Rebalancing defences

[Potjeh]

Yeah, buildings is what I meant. Building shields to evade brazier fire would definitely be a valid tactic, but I think it should be kept in check by making building stuff on hostile claim a lot more BB-expensive than your garden variety vandalism. A shield here and there is fine, spamming entire protective corridors isn't.

*edit* Darwoth, rams don't never have and never will work in Haven, as acknowledged by the devs themselves. Which is precisely why they've stated they're never going back to them. If you really feel compelled to engage in a pointless crusade to implement them, please do so in a thread of your own.

[Kaol]

Didn't his thread get merged?

Anyway I would prefer we had this discussion when the butthurt over the recent destruction of Gallows and the humiliation of its members has died down. Its obvious by the amount of over moderation and general ***** of the forums lately that people have their knickers in a twist.

[Dallane]

Didn't his thread get merged?

Anyway I would prefer we had this discussion when the butthurt over the recent destruction of Gallows and the humiliation of its members has died down. Its obvious by the amount of over moderation and general ***** of the forums lately that people have their knickers in a twist.

no one is upset about that. it just proves a point people have been trying to make for a long time.

[Chiprel]

Didn't his thread get merged?

Anyway I would prefer we had this discussion when the butthurt over the recent destruction of Gallows and the humiliation of its members has died down. Its obvious by the amount of over moderation and general ***** of the forums lately that people have their knickers in a twist.

no one is upset about that. it just proves a point people have been trying to make for a long time.

dont give defenses of GH as example. Those were not working at all cause of xploit
As for defenses being weak: It's a common knowledge for raiders that walls/brazier won't hold enemies for long if noone is online.

[Kaol]

It wasn't meant to be a dig at GH, its just my opinion that there's too much politics going on in the wrong section.

For what it's worth here my views on defenses and the overall pvp game:

1) There is no skill or strategy requirement invloved in this game.

Characters are created by pumping them with food and inspirationals but there is no real skill requirement to do this, you just need the gametime to set up the infrastructure, to craft the foot/inspirationals and to consume the food/inspirationals and you need to wait the real life time for crops to grow and fields to have a chance to get influence.

Raiding usually consists of "player versus building" - that fine art of clicking on an object and waiting for a timer to elapse. The only threat to raid characters in most situations is a game crash while under brazier fire. Otherwise the character simply retreats when their BB/Phlegm is too low and waits for crime to fade before regening and finishing the job. That is if they even need to retreat once.

Without addressing this issue i do not see how tweaks to the game will solve the fundamental problem - that the game boils down to how much time you want to sit on your arse doing boring **** in order to have a greater number of pvp characters than your opponent to grind him down.

The only solution is surely to either force people to active raid (ie by either server raid timezones or letting the defender set a raid window) or to change the PvB on passive defences to PvE (ie NPC hirelings, traps ect - things that are less predictable than static walls/braziers that could catch a raider out and make him KO on a plot)

[Potjeh]

If you consider the tactical implications of my suggestions you'll see it opens a lot of room for player skill. The defenders will need to come up with good wall and brazier layouts. I imagine some sort of a star fortress would be the most common. The attackers would need to find and exploit weaknesses in design. With the Reel analogue in play, there'd be a lot of tactics in picking where to create safe spots that are in reach of important targets but not too far to retreat from if caught while recovering from the Reel analogue.

This isn't to say I disagree with throwing in some curveballs. Traps and guard dogs definitely sound good. I reckon traps should be more about status effects than direct damage, for example caltrops could drop movement speed to crawl. I'm not really a fan of battle scheduling, though, because it's too tricky to make fair to people from all the different timezones.

[darnokpl]

If you consider the tactical implications of my suggestions you'll see it opens a lot of room for player skill. The defenders will need to come up with good wall and brazier layouts. I imagine some sort of a star fortress would be the most common. The attackers would need to find and exploit weaknesses in design. With the Reel analogue in play, there'd be a lot of tactics in picking where to create safe spots that are in reach of important targets but not too far to retreat from if caught while recovering from the Reel analogue.

I can not imagine safe town or raid under those conditions should be hard and it would be easy to abuse and glitchy as hell imho.
Any paint design for simple town with hv please?

I like idea of brazier-dmg-reel and please increase BB drain per structure hit right now even double claims sucks and we have to pay double tax for them

This isn't to say I disagree with throwing in some curveballs. Traps and guard dogs definitely sound good. I reckon traps should be more about status effects than direct damage, for example caltrops could drop movement speed to crawl. I'm not really a fan of battle scheduling, though, because it's too tricky to make fair to people from all the different timezones.

Love idea of that kind of traps... stuns, slows, increase imbalance or brazier-dmg-reel
About guard dogs I wrote in other thread, but here I will +100 this idea again

[Kaol]

As long as the defenses are static then provided my raider is not retarded he will overcome them.

[Potjeh]

Well of course they will be able to overcome the defences. That's intended behaviour. What isn't intended is breaching them before the other side has a chance to react. The siege process should be go back and forth for a couple of days before one side loses. The attacker would chip away at the defences and the defender would fortify, and the victor would be determined by both resource quantity and the skill with which they're deployed (ie placement of walls and braziers / finding a path of least resistance through braziers and defences). I reckon we should be shooting for an economy/tactics importance balance similar to the original Starcraft.

Of course, we would need some proper resource sinks for the attacker, because food regen is just too cheap. For example, there's some towers with ridiculous damage (2-3 shots to kill a 500 humour char) but limited range. You can build a cannon that takes a ridiculous amount of iron and take out those towers from a safe distance. The cannon has a limit on it, though - it can only fire a couple of shots before it overheats and can't be used again for a couple of hours. So it really needs to stay in action for a couple of days to pay for itself. But the attacker has to sleep too, and the defender will simply smash his cannon when he does, before the cannon can even destroy more value in defences than it cost to build. The answer of course is for the attacker to build a siege camp to protect his cannon while it's cooling off, and that quickly escalates into building a proper, highly expensive base. Mission accomplished, there's a symmetry between the cost of attacking and the cost of defending.

[MagicManICT]

Exactly. A raid on a base shouldn't be a 45-60 minute affair plowing through a few small defenses. There should be days of build-up and the defenders should be able to have the option to show up to the fight or let the attackers roll through.