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Affiliated Mobiles
Made this thread because I'm about to go way off-topic in relation to city-raiding/defence.
Background:
Jeremy: Create a way for guards to patrol. ... Again, this should hopefully allow for cities to be more open and larger.
Iniar: If you're making pathing for guards, could we then have (gaspshockhorror) squads path to Townes?
Jeremy: I am pretty much done coding squads and patrols. Just working on their movement issues. ... You will be able to set how fast squads move to waypoints and also how long they wait at a waypoint before moving to the next one.
Khizan: No. Firstly, pathing to townes is a great way to get a single squad caught in the middle of nowhere with no real support, so nobody would do it. Secondly, what with the towne placement of various cities, it would be a great way to get do to things like "shardfalls with guard support"
Mkay. My essential thrust is that cities don't need to be any larger.
1) Cities are big enough for the given population
2) Townes are, aside from commodity generation, functionally the same (to me) as any other point in Aetherius.
3) There is little or no simulation of a city/council's web of influence, and if there is, there isn't enough reminders.
4) Following 3), there is very little dissimilarity (i.e. minimal threat) between Iniar tramping around the Antiochan desert and plodding around the Modin valley.
Possible solution:
1) Generation of geographic and towne/racial/city/council specific mobiles/ambience messages that physically migrate/shuttle/shuffle back and forth between city/council and affiliated townes.
2) With 1), it then becomes a smaller leap of imagination to extend the military might of a given city/council into the area of influence (city/council -> interposing land -> townes)
3) Given that guard pathing is possible, we know 2) is mechanistically possible
E: Therefore, we can have city/council loyals path between City/Council -> Interposing land -> Townes and back
Reasons to:
1) Give cities/councils more of a presence in their immediate surrounding areas
2) Give new players a better appreciation for their environs (whoa, check out those badass Diavlous knights stomping past in delta-formation on their way to Trevka)
3) Make it logistically more interesting to waltz right next door to Antioch (path find bloodstone quarry, oh whoa 6 Antioch thingamabobs, backpedal/backpedal/backpedal)
4) Makes for potential non-shardfall spontaneous PK reasons
5) Potentially spurt a bit of life back into townes
Issues:
1) Guards = gold. - Tentatively, make these lesser guards spawn for free as they cannot be assigned on permanent guard duty.
2) Griefing tool. - Make it so that they are not privy to yelling out on city channel, and that if you -want- a fight, you specifically go out and catch people wailing on your guards.
3) No reason to kill. + 4) No benefit to protect.
- make the patrols deliver a baseline number of comms from the towne they visit. Not too much that it makes caravaning useless, nor too little that it makes it pointless. Perhaps 3% of daily production per patrol.
- make the guards actually drop the comms on death so you can take them back
- alternatively, make guards deliver 'shard energy' to the surrounding townes in exchange for enhanced commodity production?
5) Too much benefit to lose. - again cap the loss so that interspersed killing of guards minimally impacts any resource associated with their movement, but a sustained 24/7 for a week will significantly impact resource generation/consumption
6) Shardfalls with guard support - why not? Would make it more exciting/require consideration of home turf/give more weighting to movement/avoiding engaging close to hostile patrols + opens up the way for neutral badass shardfall monsters to be unleashed in neutral territories like some people have been suggesting. Sometimes I get sad when Magick and AM go all out at each other @ Barren Wastelands and we sit out because we don't have the numbers.
Anyway, make townes interact with cities rather than making cities bigger. Make the influence of cities/councils felt stronger (by using mobiles) in the immediate surrounding areas. There's quite a fair bit of scope to play with to both make the geography more immersive and interactive, and make townes more relevant. As always, any alternate ideas appreciated.
wit beyond measure is a Sidhe's greatest treasure
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