City destruction changes

They're talking about group xp for player kills, Dunn. So if I kill you with three other people in a raid, we'd all get 1/4th of the experience.

XP gain is already too easy. Adding group xp for PK just means the number of dragons will increase more rapidly. People should worry less about their xp, and more about playing their role in Achaea.

I'm all for introducing a comparison between the number of city soldiers online as a requirement for starting a sanctioned raid if the number of kills isn't met within a certain timeframe, because cities refusing to defend, rather than being unable to defend, isn't something that should stop a raid in its tracks. If a city wants to collectively qq to avoid a raid, they can lose guards or whatever. I wouldn't worry too much about RP considerations here, since OOC enjoyment/sensibility has to be prioritised in situations like this to make the game worth playing.

Should at the same time introduce a penalty for not maintaining a standing army constituting x% of your city's population.

Makarios said:

Its possible we can do something with checking how many online citizens compared to raiders, but something like this is hard to implement in a way that doesn't seem contrived. "Your enemies don't have enough people to be raided" or such doesn't really make much sense from an in character perspective.

The key point really is that if we want to make the system not off hours workable we have to require some kind of interaction between raiders and defenders.

I don't see why the raiders count would have to be compared to the online citizens, considering no system past or present has taken this into account to my knowledge.  A somewhat high number of citizens online to be able to force a mini raid would be nice, though. 15 (10 in city instead?) or so just to prevent situations in which the defending city should be capable of mustering a defense.  Enough time to do a room with adjacent would be enough to force a defense that could turn into a legitimate raid (by adding additional time with deaths) or allow the defenders to make the decision not to defend, but still incur some loss.  Perhaps limit how often this could be used with a timer, as Santar suggested, so that raids can still take place primarily in the way they were intended. 

My suggestion:

With how infrequent they are supposed to be, and how they are supposed to be very damaging, I see no reason to put any sort of cap on it.

If you have x city soldiers on the PMP, yet no one is engaging with the enemy after 10 minutes (basically, holding up the raid starting), your city guards all stop defending too, because, why would they if the soldiers wouldn't?. 

Can we have automatic promotions in the army toggleable? I assume the reason you automatically gain rank is to stop a city keeping their soldiers at rank 1 to minimise losses, but cities that use the army properly shouldn't have to just deal with everybody eventually being rank 5, since it stops ranks being used as anything other than a designation of your value in priming enemy tanks. It should be possible for army ranks to be given significance to the army/city they belong to, instead of just to their enemies.

@Dunn and @Makarios: Your thoughts ignore the fact that this entire system is, in fact, designed for group combat.

If the war system and Achaea conflict in general favored one-on-one skirmishes, then sure, let EXP go to the killer and suffer the rare kill steal. However, in group combat, one-on-one tactics generally become outright unfeasible in favor of working as a team.

Deciding that only one person gets rewarded for what is essentially a group effort is ridiculous.

Most of the time, one-on-one conflict usually happens as a result of a duel or maybe a side effect of no one else being around. In those cases, the group experience system shouldn't have any impact anyway!

That said, it sounds like @Makarios thought I was suggesting a flat division. I think only people who contribute in some way to someone's death should be considered. That's hard to track, considering mechanics like illusions, and even closing a door could lead to their doom, but it doesn't really have to be perfect!

Give people battle standards. Make them charge up based on PK assists etc during raids. Once they're charged up you can redeem them for  positive affirmation or whatever other reward (exp).

Echald said:

You can trade in 30 PK assists points for a pat on the head by the city guardian.

Worth more than any crazy text EXP!

It does seems like a peculiar majority of the people complaining that players are too much focused on xp and that shared exp on PK is bad idea are already up to dragon themselves. The old city destruction certainly didn't involve PKing directly, although this new one does. So it might be a way to bring it up, I guess.

Arditi said:

Have guard shifts like icon phases.

Paying guards to work more than 12 Achaean days in a row causes them to become fatigued and have reduced effectiveness. Guards require at least six uninterrupted Achaean days of rest to remain at full combat effectiveness.

The Minister of Security must set guard schedules and shifts.

Thus, you can have maximum guards at Thoth-hour times where you don't have defenders, and when you have defenders, you can give the little guys a break.

Jeez, what are we doing. Turning cities into Dwarf Fortress? I can't even figure out the damn military there, how do you expect people to figure it out in Achaea?

Jarrod said:

I believe Makarios changed it to 1-4 is automatic, and 5 requires promotion.

It results in the same thing at rank 4, but requires a lot of participation.

Yeah, I still don't like the automatic progression. Maybe a Patron-only toggle to stop cities deliberately keeping their military low ranked to abuse the system, without punishing cities who don't.