Conquest – The players input thread

I like your first two ideas. (Maybe the mages can be generated randomly, or have different types of buildings to determine which type they are?)

Not so sure I totally understand the third point though, if one faction was trying to take over an area, and were working from east to west, and the guard towers were mostly on the west side, would they have to go all the way through town, or around it, to be able to do anything else? (That would mostly come into play with larger cities I assume.)

I’ll think up some ideas to post later, wanted to clarify that first, though.

According to points 1 + 2 at what point would guards stop spawning? i.e. is it a finite number or would you put a cap on the total and then they would become stronger over time until destroyed. Either way a large faction could make their town so well defended there would be no way another faction could invade, when you add in faction members to its defence.

I think there would need to be a reasonable cap to the number of guards maybe equal to the number of players within a faction, not characters but actual players. This would still give larger factions a bonus but not make them unassailable, smaller factions would then have half a chance of competing.

As to point 3 and destroying “All” of the guards, what happens when this bugs? One fails to respawn? Surely this would not be necessary if each NPC guard had an agro radius large enough to cover the size of the building it is protecting, IMO you should be able to targert and try to destroy a building ignoring the NPC guards attacking you, if oyu wish. I see no real reason for them to all be destroyed as if you have enough players to destroy a building then surely a few NPC’s will be insignificant.

From my perspective NPC guards should be there to stop 1-2 players seriously damaging a building rather than stopping 10+ players making an assault. The faction should be defending their territory not NPC’s, if they cant do that then they should have their buildings destroyed. IMO only LARGE factions should be constructing towns, not factions of 2-20 players, if not the whole map will be covered in tiny towns that have NPC guards and the players will take no responsibilty for guarding their own territory.

I do realise small groups of friends run factions and would like to have a town, and with this situation they are kind of alienated but I would rather have 10 massive factions catering to everyone with large cities than having 1000 factions and 1000 small towns defended by NPC’s. I like to think of factions rather like nations in a world, you can have a loyalty to a faction or choose not to, if you cannot be big enough to make a city then you must make alliances with the factions that can. This allows for outlaw factions with no home that are welcome in a few places and not in others.

Sorry if I started moving from the original points.

i think conquest needs to be scheduled in some way. Nobody is around 24/7 and if your town ist vulnerable all the time realtivly small off-hour destruction teams will be all over it.
one thing that could help are NPC guards, so your city is never undefended, but that shifts conquest a little to the PVE…
another possibility would be to encourage real “conquest” and not so much destruction. That means, that you only really profit if you can hold a city for some time and would discourage pure vandalism.

What about PC guards? Cities generate quests to protect them if attackt?!

One issue I see happening here, that has happened in other games. Asia, Europe and North America all have very different schedules. Hate to goto work and find out we got hit a 7 am here by a faction made up of people where it was 7PM. not sure what you do to solve the strike counter strike during off hours. Different servers I guess. In Shadowbane we raided cities at 10PM CST and 12 were relatively empty because the folks had gone to bed in Europe. Good profit, just not much fun doing a PVE raid on a PVP target.

maybe the food upkeep could be put together with the timer idea, lets say a city has guards and a certain food supply. Now when you declare war, that means that food supply is cut out (like in every siege) and the guards can only be kept up for as long as the food reserve lasts.
Now every city has a minimum food stash, like 2-12 hours.
If you invest in food or get some imported while besieged you can delay the vulnerability for up to lets say 12 hours if you need more time to gather the troops?!

This adds NPC guards (realy powerfull, so you practically cant attack without a siege), food, a timer and another tactical aspect (siege/food caravan mechanic)

Its a question of balancing out the carebear elements and the pvp elements to get a good mix. Its also a question of finding a way out of the 4 am raids, or the planned raid times situation.

Lets asume a city has 4 watch towers, and a bastion. It also has a smattering of warehouses, houses, shops etc. The Faction who made it is moderate in size, 40 people.

My suggestions for how an assault on such a city is as follows…

First off, have it require a war declaration. No siege can be initiated without a declatation. Those attacking should initiate a siege timer, which will run for 24 hours. At the end of 24 hours, the attackers have a window open up, lets say 3 hours in which they can siege and take the city. However the defenders, can force the timer to end earlier, an start the siege.

recap on starting the siege –
War dec must be initiated first, to start an assault.
Assault starts 24 hour timer.
At the end of 24 hours a siege window opens.
Defending faction can decide to start the siege early.

During the siege, all defensive structures must be destroyed (down to rubble) before a claim on the bastion can be made. On the bastion, a room at the top will have the capture point, a take and hold for X amount of time situation. Hold the room for 20 minutes and the city is taken.

recap on actual siege -
All defensive structures must be destroyed to rubble.
Top room will house a capture point requiring it to be held for a certain amount of time.
After the timer has finished, the siege is completed.
If defenders keep room from being taken for the siege window, siege ends.

After a siege has ended another timer will start which must be depleted before city can be assaulted again by that faction.