Siege Lines

Jeremy Saunders

Okay, I think we can all agree the some of the siege lines in the cities are ridiculous. I have been looking at the rooms and their descriptions, and most of them are pretty lame. I would prefer the roads to go through the city (instead of a 10 room dead end) and have buildings attached to them.

How can we modify siege weapons (I think we are mainly talking about cannons), in such a way that we can help make cities layout and look more like a city? I do not deal with the day to day issues with siege, so I need some help with this one.

Does that make sense?

Lionas

Siege lines (specifically cannon lines) are a good thing. They make attacking risky, give defenders an advantage, and general make large-scale raiding impossible. This is good, because raiding is dumb. It's fun for one party or the other for a few minutes, then it is boring and lame for everyone.

ETA: I realize your intent is to change how cannons work so that siege lines are still possible even if layouts change. This post was intended only as a reminder that the functional purpose they fulfill now is necessary.

Jeremy Saunders

Yeah, I think we are on the same page.

Khizan

Siegelines need to be long in order to give you a weight of fire that lets you dismantle a group quickly.  If you don't have it, they'll roll your siegeline up one unit at a time. 

Suggestions:

1. Let me detail a small group of guards(1-5, maybe) as the gun crew for a siege weapon. The more guards you assign to the gun crew, the faster they fire the weapon. This also means that you won't be able to disable a siege weapon by just taking down one guard.
2. Cut the range down drastically. Somewhere in the area of ~4 rooms, maybe

The goal here is to increase the effectiveness of a short siegeline by increasing the weight of fire it can put out, while reducing the range so that you don't get an amazing defensive bonus from long straightaways. Scaling the effectiveness of the siege weapons on the size of the gun crew means that you can get a good solid defense on your gates or another important area but will not be able to cover your city in ubercannons.

With a maximum range of 4 rooms and a gun crew of up to 5 guards, getting a "full" siege defense on your gates would eat up 20% of your available guard force. It would also have full fire directly outside the gate, but only three weapons could reach two rooms outside the gate, and so forth. So it would rip up an attack into the gates, but be considerably less effective in projecting force beyond that. 

Ideally, the scaling would be such that the first 1-2 guards past the first have a fairly large effect, while the rest have a fairly minor effect. So you'd still want full crews on your gate weapons, but it would be worth crewing other weapons with multiple guards as well, in other areas of the city. 

Right now, one of the problems with city defense is that trying to defend the city actively is basically an effort in futility. All you really accomplish with a wide spread guard force is thinning out the guard force to the point where it becomes ineffective at stopping a real attack while being easily defeated in detail. Balanced right, this kind of approach could help with that problem by letting a rather small guard force spread their effective power out a wider area. A 5 guard net-thrower at an intersection, supported by a few two-guard cannons could really ruin somebody's day. 

Ahkan

The problem with that sort of siege line idea is that I'm going to walk past it. It's a tactic that's already been used/abused/exploited and will be rinse/repeated.

It's going to be really hard to get around that without:

-Adjusting how rooms/second works (sup mounts) (Maybe dash is x number of rooms sprinting instead of infinite?)

-Huge terrain revamps in cities (they're too spread out to defend well.)

-Redoing engineering. (There's no reasons not to use cannons. % damage? Sign me up. I hit the sweet spot I pick up a kill every round.)

The flip side to this is if you make the defense strategic...some people are going to figure out a solid strategy and milk it. Then other organizations who lack this are going to get steam rolled. Case in point. Lionas|Khizan|Juran|Ahkan v. (I can't cite examples, they'll get butthurt. you know who they are) Guess who is going to be raided 24/7. 

Khizan

 More thoughts. This is long, so bear with me.

After my previous post, I got to thinking about the city defense issue as a whole, rather than just as a "How do you fix the siegelines at the gates?" issue. One of the core problems with city defense, to me, is the impossibility of really defending the city. When you're in charge of Security, you make the siegelines and you clump up all your other guards in 1-2 big clots of ~30 guards each, so that they can't be killed and so that you have enough guards to guardrush an invader. And that's about it, aside from actually guardrushing people. Other than those things, security is paperwork about enemies and fines and *snore*.

And, really, I think that pretty much sucks. The siege crew thing could help, but it's still problematic. Sure, it would let you make small guard outposts more effective(and those smaller outposts would help against the aforementioned separator-move-past-the-clot raiders), but these small outposts would not only get hammered by Juran and such when they raided, but they would cause those raids just by existing, making them a net negative.

The problem here is that it's so trivial to get large raid teams past the gates that you need front-gate level security ANYWHERE you are going to put guards. Because there's nowhere near enough guards for that, you only put guards at the front gate and maybe in two other centrally located clots of ~30 guards. This is sucky but unavoidable; any other strategy means that Juran/Fazlee/Septus/etc will come in when no good defenders are around and wipe out all your guards.

And this means that you get ugly confusing spiderwebby cities like Kinsarmar when you try to build to defend, because you need everything to be in a siegeline somewhere. The alternative is that you go Celidon style, where the majority of the city is about as well defended as Caanae and you'd better hope that somebody can respond fast enough to help you if you get attacked, cause they aren't even TRYING to protect that part of the city.

And so, if you want to change how that works, you need one of two things. You either need a way to heavily restrict entry to the city so that people are forced to breach your gate defenses, or you need a way to apply your existing power over a wider area without diluting it to the point of worthlessness. The first really isn't feasible. So that leaves the second option.

And so I thought about it, and I had several different ideas, but none of them were good ideas, and the reason is this. There's a question we need to know the answer to before we can come up with any idea that will work. And that question is this:

How important do you want city raiding to be?

I mean, if the answer is "I don't want it to be a big factor at all", you might as well just give us back Achaean archers, cut our guards to a guard-rushing squad of 30, tell assassins to try and go for people when they're indoors, and call it a day. Do you want PvP objectives in the city? Do you want impenetrable cities and defensible townes? 

I mean, if you're cool with the pretty half-**** and awful defense system other than the way it affects city layouts, just implement something like my above siege idea and tell cities to deal with separator walking by digging a trench or sucking it up. If you're not cool with it, it's gonna take more than a quick change to siege engines to make it anything other than a "Stack all guards at gate, manually move all guards to raid" kind of thing.

Jeremy Saunders

Dang it, why did you have to say PvP objectives for cities. I have no time for that right now.

Not sure I want to get into a massive change for siege right now either. Although, both of these are sitting on my list right now for things to think about.

Selthis

No PVP objectives for cities please.  While it sounds fun on  paper, it will turn extremely frustrating extremely fast because no one understands restraint.

Ahkan

No. God no. Please no.

I don't want a PvP objective in my city. I suggested something similar a while back and it's a terrible idea. If you're going this direction put it OUTSIDE of a city OUTSIDE of siege. Otherwise you're going to make an FFA obelisk system where 18 people are logged on from an org and attack if and only if they have 3:1 numerical advantage. At least with obelisks I can choose to not get involved in that stupidity.

Honestly, if you want to improve siege, redesign engineering.

Jeremy Saunders

Man, you guys are no fun.

Okay, I will put engineering/siege on my list.

Labil

If you want to design a system that can't be gamed (or as least as possible) you gotta ask expert gamers (ha! double points word!)

Khizan

I don't want PvP objectives in the city, either.

However, the more I tried to find ideas for siege and guards, the more I realized that siege and guards are inherently PvP objectives. If you can break the guard/siege setup of a city, people are going to raid JUST TO BREAK IT. They'll do it because they're bored and they want to pick a fight. 

And that's the contradiction at the heart of this problem. Preparing to defend yourself will force you to defend yourself. And so, before any changes to siege or engineering or Security can really be worthwhile changes, we need to know what the end goal is.

Jeremy Saunders

That is an interesting point @Khizan. I will have to mull that over as well.

Aakrin

Change how it works entirely. Have cannons be something cities build and set up, but aren't actually seen (they're "on the walls" somewhere). Limit the number of cannons that can be built, and make sure they only run if a guard is assigned to them. And make cities have to check and make sure enough cannon balls have been built and assigned to each one.

Then, have a system that has you give orders to the cannon to cover from room X to room Y. The rooms must be connected, but that's the only limit. This allows strangely designed cities to defend more of themselves.  Only let cannons cover like, 5 - 8 rooms or whatever. And yes, ignore the 'indoors' aspect. Who knows where the cannons are actually positioned, maybe they can make a lob shot through open rooms that land in a no sky room. Or, make them unique to each faction.

Mages cause arcane explosions to happen.

Demons cause eruptions of hellfire.

AM uses.....something I'm sure someone can come up with.

Just make it a resource requirement to set them up and keep them loaded, and then make it limited by number of rooms. You could even have room descriptions that appear. "A bunker of mages is here" and then it would cover five rooms in any direction. Then make some sort of action that can take place to slowly have the bunker destroyed, but it'd have to be a big invasion to get it done.

And you could make it all possible via engineering. Just specialize it to each circle.

Mathiaus

They've already revamped this before.

Juran

Khizan said:

I don't want PvP objectives in the city, either.

I do.

Edit: To elaborate the 'safe' pvp rules would still apply, and anyone that wasn't defending wouldn't be targetable during any raid - but you would give rewards and incentivize overcoming guards and defenders to achieve an objective. It would be one of those high risk moves that people would do just for the reputation gain that comes from doing it. I am 100% on board with this style of gameplay.

Gurn

Juran said:

I do.

Edit: To elaborate the 'safe' pvp rules would still apply, and anyone that wasn't defending wouldn't be targetable during any raid - but you would give rewards and incentivize overcoming guards and defenders to achieve an objective. It would be one of those high risk moves that people would do just for the reputation gain that comes from doing it. I am 100% on board with this style of gameplay.

If death is the only drawback for losing, I don't think anything can be considered 'high risk'.

Iniar

Death isn't a drawback. Not anymore. Purposeless PvP is the new vanilla.

Septus

To be fair, for the people who would engage in this kind of thing, death was never a drawback anyways.