Rebalancing defences

[Potjeh]

Well, minus the whole showing up for the fight thing. Thanks to timezones, forcing a direct fight can never be fair to both sides. Fighting via proxy (ie defences) is simply the next best thing.

[darnokpl]

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.

That is what I was thinking about since May
Just couldn't put it into right words

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.

Ohh that would be great, but some people will start to cry that raids are too expensive and you can't get any valuable items

Maybe canon balls should be liftable objects (boulders-like - no for alt porting iron/metal) that should require some heavy metal industry structures (no for siege camp with canon balls production line), so you would have to transport them from your base?
Same with canons of course.

[Potjeh]

I don't think it's really necessary, building the cannons in the field is fine because you still won't be able to haul them off to safety after a bombardment session (BTW, cannons should totally be trackable). And then if you don't put up a proper defence around them the defender won't just destroy them, he'll capture them and take them back into his town to use against you.

Anyway, assaulting will obviously be horribly expensive, so I really don't see loot covering the costs. Which IMO is a good thing, because it promotes diplomacy over war. But if somebody is really a thorn in your side, you'll be willing to pour resources into eliminating them. But yeah, this leaves thieves hanging. IMO thieving shouldn't involve any sort of destruction, it should be about picking locks and stealing select few items. As I imagine it, you'd have to keep the claim's aggro from triggering by minimizing the number of scents you leave (higher C&D could let you commit more crimes). If you do trigger the braziers, though, it should be virtually impossible to get out alive. Similar mechanics could presumably be used for assassinations.

[L33LEE]

IMO thieving shouldn't involve any sort of destruction, it should be about picking locks and stealing select few items. As I imagine it, you'd have to keep the claim's aggro from triggering by minimizing the number of scents you leave (higher C&D could let you commit more crimes). If you do trigger the braziers, though, it should be virtually impossible to get out alive. Similar mechanics could presumably be used for assassinations.

I like this except the part of impossible to get out alive, as from your suggestion you will need high end C&D to even get into a decently made base, as well as several other skills im sure, which would mean only high end villages with clone factorys etc would be able to afford such an investment.

Seems like you would need to hual a large amount of expensive items out in your 24 inventory slots to make the risk of losing a character worth while.

[Potjeh]

Well, the risk would be proportionate to the number of items you steal. Stealing just a couple of things should be fairly safe to do if you got a decent character. Summon-assassinating someone shouldn't, though.

[darnokpl]

Well, the risk would be proportionate to the number of items you steal. Stealing just a couple of things should be fairly safe to do if you got a decent character. Summon-assassinating someone shouldn't, though.

Summon-assassinating shouldn't be possible ever
If I am wasting my time building 10 walls nobody should lock pick gates and summon kill me cmon.

You are thinking only about 1 assassin or thief, what if there will few of them?
They can easily take half of your camp and just one of them need to get better lock piking skills!!!

[Potjeh]

Claim aggro is based on claim, not on individual characters committing crimes on it. You can get the same number of crimes before braziers light regardless of how many characters participate in the heist.

[darnokpl]

Claim aggro is based on claim, not on individual characters committing crimes on it. You can get the same number of crimes before braziers light regardless of how many characters participate in the heist.

Yes you right, but I hope that thief/assassination skills will leave summonable scent and it will last longer than current scents
(2h - after that you can come back and leave another scent and braziers won't fire, right? or I messed up something?).

EDIT: thief/assassination skills should burn insane amounts of BB

[Kaol]

I'm sorry but your ideas are horrible.

Raids should go on for days? No way, that would suck and is completely retarded. These are not castles being sieged and that would make anyone not in a zerg be unable to raid. In reality what would happen is the village being sieged would radio in a zerg. Its carebear enough that you get scents and the ability to summon kill.

Defences should be breached? Well not necessarily, if they are non static defences then the raid is balanced. It's the raiders versus my defences. If that includes guard dogs, npc human guards, traps aswell as walls and the raiders face the real threat of being koed on my plot and being at my mercy (or even killed outright by my defences), then we have a system that is fair. If they cannot easily determine the full strength of my defences then we have a good system - the raiders may have something to gain by raiding, but they should also have something to lose.

[Potjeh]

Didn't I already agree that the system should include guard dogs and traps?

And you can still steal as a lone wolf, you just can't level a place. Destroying is what would take days, and I don't see how it would be fair if it didn't - your whole base can get levelled while you sleep, and there's nothing you can do about it. And sure, they might be risking some characters, but the resource investment it takes to make a couple of PvP characters is peanuts to the resource investment it takes to make a base.

Anyway, the gist of my position is that there must be a balance in cost of raiding and the cost of building defences, or the defences will always be a waste of effort. I can definitely see ways for scaling it, though, depending on your resources and the target's activity. For example, you'd need to spend as many bars for cannons as the defender did for the braziers to take them out in one day. If you invest four times the resources you could do it in half a day, and if you go with just one cannon vs dozens of braziers it'd take you a week but it wouldn't cost you much (the way to go if you're raiding an inactive base).