Salem

Dallane wrote:

Heffernan wrote:
hurr durr i have no clue on how salem works.

Says the dude raiding a empty town full of boarder stones.

Heffernan wrote:Says the guy not knowing Bo(a?)rder stones are the corners of walls, and boundary stones the Town Authority Objects.

riolic wrote:

On mobile so I can't cherry pick the segments I want so I'll try to be concise.

There are multiple things that I think are detrimental to pvp on providence.
1) Trial by combat
2) hard caps on bashing speed
3) the lack of incremental raiding tools
4) over tuned defensive tools

My starting points on each of these:

1a) trial by combat, in its current form, encourage the use of 'bare minimum criminal characters.
These characters are seldomly equipped to fight as by the end of the day it ends up being pointless to skill/bile a character beyond the bare minimum for hitting any given wall. While bashing if these characters encounter any resistance they need to run away while the player brings in a dedicated fighter to attempt to deal with the problem.
By the time this juggling act is done one side or the other is unable/ unwilling to fight.
If tbcs were changed to simply being a tool to lock a criminal to a leanto, the risk/reward of using properly statted/balanced characters to commit crime on would shift. From that we may see more actual conflict on providence.

2a) Pre-mm takeover bashing speed was not hardcapped as it is today. This lead to a faster paced raiding (too fast in some cases). So, the led to stronger characters being 'RISKED'. I do not advocate a jump back to that system. However, I do think that there needs to be some benefit to using a character above 'bare minimum'. Most likely I. The removal of the current hard caps in favor of a less harsh softcapped system.

3a) Judas favorite talking point. I do not think tclaim>pclaim is healthy for the game. But I do think a shift of mechanics involved would be healthy for enabling interactions across the game.

If t-claims were to overwrite pclaim rights entirely. The game would become a ***** with loopholes where 3-4 players wipe out 75% of providence due to old design methods.

A better solution I think would be a middle ground. Where if a t-claim and p-claim overlap. And you do not have rights on both it is considered in a 'contested' state. This state could be approached many ways.
A few not well thought out options

1) crime for anyone who does not have permissions on both claims. This would mean repairing, building, moving objects, etc would all incur crime and it's associated penalties

2) the contested state would disable all repairs and building in the contested part of both claims until one claim was removed/ran out of authority

3) anything built in the contested zone would be set to 0 soak for X amount of time. Perhaps 12 hours. With its soak then slowly raising.
Currently freshly built walls are actually stronger then old walls in a siege situation due to splash mechanics. This would aikm to alter that.

4) This has been talked to death already in this thread and elsewhere. And is a multifaceted balancing nightmare. But certainly the passive defence tools available to defenders are far too strong. With active tools for raiders being nearly non-existent. Something here probably needs to change. But as for what would require a focus group of its own and many weeks of hands on testing.

In summary: my battery is almost dead so I need to stop rambling here
E: that was not concise at all. My bad.

Taipion wrote:incredibly easy target

• Torchpost: long range, normal fire speed, good dmg.
• Baby Brazier: short range, fast speed, higher dmg than torchpost, dmg can be increased by purity.
• Blazing Brazier: medium range,medium fire speed, high dmg, dmg can be increased by purity.
• New Structure! "Beacon Tower": very long range, low fire speed, low dmg, % of max bile dmg

• Damage is reduced when within the range of other Defenses Structures, but it only affect their own kind, ex: Torchposts only affect Torchposts, etc. Individual structure do considerably less damage but will critical hit far more often.
• Torchpost and Baby Brazier will automatically ignite when it detects a crime near it.
• Blazing Brazier will NOT automatically ignite when it detects a crime near it. and can ONLY use for town defense, will talk about this later.
• If there's too many Torchpost, it will deal 0 dmg if not crit, but its still necessary at some point, will talk about this later.

• require townbell.
• can ONLY ignite by Torchpost
• Blazing Brazier can ONLY ignite by this.
• Last 1 ~ 2 day after ignite.
• If tower have ignited before (in range of 12~36 hours), tower will be slightly faster to be reignited

• Pclam defense
  
  • Just like currently mechanism, but since you can't use Blazing Brazier, the dmg should be higher.
• Town defense
  
  • Beacon Tower need to be "reignited " by Torchpost, larger the town is, longer the tower will be reignited .
  • Torchpost's fire target will be different, it will shot player first, then charge the Beacon Tower. crit doesn't affect charging speed.
    
    • ex: first shot -> raider, 2nd shot -> Beacon Tower, 3rd shot -> raider, so on.
  • Only the Torchpost that have raider in range will charge the tower.
  • After the tower ignited, the tower will ignite all the Blazing Brazier in range.
  • just like torchpost, it will shot player first, then charge the Beacon Tower near by. the charging speed is slightly faster than torchpost.
  • raider can only take 1 shot by 1 tower at a times.
  • If all the torchpost ran out of ammo before ignite the tower, your town are done

Ronch wrote:Implementing Cannons into Providence will fix a lot in this 'perceived' raiding quandary too.

Andromedan wrote:I don't think it should be possible for any one person to raid the base that Heffernan is describing. If it takes three years of extreme no-life gaming to build something, it better take a coordinated group of raiders to do damage to it, let alone raid and waste it. One can argue that certain things should take less time or effort, but that should be an acceptable ratio to time expended. That in my opinion is a correct balance. So much time is spent gathering, crafting, building, production, mining, hunting, on skills, breeding animals, travelling etc. It should not go to waste so easily. If Salem were a fast-paced game, pvp and raiding could be fast paced as well, but it isn't, not by a longshot. It would be a different story if a well-coordinated group had no chance of ever raiding Heffernan for example.