Ideas about the siege system

[Fobia]

As far as I know the problems with siege wars are two: Hearth vaults and battering rams.

How to solve this by not making in the process everyone equally vulnerable on attacks? By measuring the effort. If a village like pandemonium has put the effort of taking 50+ members on their ranks and built the biggest claim that HnH has ever seen why should someone be able to have the same kind of safety by just building a vault on a mountain or an island with just 10 guys?.

Rebuilding the siege system, or rather, making one.
My suggestions about how to make a proper siege system are these:

• Measure the effort that took to build the village by their village claim and make the attackers put more effort for developed villages.
  • Contested space system. The bigger that a village is, the more effort you've got to put to attack.
  • Adding a bonus based on the size of the actual wall.
  • Idol becoming vulnerable if people isn't willing to defend it.
• Goal system based on time but not relying too hard on online time.
  • It's all cool to play for a few hours.
  • It's NOT cool to sit 24 hours watching a ram dry.
• New items: siege ram, war banner and mini war banner.
  • It's important to let players be lazy. If they wish they can build a normal ram and pray for it to dry before the defenders break it.

A few examples on the siege system.
Example 1- Lets say I want to attack Pandemonium. Why? Becouse fuck them, I can, I've assembled a 30 man army and I want their jewgold so bad that I am going to rape them to get it.

It all starts with their claim, for the example I am just gonna assume they took 100.000.000 m^2 with their village claim. The first step I am going to be forced to do will be to contest their soverignty. How? Banner spam, of course, just like they did. So the first step is building an invulnerable to attacks but fast decaying 'War banner' (48 hours and it gets destroyed by ticks but not by hand of players) from it i'll start expanding over all their territory until I've contested at least a 51% with 'miniwarbanners' that are cheap, fast decaying and breakable by hand so defenders can actually put up a defense before their walls break. So, there am I, I've broke my back building those banners all over their vclaim taking over 51% of it, now what? The war starts. I build the siege ram near the 'War banner' and leave, since it has not dried yet. What? More fucking drying time camping? Not really. The siege ram will take between 12 and 24 hours to dry (randomly chosen once you build it) and it will be invulnerable to player attacks while its drying. And there I am, 16:30 hours for it to dry. I know it, the enemy knows it and a fight is gonna happen tomorrow. How? They will just move. Not really, now all HFs near the siege ram are stuck there until it dries.

There we are, 16:30 hours later. The ram is about to dry and I bring my strongest fighters to pick it up and start smashing the wall and there's where the str becomes important and the time bonus to bigger walls apply, their wall is made of 18.000 bricks making it have an extra 18 soak points, well, we're gonna be a while hitting at it, shame I didnt eat more cheese.

At this point, either they evac and you get a chance of getting them, or they stay and fight. But... crossroads... they will run. Well, I got their shinnies and thats what I wanted and now I am just going to take away their idol, their banners & statues and all crossroads I can find just to make their lives miserables for not having defended their place, good bye banners and statues.

Example 2- Lets say I want to attack NNN. Why? Becouse fuck them, I can, I've assembled a 30 man army and I want their jewgold so bad that I am going to rape them to get it. So I head to CCCP and take a look around. Wow, they just have a village idol, a mere 10.000m^2 claim. So I spread my 30 fighters and in less than 10 minutes I've contested their whole place. Good stuff. So I proceed to build my siege ram. Done. So I check the time and ewwww 12 hours, it's their timezone, and I need to work.. Well, no problem, it took me 30 minutes of work. I'll try again tomorrow.

So, here am I. A new day, a new opportunty to kill them. They have cleared their island of my 'mini war banners' but the 'war banner' is still up, awesome, so I send my people and voila, 10 minutes later 51% of their territory is contested and another 10 minutes later a new siege ram is about to finish. Great! 15:00 hours and I'll be ready, thats my timezone, either they defend or they are dead.

A new day, more pain. 15:00 hours later here I am with my fighters and strong guys hitting the wall. It's going down reather fast, they just put there 6000 bricks so just a little 6 soak more. Their wall breaks, all my zerg goes in and... fuck, they left yesterday after destroying the ram... Well, I'll try again in a few days after all it just took me one hour of work now I am just going to tear apart their Idol and crossroads so they have to enjoy some walking back here if they want to rebuild it.

Comments
I've noticed a few flaws on my idea, as people building their walls in the border of the claim so you'd be forced to build normal rams and unable to build the siege rams due the lack of space to claim, a pretty easy solution to that problem would be to let the attackers exchange authority for claimed space.


What do you think?

[Hourai_Chimes]

I see two glaring problem: someone can just jump to another hearthvalt, it does nothing against one-way multi-dimensional vaults.

[Fobia]

I see two glaring problem: someone can just jump to another hearthvalt, it does nothing against one-way multi-dimensional vaults.

Main problem with the second one is that one can always simply move to another village, or vault, or cave, or... Unless you actually do something related to hearth fires. I understand that in the case of a village rebuilding is far harder than a simple vault but you could always do it.

About the first one, I don't really get what do you mean. I guess you are either talking about level 5 vaults and people blocking the mineholes after you siege it. My guess is, with this problem, people would just collect enough materials to build 10 mineholes (5 the first time and 5 the second time, to use once the attackers have blocked the first set) and assemble 30-60 minutes before the ram becomes vulnerable to make sure they reach it on time. Or about vault mountains having a lot of layers of bricks to destroy, well, against that there's not much you can do, but decreasing the base soak value of the brickwalls and relying more on the bonus would make it be somewhat faster.

[GoodGirl]

I do like the idea of having the wall's soak value increase the larger it is. That alone could put a bit of a damper on hearthvaults if the base soak were reduced to something that could be torn down by hand. It's always a question of how to calculate what counts as one wall though, since they aren't always continuous when built around cliffs and whatnot. It might be better to base this on the number of wall sections rather than number of bricks as well.

I don't completely understand how the war banners would work on a larger square-shaped claim if it's surrounded by a wall. If the claim is big enough, you would need to break down the wall in order to get your banners to cover over 50% of their claim.

There's a lot of problems with "locking" hearthfires, such as how do you define what is "close" to the ram, especially if they are inside buildings. They can also just destroy their hearthfires, unless you make them invulnerable, but that would open a lot of potential to make walls out of alt hearthfires.

Overall, it's an interesting idea though.

[Fobia]

I do like the idea of having the wall's soak value increase the larger it is. That alone could put a bit of a damper on hearthvaults if the base soak were reduced to something that could be torn down by hand. It's always a question of how to calculate what counts as one wall though, since they aren't always continuous when built around cliffs and whatnot. It might be better to base this on the number of wall sections rather than number of bricks as well.

Yeah probably it would be better to calculate it on wall sections rather than bricks, the only reason to put the number of bricks was to make it more obvious trough bigger numbers .

I don't completely understand how the war banners would work on a larger square-shaped claim if it's surrounded by a wall. If the claim is big enough, you would need to break down the wall in order to get your banners to cover over 50% of their claim.

As I mentioned on the original post maybe it would be a good idea to let you extend 'mini war banners' using village authority points just like you do with personal claims, which would make the system even easier if you had a village big enough compared to the one you are attacking.

There's a lot of problems with "locking" hearthfires, such as how do you define what is "close" to the ram, especially if they are inside buildings. They can also just destroy their hearthfires, unless you make them invulnerable, but that would open a lot of potential to make walls out of alt hearthfires.

Well, the best choice in my opinion would be to forbid players who have a HF in the designed radius to change it (I'd go ahead and set that radius to 10 grids around, why? becouse it's a warzone), while allowing players who don't have one to be able to set theirs there but of course, unable to remove them until it's over. How to avoid any kind of exploiting with invulnerable HFs? Make them work like if it was yours, your HF lets you walk trough it and to avoid destruction increase its soak to 1000.

[dagrimreefah]

I agree with the OP about more HP for a bigger wall. Good idea.

[Sarchi]

Good idea.

[DDDsDD999]

Make it so you can take over a village idol, and it'll be pretty good. I actually like that they can move their Hearth, they have to move it somewhere, and you can raid that next, and eventually they'll run out of place's to hide. No status' or something though, the freeformablity of HnH is something that is very compelling and I would personally hate to lose.

There might be some general tweaking in formula's and such, but in general it'd be fun to have with the defender tower's and such, and getting shot at by defender's tower's while ramming.

[Chakravanti]

Siege Mechanics need to be based on attrition. Cost to make war. Like LP and FEP, Warfare should be expensive in and of it's own right in addition to the expense of making oneself capable of making war.

I think advantage should be a factor between distance and investment. If you sink a ton of resources into your assault you should get through their walls more quickly.

Make Seige Carts load rams, portable barriers, War Banners (Effecting authority drain and/or generating 'mobile' or 'proxy' authority to reduce distance related authority buffs/penalties)

[Fobia]

Make it so you can take over a village idol, and it'll be pretty good. I actually like that they can move their Hearth, they have to move it somewhere, and you can raid that next, and eventually they'll run out of place's to hide. No status' or something though, the freeformablity of HnH is something that is very compelling and I would personally hate to lose.

There might be some general tweaking in formula's and such, but in general it'd be fun to have with the defender tower's and such, and getting shot at by defender's tower's while ramming.

I really like the idea of beign able to take over the idol but at the moment of writing this I discarded the idea thinking it would be too rough to be able to bash their idol and people wouldn't really like it. Now that I see people thinks like me, I'll add it.