Game Development: Project Mayhem

[Claeyt]

Regardless of brazier fire with this update we can have higher titans than before (With enough effort on your end based on screens showed + once pumpkins get their own values) and as it is titans can get into nearly any base (any reasonable production base for sure) with enough time put in/lack of retaliation from the other side. Peaceful farmers are not allowed to exist in this game. If you want to avoid combat and just enjoy your time building/farming in Salem then you are simply going to have a bad time. In haven we have brick walls + rams. Rams take 24 hours to dry and can be bashed any time in that 24h. This means that peaceful people have 24 hours to save their walls and avoid the kambert. If raiders want to hurt their village, they'll simply try to catch the villagers outside of their walls foraging. Tracking off of hearthfire (homestead) is very common practice and makes pvp more optional. If you want to get your jollies out, leave your base and go look for a fight. In Salem there is a 4 hour window where a trial can be broken and within that window you have an entire raid force camping it. An argument would be "join a village with pvp players to protect you". But why? Why should I have to do that? Emerald City was a village of 100% peaceful, non-scent leaving players and they did amazingly for many worlds. They were probably one of the most loved villages out there. This mechanic does not promote lasting bases for peaceful players, it simply pushes PVP (which is only one aspect of the game) onto everyone who plays. Not to mention people just village claim hopping to protect themselves from summon. I think there should be a real shift between player strength and base importance. Put more emphasis on tool like cannons and rams and remove hand bashing of tougher walls. Player bodies should be for pvp, and crafting, not for destruction of base defenses.

I don't really think this food is going to help titans that much. It's certainly not meant for getting from 300-400 without high purity flour. The poorly designed high purity farming aspect to the game is still at a crawl and no new titans are popping up. This does help mid level guys get from 50-150 tho and maybe, just maybe be able to team up on the Titans.

As for bases, I agree something as simple as being able to destroy waste claims for 24 hrs might really help towns grow, which I think the devs are aiming for. It seems like they want us to attack villages with 10-20 100-200 stat guys, rather than with 2-5 400 stat guys. They've promised us 5 types of walls, so I wouldn't be surprised in the least if brick came out later this summer (say 5 bricks and 1 iron per section). As for rams and such, yeah, that's cooler than waste claims and yes I think they made a mistake about allowing characters to grow to the levels they have without bases growing first. They should have done better villages and bases then allowed titans to grow, but we'll never know that now. As for villages growing on Roanoke it's been looking good. There are some nice new towns popping up. Some of the old big ones have slowed but are still there. The ruins of the first big towns still stand as examples of Dev mistakes in keeping players in the game.

Thursday afternoon in the states:
Plymouth 74
Roanoke 92
Jamestown 75

Not nearly enough to pay the bandwidth for Paradox

[Mereni]

I've seen a lot of complaints about waste claims being bad vs battering rams because players can't stay just be farmers, and that waste claims should thus be destroyable any time. But there are some problems with this.

As I understand it, battering rams could be made some distance from a wall in such a way that they weren't so likely to be found. Waste claims, on the other hand, put down a huge, obvious shadow. You know as soon as you log on that there's a waste claim out there. That evens things out considerably since patrolling is not needed until you actually see a shadow. And the claim seems to be that it should be possible to play Salem and never pvp. I'm guessing that the devs want pvp to be an integral part of the game and so that is why the change was made from battering rams. If they liked the battering rams and what they did to HnH, they would have kept them.

It's still very possible to play as a farmer and nothing but. Raiders love farmers. If you want to putter around in a base all day farming, baking, building sheds, (raising livestock??), you can still join a town full of raiders and they will be very happy to give you protection, loot, You don't like him; want him dead?, whatever, in exchange for your work.

I do think it's a bad thing that the low tier stuff got nerfed. Yeah, you can mix a little barley in with your oatmeal to get "baseline" oatmeal crackers again, but that requires tier 2. I don't know, maybe the devs plan to add better purity water soon, that would make this base tier nerf make sense. Otherwise, it doesn't seem like much to get tier 2 foods with fair quality for we who have been around awhile, but I still remember when I was new tier 2 was far off and difficult to get.

I also see a problem with tier 3 being almost required now. SO much hay is needed. Might be good for the newbies to make silver with but even trying to buy it won't be enough. Those who want to make their cabbage cakes with red cabbage and wheat will need something like 3/4 of their fields to be just trash oat purely so they can have enough hay. This was true to a lesser extent before when running just a few tier 3 fields, there would be a great deal of extra cereal seed going into humus bins and turkey coops. I'm really really hoping the devs will be merciful here and either give us a crop that produces JUST hay, or give us animals soon and allow us to feed them oat ears and/or seeds depending on the animal. I can see horses and cows eating oats and chickens and turkeys eating seeds, at the very least.

I think the biggest problem for new players will be just figuring this all out. Having a tootip that shows what you can expect from base purity stuff was invaluable to me. I remember gluttony was very confusing. Farming and the interaction of influence and tiers and fertilizer was even worse. I put off farming for weeks just because it was too much to figure out and too little explanation. This change now with flour and cabbage, and whatever type wildly affecting the outcome and making the tooltips useless is going to cause so much confusion. We really are going to need some sort of cookbook or something.

[Wournos]

Now we lack just a way to counterfeit the ingredients used in the foods.
"Sure, this meat pie is made with exquisite bear" (actually was horse)

(before someone takes me seriously, i was just joking)

Haha. Art imitates life.

[Bittereinder]

Maybe they should let purity only influence the choice of the alchemical value (lead, sulphur etc) and the tier of resource how good the item is? Otherwise there titans will be even stronger than before.

[martinuzz]

Oh for gods sake stupid ***** noobs, could you for once stop whining and ***** about "the titans will grow stronger than before", when you obviously are too green to have any clue wtf you are blabbering about?
(no, I do not own any titans myself). Stop distracting the devs with your petty issues, and let them work on adding content and filling in the new system, so we get some meaningful results from our labours again.
Yes, that's right, I said labour, which is what the titan whiner noobs obviously have never heard about. If they had done any real labour in Salem, they'd know they're full of ****.

/rant

[Bittereinder]

Oh for gods sake stupid ***** noobs, could you for once stop whining and ***** about "the titans will grow stronger than before", when you obviously are too green to have any clue wtf you are blabbering about?
(no, I do not own any titans myself). Stop distracting the devs with your petty issues, and let them work on adding content and filling in the new system, so we get some meaningful results from our labours again.
Yes, that's right, I said labour, which is what the titan whiner noobs obviously have never heard about. If they had done any real labour in Salem, they'd know they're full of ****.

/rant

Shaaaaiiit bro, his account is 5 days less old than mine, he must be a stupid ***** noob!!!!

[Jalpha]

I think too many people discount the value players place on their bases after they have spent so much time and effort doing menial, boring, repetitive tasks like digging, building walls and smelting the millions of iron for braziers only to see it wiped away so easily.

To put it another way; the amount of time and effort you are required to invest into building base defenses is vastly out of proportion to the time and effort required to break through them. I'm not really sure how many times I'm supposed to enjoy building a new base from scratch only to have it torn apart, seemingly without effort.

I'm not a raider, so I'm open to explanations of how terribly difficult it is to raid, so difficult in fact that raiders are able to destroy all infrastructure in a base after breaking in and knocking out all braziers. This, in my mind, is imbalanced. Even were you to rebuild in the same location it would avail you nothing. Not being found is currently the only defence in the game.

It is my genuine hope that the lack of high tier humour replacing foods was not an oversight, and is in fact an intentional attempt to curb the wanton destruction previously so effortless for raiders. I'm not saying raiders shouldn't be able to get in, but making them carefully gauge whether such an exercise would be worthwhile or not may be a nice way to steer the course of the game towards balance.

[thl111]

Very interesting update. Much pras, fellas! Maybe there will be a needs for meat on markets now . And since crafting (cooking) is ingredient specific now, does it mean for carpentry in the future, we'll have the different effects when using different types of wood?

[lachlaan]

Has anyone checked to see if there's any difference between boiled and unboiled toxic mushrooms when using them in recipes? Cause both waning and waxing toadstools seem to count only as "toadstools" and seem to have no modifier whatsoever. Still toxic witch's hat however does have a modifier, so I'm curious wether at least cooked toadstools give some modifier.

[Champie]

Anyone worried about titans getting stronger. Well on Roanoke Russians don't even play anymore, and Candy Gang doesn't care anymore to invest anymore effort into industry.

Are you saying they went John Galt on the world of Salem?

We would all be better served to quit the "stupid ***** noobs" versus the "titans" mentality. It gets kind of boring after a while.