Combat consequences

Thoughts on the further development of Haven & Hearth? Feel free to opine!

Combat consequences

Postby venatorvenator » Tue Aug 04, 2015 11:08 pm

Medieval wars were risky and costly - villages had to supply armies with essential food and working population, and defeat meant wasted resources and dead villagers. Haven combat, on the other hand, is trivial. Even if your character dies, it can inherit most of the ancestor's LP, and the village's economy is left unharmed. Armors don't have to be repaired after battle, weapons never decay, and mutilated members are always heal.

My suggestion is that combat is turned into a riskier gamble, with much more stuff at stake. When a character is killed, its village could lose a large amount of authority. Upon reaching zero, the village idol is automatically destroyed. Or maybe all other villagers would lose a % of their stats. It's just a general idea. Aside from the collective risk, the personal risk of losing LP could be enhanced. If LP inheritance is removed, the stakes are higher when you enter combat, even with alt abuse.
To limit use of alt villages to circumvent this consequence, characters with UA and MC above a certain value would regularly drain X authority from the idol it's oathed to, representing the village's support he receives. That means a good fighter would likely to be oathed to a major village to avoid complete auth depletion, and that still keeps the risk of defeat high enough to not disregard.
The winning players should have better rewards as well. Maybe whoever gives the final blow to a village's auth should receive LS of it's idol? Skulls could give much more LP than they do now, or maybe even yield you additional stat points. You could make a forum poll to decide this.

This would, in my mind at least, give a more concrete political weight to pvp combat and also make combat more rare and more meaningful. With the right tweaks it could direct players to form large villages - not a series of villages around the world, but a huge city to support their fighters' upkeep and with enough authority to resist defeat after their fighters are killed in combat.
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Re: Combat consequences

Postby borka » Tue Aug 04, 2015 11:30 pm

yeah we should drop Monarchy and Church in ... for their wars the villagers had to pay and bleed ... "political weight" is diplomatic nature not war ... even if the war mongers try to make us believe different ...

aren't there enough war games out for you guys to play already - so that there's a little game space left for those that don't have fun with that epensing competitious stuff while accepting that it has to be some part but not an important one


War War War War War - sux!!!
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Re: Combat consequences

Postby venatorvenator » Tue Aug 04, 2015 11:44 pm

Yes and that was the point. If there is more at risk when players fight, players will fight less. Improved combat consequences and upkeep for high combat stats are a way to counter a culture of alt abuse for random fights, and it does that while still giving pvpers an incentive to keep fighting among themselves.
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Re: Combat consequences

Postby borka » Tue Aug 04, 2015 11:56 pm

venatorvenator wrote:The winning players should have better rewards as well. Maybe whoever gives the final blow to a village's auth should receive LS of it's idol? Skulls could give much more LP than they do now, or maybe even yield you additional stat points.


To me it sound more like rewarding PVPers ... (what does a farmer get when his carrots hit q100. 300, 500 ... what does an LS get for making his villager living prosper ?!?)

venatorvenator wrote: With the right tweaks it could direct players to form large villages - not a series of villages around the world, but a huge city to support their fighters' upkeep and with enough authority to resist defeat after their fighters are killed in combat.


That's what's already going on with factions ... a city to support their fighters upkeep ...

ven - in all you write in this thread everything circles around fighters ... making them the sun in the universe ... as long there aren't big improvements to the friendly side of the game like better village(rs) management, diplomatic features, keyless gates, trading and such i f*cking give a damn about PVP improvements in any way to be honest...

One last word: we all know about the Brodgars ... and why they had to fail ...
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Re: Combat consequences

Postby venatorvenator » Wed Aug 05, 2015 12:38 am

I try to cover all playstyles with my suggestions, and many people like pvp. Ideally, I would have said "make ua and mc 15x the cost of other skills, make combat gear decay 2q per combat move, and make permanent wounds be a thing", but that would not be well received, and it wouldn't be completely fair either. If there's a penalty for a valid in-game action there has to be a reward, even if I disagree with the action.
My suggestions are more than just about combat. I've pm'ed the devs before with a purely diplomacy management suggestion, my unique skill idea was precisely to stimulate other ways of playing that aren't just grinding, and every time I find an opening I hammer in suggestions to add more content - medicine, season-based farming, custom banners for village identity, custom colored clothes, true permadeath. But fighters are a reality and they also have to be taken into account. In this case, as I said, the changes would make combat harder. Besides, unless the nature of combat is changed first, other new features would just be used to improve combat in some way.

Brodgar is a good example. In my experience minor villages are usually raided by one or two people, not by large groups. According to my post, single-man fights are riskier because it's easier to kill a lone character. And dying in combat means a large penalty to both the village and the player. Then, I think, this would either make some people hesitate before going on noob village murders, or they would have to organize a large party to attack safely. End result is less fighting overall unless you're in a large village.
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Re: Combat consequences

Postby borka » Wed Aug 05, 2015 9:36 pm

venatorvenator wrote: End result is less fighting overall unless you're in a large village.


the state as we already have it -> factions (i wrote it before) with big villages trouble the rest ... game mechanics force it
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Re: Combat consequences

Postby NOOBY93 » Thu Aug 06, 2015 1:09 am

sounds like the wrong person is giving combat suggestions - no offense intended
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Re: Combat consequences

Postby venatorvenator » Thu Aug 06, 2015 4:12 am

Still waiting for a criticism to the idea itself though, and an explanation of why you think it wouldn't work, not opinions.

I do see I used bad phrasing. The base idea is that combat becomes tied to village authority. Fights happen frequently because alts and bots make fighters easy to replace. If combat were dangerous, it would not be so meaningless, and it's its meaninglessness that makes the game revolve around it. No matter how many fighters in the same group die, the village itself won't suffer any damage because of that loss.
I suggested to change that a bit by making X+ ua/mc (over, say, 200) require a proportional authority upkeep; that the fighter's death in combat makes the village lose authority; and that 0 authority causes the idol to collapse instantly and temporarily cap and revert ua and mc of the remaining villagers to X (200). This means skilled fighters would need to be oathed to a large village, and that their death would put that village at risk. This is a real risk, unlike just losing an alt, because such a large village costs time and effort to build and maintain.
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