Forts and Mob Armies

Jeremy Saunders

So we played around a little with the forts and mob armies in this event. Of course, players have limited fund and troops, whereas mobs had unlimited resources.

I want to slowly change this into a semi player war system, but I am not really sure how interested players are in doing that. There were many complaints about how hard it was, but I am not sure if that was before the players could have mob armies and their own forts. We are also not 100% sure what the benefit of owning forts would be. For example, we could be forts near towns and cities. Owning forts near other cities or townes would give some kind of benefit. What would that benefit be? I am not sure we want to allow towne takeovers completely, as there are player houses and shops in there and I would feel slightly guilty about people losing those. However, maybe we do want to do that. Or maybe, we just want to ditch the fort thing completely.

Anyways, what are your thoughts?

Jorachim

It was a cool concept, but, to be honest, I see it being abused too easily.

My thought was that controlling a an opposing towne might allow another to produce more, or maybe allow draining gold, or...

All the thoughts I have are awesome initial concepts when they start at the back of my brain, but before they get to the front they're already bad.

Delrayne

The armies and forts on paper sound really cool. However, on the flip side lets just say that having a fort near a towne lets you siphon off some of the comms they produce and they are put into a towne or city/council comms shop that ownes the fort instead. That all sounds like fun and games, but in reality it would never really work to any real extent. So you go and set up a fort outside a towne, thats gonna blow however much gold a RL day for the upkeep, but then the opposing city or council is just going to come back and wipe out the fort anyway.

Without any way to set up defences on a fort, to where it takes a considerable amount of time to first get access to the fort, and then to tear it down giving players the ability/time to go defend their forts, the gold/time investment of marching them over there just isn't worth it. Not to mention, five players going up against 30 soldiers is never going to turn out good.

Khizan

I was not a big fan of them. Several reasons:

1. The interface was horrible. This could, and no doubt would, be improved before a 'real war system was implemented, but organizing them into squads was was horrible and tedious. I didn't think of this till now, but I'd have really liked an "unassigned" slot so I could disband multiple fragmented squads and then go "army create squad, army assign 10 knight to <squadnumber>, army assign 10 bard to <squadnumber>" and have it just pull them from the unassigned members in the room. Things like "army transfer 10 knight from 23 to 43" would also be great if it goes live.
2. They're very time-sensitive. The way it worked, a city could wake up and find they've lost forts/territory almost unstoppably.
3. Skill isn't that important. It ends up being very much a gold fight, and the wealth disparity between cities is huge right now. Celidon could crush basically anybody just through sheer attrition, because it can buy more soldiers. It could take 5 losses for every Ithaquan soldier killed and still roll over them effortlessly while remaining the most wealthy organization in the game. On the flip side, Ithaqua would need a kill rate of something like 1.75:1 to even hope to compete against the (second) poorest organization.
4. If skill becomes much more important, it becomes a #2 issue again: time. There's no way to eliminate time zones, but they shouldn't play such a huge role in a war system. Kinsarmar shouldn't win a battle because your big army got outmaneuvered because your generals were in bed at 4am and it was 11 am for Justus.
5. I think it would end up feeling more like fort maintenance was a chore than anything else. It's not particularly involved or interesting at this point. Get soldiers, move to fort, clear occupants, assemble ram, spam batter for an hour.

Ahkan

-Forts served no purpose. No + to defenders, no - to attackers. They were really a road block that formed super clots of trollbots. Purpose or gtfo.
-Defender sub type did not work or did not work on all mobs or something. 

-Mortals need an easier way to find fortifications than blind luck (perception ability)
-new soldier type: Cavalry. For those times when you simply must crush an army.
-Soldiers went into a berserk rage and killed non-enemies (what's up Celidon's guards during Hammer time)

-Fortifications need to run on something that's not iron. Or fix how iron is produced.
-Perception/Engineering ability: FORTIFICATION STATUS --> # of bombs remaining in bomb/poison field, quality of trenches.
-Engineering ability: FORTIFY (if you keep forts) helps build/repair forts.

-Bombs exist. Shard research resists. Why would I use brute force when I can use explosions? Mmm, explosions.

-Forts need to be at gates or one room outside? Logic here is pretty straight forward.

-Squad caps need to be a factor (math) of the army total. So I can have a nice whole number of squads making up my army.

-Armies do not need to sleep until 50% of the soldiers are wounded (sleeping caused a lot of weird problems)

-Armies need to go IMMEDIATELY aggro to the opposing ARMY the moment they hit the room. (it's a war, guys).

-Aggro roulette as a mortal was silly. DSL. phew DSL phew DSL 40 mob aggro...dead before balance. I understand the idea, but 40 people aren't going to hit me at once in a 2s melee.

System problems:
This system will be abused.  It's too susceptible to time zone drama and the stakes are too high to really put this in the hands of our player base (1%). I can't think of any way to not make this a time zone battle. Sure, I may get some advanced warning but with enough timing/planning you could make sure your army hits at 4am, when your enemy is sleeping. Also, there's nothing barring me from walking to stavenn and capturing 4 forts while Mena tries to walk from Caanae to Stavenn in Venezuela lag. Also, with defenses being so focussed on iron, any good strategist, would slam the iron producing towne first and repeatedly and drive your iron production into the ground. This way you're choking out their defenses and waging a war of attrition on gold reserves at the same time. Speaking of gold, legacy gold is going to be a HUGE factor of balance. Ithaqua is going to go broke first, followed closely by Khandava (i wonder why) and probably Kinsarmar. It's going to end up with the New York Yankees vs the Oakland A's. Steinbrenner is just going to throw money at Oakland until they go away (P.S. Yankees = Antioch.) 

NPC Armies:

Effing. Awesome. Concept. I really like this idea because it can function to keep people honest. Problems: They have no resource management. We were getting shredded in the meat grinder because even at 2:1, 3:1 odds, every battle resulted in a lost soldier. Once you hit 1:1 you were losing 2+. The npc armies didn't give a shit, they just kept coming. Players however we seeing net losses in the millions over the span of weeks. The NPC armies need to be tied to some sort of resource system. Argue it how you like, orcs have 23423423 gold because they've got a groovy 401k and have been saving for a bloody day, which means 5 days of intense fighting and then a lull. Or the orcs are raiding, smaller armies over the course of 10 years. Etc.

Opt-in, Opt-out.
The system is almost too wild west. If I want to defend my towne, I have to get involved. As Ahkan, I like this. As newbie1433 I think this blows. A lot of people will keep it classy and just steam roll newbie1433 once or twice. A few gems of our population are going to go out of their way to make newbie1433's life a living hell. Not to mention, you're forcing newbie1433 into fighting people across the food chain. Algae vs apex predator, go! You really don't have the option to bow out because you're fighting for your home. With game mechanics as they are, what would people do if Kinsarmar controlled Antioch? Quit class? Stop logging on? 

Abigail

Ahkan brought up a point about newbies, which raises another point: the fact that mob armies do not discriminate newbies from people actually capable of fighting. When the horde/undead/demon squads were roaming around, I heard complaints from newbies that they were getting ganked by them, and there was nothing they could do to stop that. It makes the game hostile to new players who have no idea what's going on, and considering that hostile squads can aggro and kill you faster than you can speedwalk through the room this can get pretty ridiculous.

So, let's say that players under level 21 or so should not be attacked by squads unless they attack first.

Jeremy Saunders

I am getting a sense that players would just rather not have it?

Delrayne

@Jeremy for the most part, yeah. Thanks for trying though. Keep churning out ideas, one is bound to stick.

Abigail

Jeremy said:

I am getting a sense that players would just rather not have it?

The idea is fantastic, but overtaking fortifications was more tedious than fun for most people. Even with workers and a battering ram, destroying a fort and/or taking it for ourselves takes way too long, and that equals a lot of dead soldiers, workers, and players.

Khizan said:

1. Skill isn't that important. It ends up being very much a gold fight, and the wealth disparity between cities is huge right now. Celidon could crush basically anybody just through sheer attrition, because it can buy more soldiers. It could take 5 losses for every Ithaquan soldier killed and still roll over them effortlessly while remaining the most wealthy organization in the game. On the flip side, Ithaqua would need a kill rate of something like 1.75:1 to even hope to compete against the (second) poorest organization.

I had this idea that we could build mints in cities to turn gold ingots into gold sovereigns...

Khizan

As it was implemented in the event, no, not really. It was a solid system for an event, and a great way to funnel gold out of the system, and I'd actually like to see it come back(with interface improvements and maybe cost adjustments) in later events. It can be more like the Kinsarmar Reserve than a standing army. Horde is invading, call up the reserves, etc.

I just don't see it being complex enough to be engaging as a main combat feature, sadly. The main strategy I see emerging there is "take forts when nobody is around".

I wouldn't mind moving around armies and such as a war system, but not like that. I'd want them to move slower, much slower. I'd want tactics and strategy to play a much bigger role than timezones and time spent. I'd want army movements and such slow enough that it would be possible for me to, say, feint an attack towards a towne fort and then nail you elsewhere when you overextended to defend, because you couldn't get armies in place fast enough. And I'd want you to see this attack coming in advance, and I'd want you to know that there's absolutely nothing you can do about it because we caught you too badly out of position to reinforce it.

Not "army send 13 here;army send 15 here;army send 30 here;assemble ram".

Sarrius

I hated it. It seemed unwieldy and I don't think it would be fun to battle other players with it.