City Security

Khizan

The biggest problem with city defense is that it's impossible. When I designed the first modern siege defense in Antioch, it was this giant web of siege weapons and strategically placed small guard clots. It was interesting and a lot of fun to tinker with, and watching it splatter lone raiders was awesome. The problem with it was that after people stopped being afraid of it, they realized that all they had to do was swarm it down with bodies, and they did. And now the defense metagame is 1-2 big siegelines and all the rest of your guards in one giant clot to make them harder to bash, with the rest of the city left as one big No Man's Land. Any attempt to cover a wider area just spreads your defenses so thin that they're susceptible to the zerg. And that sucks.

To build a successful modern defense, you build a siegeline pointing out of the gates and then you put every other guard you have in one massive clot to discourage zerging it down. The first step is actually optional; siege lines are pretty terrible nowadays. This means that the shop district of Stavenn might as well be the market stalls of Caanae, because they have the same amount of guard coverage. The successful Security Minister will intentionally neglect the security of their city because their security resources are more valuable than the other things they are trying to protect. 

When you get down to it, there's just no good reason to have guards anymore. In addition to the fact that they cost more than anything you could possibly want to protect with them, there's the fact that they're completely freaking worthless at guarding anything. If you divide them up into enough groups to actually get coverage, you'll lose them because they'll be too easy to kill. If you clump them up enough to keep them safe, you're not actually guarding anything other than that one room. Separator walking has obsoleted the siegeline. Guards have to be on standguard permanent to be worth anything, and this means that they provide no meaningful protection unless you're 100% attentive since it's trivial to beckon off of a standguard permanent clot. AM can even find somebody AFK and mind control puppetwalk them to the guard clot and force them to order guards out one by one.

I've been thinking about this for several days now and I have come to the conclusion that having guards out in Stavenn actually gains me nothing. I have nothing to protect that's worth risking the millions of gold invested in our guards. And that's why I am enacting a scorched earth raid defense plan. I've locked my guards up in a secure indoor room with one exit, which I just put a brand new lock on. I've dismantled all my siege. We didn't have any freaking hazewards in the first place. My raid defense plan is now "You can't kill citizens without a cause and there's nothing you can do that will actually hurt us, so have fun walking around the city. Look at our shops, maybe do some shopping while you're here. I'm going to go bash now."

Basically, it comes down to the fact that the only winning move in city defense is not playing at all.

Khizan

Suggestions:

Can we just nuke the idea of city raiding entirely now? Nobody likes it, Okay, yeah, AM had a lot of fun throwing rocks at the hornet nest recently as part of their "master plan to provoke a conflict with Demonic" but once that conflict arrived we got nothing out of Sarrius but ragey mistells to clans about how we're doing that exact same thing they did to Kinsarmar and how it's not fun now that the shoe ain't on their foot anymore.

I would much much much rather have old-style archers and telepaths back in the cities. People could use their houses. People could use their guildhalls. People could sit in stockrooms. Cities could open their inns and museums and other such places up. We wouldn't have to build everything in straight lines anymore.

And the only thing we'd have to give up for it is, what? Grieftastic raiding? The ability to jump people in their city because cities are impossible to defend properly? That's a trade that's well worth making. If you want to see city/city conflicts, put objectives in the townes. You'll get your fights, and it won't make the game suck for every citizen who doesn't want to get involved in the "AM is bored and feeling griefy today" wars.

Sarciossis

While I don't do conflict anymore, or much of anything for that matter, this gets my vote for hopefully putting some emphasis on townes to be something other than a resource harvesting machine.

Eldreth

Khizan said:

My raid defense plan is now "You can't kill citizens without a cause and there's nothing you can do that will actually hurt us, so have fun walking around the city. Look at our shops, maybe do some shopping while you're here. I'm going to go bash now."

Not gonna lie, when Trez alienated the cataclysm v1.0 world and then QQ'd for life, the only defense we bothered to reinstall in Stavenn was Lixan at the Gates. Was liberating,man.

Ziat

Cities need to be made impossible to raid because having the fear of being raided discourages so much roleplaying. I don't spend more then 10 minutes in my guildhall and encourage novices to learn from Brooke in the Council rather then enter the guildhall and risk getting raided. It sucks because they are being derived from knowing their guild history and I'm pretty sure most haven't even seen the guildhall yet. 

Lets just get done with it. Raiding and getting raided sucks. We can have other ways to start conflict that have an opt in/out option rather then forcing us to participate

Ahkan

To clarify

City raiding: infiltrating a city to kill one or two people. Time spent in city: 5m (Good)

Grief bot raiding: Clearing guards. Time spent in city: hours (Bad)

City raiding is a useful tool to bring great justice to players who have made bad decisions. By and large, this is restricted to people who really deserve it. I don't think this is a bad thing. It's one of the best ways to clear bounties. The other one is just stupid and no one likes it. Well, a few people claim to like it when they're winning, but they don't act like people. Whatever system we choose, I'd like to keep CITY RAIDING and eliminate grief bot raiding.

I also think we need to hard sell the infiltrator classes, of which there are three and only three. They are Assassin, Renegade, and Predator. You should take a relatively large penalty when you're raiding as a non-infiltrator class. This is likely going to translate into 'more damage'. If you want to get in, kill some bishes and get out without a threat, you should play an infiltration class.

I'm 100% with Khizan here. Cities (not townes) need to be telepaths and archers. 'Archers' should do straight damage. You should be able to upgrade your archers to adjust damage type and hitting indoors. If you want your stupid (bad) gold sink, put it here. Telepaths should be the awesome roleplay hooplah that is going to dissuade people from camping. You can also rp the crap out of this by changing the messages. Basically, what you need to do is make telepaths be a slowly increasing damage pressure which ends not in high damage, but an insta kill (like radiance). The only classes that can avoid these, prolong timers, and reduce damage? You got it, infiltrators. I would even add security commands to allow security ministers to prioritize targets to increase guard pressure on that target.

The problems I see with this are the culmination of years of questionable design decisions:

Moradeim bypass and moradeim silent and 100% use and access even though I don't hold the monolith.

Aside from mudsex, there's a lot of guild roleplay that 'could' happen that can't because some security minister is going to bitch at you when you let someone bypass into your guildhall. How about, "bypass no work in cities" and call it a day? All it takes is one bored weakness exploiter and the cycle of butt hurt begins. "I died while raiding. I'm coming back."

Mark return (warden), mark return (amazon), mark return (outrider), hermit (summoner), heirloom mark return (predator), Raksha band ($$$$)

Here's some quick fixes to remove 90% of the latest raiding problems. 

1) They clear on death in enemy territory. (Tbh, I figured this was a no brainer).

2) For everything but Raksha band. Make them not work within opposing affinity/city/townes. "You lose your bearings and are unable to return to your mark."

3) I left off shard mark/return being cleared. However, I think you should have to use a red shard within enemy territory and only for the lowest time. See: Enemy territory 

Tl/dr: Cities should be super safe strongholds that are occasionally breached by capable infiltrators. Guard wars should be in townes. 

Sarrius

I wouldn't say I'm mad about the shoe being on the other foot, though I did mistell a lot to clan last night while being exasperated with Shou's hopelessness about defending everything ever. I don't think he realized that defending an entire city is a fool's errand. I came to the same conclusion Khizan did, albeit only after losing a bunch of guards myself. That is why we have basically 'turtled up', siege house and all. I am ambivalent to the process, but in the end, any war fought by relatively passable people, determined people, or stubborn people, will end in the horn locking and steady grind. With both organizations minimizing their losses down to the unavoidable, it is now just 'run in and kill dudes who want to fight'.

I hate to admit it, but Ahkan probably has the right of it - but only if you take Khizan's posts for what they are. Guard are more valuable than the thing they are defending. What can you do to people in the city? Give them your business? Wave hello? Yell some intimidating things (or OOC things..) and kill people who fall for it or are actively engaged in the conflict? K, whatever.

I don't want to give up the possibility of a fight inside a city. Ahkan's definition of a 'raid' is what I'm least likely to support being nixed. If archers and telepaths are the way to go, so be it. I would say that an infiltrator should be held some reasonable expectation, in this regard. What would their resistance to defense be? Would they be capable of 'shaking off' guards?

Ahkan

I don't think they should be able to 'shake off' defenses. While phased and masked (to a certain extent) you would be immune to archers and guards. Once you actively get into combat, their timers for 'defense rape' would be longer. If you go around unphased/unmasked outdoors, you should get hit by archers like everyone else. The longer you spend in a city (aka: failing at your job) the easier it is to get a bead on you and react. You can still portal your buddies in, but they're going to enter and immediately start getting hammered by defenses.

Masked gets weird since it's such an easy defense to activate. I'd honestly break mask resistance when combat was initiated on them and give it like a 6-10s cooldown before it starts ignoring guards again.

I guess you'd have to play infiltrator mode like Dishonored, but without the blinking. (or in my case, falling off shit in front of guards ) 

Edit: It's really weird you yelled at Shou. Of all the people online in Antioch last night, he's the only one that really did any sort of coherent city defense.

Sarrius

I didn't yell at him, I was mostly just wondering how he has gotten so far without realizing cities are way bigger than the security force you use to defend them.  

So remasking and rephasing might reset the timer, might not? This sounds like a flat resist to archers, then, and like you said a timer increase vs. Telepaths? I sort of agree mask is so easy to put back up, but if this system went in, that would be easy to remedy. Just make mask a channeled ability outside non-AM affinity or at least non-AM townes and cities. Same can go for phase - make it instant in townes and cities of the appropriate circle. The fluff could be covering your tracks, hiding weapons, and stashing bodies.

Juran

Sarrius said:

I wouldn't say I'm mad about the shoe being on the other foot, though I did mistell a lot to clan last night while being exasperated with Shou's hopelessness about defending everything ever.

Shou was by far the most useful person in Antioch yesterday. He chased us out multiple times and managed to not get his entire stack of guards killed in the process. He is the single, solitary reason that you still have guards left at all today. If Shou had decided to go out with friends yesterday, all three of your guard clots would have needed replacing instead of just some cannons.

That your defenses were inadequate for the job, due in part to the set up, is your responsibility. 

Sarrius

Juran said:

Sarrius said:

I wouldn't say I'm mad about the shoe being on the other foot, though I did mistell a lot to clan last night while being exasperated with Shou's hopelessness about defending everything ever.

Shou was by far the most useful person in Antioch yesterday. He chased us out multiple times and managed to not get his entire stack of guards killed in the process. He is the single, solitary reason that you still have guards left at all today. If Shou had decided to go out with friends yesterday, all three of your guard clots would have needed replacing instead of just some cannons.

That your defenses were inadequate for the job, due in part to the set up, is your responsibility. 

And I recognize that. I wish I had a way to say 'thanks' beyond a cityfavour, because damn if he isn't already CR6. My concern was mostly that he was suddenly having somewhat of a very brief crisis on RT because he suddenly became aware that the city is very big and you can't cover everything; that sort of made me wonder how you get so far as he has without noticing that, but I guess it sort of takes something like this. Antioch has a lot of dark corners that nobody ever wanders around or near, and remain undefended or uncovered by siege. I also don't know if he has the same tolerance for 'antics' like Raksha(e?) Bands and et cetera that other people involved in this do. I realized a long time ago that some advantages purchased through credits are very useful for raiding. I was ready to lose some guards (ready to lose more than we ended up losing, actually); we agreed that we should have clumped faster instead of letting our siege guards die, but we just didn't act fast enough (oh well).

Sarrius

So, on topic: if we leave guards in townes, what then? Do we also design a towne conflict system? Wouldn't we just be back to square one, just in a towne instead of an assumable sanctuary of a city? The point is that not only is the system questionable for purposes of security, it also seems to be a distasteful process to pick apart guard grids. The amount of guards a towne can field is also easily picked apart.

Ahkan

I would love it if the 'raid' conflict mechanics were in townes. It makes it more opt-in and then Kinsarmar's fighters can participate in a 'war' without their government throwing in the plushie towel.

An since guards would exist on a smaller scale, we could actually revamp some of their mechanics to be you know...useful.

Ambrose

This is sort of an idea that I came up with on the fly so there are glaring holes in it, but...

Make guards less expensive (by quite a bit... so that it's not that noticeable to the towne's owner that the guards are dying). Increase the limit on the number of guards a towne can have. Have there be a shard bank or something in townes that people are actually fighting for... something that's a nice little perk and would sting to lose, but negligible on the whole. Make shard research need x amount of shards in the entire circle's collective bank account in order to continue to function. The majority is held in the city bank account which (after proposed changes) is nigh unraidable, and completely unraidable for extended periods of time. Then smaller amounts are held in the towne accounts. Have a capture system that raiding the bank takes x amount of time to crack the vault, and during this time a message is sent to the council/towne that the bank is trying to be cracked and give them the opportunity to respond. After a towne is raided, the shard bank in the towne is emptied for x amount of time and you don't get anything for subsequent raids (this is here essentially so that guards can be repurchased for townes, defenses set up, etc).

Sarrius

Ahkan said:

I would love it if the 'raid' conflict mechanics were in townes. It makes it more opt-in and then Kinsarmar's fighters can participate in a 'war' without their government throwing in the plushie towel.

An since guards would exist on a smaller scale, we could actually revamp some of their mechanics to be you know...useful.

That makes sense, actually. I guess you could expand all the guards to have different roles, but that doesn't really answer the question how bashable they are - oh also, how much they cost. If they cost too much, you run in to a 'let's just bankrupt them' situation, where the defending side is too stupid to stop refilling the endless soup, salad, and breadsticks of guards.. or they kick the offenders out of the restaurant by way of not giving them any more guards to munch on. It sort of boils down a miniature scale of the same issue, except that issue doesn't matter nearly as much except when your city government is stupid. The lack of guards causes a fear issue in commodities, but unless they also revamp trade for that kind of penalty to actually matter whatsoever, a lack of guards doesn't do anything but disincentivize using towne houses (which nobody uses anyways..)

If you moved the 'raid' conflict down to the scale of townes, it comes with a whole host of other questions that need to be answered - the reason a conflict like killing guards in cities is so 'pressing' is because it is sometimes/most of the time perceived as oppressive to other people who never wanted to deal with it. If it is opt in, but has no point, we've really just made another system much like the towne system already is - pretty to look at, but not good for much else. I'm not saying you didn't think of this, but it does need to be brought up. 

Khizan

Masking up should entail them putting on a full disguise, it should be a channeled action that requires them to be alone in the room, and it should take exactly as long as phase does. 

I would do something sort of like this:

• Telepaths would do a little bit of damage. After ~1 minute you'd get an uncurable affliction that would last 3 minutes, and it would make telepaths do more damage to you. This would repeat over ~5 levels of the affliction, and each affliction wearing off would give you the level below it, which would take three minutes to wear off, which would take such and such and so forth. The sixth stack would be an instant kill, and the upper level stacks would hit hard enough that you aren't going to want to stick around and fight anything that does damage.
• Assassin classes would get an ability called something like Discipline that would train their minds to be more resilient, and they'd take two minutes per level, doubling the amount of time they can spend in the city. They'd also receive no damage at all until they had an affliction on them.
• Archers would basically just do a crapton of damage to anybody outside. Enough damage so it's not long-term tankable. 
• Assassin classes would get an active ability that gives them badass arrow-dodging skills for 2 minutes, which can be activated every 5 minutes for a 2 up 3 off rotation. This would turn all the archer hits into glancing hits that do ~33% damage. 

The goal here is to let Assassins fight in the city, but make it so that they fight at a disadvantage and also so that they can't fight in the city for long. Get in, get out.

Ellen

Wouldn't it be easier to tie the infiltration abilities in with the mechanics that already exist, instead of adding more?

I would suggest reworking Hostage to be usable while masked and take less time, but still require the victim to be alone. A successful Hostage would unmask the Predator and no longer allow the rifle or execute abilities, but would give the Predator a defence that stops guards from attacking them and gives any player (except the victim) that attacks them a 50% chance to hit the victim instead. The defence would be stripped if the victim escaped the room, and the Predator would re-mask upon kill.

For the two Spatium classes, give them a parallel ability called 'abduct' which would only be used from phase and not break phase like other hostile actions. Abduct would take the same amount of time as the reworked Hostage and have the same caveats. Success would pull the victim into phase with the Renegade, and escaping the room would free the victim from phase.

(Alternatively, Abduct could just be a Hostage clone that unphases upon success and re-phases upon kill. That's not as cool though.)

Sarrius

The problem is that the mechanics that exist are, for lack of better words, shitty and ill-equipped to be shaped in to something worth using. Why force a square peg through a round hole?

Khizan

Ellen said:

Wouldn't it be easier to tie the infiltration abilities in with the mechanics that already exist, instead of adding more?

I believe you have missed the entire point of the thread. This isn't "we need to make it easier for assassins to assassinate, so let's add a 1v1 lock-in".

This is "Guards are garbage and raiding is bullshit, so we should go back to telepaths/archers while adding mechanics to make assassinations possible."

Ellen

Khizan said:

Ellen said:

Wouldn't it be easier to tie the infiltration abilities in with the mechanics that already exist, instead of adding more?

I believe you have missed the entire point of the thread. This isn't "we need to make it easier for assassins to assassinate, so let's add a 1v1 lock-in".

This is "Guards are garbage and raiding is bullshit, so we should go back to telepaths/archers while adding mechanics to make assassinations possible."

I think you failed to comprehend my post. I didn't suggest anything resembling a 1v1 lock-in (note the distinctive lack of anything resembling 'lock-in' in my post,) I suggested a tweak to existing abilities that would make assassination possible if guards were changed to explode anyone who walked into the city.

Kanthari

I agree with @Khizan wholeheartedly.

Especially with the amount of time and effort that @Aleutia, I, and other members of the Tzolkin put into making our guildhall awesome, it's a shame that our novices aren't able to do more there. It's a shame that our full guild members can't hang out there and roleplay, or do the quest that we spent forever on.

We essentially have a kickass treefort that it isn't security-smart to use, as all it would take is one person to turn it into a kickass raid location. Back a while, we used to do rituals and things like that all the time, because it wasn't something that you had to worry about as much.

Organizational roleplay suffers and is severely limited by this issue. People are less likely to purchase houses and shops that fuel the in-game city/council economy, because they can't use them. People don't use their guildhalls, because if they get portalled/shardwhatevered to at the council tutor, the enemy gets guard-crushed and they don't get punished.

Short answer: I miss roleplay. Plz fix

Sarrius

Ellen said:

Khizan said:

Ellen said:

Wouldn't it be easier to tie the infiltration abilities in with the mechanics that already exist, instead of adding more?

I believe you have missed the entire point of the thread. This isn't "we need to make it easier for assassins to assassinate, so let's add a 1v1 lock-in".

This is "Guards are garbage and raiding is bullshit, so we should go back to telepaths/archers while adding mechanics to make assassinations possible."

I think you failed to comprehend my post. I didn't suggest anything resembling a 1v1 lock-in (note the distinctive lack of anything resembling 'lock-in' in my post,) I suggested a tweak to existing abilities that would make assassination possible if guards were changed to explode anyone who walked into the city.

Ahkan wants guards to go away in exchange for an all-encompassing overlord invisible gang of archers and telepaths/mages/summoners/ritualists/whateverflavorofsupernatural. They would be unkillable, would have the full suite of range across the entire city, and would actually not exist as mobiles. You could likely upgrade them to do different things based on security loadouts or shard research (later), but their entire purpose would be to perform an area-wide, low player-upkeep security job that would stop stupid raids in their tracks. Khizan proposed some specifics of this system, something Ahkan didn't because numerical specifics are generally lost in translation anyways.

In addition, assassination classes would have the ability to resist these guard types for a small period of time.

Guards would cease to exist, instead replaced by what can only be described as this:

(EDIT: Probably more glitter on Khandava's part, though. Perhaps a little more rainbow.)

Kanthari

Sarrius said:

(EDIT: Probably more glitter on Khandava's part, though. Perhaps a little more rainbow.)

Needs more balloonicorn.

Khizan

EDIT: Screw it, I'd not mess up a good thread with divergence on the lockin. Suffice it to say that Ellen's ideas would work with archers/telepaths, but that I think the assassin should always be at a disadvantage when fighting his target and that he should always be feeling the defenses at least to some extent. 

I have some ideas for shards and townes, but I need to run to the post office before it closes, so more on that later.

Ahkan

If you moved the 'raid' conflict down to the scale of townes, it comes with a whole host of other questions that need to be answered - the reason a conflict like killing guards in cities is so 'pressing' is because it is sometimes/most of the time perceived as oppressive to other people who never wanted to deal with it. If it is opt in, but has no point, we've really just made another system much like the towne system already is - pretty to look at, but not good for much else. I'm not saying you didn't think of this, but it does need to be brought up. 

Pressing really isn't a good word to describe what you're doing. Guard bashing is extorting another team into or as a result of pk. "You ignore my demands? I kill your guards. These demands are almost universally terrible. You either lose a valuable commodity or you fight me. Either way I'm going to be fighting you all day erryday." Your behavior in the Kinsarmar conflict and the lopsided troll fest that is this most recent war sums it up. You don't want to lose so you're going to behave like you haven't.  That in an of itself is a fundamental problem in your "this system is the best system" idea.  I shouldn't have to be forced to deal with a problem (currently you) because they're smashing their childish little fists at my guards screaming, "pay attention to my|our demands" after I send them to Dis 7 times. The systems need to be opt-in, opt-out. When I want to ignore the peanut gallery, I should be able to. I can eat one loss and the derps can get their objective. The way it stands now is defenders win and have to go to bed. They end up losing in the off hours heroics. How do this make sense?

 

Which leads into the point we really need to state, raiding needs restrictions. What constitutes a reason to start a war? Apparently boredom. How do you end a war? You can't until the raiders get tired. Well, this is awkward.  The force that initiates the war also determines when it ends?  There needs to be a 'good' reason (sup, admin) to start a grief war. At the end of the day, Imperian is a game. Games have rules to keep them 'fun'. Games have a specific beginning and a specific ending. Games also have rules of behavior and limitations on what can and cannot be done. Raiding doesn't. It's probably why a certain type of person favours it. You can always look up at the scoreboard and see 1,249 to 17 and think you can stage a come back. Too bad the defenders can't say the same.

Most of the arguments for the current system are going to be a ton of if statements. Most of those if statements depend on players acting like decent people and things like responsbility and fair play. We'll use every raid in the history of Achaea and Imperian as anecdotal proof to "you cannot trust the players to play for fun."

Ambrose

While I agree with everything you're saying, I will emphasize that there needs to be an actual opt in option and not just a system that functionally forces everyone to opt out... Basically, you'd have an awkward sort of Cold War that never really has any conflict other than, "Rah, we hate them ((but we fear the admin hammer more, so we don't actually do anything about it))." And largely, outside of the recent raids over the past couple of weeks, that's how my experience with it has been so far.

Ahkan

That's why you build the system properly. It needs objectives. It needs rules. It needs victory and loss conditions. Most importantly, it needs to know when to end. 

You shouldn't be forced into a fight you can't win. Example: Kinsarmar v Antioch. You should be able to lose an objective and still be able to enjoy the game. Example: Let bottom tower fall, keep farming and play for mid-game. None of this is allowed in grief-bot-raid-system.

Bathan

I wish we could figure out something akin to the low level WAR Online PvP zones. Oh my god, the fun.

Ahkan

Bathan said:

I wish we could figure out something akin to the low level WAR Online PvP zones. Oh my god, the fun.

God, remember backdooring and the rp shouts.

Crazy witch slayer, the bad war cleric and midget healer...and let us not forget, TANKENSTEIN KITTENPILE.

Sarrius

Bathan said:

I wish we could figure out something akin to the low level WAR Online PvP zones. Oh my god, the fun.

God, I feel sad now. They turned their servers off yesterday.

Bathan

Easily the best PvP experience I've ever had in anything, RIP DARK BLADE