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City Raiding and Defence
Jeremy Saunders
Administrator Posts: 1,251 admin
in New Ideas
We want to be able to allow raiding to happen in Imperian. It can be fun for both sides, offering ways to engage in PK and defence of your holdings. However, defence of such raids can become very 'not' fun after several hours of sustained death. What we would like to offer players is the opportunity to raid a city to kill an offending player or mangle a few guards, before the main city defences come to bare on the player.
Here are our ideas:
- Cities will gain access to automated archers and psychics that can attack players anywhere in the city.
- Auto defences will only start targeting enemy players when a guard sees them, or a player issues a command that the player is in the city. For players, it will require that the attacker and defender are in the same room. We want players to be able to sneak around if possible.
- Damage from auto defences will build up over time. This means that an enemy player that has just been spotted will only take minimal damage at first. This damage will slowly ramp up over time.
- This damage build up will take several hours to clear. We are tentatively thinking 24 hours. This means a player could raid 'damage free' once per real life day.
- The damage would not be unmanageable and archers would only hit when you are outdoors. However, combined with defender and guard damage, it would be significant.
- Death would not clear the damage build up, only time.
- Players that can enter a city and manage to go undetected will never take damage from these defences.
- We may offer different levels or types of 'defences' for cities that will have varying degrees of upkeep cost that will cost more gold based on damage.
- We will be scaling damage based on two things. One, the time a player has been raiding. Two, the number of targeted enemies in the city. This means a single player or small group could spend more time in the city. A larger group would be seen as a much larger threat to the city and the damage would ramp up faster. The idea is that a large raiding party is seen as a bigger threat and the defences will come to assist much faster.
Please provide some feedback on this idea.
PS: I am working on a Sect/Cult post for later today as well. So save up your rant power.
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Comments
Any thought to the part about assassin classes like Predator and Assassin having an innate resilience to this system? I was rather attached to the idea when Ahkan presented it.
Also, I would like to see the infiltration mechanics redone in this system. Namely, all of the infiltration skills need to be brought in to full parity and functionality (mask/phase).
I don't like the idea of a gold based upkeep cost. Maybe shards, generator energy, or commodities of some kind?
I'd prefer to see generator energy.
Smaller circles can have bountiful access to corpses, they do not get free access to shards.
Don't worry, I've got plenty!
When you say "The damage would not be unmanageable", what exactly do you mean? The discrepancy between sides is such that a moderate damage aura wouldn't have been a major deterrent to the raids that AM was holding on Kinsarmar, because the Kinsarmarians aren't capable of beating them even with the assistance.
Figure that any successful guardrush is going to have enough guards in it to curbstomp the room. So damage+guards isn't going to be anymore of a deterrent than guards are, though I suppose that the aura may make smaller clots safer, depending on how fast it ramps up and where it starts at.
"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."
‘Every sword’s a weight to carry. Men don’t see that when they pick ’em up. But they get heavier with time.”
Now that I have more time, a few more specific notes on the current guard issues.
I hit an elite knight for about ~17% of its max health. In exchange, that elite knight hits me for 37 damage. Six of me can kill a guard in one round. I need to be hit by 15 guards at once to die in one round. Any less than that and there's a very good chance I can escape, and so you need 20 guards at a minimum in a clot for it to really be effective against even a single person, since there are people who are even tankier than me. So, the minimum effective group is a full fifth of your available guards.
And with that in mind, a reasonably sized group of us can clear out a 20-25 guard clot very effectively. One death each, maaaybe two. Quite possibly less; we cleared 18 guards with no major losses at all. So you're probably talking 30+ guards, as things are now, so basically a third of your guards.
So guards reporting to activate the defenses isn't going to be a thing that happens often without some changes to the capability of guards. We just don't have enough of them to scatter around in the numbers they'd need to be scattered in. This problem is amplified by the way guards respond. Specifically, if you call for help next to 100 guards, you get five them. This basically just feeds your guards into the grinder bit by bit. "Call for help" is worse than useless; it is actively harmful.
And, in a way, this ties into another problem. Guards are unwieldy as hell and awful to deal with. This is the lines from moving one guard:
You order an elite Diavlous Knight to move to the w.
A black armored figure stomps out to the west, his helmed head swiveling as he appraises all threats.
If I move 50 guards, I get 100 lines of that. Per room. And in addition to the spam, this makes it really easy to accidentally split up guards, only move a chunk of them, etc. And so, here is my idea:
Squads: I would really really like it if you had a way to clump guards up into squads that would move together as a unit. This would make guards much easier to order and move around, and it would also open up some other things.
One thing I'd really like to see is a functional patrol. Let me set a series of rooms as waypoints, and the guard squad will just path around to each waypoint in turn. This would let me cover more area with larger guard clots. I could set a path so that the guards would go from, say, the Stavenn arena up through the shops, check in a Niccolo, go to the Ephor chamber door, and then head back to the arena to repeat. If the guards move at a decent clip and the entire squad responds to a call for help, this has just MASSIVELY increased my guard coverage and guards might actually be of help if somebody gets jumped and manages to live long enough to call for help a few times.
"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."
Thoughts?
Break all walls in their way
Automatically attempt to stay together (or rejoin each other)
Have some sort of CC that is regular/dependable
Be able to take down your average raider in 1 round of damage - probably have to increase damage numbers as they are now, maybe have only a few guard types do damage and a few others that only do other tasks. Building a squad would require a minimum of x damage guards to start patrolling, perhaps.
Be able to intelligently respond to calls for help - if you give the squad a key, they can use it.
Guard damage type needs to be looked at. Why don't our city guards try to mimic our game environment? You'd think in nearly a thousand years we'd have taught some city guards some new tricks like shoot fire, throw meteors, chill, incinerate. Why are the best two guard types either electric/web or most resisted damage type ever.
One thing he's completely right about is there's some serious derp surrounding the use of shard walls and the interaction with siege. Walls stop bolts and nets, this is a given. Cannons have always shot through these walls destroying them. Not so much with shard walls. Cannon balls go through the wall (like magick), while bolts do not.
Not really a big fan of generic wall breaking. Totally ok with 'give ram to guard' and SWAT teaming your way into a house. Would lol.
As far as walls go, I'd like to see a dedicated Engineer guard. Low damage, good health. Plants sapping charges on walls when he tries to move through one and gets blocked by it(special super sapping charges that even blow down shard walls). Gets increased rate-of-fire when manning siege weapons.
There needs to be some way for guards to take down walls because literally everybody who joins a city gains the ability to instantly throw up a wall. There's not much point in bothering to set up patrolling guards if the patrol can be trivially blocked out by flinging up a wall on the patrol route before making your move.
As far as houses go, I'd love the ability to give guards a ram and order them to break in a door/wall. The command would be announced over CT somehow(something like "(Stavenn): An elite Diavlous Knight says, "Yes sir, Khizan! Squad, break down the door at <location>!") and have the order logged in the city logs to help prevent abuse of powers to enter private houses. Then have the busted door removed from the house when the guards breach it. It would also be cool if the guards would instantly swarm in all SWAT style when the door went down.
"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."
‘Every sword’s a weight to carry. Men don’t see that when they pick ’em up. But they get heavier with time.”
That's something that could happen, true. But look at things right now. Khizan/Eldreth/Juran/Aulani/Iluv/Azefel can kill a guard in one round of combat, so if we do "e|kill guard" all at the same time, we're guaranteed at least one kill. Guaranteed. Our worst case scenario is trading one death each for one guard. Our worst case scenario trades one death for 5,000 of the enemy's gold. If we're doing this off hours and you have a group of 30 guards, it breaks down like this:
Let's say that after we do this, Antioch doubles down. All one hundred guards! One clot at the Shuk!
This is the problem with guards. Any decently sized group can zerg them down for a cost of "nothing special, really".
If you can prevent this, you've basically made it impossible to raid. If you cannot prevent this, you've basically made it impossible to defend.
Cities SHOULD require stealth and sneakiness to raid. That or lightning raids against specific targets. Get in, get out, wham bam thank you ma'am. The protracted raid is exactly the kind of thing we want to get rid of, after all.
"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."
Entry in to the city to kill one or two players? Yes, should be very possible. Defenses should be alerted upon aggression or a guard spotting you. Entry in to the city to kill guards, destroy property? I don't see this as popular. Kinsarmar didn't have fun. Antioch doesn't care about the level of loss we have suffered on that front, but we would prefer to not have lost it. I imagine Stavenn didn't really like it when we killed ~19-20 guards.
In the end, according to most players, cities need to be defended utterly against protracted raids and it should be difficult to infiltrate a city and stay inside for extended periods. In an infiltration review, we can probably fix the issue of easy break in skills so guilds can use their guildhall and sects can use their temple.