That messes up the need to use rams for destroying own walls, so those should be destructible by hand (0 soak if you have vandalism rights on the wall).

[Gauteamus]

How would the war declaration action remove the necessity for the ram drying period? Would the war declaration take a certain amount of time to activate? So you cannot build a ram until, say 24 hours after the declaration of war?

[overtyped]

I like the declaration of war idea but for people who are a small band that cant keep together a village claim it would be harder on them and also to hermits who want to play the role of thief. Theyd be unable to attack a town even if they would be wlling to stay there for the full drying time. It would just be a useless mechanic that would just be there to annoy.

[DatOneGuy]

It would be nice if you could not only declare war but also have 'rules' and going outside of those rules (and getting caught) constitutes the other side getting some sort of item like torn declaration of war to show to others that you can't hold your word.