City Destruction

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  • edited October 2013
    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.
  • 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.
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  • 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?

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  • 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.

  • edited October 2013
    Not likely, dude - combat-centric cities will always gravitate towards raiding neutral cities at random, besides all cities are aligned in some way.

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  • 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.
  • VayneVayne Rhode Island
    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?
    image
  • edited October 2013
    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.
  • 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.
  • edited October 2013
    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 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.
  • 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.


                   Honourable, knight eternal,

                                            Darkly evil, cruel infernal.

                                                                     Necromanctic to the core,

                                                                                             Dance with death forever more.



  • 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.
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  • 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.



  • 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

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