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Comments
@Sarathai to be completely honest I was very confused by your disagreements. I'm not sure if I was clear. My list of perceived problems were with the current war system . Your post read, at least to me as if were a Reply to perceived problems that I foresaw with my proposed system. If that's the case I'm sorry if I didn't communicate that clearly. If not, I was pretty confused by your stances and I don't think I can muster an adequate response.
On the concerns of a mechanical end game: I really should have been clearer guys. I always intended for there to be the option of a treaty or peaceful resolution in lieu of destroying the fortification so that a city doesn't -have to be starved out to lose a war.
On gaming or perfecting the system:
i think these concerns carry some weight, but they always fall into a slippery slope fallacy in my mind. Of course people will try to solidify their victory. Of course they'll want to take every advantage for themselves. I think randomization of the supply lines is the best way to combat this. It forces the generals to make the best possible use of their resources with the knowledge that they may not get the shipment they expect. Also that's why I think a siege that can be opted out of by treaty is an effective solution. Did your opponent out game you, surrender. Simple as that.
In response to some of the perceived problems being better attributed to player mindset and not a real problem: I personally feel that open pk is not a real problem. I wasn't an experienced combatant when I went mark, and it didn't really ruin my life or
make the game unplayable. I really do feel that those complaints are vastly overstated. However, it is a complaint that resounds from the common player base. It is repeated endlessly in the rants anytime someone brings up the war system. Further it was proposed that it's the leaders job to fix that mindset. Sure. That's going to happen. That's not to say leaders don't try @Jhui has thrown himself into the fire endlessly in order to make his troops less wary of consequence or death. Not even all of his troops have been convinced, though the core group certainly has. I don't think the average leader is ever going to make that goalpost. It's time for us to look at how to placate those complainants instead of telling them to "fix their attitude."
@Jurixe you can have the credit if you want it!
I don't want troop movement, I don't want seige engines, and I don't think that we need a way for "non-coms" to participate.
There is plenty of the game dedicated to those that want to hunt or gather commodities. While I agree that it would be interesting content, I feel like in the grand scheme of things, it's just going to be too much to handle. If everyone in the city is forced to worry about being ganked, collecting commodities, sinking enemy ships, or building seige equipment; war truly will no longer be opt in. As it stands, if you don't want to participate, you quit the military.
Leave war as a combat(with some sides of roleplay) aspect of the game, please. New content is always nice, but I would prefer any admin effort be focused on the numerous other endevours they have planned (such as multiclass)
Edit: faction leaders need to get together, form an ooc plan, and sick with it. If one side gets too griefy,they need to be told to cut some of it out. Let's get the ball rolling. War is an interesting prospect and I doubt any of us want one last war. If we all enter it with the understanding that if we cannot control our faction, no one will want to play with us anymore, I think everyone will be a lot happier.
The idea that city leaders need to get together to form some sort of a plan is a weird one to me as well. Leaders on both sides should be open to communication regarding how the war is going, whether it's time to call it quits, etc., but I think it's better personally to just let it play out IC and see where it goes.
Sorry if I wasn't clear - I was disagreeing with your analysis of the problem and had quite a lot to say about that, so didn't really get to what you actually proposed. Double sorry if my criticisms were "confusing".
Make some contested territories. Give benefits when you control them.
(control a seafaring island? get a bonus to seafaring, perhaps have three or four territories on sapience, and when 2/3 of them are in control, get a stat bonus? )
Maybe stats are a little too asinine, but they could provide bonuses for their citizens. (an exp bonus for your city?, gold drop bonus? increased regens?)
From what I've heard, a ton of people just entirely stopped logging in during the landmarking period - you were expected to participate, it was repetitive, the results were inherently temporary, and it was easy to tell when it was going to take place, so a lot of people just avoided it. I could be wrong, but I also think it only really provided benefits to certain classes, despite everyone feeling obligated to participate. I do know that some people did like it, but it seems like the overall consensus was definitely negative.
You can imagine how this would affect the power pendulum. People who don't want to play on the losing side would jump ship, making it even harder to gain any ground. Imagine trying to play a paladin with zero landmarks and your only Devo regen coming from immolating, or an infernal when you can only regen from eating hearts.
It was a highly demanding an activity, with a huge amount of your class's power at stake, running slightly more frequently than once/2 weeks.
It, like virtually any idea that substantially rewards or punishes an entire city of people for winning or losing a war, is problematic because it creates a positive feedback loop, where winning makes you more likely to continue to win. Of course, a negative feedback loop (winning makes you less likely to continue winning) is not exactly compelling in a highly competitive environment like Achaea either.
I have literally never seen a compelling system that tries to imitate strategic 'war' work in a freeform MUD or MMO that's anything like Achaea. And while I appreciate you guys wracking your brains, every idea that's been presented is fatally flawed, as is every idea I've ever heard, whether from players or professional designers, for a war simulation system in this kind of game world.
There are many reasons you can't point to a single successful free-form, real-time worldy MUD/MMO with a war simulation anything like you some of you are fantasizing about (not that I blame you - building that kind of thing was one of my ambitions when starting Achaea. It's a compelling prospect right up until you start delving into the details.)
Not a war system, but more of a fun little minievent every year.
This post by @Exelethril post came from Rants, not this thread, but it accurately and without hyperbole summarises my experience with Achaea's war system. After going through one, I don't know why anyone would want to participate in a second.
Wars have no objective or win condition. A war only ends when one of the two city leaders decides to change city relations. So the de facto win condition becomes forcing the enemy CL to make that decision. This is done by either 1. griefing their city until their soldiers stop wanting to fight or log in, and their CL surrenders to save their city's population - or they refuse to surrender, stick their fingers in their ears, and defiantly log out/hide on a ship while their city becomes a depopulated wasteland. Or 2. by having some kind of OOC conversation between the warring CLs where they make arrangements. "We'll raid you, then you raid us, then we'll have a big battle on Meropis on the weekend, and we'll talk to our patron and get some NPCs to shout about it. Loser pays the winner 2.5 mil and makes a concession post, and we'll wrap it all up in a week before everyone gets sick of open PK. Deal?" Then you can massage the truth and rewrite history into something cooler-sounding than what happened.
If you're making all those case-by-case arrangements yourself and organising things OOC, why do you need to use the war system at all? All it's really giving you is the city soldier flag and freedom from PK abuse claims. Is that enough?
If case-by-case will always be superior in so many relevant ways to a more heavily designed system (eg. Grandue's proposal), is a more elaborate war system needed? I guess without one, all the actual players involved have no clear gameplay goals, no way to measure progress, no little victory bar ticking up towards 100%. Which is a significant downside, unless you have a CL who's amazing at managing and motivating people on a daily or hourly basis.
It was 5 million. @Erhon bought a seastrider and named it "Shallam's Loss". smh
can we make a war system that doesn't require anyone to do anything other than participate for it to be fun?
and the answer would be: probably not
So, really the question is:
Is the war system good enough that if people on both sides can agree to a few rules/objectives before hand and build it up correctly in-game, can it be everything people would want it to be?
To which the answer would be: if it's done correctly, then most likely
People just have to do the last part or we'll never know. It's really sad that people assume it can't be more than what @Exelethril described it to be just because people have handled wars terribly in the past. The new system has a lot of room for play and adjustment. I have no idea why people think we are limited to what is coded in for us.
Granted that war was started without reason or preparation from either side, but it was far less fun than the sporadic raiding, skirmishing and defiling that was done before the war started. Most likely because both sides have people who are too fixated on winning, or not losing, that they push things and start jumping every soldier who sets foot outside their city or pick fights they know they can't lose. When it becomes all about winning, it stops being fun. Every city has people like that, some more than others.
So would it be possible to get a good war in the way @Jhui describes? Simply because what people want war to be, is very different. Some people want opt-in, others just want the freedom to gank and kill every enemy soldier and pk all day. Even then you'd need to lay down rules, compromise, agree on objectives and then have ways to check that these are actually being followed. Any mechanical goal that is easily checked, such as blow up X rooms first, is also easily gamed: don't give enemies a sanction, raid them with overwhelming numbers, etc...
The only way to get a good war would be if every participant agreed on the rules and objectives and followed them to the letter without complaint. How likely is that?
This is basically saying "If you ignore the war system and setup an engagement between the cities with pre-stated rules/objectives". Yes, it would make a more interesting scenario, but it doesn't involve the war system at all because no war system could adequately contain all the possible ideas people could come up with for conflict.
Cascades of quicksilver light streak across the firmament as the celestial voice of Ourania intones, "Oh Jarrod..."
Coming up with completely new war objectives/rules for every war would be a serious toll on anyone wanting to plan a war. But with a war system already in place, it's not too hard to come up with objectives/rules around the war system.
It should be a serious toll when people want to plan a war, not just 'ok toggle on this in-game system'. Wars shouldn't be decided upon lightly.
Cascades of quicksilver light streak across the firmament as the celestial voice of Ourania intones, "Oh Jarrod..."
I definitely think all wars should have serious thought put into them and not just be toggled.
I include city destruction as part of the war system. Maybe I am wrong there? Seems like it is.
- Have wars be conducted via "campaigns", which are initialized in the cities' war rooms and create an "NPC army" led by a central figure, maybe the guardian, for each city, both of which occupy a set of opposing "camp" areas around the continent. Campaigns could cost a chunk of change and/or commodities if we want "realism" and penalties for loss, or they could be free if we just want some fun without those positive/negative feedback loops.
- These camps are functionally just bashing grounds like Polyargos/Tundra were, (Honestly more like the sub-90 bashing areas during the Conclave events.) Players bash the enemy NPC army and earn points while defending their own, with the camp areas being free PK like Poly/Tundra was.
- The general or guardian NPC comes about on a regular schedule. This could be every hour, like the Conclave was, or maybe a once/twice a day thing, so that people can still play the game normally during a war. General/guardian appearance could perhaps be customizable from the cities' War Room like Icon phases, or just on a rotating schedule so all timezones are included.
- The camps can either be mobile, moving toward either city as one side wins/loses rounds through via a series of pre-determined locations, turning it into a sort of tug-of-war until one side's army reaches the enemy city for the "win", or they could stay static, and just represent a long pitched battle in the field to determine the war's outcome. (Like some Greek wars were decided.)
- A random element could be included to represent the NPCs' actual fighting, which affects the difficulty of camp bashing or point goals to "win" the round, like Targossas's army could have a good day vs Ashtan' army that round/cycle, which would leave it up to Ashtan's players to make up that difference, while Targ has an easier goal during that phase, just to add a touch of uncertainty to the formula and to prevent forgone conclusions because of early leads.
- Once one side's army reaches the other's city, (in the tug-of-war version) or one side reaches the arbitrary number of points or time elapses, (in the Conclave version) the campaign is won. Both sides then have the choice to call for a new campaign and begin the cycle again. The war ends when one side starts a campaign and the other chooses not to, and is "sacked" by the opposing campaign's army, setting relations back to "neutral". There could be actual rewards/penalties for the winners/losers at this point, or maybe not,
if we're still worried about those feedback loops, RP bragging rights
have traditionally been what wars are about, so we could just keep to that theme.
This lets the fighters fight and the bashers bash in the Free PK zones, and the non-com RP'ers continue to do their RP thing in their city without getting molested too much more than usual. It avoids the pitfalls of Open PK soldiers while still affording both sides ample opportunities to gank each other. It comes with clear goals and means to win, using systems we already kinda have in place, which people already said they enjoyed. And it provides feeling of epic struggle without the inherent costs being so harsh on the losers that no one would ever want to risk it, with the option to have tangible consequences or not at the war's conclusion, whatever we decide is best.Yeah, this is why I don't see any point to the open pk soldiers thing in a war though. What does it encourage other than random ganking? If you are agreeing to fight according to rules, you don't need open pk. You can always kill people for reason, or with their consent.
Agree with this. I mean, I agree with what @Jhui is saying too, in that players always are capable of creating fun activities on their own, but it doesn't really involve the war system. When I say war system, I mean, things we gain from declaring an official war (via setting relations hostile). If cities are agreeing on rules and essentially creating their own war system, the official war declaration is relatively meaningless. I guess it reduces experience loss?
I'd rather it just not create the open pk in that instance, and allow the players to decide when they want to fight. It'd also be nice if war somehow gave you the ability to declare a sanction without the defending city engaging. I like the way it is now, outside of war, but if you choose to go to war, you shouldn't be able to just keep the enemy city from attacking you.
There's still usually nothing to fight over. Typically you win the ability to make a public post saying "we win" (and some jackass citizen makes their own post that says "Not really! Really we are the winners!" even if city leaders agree not to - hell I can think of times that even third parties have made those posts) or you get some city gold that most citizens probably didn't even know the city had, that they have no appreciation for whatsoever. Maybe a few more rooms than usual get destroyed until they're back again tomorrow, or the same thing happens, but with guards.
One thing that would help I think would be to shift victory posts to Events posts so they can be set above the stupid replies that always appear on public and so wars can be more a part of the "historical record". @Sarapis, would that be doable (especially if both leaders agree to victory conditions early on)?
Also, while I was originally thinking that a system could be put in place to offer mechanics for territory to fight over (not by any means an original idea), the more I think about it, the more I think you're right, but missing one crucial ingredient in your recipe for a good war:
If you're going to have leaders work OOCly to make wars fun, I think the primary thing they need to work out is lasting consequences. Cities need to cede territories or change policies to suit the victors or set up recurring payments or something. The world should look different after the war. Give me a Targossas with simmering resentment over the gold they send every year to Ashtan, until it boils over and they go on the offensive. Give me a small cabal of Hashani, publically disavowed but secretly supported, fighting to "Take back Tasur'ke!" (I want to see those posters everywhere!). Give me a Mhaldor that stipulates that Eleusis only be allowed to build a single barracks and an election in Eleusis where a firebrand is running on the promise of breaking the treaty and a return to a stronger military to keep Eleusis safe.
That's the sort of stuff I want to see out of wars, not a lump sum of city gold changing hands or some temporarily destroyed rooms or a bunch of dead guards that will be replaced in a day or two or a couple of public posts declaring victory.
I think people just want something memorable and fun. If people need to write their own books documenting the war I don't see why they couldn't. I am sure you could even ask a divine to help with an events post and a symbol of victory like you've described.
if we get too detailed in a war system then we're not left with as much room to innovate.
basically, if the devs want to add something to help out the war system then that's fine but we shouldn't wait until 2020 to use the current one with the right amount of planning
Cities already have territorial interests. And they have policies of barring citizens of enemy cities from entering. And they have buildings. And they have laws. And they (at least used to) have trade agreements. Things like that would be really interesting and would allow wars to alter the landscape for more than just combatants.