Raiding
We are currently thinking a bit about raiding.
I personally feel as though raiding a city is a key element to the game and I do not want to remove it. As a player, raiding and being raided were some of the most exciting times in the game.
However, it has become increasingly clear that the cost of raiding is nothing compared to the cost of defending a raid and raiders have learned to exploit this. While this is not breaking any rules, at that is the way the game is currently set up, it does create problems we need to address.say
We do feel as though we need to create a way for raiding to have a more of a cost for the raiding characters and organizations, or we need to reduce the cost of the raid on the targetted city or council.
We are currently working on some ways to address this.
Some initial thoughts on the table:
- Significantly increase XP loss for raiders.
- Reduce or remove comm costs for siege ammo.
- Significanly buff guard health.
- Instantly heal guards when raiders are killed.
- Make guards invinicible and add upkeep costs.
- Turn off raiding completely.
- Increase telepath and archer damage.
- No siege fired outside of the city.
- Org related costs on the raiding city.
- Raider costs on death that are not XP related. Some sort of malus.
- Killing a guard (or enough guards) results in an org declared war, with associated costs.
If you prefer to just share your thoughts/ideas with me, you can email me at jeremy@imperian.com.
When posting in this thread, we are going to be extra diligent in the forum rules. Do not be a douchebag. The definition of 'being a douchebag' is solely up to me. 
6
Comments
XP loss should double each time a player dies to a guard, lasting about an hour with the timer resetting each time the player dies.
Having a tangible objective for raiding would probably go a long way towards mitigating a lot of the problems with raiding, because the current issue is that it's really just monetary damage being inflicted. If a city didn't have siege or guards around, there'd be nothing to attack, which kind of puts everyone in a weird position where the best defense is literally no defense.
No immediate ideas spring to mind, but I think the Achaea model has been relatively successful. Charge up a tank (similar to powerbombs for obelisks, meaning initial cost and prep time), drop in city, build up via combat for an explosion that wrecks rooms (requiring repair), but at the risk of the defenders stealing your tank (my details may be way off since this is secondhand knowledge). The investment lead time means that raids have to be planned in advance, and also means that there's more risk to the attacker because that previous investment might be lost. For the defenders, well, nobody likes having their rooms blown up.
I'm not saying we should steal the idea wholesale, for numerous reasons, but it might be worthwhile to brainstorm why players should be attacking cities, and what goals can be laid out to accomplish that work to equalize the costs and turn it more into an objective-based system than a war of attrition.
I don't think guard escolation is the way to go about it.
We talked about this in another thread a bit ago (sorry, forget which) and I think what I said then still holds true: if its possible, the guards will still die.
If raids should still be a part of the game, they really do need a concrete thing raiders can go after (and that defenders can defend). At the same time, if they did become a conflict mechanism you'd probably have to tone down guards (while probably making them respawn with a constant upkeep cost or something), because a static target in a city is trivial to force out by someone who knows how to use guards.
I'm with Wysrias on this one though, changing the reasons raiders come to the city is going to be a much better approach than attacking guards as the primary issue. The reason (most) people kill guards is to cause damage to a city, and I think that's something worth keeping. The damage is just incredibly disproportionate and entirely on the defenders side.
As a random thought, why not expand upon the townes concept (the plundering of commodities), with a hard cap on how much can be plundered or something. You'd probably have to account for the ability to just drop like 60 guards at the commstore and lock it out entirely, but something like that might work for cities at war. It'd obviously need an initiation cost of some kind, but it would probably be more fun for all parties than the current state of things.
(ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧
What if there is a new guard added that can resurrect the dead ones for free? This will require the guard to be led there by a player with guard privs and channel for a few seconds. That way it is not so costly to the defenders.
One major problem is that distributing guards out in small patrols(5-15 guards) to cover the city is just melting down 150-450k in gold as an offering to Septus, so the only really effective use of guards is in large(30+) clots that provide no actual security coverage. One big clot sits at the gate to prevent entry. One big clot sits at the main gathering point of the city, so it's always available for use as a raidbuster And then you have a basic siegeline and that's it. Maybe you scrap the siegeline and do 3 clots of 33, but that's still crappy security and it just means that the other clot ends up lurking on the city tutor or something.
One of the big things about our raids on Stavenn in the past has been that once you get through the gates the rest of their security is basically non-existent. Septus and I stole something like 17 cannons from Stavenn once because after we killed their siegeline all we had to do was ignore the gates because guards are crappy at actually guarding things. Guards are just a hammer that somebody uses to swat raiders, and this hammer provides no security in and of itself; if we want to raid all we have to do is wait for that person to leave because the guardhammer is useless without somebody to wield it.
And part of the problem with that is that guards currently can move as fast as the players and I can cover 6 rooms a second. With guards striking instantly, they're basically just a giant hammer with zero counterplay. I see Vasharr in my city, I can have guards on him in two seconds. With guards now attacking in a city is either clear sailing because nobody can move guards well or flat-out impossible because somebody can move guards well. Additionally, the current guard setup will make any kind of city objective pointless for the same reason. I could park 50 guards on top of any objective in the world and nobody could do anything about it, so the current guard setup has to change.
With that said, this is the kind of changes I would consider:
And here's the big one: Guard function can be temporarily improved with shards. Burn shards to speed up their movement rate. Make them hit harder, make them tankier. Respawn your dead guards for a shard fee. This ties shardfalls into city defense, burns shard stockpiles, and gives cities a reason to care about them again.
As for city conflict objectives? I'd like to base a lot of that in the townes. This makes the conflict less irritating to non-combatants while letting you attack a target that clearly belongs to the city. However I would also like some objectives in the city proper. I don't think they should get to just turtle indefinitely. I had some ideas for a towneish system in another old thread, which I'll just quote here:
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
To me there are three main reasons people play this game: Combat/Coding | PvE | RP/Aesthetics.
For nearly all three of these things, participation is voluntary, standing out is an option AND isn't a big deal, and pretty much they last about as long as your interest is directly upon it. Even as far as Combat goes things are to the point where if I'm sick of a shardfall I can walk away and I won't even feel bad.
Raiding is different, though, for many reasons:
Even single-man raids means I'm going to have to move around to avoid a prism so I can keep typing an emote, or stand in a designated 5 rooms that are 'safe'. In practice this is one person deciding that I am going to Combat with them unless I jump through the X number of hoops of perfect behaviour not to die. I do not think pressuring other people into fighting in increasingly frantic ways is the way to get anyone to care about doing anything more than leaving you alone however possible. In the large raid we had to tell novices they couldn't leave the city (gates closed, had to be escorted out) and another citizen to leave a shop so they weren't flagged as aggressive and murdered.
Unlike Obeslisks, raids have no 'time'. As was clear, we can just got for half a day if we have the enthusiasm for it and honestly, I didn't bother yesterday 'cause I half-expected the goal to be 'use all of Kinsarmar's iron 2 victory' and there's nothing at all that exists to stop that being the goal and the end result. Sure theoretically we could be more powerful, call in loldemonic, but also, we could not beat the dead horse until all of the iron falls out of it.
As far as large raids go, I really CAN'T just go sit it out. I am in a position where if I don't feel like it even once I am probably going to hear about it. I had fun, for like, a long time. Until round 2 - less than an hour after I'd finished learning about and replenishing all of our security crap. I qq'd for relief the other night and actually legitimately woke up within a half hour to news of two separate people upset because I decided to leave instead of wasting the rest of my favor. They don't want to deal with it. I don't want to deal with it. Somebody eventually has to, during to try to minimize loss (and likely encourage a longer raid) or afterwards having incurred greater losses.
This -especially- more than any other avenue of PK has real damaging effects. I understand the brofist of 'we win kinsarmar' but we have massive losses even if we manage to get you out, and without active effort we lose everything we have not literally hidden away and versus numbers and ability this might happen anyway. Unlike caravans and shardfalls though, what we lose is palpable city property, which is replaced, replenished, and intentionally more limited than resource-seeking fights.
There's no non-comm classlead and ideas are only spuriously added for non-combat changes and mostly on a small scale regardless. Combat IS the game to probably 10% of the players and 80% of the coders. For those who aren't Kryss, and especially the people in my city, the closest thing to a legitimate sanctuary in this game is a half million investment on a single room which you have to be standing in inside of a city-controlled property subject to taxes and dependent on your citizenship(/towneship) and continued good standing. That does not give the player many choices, and without that specific 'sanctuary' they don't get a choice at all. Why is that?
Not everything needs to be a PK mechanic. I get it 'lol raiding already is' but seriously, there are a lot of things that need to looked at other than making things 'fair', because 'unfair' is perpetual and cities are not exactly optional.
This game is literally designed to have PK be the only advantage necessary to 'win' nearly every aspect of interaction, and most of everything else is mitigated trying to find a fair balance between not making the losers lose a bunch of stuff and not having the winners feel like they've accomplished nothing. With the other two aspects of the game being what they are, it is hard to put emphasis elsewhere. But honestly, lack of palpable goals and consequences is not the problem with whatever PKthing. Most things happen like this - somebody pushed it cause they could. The rest, to me, seems like adding limits for PKers while trying to dangle the carrot for people who might be motivated by quartz or whatever (like me, for instance), but has little to do with creating opportunities for the rest of the playerbase.
tldr bawwwwwwww
Or, both sides just burn, burn, burn through all their gold and credits, and then one fortress is a burning ruined mess for X time and an objective victory is declared without too many tears being shed and people not quitting the game because they literally can't play anymore.
I think it should be a thing, but there should be some kind of objective to do beyond killing guards.
What do you mean turn off raiding completely? What would that look like?
I think it would be interesting to see a malus penalty like we see when we die in PK with a compounding vulnerability inside of the enemy City/Council for repeated griefing. Perhaps let it reset every 24 hrs. It would make the enemy practically useless after a certain number of attacks and also give young ones or stragglers an increased chance to defend the city against such a person.
I feel like stopping automatic cannon fire by guards outside of city/council limits should be stopped immediately.
Like I mentioned above, it wasn't gold and comms I was fussed about, it was the fact that 1- I could not feasibly opt out and 2- no matter what I did or how well I did, I had no options that would prevent me from 'losing' and from doing so for as long as Antioch felt like watching me lose.
Here's my idea:
A raid is 'initiated' when certain loyals in the city are attacked (10 new 'peacekeeper' mobs for each or something). Also a command for raiders JOIN RAID or something. These can be moved throughout the city by war ministry, they have a walk delay, cannot stand with another peacekeeper and cannot go in a home or an org-owned building. After the first is killed, there is settimelimit minutes for the others to be killed entirely. This number can be easily adjusted: 60 minutes would give 6 minutes to kill each individual peacekeeper. This encourages big groups and also defines a goal, as well as preserving the funtimes of individuals infiltrating to kill Mathyew or somebody.
Guards are immortal, but the number of guards allowed in a squad is limited (maybe 20 or 25 - to balance the need of 'more squads' with 'bigger squads' with 'siege guards') . Siege ammunition is free at the cost of a cannon upgrade (done with workers and at that speed) for a cost of 500 shards (or the redshard equiv, and this is per-siege item. Maybe create a way for them to not be dismantled if they have this as well), and maybe every 35 shots they have to stop and reload for a minute or two. This effect will wear off after two years. Make siegeline squads possible and make it so you are able to order them to fire only at one person, not fire at all unless ordered, or to fire at any raiders. This gives the defense a really good chance to strategize prior to a raid - check cost/benefit to investing shards and stuff in siege, and giving cities like Kinsarmar who WOULD find value in that to have the opportunity to buy an advantage. and to have a decent chance to defend during, even if thinking on their toes.
Raids can only be done on any given city once a week, and cannot be performed if there are less than 3 citizens active at the start of the raid (limit but not prevent downtime hours)
Obviously the raid would end when the time-limit is up or the peacekeepers are killed.
If the raiding party wins, all of the guards will ignore them in the city for 12 Aetherian days, and all of the NPCs will cower when a raider walks into the room, as well as a huge world emote announcing the prevailing city:
"The loud cry of a phoenix pierces the sky as Celidon fells the forces of Khandava"
and an accompanying qhonors line, because obviously.
If the defenders win, all of the raiders will be immediately swarmed by guards and slaughtered for 12 Aetherian days if the enter raided city's territory (Suddenly a cluster of guards appears and rips you to shreds without regard. Yes, even you Septus), as well as a huge world emote announcing their victory:
"A victorious cry from the north announces Kinsarmar's triumph over Antioch's raiding forces."
and obviously an accompanying qhonors line.
I think that strikes a nice balance.
This kind of stuff is awful design, because it ensures that the best defense is "don't log in". You have three citizens online and it looks like somebody might raid? Well, your best defense here is to have somebody log off. You never want to encourage that kind of thing and you don't want people afraid to log on because their presence might push their side over some kind of limit.
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
I'm just going to put this out there since for some reason I keep getting tagged in here.
Kinsarmar would do well to ask the raiders what the deal is. If it was pure bordom, Antioch would be doing it to Stavenn, 100% guaranteed.
There also seems a misconception about guards. I'll go on record: I cannot tank guards. Noone in this game can tank guards. The only way to tank guards is not to tank guards.
Oops
"On the battlefield I am a god. I love war. The steel, the smell, the corpses. I wish there were more. On the first day I drove the Northmen back alone at the ford. Alone! On the second I carried the bridge! Me! Yesterday I climbed the Heroes! I love war! I… I wish it wasn’t over."
The nice things about objectives is that other cities can retaliate. Honestly? Current raiding isn't a thing if you're not part of the tiny subset of the game with the experience/artefacts/class abilities to make it a viable thing. If Antioch goes to raid Kinsarmar, Kinsarmar isn't coming into Antioch to retaliate because the players with those capabilities are all either in Antimagick or Demonic now. The system won't be give and take as it'd need to be for it to be fun for both sides unless that accessibility barrier changes in some way.
With the defenders not having a recourse with objectives, I think (Wysrias maybe?) mentioned earlier that you'd need an opportunity system. I know the system isn't popular, but obelisks do this really, really well. Its probably the best thing about the system, in my opinion. If you repel an obelisk attack, it really feels like a win, because you know it cost the attackers a lot of resources and they'll be locked out from trying again.