What to do about Vaults

[Koya]

Yeah, I think that removing *all* fast travel (especially travel to idol) would go a long way towards nerfing vaults.

+1

[Valten21]

I like the idea of removing fast travel too. +1.

[Flame]

Only when we'll have another way to travel in game. Horses or a decent pathfinding. Remember.

never remove before fix.

[Potjeh]

How? Those stupid towers will still be limited by the area they need to cover. Big town big area -> fuckton to lose and large number of towers to fit (and fitting towers will be a problem more than likely in a real town while a vault just needs a house and you can put towers wherever you damn please, that is if even towers are limited in number somehow by minimum distance between them or authority or god knows what because if they aren't it's even worse). So how do those towers solve anything? Did I miss info about them or what?

Yeah, it's pretty safe to assume there'd be a minimum distance between them. Then it's a matter of the depth of your defence, and a town will obviously have deeper defence than a vault thanks to it's sheer size.

[Avu]

How will depth alone be desirable when every single breach in a town will put in danger sometimes far more than the simple full tradition life of a fighter alt? One of a time smelters and kilns that can not be reproduced (you know the reasons extreme trade prices, vandalism of nodes etc), loss of high q forests (maybe forever), theft of high q tools death of the actually important crafting characters, destruction of silk industry shit that takes weeks to set up if not more. You may respond with well better protect those too with more depth but sometimes the geography of the place simply does not allow to build extra layers of walls not to mention the material costs the time invested the availability of resources and any number of other aspects that make actually building shit.

I am fairly certain there is no way to balance this aspect without the game finding ways to distinguish between lived in places and simple vaults. Why do I think it's such a big problem? Well it's a matter of how I want to play the game rather of how the game forces me to play it now. I want to be able to be proud of a production center, I want my e-wealth to not be just a liability and a flag of come here and steal and destroy shit while you cowards hide your main towns and simple jump from vault to vault. I want to not be forced to basically be a dick and hunt every other town that is not mine to root out the fags that hide in vaults (sometimes the combat alts never ever even visit a main town). I want to be able to be a "good" guy if that's what I choose to be rather than tiny production centers spread out and ultra low key and an army on the side that goes around attacking everyone allied or not without any way to attach responsibility to the truly important and vulnerable part of the war machine the production centers.

[Potjeh]

The really important stuff will obviously go in the centre. All you could destroy by breaching the perimeter would be some fields and lower grade animals.For a really big town it'd take weeks to get to the sensitive stuff in the centre (provided you can actually get there, which would take an economy stronger than the defenders'), whereas for a tiny vault it'd only be a couple of days.

[Avu]

Seriously weeks? You've seen sodom and pande and I can be fairly certain there is a fat chance in hell you'll get bigger places actually defended and it wouldn't take more than a few days to get to the center of either towers or not. And how would the economy even factor into that? Will the milk I gather every day make stronger towers will any of my crops matter at all for defense will my nice silk production help in any way how about my trees? I don't suppose you're suggesting I load high q logs into my balistae just so I can get fooled into wasting it while the opponent just bluffs with q 10 shit? And again what if the other guys do have a good economy being raiding douchebags doesn't prevent one from having production centers on the side I think RUA made that quite clear. And while they try succeeding or not and get to my goodies and killing my not so high q animals (because apparently I have to be full communistic too and keep best shit only at the center of the town no room for private property since that's obviously a liability) when I try and get back at them what do I find? Oh nothing just the fucking vault.

[Potjeh]

You sure do seem to know a lot of specifics of unimplemented mechanics. Are you actually Jorb's alt account or something?

[Avu]

Just educated guesses from the info we were given. I mean sure I want to be wrong but my basic premise of the game needing to differentiate between lived in and vault places is imho the important shit that needs addressed with any new system otherwise it will be gamed and simple logic tells that a place which only purpose is to hide from scents is inherently a lot less vulnerable than a place that has other requirements and purpose as well.

[Potjeh]

We know nothing of the costs of offence and defence so no educated guesses can be made. I reckon the game could be balanced so you get progressively more defence for your resource investment and progressively less offensive capability. In this scenario there is a certain tipping point below which it's cheaper to siege than to defend and above which the reverse is true. But going just past that point is still not the optimum strategy - as the defender you'll want to move as far away from it as possible in order to make it prohibitively expensive to siege you. Tiny vaults on the other hand would end up being a net loss for the defender. Especially if the attacker can actually take them over, which IMO is a must-have feature. And sure, you could still build one giant vault for your HFs and keep your production somewhere else, but that just means your production will have flimsy defences and will likely get destroyed by someone completely unrelated to whoever it is you're fighting.