Back to a dangerous wilderness

[Onionfighter]

I happened by the old bottleneck stopover the other day and wondered to myself it it is even used any more.

Before the dynamic civilization system, it used to be somewhat dangerous just to walk to Laketown. Not only did this add to the excitement of exploring, it served as a form of protection to the more secluded communities. Alt abuse would be more difficult if you get attacked on the way to your destination. Before walls were formally implemented, they were improvised to keep wildlife away just as much as thieves.

While I appreciate being able to harvest a field without worrying about foxes, I now have to travel a considerable distance to find challenging game. I look forward to a non-linear civilization system.

Also: As a community ages, some players lose interest, and new players join. This causes a steady increase in the civilization level if there isn't active management (perhaps hearth fires on town land should be identifiable to the chieftain). Ghost towns which retain hearth fires continue to influence civilization. I would support hearth fire decay with disuse.

[Yolan]

Yes, hearthfires really should decay if you don't log your character in for a few weeks.

[EveryTimeV]

Everything should be submitted to a rate of decay, walls, buildings, even your hearth fire.

Evidently if you logged out and returned 5 Years later to your small town, you'll find an astonishing ruin there. (It would be nice to see ruins).

[niltrias]

I agree with all of this. Also, I think that the impact of Hfires and village items should be less broad. I would like to see, instead of a corridor of safety between RoB and BN, an Island of safety centered on each town with dangerous zones in between.

[AlexFili]

It's annoying how cutting a few trees down suddenly turns the wildlife into a bunch of pansies. So much for the VIII bears, now I'm lucky to find a II fox!

[bentalbot]

The way I see it, the radii around civilizations should not merge together and instead be centralized on each location, and with a much lessened degree of influence. I would imagine that at most, the area that is safe around a town should extend for no more than a screen or two before the wildlife are no longer afraid to go near.

While this would leave dangerous areas between the settlements, I think that's entirely the point. It should be a challenge if you want to move from Laketown to Bottleneck, because you don't know what you're going to run into in the interim. Perhaps make it so that the wildlife is more locational to the type of tileset that they are on. If forested areas were more prevalent as they were in medieval Europe, then there would be credit to just making higher level creatures appear on forest tiles. It would also give reason for people to create connecting paved roads through the forests, providing those alleyways of relative safety that you trust will keep the dangers of the woods at bay.

This would work better with the idea I just posted about varying degrees of wildlife. In the grassland areas which are theoretically just fields, that would be where low level foxes and cows, etc showed up. In the deeper forests, you would have the wolf packs and bears lurking, regardless of how close they are to civilization. Although limiting them so that they don't favor going within a screen of the forest edge would be more believable.

Not to say that I don't think the stronger wildlife should decide to roam into more civilized areas at times. I know it would certainly add something to have a bear wander up to your property and force you indoors until you think it has moved on. Bears find their way into people's backyards as it is so they obviously don't always wish to stay away from civilization.