Game Development: The Danger Zone

[venatorvenator]

You will land no kills, and will get no loot as well. You might destroy some ovens and cupboards, but they are easy to restore as well.
[...]
It does not even hurt the enemy, considering how much time you have spent sieging the place.

What does this mean, though? Don't production centers matter at all? That doesn't seem to be what I've heard otherwise.

In a large faction, usually the important part of the "industry" of a village is split among the sepparately-brickwalled-off plots owned by its members. What is at risk from an initial succesful siege are the tools the villagers decide to share among eachother. Usually, these are ovens, kilns and any other thing that would otherwise be inconvenient to have in each and every plot (due to space constraints, perhaps).

The matter is entirely different in a medium-sized village though, where you've payed 60 pearls for a good public kiln and another 60 for an anvil.

[burgingham]

To expand on this, the aggressor needs at least an equivalent army to the village to be on for 24 hours to theoretically successfully defend the ram. The target only needs a larger army on for a few mins to destroy the ram.

Seeing how you're intending to destroy something they've been building for months, though, I'm not sure that seems unreasonable.

Yes, that is an important point and we have talked about removing the boolean nature of destruction in the past. Avu has expanded on it a lot (as I have pointed out in an IP post just yesterday btw ). The destruction proccess during a siege should come in small steps that the defenders can combat. Setting houses on fire that slowly burn, your animals having 3 lifes idea (that was a decent first step) etc.

The main reward for a raider that just wants to go in and out quick should come from some stolen loot and killing criminals, not from leveling an entire base worth months of work.

The question that remains is if destruction takes time how can the attackers return to continue their work - if they are really that invested in it - without having to ram the wall yet again. Maybe ramming a wall leaves some special kind of tile/object called a "breached wall" or something? It cannot just be fully repaired like a brickwall within minutes, but the defenders could invest work on closing it (or making it risky for the attackers to go through it again. Not sure how the automated defenses in Salem worked out, but something along those lines?) while the attackers can try and keep it open through some sort of mechanic.

[sneezewortt]

if i drop a large chest full of curios in the water, can that be fished up?

[strpk0]

ideas

I can try to summarize the ideas into a more update-patch-looking format (and add a bit of my own). Maybe in this way people can build upon them in a more organized manner.

New siege system, works as follows. Please keep in mind these things will only happen if you don't have vandalism rights on a given claim, and instead use criminal acts to carry out these actions:

* Structures (such as containers, houses, kilns and what have you) can no longer be demolished in the ordinary fashion. You can however use the destroy option on them, which provided you are currently equipped with a lit torch, will set the building on fire. The building will then take progressive damage over the course of 72 hours (3 IRL days) after which period the building (and anything inside of it) will be destroyed. This fire can be extinguished by a player at any time.

* A destroyed wall segment will turn into a collisionless "wall rubble" version of itself, with a soak value similar to palisades. This rubble may be repaired by 25% each 6 real life hours, and hand-destroyed by attackers by 25% if it's currently on repair cooldown (thus also resetting the repair timer, while still keeping the 25% health loss). It may never be fully destroyed, and instead will decay into nothing after 72 hours of not being repaired. A 100% repaired wall rubble segment will of course turn back into it's full-soak and full-health brickwall counterpart. (On second thought, this one may be a bit unnecessary due to how building walls works nowadays, I guess it's just more for visual appeal and theme).

I also wanted to suggest a mechanic to do with rams and how they could work, but I realize there are many ways to exploit it, so I'll just make it hidden (Mainly incase it can help to come up with better ideas, otherwise don't take them seriously at all).

* A battering ram can now be used immediately after being built, and is unlimited in movement range. Upon causing any damage to a wall however, the ram will become "attached" to the wall segment. This ram can only deal a maximum of 25% of the segment's hitpoints in damage each 7 real life hours. The ram will then become indestructible up until each cooldown is over (a ram that is on cooldown period will be signified by the battering part of the ram being visually lowered or detached). After reaching 75% damage however, the ram will enter a final 3 hour cooldown period where it will be destructible (signified by a graphically ready to strike ram, with perhaps some other visual effects to help warn of the impending doom) (this is when the raiders are supposed to actively defend it, and the defenders try to destroy it). If the defenders fail to remove the attacking ram, the wall can be 100% destroyed after this period is over.
But then there's the problem of people spamming rams each X amount of time on you until you give up, which is why I thought of the idea below.

* A new siege attempt (as in, a new ram) may only be laid upon the same connected set of walls (provided they have the same soak value) each 24 hours.
Of course, I realize this can be abused by the villagers "attacking" their own walls each 24 hours to guarantee their immunity, hence why I hid out these suggestions.

Finally, these are only my ideas. I know might have been posting a bit too much lately regarding updates, but I'm just looking to help if I can. It would be nice if from now on the siege update suggestions could follow a similar format of structured ideas, instead of loose words and thoughts. I dunno, hope this helps.

[Ethan]

Instead of everything having its own individual time gates, I would rather see a pool of actions, that gets filled every X hours.

Otherwise there is too much requirement to be online at certain times. Or as you suggested massive windows of opportunity (72 hours). Which means it's almost impossible for either side to advance anything.

[Tapewormz]

time to spend an entire day digging and throwing sand into the water.

[bmjclark]

Current plan is to address the death mechanics next time, as we are frankly not sure what to do about siege.

The start of implementations from your siege post were obviously in this update, but the problem is that you only implemented the offensive part of it (making rams stronger) but didn't implement the defensive parts (multiple sessions hitting a wall, ways to repair the wall inbetween ect ect). If you implemented it all at once i think it's definitely a good start to a siege system, but you can't just do half, especially the half that can get everybodies village screwed over in the middle of the night. I really think that the post you made about siege a few months back was full of decent ideas that could get siege working in a fair way (some tweaks here and there) so i hope you don't just abandon it.

Also, if you're going to make something invulnerable to damage please make it so you can walk through it while it's invulnerable .

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[Potjeh]

The question is why people hermit behind walls. I think that's an important question.

Infinite stat and quality growth.

[Astarisk]

You will land no kills, and will get no loot as well. You might destroy some ovens and cupboards, but they are easy to restore as well.
[...]
It does not even hurt the enemy, considering how much time you have spent sieging the place.

What does this mean, though? Don't production centers matter at all? That doesn't seem to be what I've heard otherwise.

Depends a bit, if you own the clay and soil nodes, the industry doesn't really suffer at all, you waste a small amount of time re-collecting clay and fixing it all. However, the only time industry has really hurt is if a kiln you made out of bone clay (from troll bones, though this pretty much got botted near the end) then it would hurt, likewise if your iron spiraled anvil and hammer were taken, that also would be a pretty costly blow to industry. As these took a pretty big time investment to make.

edit: Back to the brickwall bit, Goo summed it up pretty nice, its hard to keep a group focused and online together at all times for a full day due to real life obligations, however if you got spotted at all during that 24 hour period, you would then be at a major disadvantage, by the time you would enter the village everything would have been removed out of reach, players, items, etc. However, I'll give some of my own ramblings and experience during the longer camps.

Furthermore you start running the risk of them gathering numbers to straight up overwhelm you at any period, since they would know how many people lay in wait, etc.

Once an enemy spots you at the wall, you can just expect a straight up flood of alts coming your way, and this can get really scary (especially since nidbanes are now in play). So you need to focus on killing alts during the period of waiting, or run the risk that one of them has vandalism for the ram. Now if things do go bad, everyone in your group is outlawed in enemy territory. I have also seen attempts by alts just to surround people completely and trap them, it just get insanely troublesome to guard a ram for 24 hours. Which means in the end the best ram is one that has not been seen at all, so you really have no need to guard it. It becomes too much of a risk to stay once you've been spotted.

When we raided Zox this world, it was suppose to be a 24 hour camp, but we all pretty much just said fuck it and decided to try for a 12 hour camp instead, but he was a unique case of being a hermit far off in the corner of the world, so we had hopes of keeping his base on lock down long enough to get in there to kill him. It took a large coalition of multiple factions to get together to have enough confidence and people online just to steadily camp the ram for 12 hours for a village that just consisted of pretty much 2 people. Turns out though, he went on vacation a day prior...

[Bargud]

I wanted to post here my ideas about siege mechanics but its so extensively that I realized the new thread in crit&ideas will be better. So please have a look I think there could be something usefull.
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