The Ghost of Christmas Future, II

[Robben_DuMarsch]

Also, never suggest that the limiting factor for being able to utterly destroy a village just be resources. Cost never scales well. What seems expensive to a lone hermit is pitifully cheap to an advanced group. If you make it so woefully expensive that even massive end-game organizations struggle to afford it, no one else will ever be able to. Cost should only ever be there to limit excessive use, engage in realism or immersion, or to guide the player to understanding the game better.

I commend you for this wonderful observation, sir. I agree completely.

Dear Leader,

The proletariat drink many swigs of water from our kuksas in your honor. We honor your gracious commendation bestowed upon glorious comrade, TeckXKnight, for his thesis on the monopoly of production by the bourgeoisie, and why such wealth should be curbed for the glory of the people!

Eminent and Superlative Leader, may we unworthy beings pray for you to explain your thoughts on the equally unjust walls that the cowardly bourgeoisie hide behind, striking viciously from their capitalist hideouts, immune from and all retribution from the righteous peoples of this land?

Thank you,
A Loyal Producer

[LadyV]

@avu I liked some aspects of your suggestions. However prestige should be avoided at all costs. This is not a single player strategy game. It is an MMO with people setting their own goals in an open world. If we define right and wrong then you reverse things the the raider lot lose their voice. Maybe some group want to be bandits and create harm and chaos. In that case the prestige you suggested hurts them. In their minds doing harm raises their prestige.

I a peaceful person myself but I do think others should be able to play their way even if I don't necessarily like it or agree with it.

Your wall defences idea is a possible option for larger groups or kingdoms. I have no problem with that. but walls should only be scalable by someone hold scents of someone they shelter. Otherwise you might as well remove them, they will be breeched on a regular basis.

I do agree on new levels of government or organization. Your feudal titles were nice. However from there we spilt somewhat a you get to heavily favored towards larger groups. Yes they should have benefits and unique things but more balanced I think.

The one thing I might add is if someone is using scents to gt into a walled or fortified place if they deviate from justice those scents become null. ie. you stop to steal from a village or begin committing murder yourself you just nulled your scents you carry because you are not using them for justice merely to enter an area. And as such your ability to wall climb back out is blocked. Now that's more balanced.

[Avu]

stuff

I like the ideas and feel they could actually work and be fun, but it just seems like a completely different game.

That's my feeling about your post too, avu. At least the whole feudal hierarchy part of it. Not sure Loftar and Jorb want such a tightly fit role system for our characters.

My system solves a lot of problems at the same time but it's not like it's a monolithic system all or nothing parts of it I have suggested in the past like wall jumping, arson, natural resource vandalism protection etc. Thing is if you don't change the game and implement incentives for people to behave a more sociable way good will alone will never prevail. It's been pointed out before why real life works differently than a game aka real consequences for your actions and fear of them that keep all but the most psychopathic and desperate away from crime and those are rare and can be relatively easily put away in prison or killed. If you insist a society forms when bad behavior is easier work than constructive socially acceptable one then many will just choose that they'd do the same in real life they knew for sure they could get away with it. So whatever solution is needed HAS to be one that rewards social behavior mechanically rather than in some belief of free market or whatever other larpy ideological system one seems to favor at a given time. If jorb and loftar insist on not doing it then the game will just be as doomed as this current incarnation.

As for point to point fixes you guys seem to come up with only for someone else to immediately point out the flaw of course if you make walls expensive then a hermit will be fucked and the thing is he should be fucked because there is no reason why a tiny thorn in the side of a big organization should be able to hold out against said organization unless of course he can become part of a bigger organization. Some are really enamored with the idea of carving it on your own not living in a comune and my system still allows for them while integrating them into the bigger picture affording them more protection than they would otherwise deserve.

Seems to me we are heading away from instant base distruction why not admit that such binary all or nothing system hurt the game now and that if we would extend the new version to characters as well, like I suggest, it would both d-incentivize alts and make conflict more common at the same time without it ending up in hermits quiting after they lost month's years of work. Do we really need the mental masturbatory aid of permadeath so we can brag how hardcore we are playing permadeath char one slip of a mouse button (hi retarded movement combat) and it's all over? I'm sure there's quite a lot of you left playing who get off on this thing alone because frankly most of the others who don't quit long ago.

@LadyV
My prestige has no bearing on morality merely a power and control measure. If you go around robbing people knocking them around destroying keeps and revenge never comes then your prestige goes up why you do these things doesn't even matter either you're some bandit group or some white knight organization stamping out a hive of villainy. Of course if you get your ass kicked as a result your prestige should get a hit.

As for only scents wall climbing I'm ok with that too but the idea in my system is to make walls irrelevant unless you go for big prestige. It would allow a no wall farm to exist unlike now since yes wall won't matter because their role will be to stop rams and catapults to knock out your keeps and castles and not stop petty crime. An innocent getting knocked out while his structures stand will keep him out of char progression (but maybe still able to do work around their farm) for a few hours while getting scents and going after the criminal will put him out for a lot longer time especially if it's done with siege warfare. Vandalism will not be this instant thing you will have to set fire of stuff an it will be something like 12 hours no damage at all 6 more hours of tiny tiny damage then progressively more until 24 hours at each point before you can repair your shit and put out the fire. Without teleportation and cumulative penalties on item theft the thief will absond with an item or two instead of full inventories of them otherwise when you track him down you'll knock him out for weeks.

[TeckXKnight]

LadyV, they'd still be a necessity. They're already painfully expensive in terms of bricks, steel, and other resources. It'd just mean that there's a higher tax to play the game, and then we're just punishing players for the sake of punishing them.

Why make walls rare? What does that accomplish? If anything, it'd be better to just remove them entirely than to make them rare. At least then everyone is on an "even" playing field. Otherwise we're just exacerbating the issue that large factions of yoloswag#420 who are at the end game will just walk around desolating the world as they'll be the only ones living without consequences. Any attempts at even small amounts of retribution will just lead to your murder and the destruction of your property. That problem is bad enough as it is between brick walls and palisades, why make it worse?

Simply limiting their availability without tackling the underlying issues for why they're necessary only serves to generate a larger power gap between players and limit playability of the game for large numbers of people. It's very easy for us to say that it's good and necessary to stomp and kill every newbie who joins the game but, realistically, some kind of balance must be struck to ensure a healthy world. A healthy world being defined as one that is able to draw in roughly as many new players as old players who quit.

Walls are an issue, lack of walls causes more issues.

And sure, the best way to solve the issue of walls being everywhere is to solve the problems that walls are a band-aid for. When they are no longer a necessity, I promise you that players will not spend 100 man hours in front of a clay spot burning bricks for the fun of it. How do players protect their livelihood, property, and selves against internal and external threats though? That is the question we need to be answering.

[Headshot]

By the way about bridges.

J&L why you dont want to just make it like wall construction?

Starts with cornerpost-like building table called bridge entrance for example, then you just need to gather resourses for main part of bridge(long - more resourses). Finished with second entrance/exit tile.
So this entrance/exit connected, when you activate one (like door in house) you just teleport to next. So this will be just like static building with teleport points.

I hope you get my point of view.

[WaitingforHaven2]

Sorry, I did not bother to read all posts on this issue. Too much text for me right now, so I only read a few sentences in every post. I don't think my crappy ideas have been covered yet (although the general direction was probably subject to debate), so here we go:

I think Jorb and Loftar should introduced local governments on self-defined regions. A region is an area defined by a certain amount of tiles. Maybe you could mark them through boundary stones that players can set up. There must be a minimum requirement of tiles to receive the label and there must also be a maximum amount of tiles to limit land-grabbing. Building boundary stones would require a town plaza / statue or some shit. Hilarious to think that wars could break out due to the placement of these stones.

Anyway, these central towns that hold reign over a region can build "real fortifications", meaning stone walls and the like. They can only be constructed around the immediate area of these town centres. In my vision towns should be stuffy places like real medieval towns and being a townsman should come with the bonus of living in greater safety (among other things). It should be desirable by most players to get a small parcel inside a town compared to living outside in a more laidback but also more dangerous style.

There could also be fences and palisades that other people in the area can build around the usual village plazas / statues / idols (but these are also limited by a max-tiles-requirement per village idol to prevent abuse). They should offer basic protection against invaders from other regions but hardly any protection to the dominating faction in the specific region itself.

Towns need to be besieged to be broken into (meaning severe effort and long-term investment), palisades can be smashed with easy-to-set-up siege engines. Think of rams. These small raids should take a certain amount of time though, so that the local authority can intervene. There should be no drying requirement this time and no "hide and seek" game with rams. Instead notify the central authority of someone building ladders/rams/whatever at village X, so that they can come and kick their ass within an hour or so. If they fail to do that then the villagers are fucked. Being a villager should be less safe than being a townsperson and being a hermit should be less safe than being a villager (no notification to the authority). Also makes sense for the authority to set up militias with other locals in case they can't be around to save people's asses.

Sieges themselves should be decided by the willingness of the townspeople to go out and fight invaders. Invaders will just pop up and build a siege camp,
following up with reinforced walls around that camp and eventually a trebuchet. Preventing this from happening early is in the townsfolks best interest. If
they fail, then parts of their wall can be breached by the trebuchet and the place can be pillaged even when they're not online, possibly resulting in the complete loss of everything they have achieved in the region. Setting up the camp should notify townspeople immediately and take two hours maybe. If they are incapable of stopping the attackers at this point, they should still have another day before the attackers can begin with the next stage. During this one day they can attack the siege camp and raze it (within a hardcap of say one or two hours again). Attacks on the siege camp should notify the invaders (who as a requirement to build the camp should probably also be townsmen from a different region to allow feuding/retaliation), enabling them to teleport in. Ideally a decisive battle occurs now and either the siege is broken or the next stage can start. In this stage the camp can be reinforced with towers, giving the invaders a defensive bonus to the defend their camp (auto-firing towers?). Let this phase take a day again. After that they can build the trebuchet and fuck the town over. Two days should be enough time to somehow deal with this dilemma for both sides (and this is subject to fine-tuning anyway). Maybe they could even reach a more peaceful agreement and just give up land in favor of avoiding a battle. All this also means townsmen should be interested in maintaining a military force of some kind (and happily accept people from all time-zones into their army).

Of course towns must somehow profit from villages through some kind of new resource so that they are interested in defending their area. Make it taxes,
power, whatever. But this is an entirely different topic.

Oh and towns should also be notified about new villages getting erected in their area so that they can prevent it early if they don't want it (better for
everyone involved). Also, if a town falls because of a siege the victors should get an option to completely raze the stone walls and border stones after taking over the idol (and an option to keep it, installing a new ruler for the region). The same thing can be applied to villages, including villages that the local authority decided to remove from their region for whatever reasons. You could also install kingdoms on top of that but that's a different story as well.

This is all awfully specific (and at other times awfully vague). But maybe someone can pick a useful idea from this mess.

[mvgulik]

but vandalism should somehow involve leaving a trail to your production center.

Seems to have the same disposable alt issue as most other back tracking idea's.

(Ones players know the details of something that's in there way, they will find ways around them.)

[mvgulik]

As far as History is concerned, One strong invader/misfit deterred seems to be good local communication network. (information sharing)

So how about some semi global chat, that is limited in range. And extendable by some civil/culture level. (Character/Village/Kingdom/etc)

Probably requires a range-nerving of the know HnH-1 kin features (if included in HnH-2) to prevent it being a general unused feature.

[simimi]

Peoples could make allegence to big villages in the limit of a grind.
Sort of a guilde, the total of each member works could fill a sort of autority that benefits to LP gains of every member.
The problem is to find what activity could miror the real presence and play time of real peoples, so the real question is : what activity cant be bot ?

[painhertz]

Remove Walls, add in lockable doors/storage and a lock picking skill. Probably more to theme for this period than a bunch of walled compounds.....