War of attrition - my 2 cents about siege

[SaltyCrate]

Certainly it will change psychology of defence though, so people would try to pack as much valuable things inside as they can. The real change will be spreading industry between alliance bases, or keeping redundant high q structures in different places. There might be a problem with mine level 9 industry vaults.

Yes, you don't even need lvl 9 for that. Everything except crops and trees will just move to lvl 2+, which for most intents and purposes would be unassaillable. And in that case no one will care for having keep claim, except maybe for hearthvaults. And being safe will just be more tedious for everyone.

It should change siege scenarios to repeatedly wiping industrial parts of opponent villages in expectation they will fall behind and give up. It is about war of attrition after all. It can be expected factions will place a lot of redundant low q structures in random places as decoys, hoping the attacker will give up chasing that one true kiln. Attrition works both ways.

Nothing of the sorts will happen. Important stuff will be hidden in some way or another.

It does not matter what exactly means "easier to raid". Practically every system, including ones to be invented in the future can be tweaked to be either easier or harder. As a basic example consider varied drying time, soak value, damage per tile moved (ram), material costs. Manipulating any these parameters can make siege easier or harder.

It very much does matter. In current siege system you technically can change the parameters you mentioned (of which only drying time is of any importance btw) to make siege easier, but it would still fall into one of 2 categories: mostly impossible or mostly trivial. That is kinda one of the central problems with the current system - it can't just be completely balanced by changing couple of numbers. Currently drying time is probably as low as can reasonably be given the game being online one, and with the partial invulnerability of catapults and rams siege is easiest it ever was. Yet still almost no one bother.

[pppp]

It should change siege scenarios to repeatedly wiping industrial parts of opponent villages in expectation they will fall behind and give up. It is about war of attrition after all. It can be expected factions will place a lot of redundant low q structures in random places as decoys, hoping the attacker will give up chasing that one true kiln. Attrition works both ways.

Nothing of the sorts will happen. Important stuff will be hidden in some way or another.

Hiding is very much part of what I have described, including hiding in plain sight sometimes. If hiding fails, wipe happens.

It very much does matter. In current siege system ...

My point is it does not have to apply to current siege system but to any other future siege system which might have no "drying time" concept. It's different level of detail / generalization.

Also, this idea was intended to be "2 cents" a small plug-in piece that may be added to a system or not, in hope to improve balance. It is not enough, and was not intended to solve all numerous siege problems.

Derailing outside intended scope I can say:
1. Siege shorter than 24 (or better 48 hours) is not acceptable defender-side. It's terribly unfun to login next day to a wiped place.
2. Siege requiring more than few (meaning maybe 3-5) hours of total commitment is unfun attacker side, and that includes grabbing at least most valuable spoils after breaking in.
3. To stay within casual gameplay terms, no activity should require than 2 hours total online per day, including all upkeep chores. That means attacker and defender may never be online at the same time.
3. The only solution for the above is ditching the idea of siege being coupled with pvp combat, especially the combat itself requires remake. Siege will stay an opportunity for pvp but it must be possible to resolve siege without pvp part. Given quite conflicting time constraints in 1. and 2. the only solution is to split siege over multiple days, where each day requires no more than 15-30 minutes to execute siege moves by both defender and attacker side. The siege should be resolved in correspondence-chess style. Otherwise siege becomes nolifing abilities contest.