The time has come to ring out the old, dying world, and ring in a new in its stead. Changes are as follow:
SIEGE & REALMS
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- Reworked siege
- Removed "siege power" and "siege boost" from claims and villages. Battering rams and catapults can now attack all objects after 24 hours, quite simply. The difference between palisades and brick walls are back to being their respective health.
- Battering rams and catapults can now be hand-bashed significantly faster, down from 4 hours to 5 minutes.
- Siege machines can now only be built and operated in provinces where the Thing Peace has been broken.
- The Thing Peace in a province is broken by challenging the Thingwall of the province. This works similar to the current Thingwall challenges between realms, in that the challenge needs to be in direct line of sight of the Thingwall, takes three hours to complete, and is only destructible during the last 20 minutes of its life. However, it can be built by anyone (not just realm owners), in any quantity (you can place 10 simultaneous challenges if for any reason you would like to).
- The Thing Peace challenge requires some amount of precious metal to build. If destroyed, this precious metal is given back in the area where it is destroyed for anyone (presumably its attackers and/or defenders) to pick up, hopefully giving some incentive to third parties to destroy challenges.
- If a realm controls a province in which the Thing Peace is being challenged, they are given notifications thereof similar to their notification for take-over challenges.
- If a challenge is successfully defended, the Thing Peace is broken for 48 RL hours. During this time, subsequent challenges can still be placed for whatsoever reason to extend the breaking of the Thing Peace.
- Removed the mechanic where walls need to be repaired up to full health over a significant amount of time. This was already a holdover from a previous siege regime and hasn't been necessary for quite some time, so this is really just a clean-up.
- The sum of the effect is to, hopefully, make siege a shorter-lasting affair, but also more defensible, and perhaps also to give third parties (including but not limited to realms) some incentive to guard the Thing Peace.
FOOD & ENERGY
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- New characters now start at full (10000%) energy.
- If energy is below Healing (8000%) when eating, the only effect of eating is to gain energy. FEPs, hunger, satiations &c are only affected when eating while Healing.
- The "hard-labor cap" (for digging and mining) has been set to 2500% energy instead of the current 5000%.
- If feasting (eating by a table) you always gain both FEPs and Hunger, irrespective of your current Energy.
CHARACTER & COMBAT
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- Reworked health points
- A player character now always has exactly 100 HP. Dungeon heart pieces can still extend the maximum HP, but that's it, and they give less HP than currently.
- Attack damage is calculated not as a function of Strength, but as a comparison between the attacker's Strength and the defender's Constitution, in a manner entirely similar to how the current comparison between eg. an attacker's and defender's Unarmed/Melee Combat value works. In other words, the more Strength you have, the more damage you deal, but the more Constitution you have, the less damage you take. When attackers and defenders are evenly matched in their Strength/Constitution, attacks deal the amount they specify.
- More precisely, for those who do not remember how the comparison between combat values work, a "damage ratio" is calculated between Strength and Constitution, where, if the attacker's Strength is within a factor of two of defender's Constitution, the damage ratio is considered to be 1.0. Outside this factor of two, the damage ratio is the cube root of the "residual ratio". If the Strength value being compared more than two times greater than the Constitution value, then the damage ratio is (Strength / 2) / Constitution. Some examples:
- Strength = 100 and Constitution = 100 gives a damage ratio of 1.
- Strength = 200 and Constitution = 100 also gives a damage ratio of 1.
- Strength = 100 and Constitution = 50 also gives a damage ratio of 1.
- Strength = 400 and Constitution = 100 gives a damage ratio of ~1.26. That is, ∛((400 / 2) / 100)
- Just to reiterate, this is the same way as the comparison between Attack Weight and Block Weight is currently made.
- The damage ratio is used to calculate the final damage value. That is, if an attack specifies that it gives 10 damage, and the damage ratio is 1.5, the attack will actually give 15 damage.
- Previously, weapons worked such that their damage scaled with √(Strength · Quality). Now, their damage is fixed and weapon attacks use √(Strength · Quality) instead of just Strength to calculate their damage ratio.
- Technically, the values used for calculating the damage ratio are known as the "Damage Weight" and the "Receive Weight". By default, the Damage Weight is the attacker's Strength, and the Receive Weight is the defender's Constitution, but weapon attacks substitute the Damage Weight.
- Armor now works such that each piece of armor calculates its own "effective armor class" when receiving an attack. The effective armor class is calculated in a similar fashion to how damage is calculated, in that an "armor ratio" is calculated between the attack's Damage Weight and the armor's quality. This armor ratio is multiplied by the armor's stated armor class to yield the effective armor class in a particular attack.
- So that smaller damage ratios can be meaningful, fractional damage can now be taken. Hard damage (wounds) is still integral, and does not really change from how it has previously worked. Which means that it is dealt probabilistically, ie. if you were to conceptually take 0.1 hard damage, that translates into a 10% chance of taking 1 hard damage.
- Static damage sources, like Crabs and Sand Fleas, scale down with the square root of the receiving character's constitution, so that they net effect is similar to how they currently work. Fractional damage is, again, dealt probabilistically.
- The intent of the change is to make combat more even between somewhat evenly-matched parties, similar to how the comparison between Attack Weight and Block Weight works.
- This whole thing is a fairly controversial change, and we will monitor it and may revert it if it does not work well, so please give us your prompt feedback on the effects.
STORE & SUBSCRIPTIONS
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- To extend the usefulness of Sketches in World 15, we intend to make it so that a total of up to two sketches can be applied to any mundane container (e.g. Chests, Wicker Baskets, Cupboards, &c), to extend that inventory in size by one row, and/or one column.
- All subscriptions are, effective immediately, paused until the launch of World 15.
Do note that this list is not necessarily final or exhaustive. If you have pet peeves you'd like to see fixed before launch, or if there is some change stated above that you disagree with, feel free to opine!
Most changes have been left to the joy of discovery, and out of this document.
TLDR: We will aim to launch the...
W15 server @ 19:00 UTC, Friday October 13th, 2023
Enjoy!
UPDATE: The Eye of Sauron stream is now available at https://www.twitch.tv/dolda2000. Note that the computer it's running on is weaker than last world's, so let's all hope it can stand up to the demands.
