Guard Types

Ahkan

I couldn't find a topic associated with my question so I started a new one.

Is there anything in the pipe to look at/update the guard types for cities? With the renewed fervor to bring back the age of "sit in your city and kill half-comms" it brings to light a few holes in guard design and code.

Problem 1: Knights
Somewhere in the history of Imperian, Halloween came and went and children were handed blunt/cut resist instead of candy. This guard type is the 'regulator' of the guard selection. High strength and fast attack. This is nullified by the fact that Captain Cleaver is hitting the most resisted damage types in the game. Your upper tier artifact bots (Eldy, Lio, me, Khizan) can tank an obscene amount of hits from these dudes and keep trucking. Your mid-tier meat shields (Sarrius, Arlith) can enough of a chunk to kill a few before he inevitably bites it. Don't get me wrong here, I don't want the damage type to be changed to no-block, but I'd like a 40k gold investment to shell out a little more usefulness outside of a pack of 50 (200k investment)

Problem 2: Guard types 1,2,3,6.

Constable, soldier, warrior, archer. I like my filler in my class files between inept and fabled. I'm not a big fan of it in my security budget. None of these guys really come near relevance in turf defense. They're not even good henchmen and they never have save-the-day moments like Sgt Al. Powell. They suck. Their only justification here is "they can be used to man siege." Well, let's do ourselves a favor and make "a city guard in a yellow uniform" and call him an engineer.The archer seems useful  until you realize that's a huge investment for such a niche. He's taking up a spot that an Istani or Knight could roll into so he can shoot Azefel for low end damage and not follow through. After that, he's just a meat shield who can't do his job because people are smart enough to hit 'knight' and 'istani' and not 'guard.' 

Problem 3: The role of guards

Honestly, I see guards as go-to for security when my team doesn't have enough dudes to complete the line up card. They're doing the job I should do but can't because I have to make fun of Lionas and bash. They're my backup when Sarc goes afk in a guildhall without a hazeward (dumbass. Shame on you). In a lot of situations, my guards are boss. I can whytewalk with my posse and dispense some justice like nobody's business. Other times, especially lately, guards are superbly easy to deal with because of some pretty crappy mechanics and shortfalls. Walls, call for help, attacks, etc. Mind you, I don't want cities to be 100% impenetrable, but the defending city should have all the advantages, putting the onus on the raider to get it, get out, get done or be very, very good. One or two people with guards should be able to harass and break a raid with guards because...that's how it is. It's called the radio and you can't beat it.

My suggestion here is going to be the development and release of new branches of shard research that unlock both offensive mechanics and defensive mechanics to facilitate raiding and raid defense. You like gold sinks, we love investing money in things that make our lives easier. It's win/win. People are going to be butthurt when I drop some of these, but oh well.

I'm throwing in commodity drains because the commodity economy is just bad. There needs to be something to reduce the stockpile and make caravans with running, instead of being a gold sink.

Defensive: (need more ideas here, guard types mostly)

-Not-cutting damage guards: Researched. Cost shards/gold to upgrade. Unique commodity to maintain.

-Guards that prone/limb break: Research. Cost sharsd/gold to upgrade. Unique commodity to maintain.

-Sapper guards*: Mid-top tier research: Cost shards/gold to upgrade. Unique commodity to maintain. <- these bad boys have one job. They're expensive to buy and upkeep..but their job is amazing. They break walls at a cost to the person ordering the move.

-Remove shard disrupt from Sukhder and put it in here.

-Detonation: The ability to blow up the implant shard in your city.

-Lockdown. This would be the functional opposite of focus sukhder. Within your city this would block all forms of transport. Portals. Artifact pets. Twist rings. Mark return. I would honestly add an additional cost to clear all of these effects from the room.

-Be creative!

Offensive: (I had more trouble with this)

-I'd put a shard effect in here that a costed shards would allow you to implant a shard in a location for x amount of time that people could shard travel to you (like squads in BF3)

-I'd put moradeim wall here.

-The foreboding stone for guards. A nice "gtfo" warning before someone rushes you.

-Because the game is going this way anyways, consume a blue shard for a 10s channel to return to your cities generator. 5s for a red shard. 10 allows you utility, 5 allows you escape.

These ideas are rough because I just brainfarted them out. What I'm aiming for here is a system that favors bltizkrieg style raids. Get in quick. Knock out your target. Evade guards. Get out. If the guy you're fighting knows his shit, he is probably going to be on you in 1-2m and be able to break your raid. If he doesn't, he'll be able to ham-hand his way through figuring it out. The abilities allow the defender(s) to crush an FOB in a city by using guards as red shirts. Best example of this was Sarc getting a crash course in 'how to defend' last night. This doesn't mean you can't raid, kill guards and spam kill npcs. If you're good and have enough coordinated people, these abilities will allow you to evade the 'bad guys' and do everything you can normally do (just get out safer).

Ahkan

Things I forgot in my wall of text:

-more awesome guards would justify reducing the guard cap.

-suggestion: If you can't afford the gold cost to upgrade a guard, you can use shard instead

Juran

There isn't yet a large problem with 'raiding' that justifies a large change in guard mechanics. Antioch being aggressive and having some small successes during off hours is an odd reason to effectively ask for both passive guard upgrades and to steal obelisk powers without having to first take an obelisk.

Juran

There were ~29 deaths in a 1 minute and 8 seconds during our impromptu guard rush last night, all but three of which were caused by those 'worthless' guards that do cutting damage.

Ahkan

When a problem is presented that would upgrade an older system that many parties have agreed is boring your proposed solution is "It's not broken yet" with the follow up, "let me try harder?"

Good input. Progress (for anyone else but me) is for the birds!

Juran

Guard rushing is still fairly effective. We have been guard rushed and have had to evacuate far more often than we have been able to stop it - even when self admitted 'bad defenders' are the only ones doing the rushing. Everyone still goes into city raiding expecting to die.

Ranged stripping is incredibly difficult, even for the classes with worm vortex and/or telepathy - meaning that the rewards of sitting in a city and pretending that you're there to do something useful have already been diminished. Formulating shard upgrades that tip the balance even further away from giving people a reason to attempt it is a solution looking very hard for a problem.

The offensive tools presented almost entirely exist already through other means. Shard wall, shard return, focus sukhder, pillar of travel - everything but your 'foreboding stone for guards' skill already exists. Asking for the things you want to be moved to a skillset that you can more easily achieve is simply lazy.

Khizan

More than anything else, what I want of out guards is for them to use something like the army syntaxes we had during the Godwar(announce 2148).

It would be so nice to be able to be able to organize guards into squads and order them around with "squad 32 move n" instead of having to spam "order knight move n" and capture id numbers and the like.

Sarciossis

+1 to Khizan's idea.

Ahkan

Juran said:

Guard rushing is still fairly effective. We have been guard rushed and have had to evacuate far more often than we have been able to stop it - even when self admitted 'bad defenders' are the only ones doing the rushing. Everyone still goes into city raiding expecting to die.

You either expected everyone to die or were surprised at your losses. Can't have these both, chum. They conflict with each other. The fact this occurs is used to over exaggerate the loss of players. Clot of 25? Killed 10? Not bad, all things considered, but if we said that, it would poke holes in your argument.

Ranged stripping is incredibly difficult, even for the classes with worm vortex and/or telepathy - meaning that the rewards of sitting in a city and pretending that you're there to do something useful have already been diminished. Formulating shard upgrades that tip the balance even further away from giving people a reason to attempt it is a solution looking very hard for a problem.
See, this is clever. Ranged stripping -is- difficult. But you don't use range stripping, so I guess that's not a problem. Balance is not a good thing. Stop treating it like it's some anathema. New things aren't bad. They're actually good!

The offensive tools presented almost entirely exist already through other means. Shard wall, shard return, focus sukhder, pillar of travel - everything but your 'foreboding stone for guards' skill already exists. Asking for the things you want to be moved to a skillset that you can more easily achieve is simply lazy.

This is just over simplification. I don't see the travel pillar I described anywhere. Everything is was reallocated to fit the needs of the system I proposed. If the Dude doesn't go for this, the status quo remains and I'm fine with that. 

All in all,  I think I should address your attempts at misdirection. The projection part? That's on you. I don't want shard wall. I don't raid. If we're going to make a conflict system based in raiding, everyone is going to need shard wall and shard disrupt. They'll be the buy in for the game.

You claim to want interesting combat. You and I both know better, but we'll try anyways. Raiding as it is now is boring for all involved.  The guard system is bland and clunky  (you've mentioned this, as have about 30 other people). It's alright if you selectively forget mentioning this, sorry. Cities should not be 100% safe. Raids should also not be a mechanism for grief. Raids inspire what you want, which is pk outside of shard falls. The gift that keeps on giving.  The idea here would be to give people a good reason (that you often lack) to raid. This gives you a goal. By virtue of having a goal the raid now has a start, a clear victory condition and a predictable timeline and most importantly, a cool down timer. The problem is the system cannot work unless everyone has access to the basics. Personally, I'd remove shard wall. It's already here, so I took your approach and kept what we have and made it into something accessible with general research. Sure, it removes the 'dragon horde' approach to the game, but that's a good thing (so 2009). The balancing act to determine the prerequisites could easily be engineered to restrict access by requiring deep research into a pre-existing tree. If the shard system showed us anything, new toys are the most interesting toys. Sure you don't get to win at them instantly and probably don't even win more than 50% of the time, but that's what makes them better than anything else presented thus far. If I remember, you said shards were a bad concept when they were first suggested.  

Bathan

What if we just have room messages that are like 'city psychics hit you for bazinga level damage'. Maybe archers too!

Khizan

Ahkan said:

Juran said:

Guard rushing is still fairly effective. We have been guard rushed and have had to evacuate far more often than we have been able to stop it - even when self admitted 'bad defenders' are the only ones doing the rushing. Everyone still goes into city raiding expecting to die.

You either expected everyone to die or were surprised at your losses. Can't have these both, chum. They conflict with each other. The fact this occurs is used to over exaggerate the loss of players. Clot of 25? Killed 10? Not bad, all things considered, but if we said that, it would poke holes in your argument.

I imagine that he means "I expected to die, but I didn't expect to take 29 deaths to clear out just 10 guards."

200k worth of guard damage for 29 deaths isn't an amazing ratio, especially when that ratio will get worse if/when Stavenn uses a larger clot in the future. 

Ahkan

Bathan said:

What if we just have room messages that are like 'city psychics hit you for bazinga level damage'. Maybe archers too!

Haha, those days were awesome. They would make Luthyr mad because you couldn't survive them by yourself. If you pulled an Antioch and ordered the entire city to come with you, the damage was split by enemies present and was manageable.

Of course the topic name sadly means the archers and telepaths won't be making a cameo. Sorry.

@khizan: Doublespeak is doublespeak. Insightful.

Bathan

Like Antioch has to 'order' people to come. Most of Antioch is just begging to come along because while old professionals realize raiding is a waste of time (who am I to talk I bashed for 30+ hours *sob*), people who haven't been doing this for like eight years are like 'WE ARE DESTROYING OUR FOES AND DOING PERMANENT, IRREPARABLE DAMAGE YAAAAAAAAAAAAH'. It's an activity that happens when Antioch is the main superpower in the world and breaks up the monotony of AFKing, bashing and doing nothing.

I realize that has nothing to do with your main point, but I have 15 minutes to kill before work, so. Jump on this sidetrack adventure.

Ahkan

I was mocking Dias and his monolith adventures when people would say, "I had no idea what we were doing but the ordered me to come."

I bash in 20-30m phases before I lose complete interest and go back to dinking around with other classes. Somehow, it makes it more tolerable.

Juran

Ahkan said:

I was mocking Dias and his monolith adventures when people would say, "I had no idea what we were doing but the ordered me to come."

Maybe Dias did that, I really can't comment. I went 'hey, Moradeim here and let's kill some guards' and my group went from 4 people to about 13 in 3-4 minutes.

Juran

Now the next time I try that they'll probably all pretend to be afk, but alas.

Ahkan

Dias was big on. "I died and lost my monolith. Come defend me or else." He even stooped to telling them it was a part of the shard fall system.