Revamped Protection System

[ewlol]

Purpose:
In an attempt to balance walls and raiding, I have created (and am still working on) a new defense/raiding system.

Preface:
Please share your critiques of the system. Most importantly, please bring up thoughtful counter-arguments against this system. Proposing theories which will nullify this system is crucial, so please use honest thoughts and creativity to create situations that may crack and exploit this mechanism. If you think this system is awful and will never have its place in Haven and Hearth, please say so; however, if you think this system is awful yet can be mended into something better, please suggest ways to improve (think of amendments or something...). I believe my ideas are rough and need polishing, and only by community thought can they be smoothed.

Plan:

The Defensive Side

• The current authority pool system is removed from the villages.
• Finite wall soak is totally removed.
• Walls must be created under some sort of claim.
• Village Idols must be easier to create.
• Brick and Palisade walls can be attacked by hand.
• Damage system is maintained as is.
• Ram Cooldown significantly reduced. I think 4 - 6 hours is a good wait.
• Two new pools are added to the village system: The Stability Pool and The Preemptive Protection Pool.
• Village claim is increased normally with statues and banners, but those do not increase the size of the two pools.

The Stability Pool
• The Stability Pool reflects a village's defensive capability.
• Think of this pool as a village's Hard Hit-Points.
• As more actions are completed (i.e. farming, mining (yes this will require Loftar and Jorb extending village claims underground), crafting), not as more LP points are gained, within the village claim of a village, the magnitude of the pool will rise, and must be maintained at that level of "business". The pool does not rise at once, it is gradual.
• The magnitude of the Stability Pool determines the strength of a village's wall system. Essentially, permanent "soak" on a village's walls will scale to this pool. However, the number of tiles of wall within a village claim will effect the soak. If a village has an enormous wall system, yet a small Stability Pool, their walls can be easily broken.
• Raiders can only attack this pool until the Preemptive Protection Pool has been completely depleted.

Notes:
• Palisade Walls are more taxing on the Stability Pool than brick.
• Brickwalls are less taxing on the Stability Pool than palisade.
• To clarify this, if a village has 100 tiles of palisade and another has 100 tiles of brick, and both villages have the same size Stability Pool, the village with Palisade can be broken into easier because the walls are weaker.
• Somehow the size of a village's claim must also play a part in the strength of the walls. There should be some "golden ratio" between claim size and wall size.

The Preemptive Protection Pool
• The Preemptive Protection Pool (I will refer to it as the PP Pool, pun intended) reflects a village's immediate defensive capabilities.
• The PP Pool is essentially a village's Soft Hit-Points.
• The PP Pool is based on the "business" of a village in the last week and the stats of a village's members that performed the activities in the village.
• Attacks against a village must first penetrate the PP Pool.
• Raiders attack the pool by killing village members and attempting to ram walls.
• Once penetrated and depleted, the PP Pool will open the Stability Pool up for raiders.
• Once the Stability Pool is exposed, the raiders can now attempt to break a wall.
• The PP Pool regains itself each week.

Notes:
• The PP Pool gives a freshly built village an immediate defense against raiders.

Goals of this Defensive System:
• Nullification of Hearth Vaults. If hearth vault does not have active villagers doing things within its claim, it can be very easily broken into.
• Indirectly making the size of a village's walls and its claim dependent on the number of active members (a small village would not want a huge claim/wall)
• Differentiating the two types of walls.
• Providing the village with a benefit for active members.
• Villages that are inactive can be obliterated easily.
• Binding protection-determining actions to the claim.
• The Stability Pool tries to define the strength of a village's walls.
• The PP Pool tries to define a village's immediate defense, or an immediate soak to the walls that the raiders must attack.
• The Stability Pool tries to give long-time active villages a strong bonus.
• The PP Pool tries to give immediate defenses to fresh villages.
• Bringing an element of realism to villages. If a village is gigantic but under populated, how can it hope to maintain its protections? etc.
• Limiting the spread of village claim over territory. How can a village with huge land claims hope to monitor all of its areas and stay safe?
• Giving less power to the idol and more to the people attached to the idol.
• Excessive wall labyrinth building is negative for the village, because once the PP Pool is broken, and if the stability pool is weak, walls within the village claim may be bashed into by hand, providing that that Stability Pool is weak.
• Successive attacks by a raiding group should increase the chances of defense breaching.
• By keeping a ram's element of decay from movement, inner-protected or walled areas of villages should stay protected UNLESS the raiding group has depleted the Stability Pool so much that they can break the brick by hand.

Cons of this Defensive System:
• Hermits must have small villages or be incredibly active players.
• What if someone uses bots to maintain a Stability Pool? Should there be some negative aspect to repeated, robotic actions?
• What if someone goes on vacation from their village? How can they hope to sustain it?
• How complex is the coding regarding the scaling of Stability and PP Pools?
• Mechanism for depleting each of the pools is vague and unclear.

Questions To Consider:
• If a village is upgrading from Palisade to Brick, how can they easily destroy palisade tiles?
• Should the defenses of a village be based on the stats of it's village members along with the Stability Pool?
• What if walls are way too strong in the beginning of the game?
My Response: The PP Pool should try to scale a wall's strength to the activeness and developed-ness of the characters in a village; furthermore, it will take time for a village to build up a strong Stability Pool, but the PP Pool should provide short-term defenses.
• How can a village heal their Stability Pool quickly ?
• What if raiders kill fresh toons and alts? How should that deplete the pools? Should higher LP and Stat kills deplete the pools and weaken a village's walls more?
• Does this system encourage centralization of villages? Does it encourage decentralization?
• What is the purpose of personal claims now?
• Where is the human element in this system. By that I mean, how can players intercept a raiding group?


Note to Self: Reexamine how this system discourages the building of Hearth Vaults.


I am still putting consideration into every element of this system. I need your consideration too. Please help.

[Thijssnl]

Very interesting, I'll read this over some times before reacting on it.

[ApocalypsePlease]

I would first off like to thank you for this marvelous idea to revamp the siege system and village protection, and appreciate the details you've put into it.

I personally see this being a great leap in the right direction, however there are some tweaks which would need to be made before something like this be implemented into the game.

Some comments/questions/critiques (keep in mind I'm trying to help you develop this incredible idea which I support):

-How would hermits be able to protect themselves?
Expanding on that, if the answer is more easily obtainable village claims, doesn't that make a village claim lose it's meaning?

-Does the PPP only regain/lower itself at one specific time every week, and regain/lower based on village activity within that week?

-Could you please elaborate on the PPP being drained by "attempting to ram walls"?

-Wouldn't the soak of the walls potentially become unseigable by a dedicated superfaction late world?

-How would the raiders attack the stability pool?

-Would walls just be unbreakable until the PPP is depleted, and afterwards would they be plain and simply breakable (assuming the raiders are capable to deal with the soak)?

This system coming from a new player's point of view would probably just create yet another barrier between the noobs and the pros

This seems to continue to favour of the defender, however favours active defenders eliminating vaults to some extent

It still seems elaborate vault setups could be made with bots set up to actively farm or complete other tasks, essentially destroying the main issue this revamp is addressing

If a vault owner could maintain the pools as if it were an active village, this system loses it's effectiveness since the attackers would still require to guard a ram for 24h and the likes to damage the PPP

If the answer to "If a village is upgrading from Palisade to Brick, how can they easily destroy palisade tiles?" is that the soak is 0 and handbashable by villagers, 1 spy can ruin the structural integrity of a village (spy could also just be someone fed up with that village, and backstabbing them). In other words, the villages would be fortified to outside attacks, but fragile to inside attacks.


Sorry for the disorganization. There are more comments and questions I can probably come up with, but the time being I think these will keep you busy

Have a nice day, and thank you.

[AnnaC]

One question, the problem with building these new pools up via "actions", is similar to a suggestion someone had in my thread about personal claims; I think having a counter for all these actions is redundant since the LP growth system is done through curios and not individual actions anymore. Having curio system for personal growth and action-count based system for something essentially hidden, seems like an inefficient redundancy.

Removing an existing system like Authority (which is admittedly underused), to add two new ones might be a bit of a stretch, as well. And another thing, what aspects will handle the political and social aspects that authority covers currently, like revoking, exile, etc.?

It's interesting, but to me it seems like what it does to stop hearthvaults, would be the same mechanics that would make hermits suffer. It seems to be a system that would just make the large villages basically untouchable. As someone said in another thread, Pandemonium could've been considered a nexus of individual hearthvaults in itself. Yeah, with this plan there might not be hearthvaults anymore, but what does that matter when rangers track all scents to the same untouchable village? I suppose it is better than a bunch of hearthvaults as you could plan guerrilla raids on a village as villages do need to do other things.

I do like the ideas about linking walls more to authority of villages though, and I imagine from what little I've read about a new siege system, that any defensive towers would be based on something similar. But the downside to this, is it makes it all the more difficult for unafilliated players to protect themselves without establishing a village. But this wouldn't be a bad thing if the civilization value or whatever would be modified to support a few more villages for the same area.

I'm definitely not convinced about removing authority and adding the two pools, though, but it does have some advantages; Authority is an all-or-nothing type of deal, yet having two seperate pools can give more levels of vulnerability, which is good. But I think Authority could be adapted better, and this system more adapted to existing precedent instead.


Also this whole idea seems to be based around the issue with hearthvaults. But what exactly is a hearthvault, and also, what are the motives for hearthvaults? In my opinion, hearthvaults are designed because people don't like logging in from sleep or RL business to find their character summon killed while offline. While I don't know what to do about that without making it much too easy for criminals to get away with their actions, I think having some option where you could divert personal scents from criminal acts to a village or authority structure, might somewhat alleviate vaults as well.

[ewlol]

-Could you please elaborate on the PPP being drained by "attempting to ram walls"?

I think this remains as the huge gaping hole in the system. Still something I am working on.

-Does the PPP only regain/lower itself at one specific time every week, and regain/lower based on village activity within that week?

The PP Pool will be determined based on the activity in the previous week. It will be some set number and then can only be decreased from attacking (once again I need to create some way in which this pool is broken) and that will not regain itself during the week (this is so successive attacks make it possible to raid a village). At the end of the week, the pool is redetermined etc.

-Wouldn't the soak of the walls potentially become unseigable by a dedicated superfaction late world?

Not necessarily, I think the Stability Pool should level off at some point based on activity, or at least it should grow in some logarithmic way.

It still seems elaborate vault setups could be made with bots set up to actively farm or complete other tasks, essentially destroying the main issue this revamp is addressing

I thought of this, and I suggested something about redundant actions, but that just seems to make the entire system more complex. I think this is an issue. However, the vault owner would have to maintain this activity for an entire week.

One of the problems is vaults created on mountains with just like 5 tiles of wall totally blocking bottlenecks.

It's interesting, but to me it seems like what it does to stop hearthvaults, would be the same mechanics that would make hermits suffer. It seems to be a system that would just make the large villages basically untouchable. As someone said in another thread, Pandemonium could've been considered a nexus of individual hearthvaults in itself. Yeah, with this plan there might not be hearthvaults anymore, but what does that matter when rangers track all scents to the same untouchable village? I suppose it is better than a bunch of hearthvaults as you could plan guerrilla raids on a village as villages do need to do other things.

Hi AnnaC.

Because this system scales the magnitude, or number of wall tiles within the claim of a village, to the Stability Pool, Pandemonium probably would have had generally weak walls unless it had large numbers of highly active members to back it up (I would say it was a relatively gigantic village in comparison to active members). Furthermore, because of the Stability system, rangers could assemble themselves and then try to weaken it (somehow, that is the problem. I haven't figured out yet a mechanism for weakening a village's Stability Pool) enough that the walls can be broken by hand.

Essentially the goal of that system was to make it possible to break village's walls if the ram broke from too much movement (if the raiding group was strong enough).

A few other things about which I want to comment:

I'm definitely not convinced about removing authority and adding the two pools, though, but it does have some advantages; Authority is an all-or-nothing type of deal, yet having two seperate pools can give more levels of vulnerability, which is good. But I think Authority could be adapted better, and this system more adapted to existing precedent instead.

I believe Authority is a useless system. What I am trying to accomplish here is a system of defense that revolves around the activity of village members to maintain and strengthen it. This system does not strengthen itself with passive curio usage, unlike the Authority system. I believe authority's main usage is with 1. declaiming and 2. determining when a idol can be completely broken, (both of which I think need to be reworked) and 3. chieftain skills (which I think are perfect).

Which brings me to the whole personal claim system... I really (and I admit fully) that I just don't know what to do with it. I think I really want to encourage people to create village idols.

[Potjeh]

• What if someone uses bots to maintain a Stability Pool? Should there be some negative aspect to repeated, robotic actions?

The whole thing falls apart without a satisfactory solution to this problem, and I don't see one.

[TeckXKnight]

• What if someone uses bots to maintain a Stability Pool? Should there be some negative aspect to repeated, robotic actions?

The whole thing falls apart without a satisfactory solution to this problem, and I don't see one.

What about a system similar to the ancestors sacrifice system where you get a set number of tasks which will reward the village; things that the village really needs in order to survive. You can forfeit for a loss of the total amount that your actions will give to your village to a minimum of say, 1 point, which would be a ton of forfeits and be effectively worthless.

This'll make bots useless unless they can read and perform complex actions such as that, in which case what's the difference between them and a player anyway.

So for example, there's no limit on the number you can do in a day but each task will reward you for 250 points which will be given to the village's pools across the week. The first forfeit drops you to 200, then 150, then 100, then 50, then 1. So a bot that forfeits looking for action that it performs will, at most, get 1 point at a time. Meanwhile, a player who is capable of performing a few different tasks will be able to mean significantly more.

Tasks should be broad concepts such as harvesting, making food, mining, skinning animals, etc. etc.. basic tasks meant to be done in a village claim.

[Tonkyhonk]

please. i dont want this to be another "do this, bring that" quest game...
ancestral worship is fun to do sometimes, but not always or do loads sometimes for our "defense"....
*shouts for freedom of play*

[TeckXKnight]

please. i dont want this to be another "do this, bring that" quest game...
ancestral worship is fun to do sometimes, but not always or do loads sometimes for our "defense"....
*shouts for freedom of play*

Perhaps then it just reduces the amount given the more a task is done until it reaches a nill point, regardless of which character is doing it. A village that does nothing but harvest crops will grind to a halt but if they also process and bake their goods, generating a form of GDP from firing kilns and ovens while milling at a quern then they'll be "wealthy" enough to afford their defenses.

Over time, when the task is not being performed, it will recuperate and be more valuable again. This may not actually work very well if a city is huge and running 24/7 though as that would mean they'd never get a chance to recuperate. However, if it's fixed by just switching tasks then bots can be easily designed around that. Perhaps if it reset itself if every value was dipped to its max; so if all of the hunting, tanning, drying, cooking, mining, etc. was bottomed out it would reset them all to decent values again.

[Potjeh]

What about a system similar to the ancestors sacrifice system where you get a set number of tasks which will reward the village; things that the village really needs in order to survive. You can forfeit for a loss of the total amount that your actions will give to your village to a minimum of say, 1 point, which would be a ton of forfeits and be effectively worthless.

This'll make bots useless unless they can read and perform complex actions such as that, in which case what's the difference between them and a player anyway.

switch(labour request)
{
case harvest: invoke farming bot;
case mine: invoke mining bot;
...
}

Anyway, even if it wasn't bottable (possible if you add captchas to every action in the game) the solution is worse than the problem, I much prefer hearthvaults to having to work on what the game tells me to work on.