City Destruction

Anedhel

They could strive to make enough of a name for themselves to stand apart from their Cities, for one, so they're not just a mash of indistinguishable parts, if they actually want their Order/organization to operate independently of their City.

They could also work to take control of their City to push it in a more beneficial direction.

They could also leave neutral Cities and participate in conflict without hiding behind said Cities.

Look, I know why it seems like I'm attacking neutrality (because I am). I just don't think you should be able to have your cake, and eat it too. Continuing to protect people under the aegis of neutrality waters down conflict, bogs down the development of interesting, unique perspectives and identities, and perpetuates a status quo that is, for the most part, pretty stale. I see no downside to making people take conflict more seriously, to having neutral Cities have to make hard choices where that neutrality is concerned, and driving a wedge between organizations that are happy to accept a City's protection when it's convenient, and lash out from behind that City at their enemies with impunity. Maybe it's a good thing to explore, that difference between City leadership and Orders. Conflict is fodder for progress, after all.

Jacen

I'm totally with you on that point. I think neutrality is stifling and should be avoided. My point is that this system would very likely push Hashan and Cyrene over to neutrality, because it will essentially be "be neutral or wade thru rubble all the time." It will stop any sort of small scale engagements, because even though geouos from these cities could win on a small scale, the retaliation will destroy the city. To use a recent example in Hashan, Kaitali stole some items fro Sartan's temple, but got derided by Hashan because Mhaldor counter raided several times. Add more far reaching consequences, and people like that would probably be enemied on the spot, thoroughly stifling any chance to rise out of neutrality.

Vayne

As a member and a long time leader of one of the "neutral" factions, I have to whole heatedly agree that a city that cannot defend itself one way or another naturally puts itself at the mercy of the more powerful entities. In this, they must either submit to their masters or find the strength through it to resist. This much is obvious when it comes down to gauging military strength, and I see no reason a weaker city should get any special provisions for being weak. If you are losing you need to re-evaluate your situation and find a way to get stronger.

However, although this is a discussion about physical military mechanics in the game, the sociopolitical elements are still intimately related and should be considered as well. I hear a lot of complaining about neutral cities leaning on others for their military strength. This is the basis for political intrigue, if Hashan is friendly with Ashtan and you don't like it, too bad. There is nothing wrong with Hashan having good relations with another city, even if it is not to your benefit.

 I know the game has moved towards more individually delineated factionalization, and while I agreed this is a good thing overall for the game, it does create significant disadvantages for cities that are left in the middle of the spectrum. Factional classes have been essentially removed from the rosters of neutral cities, dramatically reducing the pool of classes they can draw from and hampering player recruitment in that aspect, there are other more serious impediments that those cities do have control over. However, one tool neutral cities do have which the more factionalized cities do not is the ability to politic. It is obvious, official alliances are out of vogue in today's Achaea, and we have not seen them come into play in recent times, but again, Hashan and Ashtan being friendly(probably not so much anymore) is perfectly legitimate, as is Cyrene and Targossas.

These relationship have both necessitated political balancing acts to keep them in each other's good graces. As Seneschal much of my time was considering how can I position Hashan so that if x faction becomes aggressive towards us, I can move us out of the line of fire. Perhaps that is by pursuing a treaty, perhaps it is by making friends with that city's common enemy. Steering a city away from war takes considerable skill and usually far more time and effort than a full on military confrontation. I made the mistake of trying that towards the end of my career in hopes that Hashan would rise up, but that obviously did not happen.

If, for example, a city like Mhaldor is resigned to playing the bad guy, then unfortunately the political option is closed to them; they have the ability to try to be political if they want but their theme seems to be antagonize everyone, and that is fine. However, If they feel these relationships are so threatening they should endeavour to find a way to break them up in game. Building political relationships is a means that all cities have to enlarge their powerbase, and it is a bit silly to try to dictate that neutral cities like Cyrene and Hashan should not be able to take advantage of them because it might tip the scales out of your favour. There is no reason every city-state must hate every other city-state. This would eliminate any positive intercity interatctions and only leave room for mafia style protection extortion.

Exelethril

I think the reintroduction of exp loss for defenders even at a reduced rate, will create a disincentive for non-comms to participate. Aggressors should pay a heavier penalty for dying than defenders since the initiation lies with them at their own time/merit/willingness.

Also, what time interval between each of the "5 deaths" whould be optimal before a sanctioned raid is declared?

Arditi

The more militant orders will gravitate out of the neutral cities anyway out of either disgust with the neutrality, or to avoid bringing conflict to people with no interest in it. Probably the former.

Exelethril

Not likely, dude - combat-centric cities will always gravitate towards raiding neutral cities at random, besides all cities are aligned in some way.

Anedhel

Arditi said:

The more militant orders will gravitate out of the neutral cities anyway out of either disgust with the neutrality, or to avoid bringing conflict to people with no interest in it. Probably the former.

One can only hope.

Vayne

Arditi said:

The more militant orders will gravitate out of the neutral cities anyway out of either disgust with the neutrality, or to avoid bringing conflict to people with no interest in it. Probably the former.

What militant orders are in "neutral" cities to begin with?

Tael

I didn't read all of the posts, so sorry if any of this has been addressed, but the basic idea of this sounds wonderful.

Giving an actual reason to melee (to capture the tank) is a great idea, as is giving a reason for the defenders to be relatively aggressive. And, while the initial proposal allows for one city to do a lot of destruction if they can manage it, I think that's fine - it should allow for large-scale destruction that actually gives the other city a real reason to capitulate rather than just "losing" because some point total hit a certain value.

In fact, what would be really neat to see is some way in which the war actually impacts cities more substantially than making more and more cul de sacs take a second to walk through. I could see a simple percentage solution - for every percentage of the city destroyed, that percentage of shops (randomly selected) get closed. Maybe at a certain percentage the newsboard gets frozen. Or maybe shops/news/whatever stop working if enough areas near them get destroyed. As it stands, because it's far, far easier to protect a tank in a little-used indoors area, destruction doesn't really have a very palpable effect for most citizens. If, on the other hand, it actually affected them, there would be little need for a point system to determine victory - the shop owners might be clammoring to end the war and get their shops open, the citizens might be frustrated about lack of a newsboard. None of those things are crippling - you can still trade goods without shops and you can even emulate a newsboard pretty easily with books or letters, but they make things more inconvenient and give actual gravity to war.

And I'm all for removing the tedium from charging the tanks.

My only fear is that there should be some mechanism that prevents people from sitting at a deployed tank for hours and hours picking off people in a less-populated city to try to get the bigger explosion. If a dozen people from Mhaldor go into Eleusis in the dead of the night, there's a lot of incentive here for them to just sit there and kill people until they get a bigger explosion. And, while I think having big line-of-sight explosions as a reward for big battles is a good idea, if you can charge the tanks by picking people off, you could destroy half a city with a group effort attacking at a low-populated time. And just having a sort of decay on the charge of the tank would be a really poor solution - it isn't fun for anyone if the ideal way to limit destruction is to just evacuate the city until the raiders give up and detonate.

The problem you create is that you don't want it to be worthwhile for an attacking force to sit there forever and rack up kills against a smaller force to get a big explosion, but you also don't want to incentivize a situation where the defenders do have a large force to defend, but it's better for them to just leave the city and starve the attackers of kills instead of fighting.

The issue of trivial damage from the average citizen perspective and the issue of potential camping also combine to create a sort of weird structure. Ideally, you want big battles to have the biggest potential impact. Without significant modification to prevent camping to charge the tank, it will be easiest to get a big explosion in an actually impactful place when the battles are smallest and, though you could charge a tank much more quickly in a big battle, it's extradordinarily hard for raiders to survive any sort of tank-defence unless they're off in a corner somewhere, where a big explosion really won't matter very much.

One solution to part of the problem could be to make the damage nonlocal. I can think of a few ways to do that. The easiest would simply be to make it random. So it's not so much that you're setting off a bomb as you are completing a summoning ritual or something - imagine something like a ritual that calls down meteors (it could be different for every attacking city!) onto random rooms. Or perhaps do both - level 1 destroys a room, level 2 destroys adjacent rooms, level 3 destroys room, adjacent rooms, and some number of random rooms.

If you wanted to get extraordinarily cool and fancy and make the whole affair more interesting for everyone, allow someone to act as a target designator - so you get the tank all charged up, and you're sitting there biting your nails for word from the serpent that she's in place, and then you detonate the ritual to call down a meteor on that location, with exactly the same destructive force as put forth in the OP.

Anedhel

Tael-

The ways people thought to limit those concerns were:

Establish a minimum amount of defenders that you can sanction against.
Limit the time a sanctioned raid can last.
Make it so that tiny adventurers don't count as much towards tanks as big ones, in an effort to not just let it be an exercise in newb-ganking to meet a quota.

If I missed something, my bad, but I think those are the three most important things listed.

Tael

That definitely helps with preventing attackers camping the city, but pretty much anything you do to prevent camping becomes a tactic to use when defending. If there's a limit to how long a sanctioned raid can last, then defenders, even if they have a decent chance of taking the tank, can just wait it out and suffer a smaller explosion (again, probably in a room that doesn't matter).

You really, really want people to fight if it looks like a 50/50 thing. That's the ideal scenario from a gameplay perspective and you want to do everything you can to incentivize fighting in that situation.

You have to be careful though that you don't create a situation where it's optimal for defenders to defend only when they're sure they can win and for attackers to attack only when they're sure they can win. If kills charge a tank and you only prevent the tank going off through a decisive victory, you're better off just evacuating and letting them get a small explosion than trying to rout the attackers and, if you lose, giving them a much bigger victory.

Making city destruction more impactful would help a lot to remedy that situation - the key is that it has to be structured such that a small explosion is bad enough that it's worth trying to rout the attackers even if it risks a larger explosion. But you have to do that in a way that prevents small explosions from being so bad that it's a good idea for attackers to just attack when they know they can get a small explosion off, even if there aren't enough defenders to kill to make a bigger one.

It's a tension that requires really careful balancing. If you don't put in something that prevents camping, you're going to get a lot of camping. But if you do, with the proposed amounts of destruction and given that most destruction, by dint of being purely local to the attacker's position, happens in largely inconsequential places, it seem likely to me to lead to situations where defenders evacuate instead of fighting.

Jarrod

I think the ideal solution would be for raiding groups to seek out interesting fights over guaranteed win ones (like 80% of Ashtan's raids)

But that's really unlikely to happen.

Tael

Jarrod said:

I think the ideal solution would be for raiding groups to seek out interesting fights over guaranteed win ones (like 80% of Ashtan's raids)

But that's really unlikely to happen.

Agreed on both points.

Katzchen

I would really like to see a PK share exp option, where you choose whether or not you want to share your experience with those who assisted. This would mean those of us who already have oodles of experience, or just don't care about gaining anymore choose to, and help out those sub dragon/sub 80, while it wouldn't put off newcomers to combat by taking theirs. I can see why they wouldn't do this, but it seems like a nice option to avoid pissing off PKers who don't want to lose their kill exp.

Kyrra

I'm genuinely concerned at wanting to force non-combatants into conflict against their wishes.

There are those that love combat, those that like to get involved, and those that like to explore other avenues of Achaea. Sure the combat system is really indepth but it's not the only thing that people log in for.

You won't just see more journaling, shipping, and going to other continents. It can push people into wanting to be less involved, contribute less, and potentionally drive players away.

I understand the War system needs work and all, but the idea of logging in for two hours after work and getting drawn into conflict that I don't want to be a part of, as someone who actually has plenty other things to do not only sounds like a waste of my own time, but it doesn't sound like fun.

At least joining your city military and being a soldier gives a solid indication of those people that do want to be involved regardless of skill (Yes, I know Mhaldor is an exception).

And for what it's worth, I've probably spent an equal amount of money on credits for housing and housing upgrades as I have on artifacts which could be used in combat. People spend credits on pets for ambience and as a roleplaying tool as well, not just to have another ent throwing out afflictions.

I really would suggest giving people an opportunity to bow out of conflict if they don't want to be a part out it.

Hirst

My thoughts on city raiding/defense

1. Further reduce guard cap -and- limit the number of guards between rooms to prevent people from placing guards everywhere to defend every area 10 rooms in from city gates.  For instance, five guards in one room prevents guards in rooms nearby or three in one only allows two total between the adjacent rooms.  In hand with that, limit the number of mobile guards who can respond to a call for help to help encourage more thoughtful placement of guards, having to balance mobile guards, stationary guards, and the distance between them.

2. Reduce the strength of guards.  Their differing abilities is fine but they do a lot of damage.  Guards should be a supplement to defense, not the defense itself.  One person being able to break up a raid by eyeing themself out of phase or such and calling for help seems unfair to assembled raiders.  Too many cities rely on guards for their defense instead of their citizens.

3. No XP loss for normal city deaths but have XP loss for defender/aggressor deaths during sanctioned raids.  I know this can be a touchy subject because people are way too preoccupied with their precious XP.  Maybe don't have defenders lose as much but there should still be some penalty.  No XP loss encourages people to use stupid tactics with no fear of consequence.  It also encourages people to turtle up and either ignore raiders or not care because there is no penalty if they die.  If XP loss is not restored, double or even triple the time it takes to pray when embracing and prevent all forms of resurrection (priest, forestal, alchemist, etc) during these sanctioned raids.  Again, there needs to be some consequence of death.  Or you could make it that so being a soldier initiates XP loss in city whether you are Mark or not.  This will allow people who don't want to be drawn into conflicts the freedom to abstain but serve as encouragement to soldiers to be smart defenders.  To discourage these non-soldiers from participating in city defense but without the worry of XP loss, make them have no XP gain for any kills on aggressors. 

4. Make more forms of forced entry into a city auto-enemy the citizen.  Currently, methods such as Empress tarot, whips, and boomerangs enemy the user. This is fine to prevent too much abuse but other methods of entry don't do similar, namely Priest and Apostate beckon.  They should risk dying to their own guards for forced entry as well to prevent solely relying on beckon and city guards to defend.

5. Make totems only implantable in cities.  This removes the infamous "defendable" totems and any totems along entry routes to cities.  This prevents defenders from using methods of forced movement from gaining the advantage of having a totem but no risk from auto-enemying themselves such as empressing or beckoning into a "defendable" totem.

6. This is probably going to be handled sooner or later down the road but shrines need some major adjustments.  Solutions include reducing the strength of worldburn, adding a cooldown to worldburn such as once per day per Order, and limiting the number of shrines in an area. It is no secret that most cities have shrines covering almost every room inside the city and those close outside, preventing any form of raid.  Better yet, delete worldburn entirely.  One person from the comfort of a safe temple can make their city completely impervious by looping worldburn given its damage, length, lack of cooldown, and shrine density.  Or leave worldburn as it is but only shrines inside a god's temple will cause damage.  Worldburn is meant to protect shrines and temples, not become a crutch for city defense.

Current system can be and is fun but right now the mechanics encourage too much turtling and acting without consequence for defenders with little gain for the aggressors.

Rangor

I don't think the current system is too bad, could use tweaking

I hit shrines to engage smaller battles outside of cities. If the "enemy" has enough people to respond to my group, then they will and we get a pretty awesome skirmishes. (plz, if you rush to the shrine alone, you're likely going to get owned.)

If we have a bigger group we usually head into the city (always bringing enough corpses to drop the neccesary shrines). Sanctioning and summoning spark gives us an achievable goal. The problem here is that it's only achievable if you greatly outnumber the enemy. If you go into the city with even odds, you're going to get hit by eye of proteus, totems and careless defenders that rush in due to no xp loss(don't really mind this, but kinda silly since we don't gain anything from it either). Which makes summoning spark really unachievable if you're looking for a fair fight. If it turns into a battle between two forces with deaths on two sides, the raiders can only loose from the encounter, while the defenders can only gain.

Blujixapug

Hirst said:

1. Further reduce guard cap -and- limit the number of guards between rooms to prevent people from placing guards everywhere to defend every area 10 rooms in from city gates.

2. Reduce the strength of guards.  Their differing abilities is fine but they do a lot of damage.  Guards should be a supplement to defense, not the defense itself.

I disagree. Cities should be safe havens. Raiding should not be impossible - but it should be infrequent, city raids should not be the #1 source of reliable team fights. Right now, they are, which I think is because of the weaknesses of piracy, shrines, Icons etc.

Borran

Kinilan said:

Lots of fun and exciting things you could come up with for cities that refuse to fight like a tax on gold moving in/out of the city accounts, a negative experience modifier for citizens, reduced guard strength/count, reduced health/mana sipping. Deactivation of city improvements (that were supposed to be destructable but that part of the system was never added). Whatever. A war grace period after a loss/refusal would be an easy enough way to prevent abuse.

I liked your idea here for negative effects on citizens, but I would say these should be the negative effects on those who lose wars, too. But before any of that can happen, I think we need to work on improving cities to give more benefits to being a citizen before we start burdening them with all these negative effects or people will just decide to go rogue, or go join the winning side. 

Tecton said:

War Points:

• A new tally system that acts as an end-goal for mutual hostilities, more details interspersed throughout the proposal
• When hostile relations are declared, the first city to declare will specify a war point goal as well as a gold bounty/wager for the war. The second city will then either accept or decline and a different wager can be set.
• The bounty/wager is then held in escrow for both cities, and granted to the victor upon reaching the war point goal.
• War points are accumulated in the following ways:
• Killing enemy soldiers.
• Destroying enemy rooms.
• (Potentially) Sanctioned raid time.
• Foiling a sanctioned raid - dismantling/capturing an enemy tank.

City Destruction:

• Tanks become a new form of resource available to cities, they're checked out by an appropriately ranked citizen.
• There is a limit of (5) tanks at any one time still, but this can be supplemented by capturing enemy tanks in sanctioned raids (up to a maximum of (3).
• The tanks would regenerate (up to the maximum) every Achaean year.
• Instead of summoning a spark, a tank is placed in the room with the raiders, it feeds of the hostile energy to charge the tank.
• Each defender death in the city causes the tank to charge up, with three cumulative levels of effectiveness:
• Level 1: Destroys the current room
• Level 2: Destroys the current room and one room in each direction.
• Level 3: Destroys the current room and all rooms in line-of-sight from the current room.
• There would need to be some slow buildup on it's own to provide reason for the defending forces to want to defend.
• Tanks need to be manually detonated by the attacking forces (an instant ability)
• Victory experience scales based on the number of rooms destroyed.

• Defending forces can route the attackers by clearing them out of the room, either by killing them or forcing them to move. Once they control the room with the tank, they can:
• Dismantle the tank, granting a similar experience bonus as attackers do upon destroying a room.
• Capture the tank, granting a smaller/no experience bonus, but adding an additional tank to the defending city's arsenal.
• Manual city room repairs are removed.
• Rooms are repaired at the rate of one every (3) Achaean months, at a fixed cost to the city.

Empowered fonts:

• Potentially new powers added to the font arsenal:
• Something to speed up the decay of enemy room effects inside the city.
• Something to provide a city-wide "indoor" protection for a very limited duration.

You called them tanks, but it seems like this would be more like a bomb.. Like a super-holocaust bomb. It should be somekind of bomb. And I think that it should cause room effects against those in the room while it charges. The longer it charges, the worse the effects. And you shouldn't be able to blow it up in a last-ditch effort. Each time it reaches a new level, the raiding team should have to decide if they're able to hold out until the next level, or just detonate now and call it a victory. Also, I think the charging thing should not be start it and let it go. It should take active involvement of the raiding party so that they have to invest as much effort in it as the defenders do. As for kills feeding the machine... that seems like it'd lead to the ganking of non-combatants, targetting the weak, and leading to an overall unfun experience. Maybe instead, you have to feed it the essence of anything loyal to the target city, or soldiers of the target city? And only soldiers of the defending city would have the training to disable such a bomb, though anyone could participate in defense?

As for the fonts, isn't there already a font that prevents people from flying? 

For the 'automatic repair of rooms', why not create a new denizen 'guard' that can regenerate rooms, and allow them to wander about the streets of each city repairing the destroyed rooms? I think this would lead to a more immersive environment for the players, as they get to see people actively building their city back to what it was before they failed to defend it, as well as give them something to defend, and gold sinks always seem to be a good idea.

Achimrst

Ok so I haven't been completely following this thread, but I have read a lot of it.

Turning cities into a "Safe haven" might be a good idea for some cities but this game is supposed to be loosely based in a realish environment, not to mention a PvP environment. There are those who don't like PvP and want to just sit around do non-combat stuff but people attack cities because it will force the defenders to do something about it. I know some people do get angry about it but maybe you should use your non-combat time to complain about it to your city leaders so they do something about the city raiding you instead of trying to force a change on the system which allows it to happen.

Also increasing Icon, Shrine, and other types of conflict is good although I see a lot of shrine conflict going on already anyway.

(╯° _°）╯︵ ┻━┻ Just my thoughts disagree and WTF all you like :P