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Comments
The soul of Ashmond says, "Always with the sniping."
(Clan): Ictinus says, "Stop it Jiraishin, you're making me like you."
Would be nice if a divine gave Mhaldor something else to do
WINK WINK NUDGE NUDGE GARDEN
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One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important
Mhaldor gardening, eh? Careful, you might reveal your plan to transform Mhaldor into one giant flowerpot.
Something magical and event-y happens so all forests and jungles are protected from extermination. This happens in a manner tied to the forest spirits. Under usual circumstances, extermination can now no longer be performed.
The Twin Lords go "wtf mate we're not taking this sitting down" and Mhaldor gets a necromantic relic that lets them attack the major forests (the ones with forest spirits, but not random islands or other far-off places).
Oakstone also gets an equivalent way to attack necromancy.
Mhaldorian relic: Hellspawn Altar
- This name is cheesy. Cheese is delicious.
- This is located somewhere on Mhaldor Island. Not inside the city.
- The Altar stores energy. Its reserves tick up by +100 every game day. (This is an arbitrary number, just to give you an idea of how it would work.)
- Mhaldorian necromancers gain a new ability to "darken" forest/jungle rooms. Not wilderness, not off-plane. It's a fairly simple process and leaves a cosmetic alteration in the room saying something like "The forest has been unnaturally darkened." This has no other negative effect. When the day ticks over, for every darkened room, the Altar ticks up by an additional +1 energy.
- Darkening would cost maybe 2% necro essence - a minor but not too minor amount.
- Darkening can be easily reversed by Oakstone druids/sylvans/sentinels if they are in the room. Maybe they gain abilities to see if there are any darkened rooms in the area, and tell if a room in the area they're currently in is being darkened. Doing this would cost say, 100 sunlight, a trivial amount compared to the necro cost. Banish the shadows.
- When the Hellspawn Altar is at certain thresholds, eg. 25,000 energy (another arbitrary number, but this amount would take ~10 RL days to accumulate at +100 per game day with no forest rooms darkened), an assault can be declared on one of the major forests: Aureliana, Western Ithmia, Northern Ithmia, Eastern Ithmia, Northreach, Black Forest, Aalen. (Darkenwood is protected by Twilight, Aerinewilde by Melantha, and Ulangi is maybe excluded as well for whatever reason, purely because it's offshore and fights there would be a hassle.)
- Declaring an assault drains the Altar of 25,000 energy.
- When an assault is declared everyone sees some plane-wide lightshow about how "necromantic energies converge over the Aureliana".
- During an assault, rooms within the forest may be exterminated. Grove summon doesn't work. Necromancers can set rooms within the forest on fire with hellfire, because setting stuff on fire is awesome and fun. An assault lasts for maybe 30 minutes. If say two thirds of rooms in the area are exterminated, Evil wins. Yay Evil! The forest is blighted, the forest spirit disappears, local wildlife mobs disappear, and demonic critters start prancing around the forest. Maybe the raid lasts for like 1 extra minute per room exterminated, so it doesn't end abruptly if progress is being made. If Oakstone defends until the 30 minutes are up, the assault ends, the area can't be exterminated any more, Evil's efforts were in vain, and there's much playing of panpipes as Oakstone celebrates a victory.
- A blighted forest may be restored after a while. Maybe after say 3 days, Oakstone can begin rejuvenating the rooms, and once they're all rejuved they perform some other action and the forest spirit returns.
Ok so there are a few things going on here.
Forest assaults can't happen every day. The Altar needs enough energy first. There's a period of delay between an assault being initiated and when the next one can be initiated, as regulated by the Altar and its energy. Maybe the Altar has an upper limit on how much energy it can store, eg. it can store 40,000 and an assault costs 25,000.
Assaults have a time limit, so the team playing defense has a win condition which isn't "wait for the attackers to get tired". The team playing offense also has a win condition which isn't "are we tired of doing this yet", and is rewarded for achieving it (forest gets blighted).
The ability to darken rooms serves several purposes. It gives necromancers something to do to work towards preparedness for the next assault during the period when they can't assault. There's an element of "the necromancers are rallying, they encroach upon our lands" (insert your Tolkien-esque connotations here). It can also be used for provocation, to spark lesser fights that are not on the major scale of an assault. It's an activity for explorer-types to engage in. Reversing darkenings provides an incentive for forestal explorer-types, while hopefully - HOPEFULLY - not coming off as a mandatory activity that shackles them into patrolling as a chore (there is such a fine line here though, forestals seem to love turning things into chores in my personal experience).
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Oakstone's method of attack
It's hard to come up with something that roughly mirrors the necromancer offense, due to necromancy's present lack of assets outside Mhaldor Island, compared to Oakstone's assets which include every forest. But here's what I'm thinking.
Certain major graveyards are somehow important to necromancy, as a source of power, or by being connected to the source of necromantic power. (Necromancy comes from Sartan/the Twin Lords though doesn't it? So I don't know.) To reinforce this new declaration of their importance, and make it less of a blatant retcon, maybe give necromancers some minor ability to summon zombies/skeletons/spectres/the unquiet dead within these graveyards. I don't know I'm just pulling this out of my sunshiner.
Not every graveyard gains this distinction, just 5 or so specific, major ones. One on Mhaldor Island. Maybe Azdun. There are a few others across Sapience you could choose from, or you could "reveal" new ones (that had been there all along!) in locations that are agreeable for conflict: Great Rock, Moghedu, Harae, Blackrock, somewhere in the Vashnars, somewhere in the Granite Hills, somewhere in the Mhojave Desert. These are the analogues for the 7 major forests which can be attacked by necromancers.
Oakstone can declare assaults similar to necromancers. During an assault they can "purify" these graveyards ("major loci of necromantic power" if you want to make them sound less hacky). They do these by growing magic trees - birch, oak, rowan, willow, hawthorn, hazel, apple, fir, elder - which churn the soil, crack gravestones and pulverise mausoleums, recycle the dead back into the earth, and interrupt the availability of necromantic power. Growing a sacred tree involves a similar channel and cost to exterminating, can only be performed during an assault, can be interrupted, etc. If two thirds of rooms have these special trees in them, Oakstone wins the raid and the location becomes an overgrown ruin/small forest.
Oakstone would have something similar to the Altar, storing energy, to regulate how often they can declare assaults. They'd also have something similar to darkening they can do to stimulate energy in their Altar-equivalent, but I'm not sure what.
I mean, as far as I know,both Eleusis and Mhaldor just take random pot shots at eachother, What I have seen is a few mhaldorians blowing up many rooms, with timezone abuse, and eleusis raiding..with timezone abuse. To both sides, when you instigate conflict, you're not trying to win. When you instigate conflict, show the people that have harmed you or your org that you are strong enough to face them, at the same time, in a plotted attack. don't just let a person log in with a ton of work to do.
So, if you want a conflict,be proactive about it. Eleusis, if you don't want a conflict, unenemy everyone from oakstone. I sure won't want to get enemied again. But as long as there is the conflict, no matter how ill formed, do it right, or to the best of your abilities.
@Sabiru I agree. Doing something like that would be great if you could manage it, without depersonalising it too much and making it one size fits all (like Icons, which suffer for it).
But forests vs necro is a fight that's actually happening and that people care about. It's something that most people want redesigned. It seems more sensible to make something for forests vs necro - but to leave openings for it to be expanded later, if occult vs necro or forests vs devo ever become a thing - than to inflate the project into something vastly larger, and then see it inevitably shelved as being too large to handle.
On a separate/related note I do think Achaea suffers from a lack of ways for cities to meaningfully compete against each other, other than raids, CTFs, and city-based egghunts. Lusternia has its revolts/aetherflares/culture system. Aetolia has ylem. Imperian has shardfalls.
From a mechanics perspective, Mhaldor is at a severe disadvantage.
From a PITA perspective, Forestals are screwed.
I like the whole plants vs zombies idea!
As a Mhaldorian, I will say that the reason Exterms are so enjoyable (For me) is the fact that we can go around, try to set up a territory, claim it as our own and defend from there while moving out freely. Now don't get me wrong, your idea does indeed have that aspect to it. The only thing I actually fear is how long the "red fog" would take to do anything, which would revert it back to boring old city raid mechanics of entrenching a position and having to wait around until something interesting happens, then look at moving to the next point.
As well, I do think that you have not fully addressed the issue of Agressors V Defenders. This form of conflict takes a bit longer, would be harder to pull off, but in the end it remains mostly the same. We're still just attacking forests when we feel like it, and they are still just having to defend.
Also, the wildwood tree thing should not be in concoctions. Mainly because sents don't need that. If anything it would be a groves ability. Sentinel does not actually have a spiritual/magical bond to the forest in the same way that druids and sylvan do. They protect it yes, but they are hunters/woodsmen/survivalists. They don't have the ability to create or use the forest's powers.
I'm not meaning to shoot anything down, and while I think the mechanics look fun it needs to be revamped a bit into a way that the player base finds more attractive as I do not think it is amazingly different than what we currently have in terms of conflict.
Forestals are obligated by their roleplay to defend the forests no matter what. Protecting nature is by definition the most important thing for a forestal, so if they're way outnumbered, they still have an RP obligation to defend even if it means dying over and over, and if they were in the middle of doing something really valuable, they have to cancel that valuable thing and go defend, and if they were trying to raid, they have to stop raiding and go defend. The only alternative is to roleplay bad, hypocritical forestals.
By contrast, nothing you can invent for forestals to do back to Mhaldor will have anything like that status. Attacking their red fog, or making trees grow, are not destructions of the thing Mhaldor values above absolutely all else, the way attacking the forests is a destruction of the thing forestals value above absolutely all else. That means that if they're in the middle of something or they're outnumbered, they have the freedom to just ignore it.
That means that any alternate system which still involves an extermination mechanic, no matter how even-handed you try to make it, is still massively imbalanced in the grand scheme of things and gives anyone with the ability to attack nature unfair leverage over forestals, when they have no comparable leverage in return.
I once proposed something like Blujixapug suggests but honestly, even the thing I suggested there would still suck for us. The only real solution is to just delete the whole mess. I hope to hell that's what the Garden is planning.
This is a fair point.
If extermination is deleted, then probably monoliths (or something like that) should prevent grove summon. Grove summon's main reason for existing is defending against extermination anyhow.
As for grove flow, I'd be open to nerfing that too, though it might be necessary to balance out gravehands/the fact that forestals are very melee-centric/the fact that Eleusis is the only city where you can't implant totems in the defendable area. If you don't want people to flow to you, you can prop a totem.
However, once Oakstone defenses are deleted, the restriction on implanting totems in the forest ought to be lifted, as there wouldn't really be any more justification for it anymore. If that happened and we got to put totems up all over Eastern Ithmia, then nerfing grove flow would make more sense.
tl;dr: The solution is to delete extermination, and if necessary for balance, nerf the forestal skills that exist only to help us cope with it. The solution is not to try to make extermination suck slightly less.
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