Game Development: Clay & Some fixes

[Grog]

i even get less than you (full nature)

[Sarge]

K, so that must be it then, thanks.

[KillerofLawyers]

Making and handling mortar with bare hands is not a very good idea. And if there's no mortar, you can quite simply apart the wall without any walls.

A little mortar's never hurt me. But fine. Use a trowel, and then try and bash the wall down with said trowel. A brick wall is significantly harder to destroy than it is to assemble.

1. It can be assembled in small parts.
2. Mortar allows it to take advantage of hydraulic processes.
3. Even with out mortar, such as a stone wall made of large stones, the piece by piece construction allows gravity to eventually secure the wall, making it harder to take apart. (Although you can always disassemble it stone by stone.)

The things we build are usually easier going up than coming down.

[Potjeh]

If you handle lime with bare hands all day it's going to eat your skin.

But the whole point is that the whole "bare hands" thing is a really shoddy strawman. We have picks, you know.

[KillerofLawyers]

I'd still rather spend my time laying bricks for a few days than furiously trying to take a pick axe to a structural brick wall. You're not just talking about a facade of bricks like we use on modern houses. You're talking about thick heavy brick walls, probably filled in with rubble like you'd see on a castle.

And it's not a straw man. A pick only adds 20 str. The majority of the damage as it is modeled is still brute strength. The entire concept that you can just easily tear down a wall after it's been finished and set is just silly. I've already listed that you have the compression of the entire structure from gravity and the setting mortar working against you.

Although this brings a good point. Walls could have a curing time, in which they are easier to dismantle. Palisades, of course, wouldn't have this time as they use nails instead of mortar.

[Squidgy]

Correction: It's sqrt(x)+2 damage.

[Zamte]

Alternatively, the no soak on objects owned by the player (except in my opinion you should only be able to do it on your own claim or on land you have vandalism rights to, not on anything unclaimed) is a very nice option, because it'll also allow anybody who has a claim to have mastery over it.
...
Anybody who lived in the city could dismantle it piece by piece.

I can imagine, how medieval-age people build a brick wall around their town and place a big red "Dismantle" button on every section...

Guys, have you ever seen a real castle wall?
The one that is supposed to stop an attacking army with battering rams and such?
Something like this?


Can you dismantle it with bare hands?

Same with palisades:

Typical construction consisted of small or mid sized trunks of trees aligned vertically, with no spacing in between.
The trunks would be sharpened or pointed at the top end, and be driven deep into the ground on the other end.
They would sometimes be reinforced with additional construction.
As a defensive structure, palisades were often used in conjunction with earthworks.

Guys, just accept it.
One man cannot destroy such thing with bare hands.
Think before you build walls - it saves a lot of time later!

Yes, you can disassemble palisade walls. Those styles of walls were still in use in forts in the US even in the 1800s. Many of them have been dismantled, moved, and replaced elsewhere. The same can be said for some European castles. I never said it should be easy to dismantle it, just that it should be possible. Within the safety of the walls there's no reason it could not be dismantled. I never even said bare hands.

Overall the point is, from a gameplay perspective, this crap doesn't work. The reason grief walls are so popular is because they're so bloody easy to build and so bloody hard to remove. There needs to be some sort of distinction between owner and enemy which allows the owner to dismantle wall sections. This already has the drawbacks of costing you the build materials (I don't intend for any to be given back) and the loss of the safety the wall might provide.

Even if they just annuled the soak value and halved the stamina cost of demolition for the owner/person with vandalism rights, it'd be much much better. The main problem I have with using the ram is the stupid time commitment. Before this buff to walls, each section took me 3 stamina bars, and roughly 10 minutes, WITH four people, all with ~100 strength each. Now that damage is nerfed, walls are buffed, and I still have a couple dozen wall sections to destroy (That were all grief walls and not built by me, if I must remind you). Even if we assume 20 minutes and 24 sections, we're talking about 8 hours of time purely spent watching an hourglass and my stamina bar empty. A lot of time commitment is fine for somebody trying to break in to steal/take over/murder people, however such a requirement for somebody to simply clean up their own property is just silly.

One thing I like about this game is, the "artificial difficulty", also known as, stupid busywork being masqueraded as "hard", is kept to a minimum. The game is fun, and somewhat quick, and things are genuinely challenging. The idea of having to spend 8 hours gaining a level in most games causes me to sigh and want to stop playing such a grind-based game, let alone to bring down a few walls so I can use the space they occupy. Please do not start down this road of adding stupid unwarranted time sinks to try to make people feel overwhelmed.

[springyb]

"You can't use a stone axe to break down wooden palisades you build out of parts of a tree you chopped down yourself with no trouble! That's not realistic!"

Come on now.

[KillerofLawyers]

You can, but it's slow. A tree is a free standing pole rooted in the ground. A palisade is a number of poles, closely together and sharing support. You don't have to chop all the way through a tree to get it to fall, but you would probably have to hack through one pole twice on a palisade to get an opening of any sort you could get through.

Edit: That said, I do wish that it was easier to fix mistakes.

[Granger]

Last time i checked this was a game.

Should it become to much hazzle to do stuff in it compared to RealLife (tm) then i (and i think quite some more) will go and play that instead.

So there should be a way for a village lawspeaker to take down structures without having to resort to rams, a handfull of people who have to be online at the same time and some days waiting time.

As for the problem with village placement to conquer claims the authority objects should be changed like the following:

Village should only be foundable (idol can be build though) as long as all owners of claims overlapped by the new village are present in the process.
Banners and Statues should only be placeable where their influence dosn't overlap claims of people who are not village members.

Personal claim stakes will need to be destructible to stop village griefing by restricting it with claims, here is where the rams would have to come in to stop random joe from declaiming other people with pickaxe and some str. In case a stake is destroyed the LP bound in it should be returned to the avatar owning it.

Discuss this please.