Raiding

Jeremy Saunders

We are currently thinking a bit about raiding.

I personally feel as though raiding a city is a key element to the game and I do not want to remove it. As a player, raiding and being raided were some of the most exciting times in the game. 

However, it has become increasingly clear that the cost of raiding is nothing compared to the cost of defending a raid and raiders have learned to exploit this. While this is not breaking any rules, at that is the way the game is currently set up, it does create problems we need to address.say 

We do feel as though we need to create a way for raiding to have a more of a cost for the raiding characters and organizations, or we need to reduce the cost of the raid on the targetted city or council.

We are currently working on some ways to address this.

Some initial thoughts on the table:

- Significantly increase XP loss for raiders.

- Reduce or remove comm costs for siege ammo.

- Significanly buff guard health.

- Instantly heal guards when raiders are killed.

- Make guards invinicible and add upkeep costs.

- Turn off raiding completely.

- Increase telepath and archer damage.

- No siege fired outside of the city.

- Org related costs on the raiding city. 

- Raider costs on death that are not XP related. Some sort of malus.

- Killing a guard (or enough guards) results in an org declared war, with associated costs.

If you prefer to just share your thoughts/ideas with me, you can email me at jeremy@imperian.com.

When posting in this thread, we are going to be extra diligent in the forum rules. Do not be a douchebag. The definition of 'being a douchebag' is solely up to me.

Sumie

What i think you should do is let guards respawn for free on their own every irl day. I believe guards are the only mobs in the game that do not respawn which does not make sense from an RP standpoint. To compensate for that perhaps making guards weaker so that raids can actually happen. I feel like making it a irl day respawn will give raiders something to accomplish without a large negative consequence for the defender

Siege ammo comms should be vastly reduced, but with an increased time to make. Changing it to a cost of gold to a cost of time.

XP loss should double each time a player dies to a guard, lasting about an hour with the timer resetting each time the player dies.

Wysrias

Busy with work so I'll have to post more later, but the initial thought that keeps coming to mind is - why are guards the objective?

Having a tangible objective for raiding would probably go a long way towards mitigating a lot of the problems with raiding, because the current issue is that it's really just monetary damage being inflicted. If a city didn't have siege or guards around, there'd be nothing to attack, which kind of puts everyone in a weird position where the best defense is literally no defense.

No immediate ideas spring to mind, but I think the Achaea model has been relatively successful. Charge up a tank (similar to powerbombs for obelisks, meaning initial cost and prep time), drop in city, build up via combat for an explosion that wrecks rooms (requiring repair), but at the risk of the defenders stealing your tank (my details may be way off since this is secondhand knowledge). The investment lead time means that raids have to be planned in advance, and also means that there's more risk to the attacker because that previous investment might be lost. For the defenders, well, nobody likes having their rooms blown up.

I'm not saying we should steal the idea wholesale, for numerous reasons, but it might be worthwhile to brainstorm why players should be attacking cities, and what goals can be laid out to accomplish that work to equalize the costs and turn it more into an objective-based system than a war of attrition.

Septus

I don't think guard escolation is the way to go about it.

We talked about this in another thread a bit ago (sorry, forget which) and I think what I said then still holds true: if its possible, the guards will still die.

If raids should still be a part of the game, they really do need a concrete thing raiders can go after (and that defenders can defend). At the same time, if they did become a conflict mechanism you'd probably have to tone down guards (while probably making them respawn with a constant upkeep cost or something), because a static target in a city is trivial to force out by someone who knows how to use guards.

I'm with Wysrias on this one though, changing the reasons raiders come to the city is going to be a much better approach than attacking guards as the primary issue. The reason (most) people kill guards is to cause damage to a city, and I think that's something worth keeping. The damage is just incredibly disproportionate and entirely on the defenders side.

As a random thought, why not expand upon the townes concept (the plundering of commodities), with a hard cap on how much can be plundered or something. You'd probably have to account for the ability to just drop like 60 guards at the commstore and lock it out entirely, but something like that might work for cities at war. It'd obviously need an initiation cost of some kind, but it would probably be more fun for all parties than the current state of things.

Kanthari

These are the options that I thought were the most effective

1. Make guards invincible and add upkeep costs. Alternately, you could make them respawn daily. If the main objective of a raid is to promote PVP opportunities, the guards (city coffers) should not be the target. The removal of the off hours corpse rush to drain coffers would be a move in the right direction.

2. Substantially increase the amount of experience lost on guard death. I can regain the amount of xp lost to a guard death by killing 14 mobs in Khous, which isn't much effort to have to put back in.

3. Give siege ammunition a 'supply line' that has to be disrupted to actually drain down ammunition or prevent siege from firing outside the city.

4. Institute a 'high alert' function on guards. Once they have been attacked or have aggroed on a raider, place them in this state and have them actively detect/engage infiltrators both independently and in groups. Have this include a damage bonus and increase special attacks (stop movement, web) by 2.

Questions I would have:

- Significantly increase XP loss for raiders.

- Raider costs on death that are not XP related. Some sort of malus.

How much experience or malus would be the target range? What kind of malus would be effective if these altercations occur off hours?

- Killing a guard (or enough guards) results in an org declared war, with associated costs.

Would associated costs include additional cost to the defending city?

Jules

I sent you an e-mail.  What I will say publicly is:  if you guys do end up leaning towards making raiding something even Septus (leading some of the tankiest people in this game) can't really pull of, please, just commit and turn it off completely, and state that that is what is going to happen.  

Lartus

 

What if there is a new guard added that can resurrect the dead ones for free? This will require the guard to be led there by a player with guard privs and channel for a few seconds. That way it is not so costly to the defenders.

Cyr

I think the problem with raiding as it stands is that guards (and the economical damage they represent) are the goals of raiding. Guards are actually reasonably strong right now, in a large group from Antioch with some of the tankier people in game it's already fairly hard to kill more than 5 or 6 of them, get much above 10 in a group and it becomes practically impossible, there's no actual incentive to raid a city when people are there because the additional fighters/ the ability to guard rush turns it into a massive waste of time. Realistically I think guards and Siege damage need to be toned down a bit provided there is another goal. Occupation, economic damage, some way to influence politics in a conflict. As it stands the Economic damage done via killing guards and emptying siege is just means to a political end, if we lose the ability to raid, or if it becomes to hard to raid, we lose access to a important tool in settling conflict (or causing depending on the situation) and no one need ever settle a fight when there are no consequences other than the inconvenience of being killed (because outside of dying to a guard, there is no consequence to dying right now).

Khizan

One major problem is that distributing guards out in small patrols(5-15 guards) to cover the city is just melting down 150-450k in gold as an offering to Septus, so the only really effective use of guards is in large(30+) clots that provide no actual security coverage. One big clot sits at the gate to prevent entry. One big clot sits at the main gathering point of the city, so it's always available for use as a raidbuster And then you have a basic siegeline and that's it. Maybe you scrap the siegeline and do 3 clots of 33, but that's still crappy security and it just means that the other clot ends up lurking on the city tutor or something.

One of the big things about our raids on Stavenn in the past has been that once you get through the gates the rest of their security is basically non-existent. Septus and I stole something like 17 cannons from Stavenn once because after we killed their siegeline all we had to do was ignore the gates because guards are crappy at actually guarding things. Guards are just a hammer that somebody uses to swat raiders, and this hammer provides no security in and of itself; if we want to raid all we have to do is wait for that person to leave because the guardhammer is useless without somebody to wield it.

And part of the problem with that is that guards currently can move as fast as the players and I can cover 6 rooms a second. With guards striking instantly, they're basically just a giant hammer with zero counterplay. I see Vasharr in my city, I can have guards on him in two seconds. With guards now attacking in a city is either clear sailing because nobody can move guards well or flat-out impossible because somebody can move guards well. Additionally, the current guard setup will make any kind of city objective pointless for the same reason. I could park 50 guards on top of any objective in the world and nobody could do anything about it, so the current guard setup has to change.

With that said, this is the kind of changes I would consider:

• Drastically reduce the amount of guards in a city. Maybe, say, 35 guards total.
• Drastically increase the performance of each guard, but limit the maximum size of a guard squad to 5 guards, and limit squads to one per room.  The idea here is that five guards can wreck any single person and any small-to-medium group
• Make it so that guards move about 1 room every 5 seconds. The idea here is that this kind of thing would reward smart positioning and patrols of your 7 guard clots. If you keep one central hammer near the gates, your guards will be like a minute or more away from me when I'm killing somebody in their shop. 
• Guards can use ranged weapons to assist squads that are near them, but at reduced effectiveness.
• Guards respawn on the turn of the month, so that even if the enemy does organize to kill your guards, there's no replacement cost.

And here's the big one: Guard function can be temporarily improved with shards. Burn shards to speed up their movement rate. Make them hit harder, make them tankier. Respawn your dead guards for a shard fee. This ties shardfalls into city defense, burns shard stockpiles, and gives cities a reason to care about them again. 

As for city conflict objectives? I'd like to base a lot of that in the townes. This makes the conflict less irritating to non-combatants while letting you attack a target that clearly belongs to the city. However I would also like some objectives in the city proper. I don't think they should get to just turtle indefinitely. I had some ideas for a towneish system in another old thread, which I'll just quote here: 

Khizan said:

People won't fight over meaningful buffs either, they'll just get upset that the other side gets to get them.

I've been pondering some kind of towne-based conflict system. First, remove all the commodities and crap from the townes first, because basing needed commodities off of a player conflict system is awful. Just make them generated by the cities or something, the current system is p much useless anyways. Then remove the guards or reduce their effectiveness or give us some way to temporarily cancel them out. 

Then give each towne some kind of capture objective and a defensive buff that would scale based on how many townes you controlled. When you have 5 townes each of your townes get a defensive buff at 20% effectiveness. When you lose a towne, you get the buff at 25% effectiveness. 3 townes left, 33%. Then 50%. Then 100% on your last towne. When you capture townes past 5, the buff on your 'real' townes gets reduced by a similiar percentage and your captured territories actually grant a bonus to their original owners during an attempt to retake them.

The idea here is that as you take more objectives it gets harder to defend what you have and it gets harder to take more territory. Ideally it would allow a strong faction and a weak faction to reach a middle ground where they could get decent fights. Maybe when Magick is down two and AM is up two the buffs stack up so that we can't just brute force them down anymore, or they let them burst one of our artifacted people quickly, etc.

Iniar

I have an opinion that will probably be in the minority:

If we take a step back and look at the overall picture, what has the advent of fortress-cities done for the good of the game? What has it really achieved apart from segregation of a small player-base? Is it still necessary?

Consider now the events of the last 2 to 3 weeks. How much more interaction has there been had, since Stavenn and Kinsarmar have decided to share their areas? How amusing is it that I see Tikal wander down Caanae Road with her Magick posse?

Consider also the creation of the privacy and protection add-ons. Should you have need of a secure location, this can be provided in guildhalls and houses.

So, considering all of this, in the grand scheme of things, what purpose does a city-wide defense still fulfill? The only reasonable purpose is to remove unwanted people. Why would a person be unwanted, and why would they want to be in your city in the first place once guards and siege are removed from the equation? To stir up trouble? To kill someone? To kill a few mobiles?

The most encompassing solution would be three-pronged:

- by necessity, it will create a conflict system that lies outside the 'city' and is not purely 100% opt-in - it can be 75% opt in, but not 100% - this drives conflict, this keeps people out of cities from lack of conflict

- by necessity, it will require a city-defense that is unbeatable - this further reinforces the outlook that conflict should be parted from the cities; cities should remain a place to socialize, intermingle and antagonize as need be, but they need to be a place where the city leaders can say 'nope, you're out. get out. here is your one warning shot. the next one will kill you.'

- for a better experience, city leaders need to have a broader perspective. disarm, disarm, disarm. Your city will be better off for it. Someone might actually go and visit Ithaqua.

Dicene

Can I just chime in to say that Trenches should probably just be removed at this point? With guards getting a chance to attack/prone/massacre in between separator'd actions, they serve no real purpose and their only real purpose now is to make friendly people want to be in Kinsarmar less.

Oystir

Skimread. Not joining convo, I can't offer solutions just my perspective.

To me there are three main reasons people play this game: Combat/Coding | PvE | RP/Aesthetics.

For nearly all three of these things, participation is voluntary, standing out is an option AND isn't a big deal, and pretty much they last about as long as your interest is directly upon it. Even as far as Combat goes things are to the point where if I'm sick of a shardfall I can walk away and I won't even feel bad.

Raiding is different, though, for many reasons:

Even single-man raids means I'm going to have to move around to avoid a prism so I can keep typing an emote, or stand in a designated 5 rooms that are 'safe'. In practice this is one person deciding that I am going to Combat with them unless I jump through the X number of hoops of perfect behaviour not to die. I do not think pressuring other people into fighting in increasingly frantic ways is the way to get anyone to care about doing anything more than leaving you alone however possible. In the large raid we had to tell novices they couldn't leave the city (gates closed, had to be escorted out) and another citizen to leave a shop so they weren't flagged as aggressive and murdered.

Unlike Obeslisks, raids have no 'time'. As was clear, we can just got for half a day if we have the enthusiasm for it and honestly, I didn't bother yesterday 'cause I half-expected the goal to be 'use all of Kinsarmar's iron 2 victory' and there's nothing at all that exists to stop that being the goal and the end result. Sure theoretically we could be more powerful, call in loldemonic, but also, we could not beat the dead horse until all of the iron falls out of it.

As far as large raids go, I really CAN'T just go sit it out. I am in a position where if I don't feel like it even once I am probably going to hear about it. I had fun, for like, a long time. Until round 2 - less than an hour after I'd finished learning about and replenishing all of our security crap. I qq'd for relief the other night and actually legitimately woke up within a half hour to news of two separate people upset because I decided to leave instead of wasting the rest of my favor. They don't want to deal with it. I don't want to deal with it. Somebody eventually has to, during to try to minimize loss (and likely encourage a longer raid) or afterwards having incurred greater losses.

This -especially- more than any other avenue of PK has real damaging effects. I understand the brofist of 'we win kinsarmar' but we have massive losses even if we manage to get you out, and without active effort we lose everything we have not literally hidden away and versus numbers and ability this might happen anyway. Unlike caravans and shardfalls though, what we lose is palpable city property, which is replaced, replenished, and intentionally more limited than resource-seeking fights.

There's no non-comm classlead and ideas are only spuriously added for non-combat changes and mostly on a small scale regardless. Combat IS the game to probably 10% of the players and 80% of the coders. For those who aren't Kryss, and especially the people in my city, the closest thing to a legitimate sanctuary in this game is a half million investment on a single room which you have to be standing in inside of a city-controlled property subject to taxes and dependent on your citizenship(/towneship) and continued good standing. That does not give the player many choices, and without that specific 'sanctuary' they don't get a choice at all. Why is that?

Not everything needs to be a PK mechanic. I get it 'lol raiding already is' but seriously, there are a lot of things that need to looked at other than making things 'fair', because 'unfair' is perpetual and cities are not exactly optional.

This game is literally designed to have PK be the only advantage necessary to 'win' nearly every aspect of interaction, and most of everything else is mitigated trying to find a fair balance between not making the losers lose a bunch of stuff and not having the winners feel like they've accomplished nothing. With the other two aspects of the game being what they are, it is hard to put emphasis elsewhere. But honestly, lack of palpable goals and consequences is not the problem with whatever PKthing. Most things happen like this - somebody pushed it cause they could. The rest, to me, seems like adding limits for PKers while trying to dangle the carrot for people who might be motivated by quartz or whatever (like me, for instance), but has little to do with creating opportunities for the rest of the playerbase.


tldr bawwwwwwww

Salik

A very minor thing about guards, but how much stronger would they be for defense with the following two conditions put in:

Guards sense and track city enemies within 10 rooms of them, moving at normal rate to kill them.

Guards cannot be critted.

This might actually make patrolling guards more feasible.

As far as raids go... I've actually not really seen why people are raiding yet. There hasn't seemed to be any great benefit one way or another, at least from a newbie to Imperian's perspective. They come in, kill some respawning NPCs, maybe a few players, and run away.

Kryss

Guards are already immune to critical hits.

Salik

Thank you. I wasn't aware of that. As said, Imperian newbie!

Sumie

Jules said:

I sent you an e-mail.  What I will say publicly is:  if you guys do end up leaning towards making raiding something even Septus (leading some of the tankiest people in this game) can't really pull of, please, just commit and turn it off completely, and state that that is what is going to happen.  

I'm going to say this, 1-3 people raiding is lame and more of just harassment than fun. Five to ten people should be the ideal size to raid a city. So obviously it should be able to handle one person, even it is the tankiest person in the game. 

Gurn

So, hey, crazy idea. What if raiding didn't happen in cities and councils? I absolutely agree with Iniar that the population is too small to keep dividing.

Let's create new "fortresses" for cities and councils. I dunno, do some event, and these will be the training grounds/army/villages/whatever. These will be the raid points, instead of the actual cities/councils. This allows cities and councils to be generally safe points where you can socialize and trade. Make these places be powered by shards, be powered by gold. Hell, allow players to build their own defence forces/villagers/villages whatever as a new gold sink, and let other players lead an NPC group like during the wars. Make these cost gold, and be powered by shards. Some parts of this fortress must be raided by NPC, some parts must be raided by players. Assume that win conditions MUST be player done, no matter how many NPCs are there, but NPCs can make things easier/harder for offence/defence.

See, now, when Celidon's inevitably getting our asses handed to us, we can still sit and grumble in our councils while watching our villages and stuff die horrible, burny deaths. Our combatants are worse, but wait, we're just filthy rich because Tikal never stops bashing, so hooray! We just bought ourselves back to status quo and our villages are all alive and the fluffy lycaean pups that someone RP birthed is alive again. Antioch sustained some NPC army losses in the battle, so they have to recoup and not raid for a while, but are generally content with the gold and resources plundered from poor Celidon.

Or, both sides just burn, burn, burn through all their gold and credits, and then one fortress is a burning ruined mess for X time and an objective victory is declared without too many tears being shed and people not quitting the game because they literally can't play anymore.

EDIT: I would totally pay credits to design my own army of dudes. And pay to totally design my own badass fortress with unique guards wielding unique weapons. And totally pay to have some kind of leaderboard where I'm totally showing off those badass things that I did.

Iniar

Gurn said:

EDIT: I would totally pay credits to design my own army of dudes. And pay to totally design my own badass fortress with unique guards wielding unique weapons. And totally pay to have some kind of leaderboard where I'm totally showing off those badass things that I did.

@Gurn

HELP IMMORTALITY

Ivellios

Salik said:

A very minor thing about guards, but how much stronger would they be for defense with the following two conditions put in:

Guards sense and track city enemies within 10 rooms of them, moving at normal rate to kill them.

Guards cannot be critted.

This might actually make patrolling guards more feasible.

As far as raids go... I've actually not really seen why people are raiding yet. There hasn't seemed to be any great benefit one way or another, at least from a newbie to Imperian's perspective. They come in, kill some respawning NPCs, maybe a few players, and run away.

There are no benefits to raiding beyond flaunting the fact you can/trying to kill someone and do economic damage to a city/council by killing guards and draining gold in the process. But the raiders don't really get anything out of it. Anyone they would want to kill I'm sure they can gank outside a city/council eventually. They don't get any bonuses, killing guards doesn't grant crazy exp/gold. It's literally an activity to do cause you can. And the defenders don't get anything either even if they succeed in repulsing a raid perfectly 100 times. All it takes it for one successful raid when no one is around to cost a lot of gold. Hence the problem.

I think it should be a thing, but there should be some kind of objective to do beyond killing guards.

Alvetta

@ Jeremy
What do you mean turn off raiding completely? What would that look like?

I think it would be interesting to see a malus penalty like we see when we die in PK with a compounding vulnerability inside of the enemy City/Council for repeated griefing. Perhaps let it reset every 24 hrs. It would make the enemy practically useless after a certain number of attacks and also give young ones or stragglers an increased chance to defend the city against such a person.

I feel like stopping automatic cannon fire by guards outside of city/council limits should be stopped immediately.

Caelya

It would be pretty amazing if -any- system could be put in place that would encourage strategy and discourage, say, corpserushing guards and 'draining' siege, the latter of which doesn't necessarily result in death for the raider. One organization is having to cough up a ridiculous amount of commodities, gold, and time to ensure that everything is properly secure, and all it takes is a persistent small group to abuse every mechanic they have available to them in order to drain siege and kill guards, with such a trivial cost in comparison to that which the org in question is forced to pay. It's, in a word, infuriating, because currently no amount of strategic genius on the part of the defenders is going to keep a bored raider from brute forcing their way through that defense when no one is around. It's doubly infuriating that the motivation for these raids is boredom and not an actual desire for conflict that is remotely fair or mutually fun. 

I wish I had actual suggestions for a system beyond 'make it something that doesn't leave one party feeling miserable and like logging off as soon as they log in that day,' but that's all I've got. 

Ohm

I think guards should be immortal generally. However, if you hit them enough, they should become tired or suppressed. After 2 Imperian days they could be refreshed again and ready again. 

Using them in the midst, would use gold - given enough money people will work harder (or you could give them an adrenaline potion or whatever). Similarly guard rushing should cost gold. 

Siege ammo should be free for the most part (with a firing limit per day). If drained, they could take 1 day to replenish automatically. You could tie in supply line mechanics or towne mechanics to the replenish rate if need be. 

I also know nothing of raiding. 

Jules

I don't like having significant "real" costs for the targeted org in terms of making people spend credits to purchase guards, materials etc... I am against "real" consequences/costs of that sort almost categorically, and this is no exception (and a huge part of why I like Imperian so much).  That is at least one thing that a lot people (admittedly not all) probably agree on.  That said, cities should provide somewhat limited protection if you are bountied/holding monolith etc... and someone wants to get to you, for example.

Yurii

Okay, I haven't fully thought out what I'm typing here, so I may just ramble, but here's what I think.

Guards shouldn't be giant stacks like they are, that means if someone(Septus) can get through guards easily, they can take out a huge stack, cost the city tons of gold, and all Septus really gets out of it is a few deaths. I think guards should be singled out with different types(ranged, close-combat, hinder, healer). Maybe more than that, maybe not. The guards should then be buffed, significantly. So significantly, that perhaps they cannot be killed outside of raids.

Raids should also be sanctioned. Say Septus wishes to raid Kinsarmar, the raid would have to be sanctioned through his city. Costs gold to raid or something like that. When the raid is sanctioned, it gives a 5-10 minute window for the defenders to prepare(or not). After that window, the raid can be officially started. During the raid, the guards become killable, but still don't walk around in giant stacks, each single guard should be quite powerful, but more killable than when not in a raid.

Guards should also be able to track people, but again, not in stacks. There should be a limit to how many guards can be in a room at a time. If the enemies leave the room(Or maybe something more, like the whole area), the guards who can heal can then rez the guards that died.

This will also allow for some sort of "prize" or at least something to gain from raiding, or defending a raid. Perhaps maybe something like commodities from the losing city to the winning city, or if the raiders win, they get their gold back, and if they lose the defending city gets their gold or something.

Like I said, just rambling though.

Oystir

I feel like, at core, changing the way the guards are attacked, adding limitations and such, and the cost/benefit of raiding and defending will not actually address the issue of the fact that AM obviously can and will launch themselves constantly at Kinsarmar if they feel like it. Adding in incentives for either side isn't exactly the right way to address what is identified, in the fifteenth hour of defending in a week, as 'griefing'.  That said, creating a way to balance 'AM is having fun doing something newish ish idk nobody raids anymore' and 'Oystir super wanted to bash today instead' is hard, especially since giving the defenders the opportunity to opt-out of a raid will either cost them something (a malus for not playing, which is reasonable except Kinsarmar will like opt out and just automatically lose gold or whatever and honestly that's not fun for anyone) or will cost nothing (giving the raiders pretty much no option to raid until somebody feels like it. That's not fun for them). Both of these are crappy, but so is not giving defenders a choice at all.

Like I mentioned above, it wasn't gold and comms I was fussed about, it was the fact that 1- I could not feasibly opt out and 2- no matter what I did or how well I did, I had no options that would prevent me from 'losing' and from doing so for as long as Antioch felt like watching me lose.

Here's my idea:

A raid is 'initiated' when certain loyals in the city are attacked (10 new 'peacekeeper' mobs for each or something). Also a command for raiders JOIN RAID or something. These can be moved throughout the city by war ministry, they have a walk delay, cannot stand with another peacekeeper and cannot go in a home or an org-owned building. After the first is killed, there is settimelimit minutes for the others to be killed entirely. This number can be easily adjusted: 60 minutes would give 6 minutes to kill each individual peacekeeper. This encourages big groups and also defines a goal, as well as preserving the funtimes of individuals infiltrating to kill Mathyew or somebody.

Guards are immortal, but the number of guards allowed in a squad is limited (maybe 20 or 25 - to balance the need of 'more squads' with 'bigger squads' with 'siege guards') . Siege ammunition is free at the cost of a cannon upgrade (done with workers and at that speed) for a cost of 500 shards (or the redshard equiv, and this is per-siege item. Maybe create a way for them to not be dismantled if they have this as well), and maybe every 35 shots they have to stop and reload for a minute or two. This effect will wear off after two years. Make siegeline squads possible and make it so you are able to order them to fire only at one person, not fire at all unless ordered, or to fire at any raiders. This gives the defense a really good chance to strategize prior to a raid - check cost/benefit to investing shards and stuff in siege, and giving cities like Kinsarmar who WOULD find value in that to have the opportunity to buy an advantage. and to have a decent chance to defend during, even if thinking on their toes.

Raids can only be done on any given city once a week, and cannot be performed if there are less than 3 citizens active at the start of the raid (limit but not prevent downtime hours)

Obviously the raid would end when the time-limit is up or the peacekeepers are killed.

If the raiding party wins, all of the guards will ignore them in the city for 12 Aetherian days, and all of the NPCs will cower when a raider walks into the room, as well as a huge world emote announcing the prevailing city:
"The loud cry of a phoenix pierces the sky as Celidon fells the forces of Khandava"
and an accompanying qhonors line, because obviously.

If the defenders win, all of the raiders will be immediately swarmed by guards and slaughtered for 12 Aetherian days if the enter raided city's territory (Suddenly a cluster of guards appears and rips you to shreds without regard. Yes, even you Septus), as well as a huge world emote announcing their victory:
"A victorious cry from the north announces Kinsarmar's triumph over Antioch's raiding forces."
and obviously an accompanying qhonors line.

I think that strikes a nice balance.

Khizan

Oystir said:

Raids can only be done on any given city once a week, and cannot be performed if there are less than 3 citizens active at the start of the raid (limit but not prevent downtime hours) 

This kind of stuff is awful design, because it ensures that the best defense is "don't log in". You have three citizens online and it looks like somebody might raid? Well, your best defense here is to have somebody log off. You never want to encourage that kind of thing and you don't want people afraid to log on because their presence might push their side over some kind of limit. 

Septus

I'm just going to put this out there since for some reason I keep getting tagged in here.

Kinsarmar would do well to ask the raiders what the deal is. If it was pure bordom, Antioch would be doing it to Stavenn, 100% guaranteed.

There also seems a misconception about guards. I'll go on record: I cannot tank guards. Noone in this game can tank guards. The only way to tank guards is not to tank guards.

Khizan

Oops

Salik

It does seem like there's more defense when you do happen to attack Stavenn.

Jeremy Saunders

We have an entire large event coded and ready to begin, but we would like to adjust raiding a bit before we start.

I think we eventually want to move to an objective based city conflict system, but I am still thinking about it.

In the meantime we will probably do the following things so that we can run our next two events.

1. Have guards reset an hourish after killed.

2. Increase xp loss from guard deaths.

3. Increase guard upkeep costs.

4. Remove siege comm cost.

5. Maybe add a generic comm upkeep cost for siege.

6. Do not allow siege to fire outside of the city.

7. Hide the log spam when guards are killed into its own log.

8. I am debating some of the thoughts about fewer, stronger guards.

9. Possibly a shard cost that will make your guards suddenly super stud mega killers.

Of course, it's 7 at night and by tomorrow morning I may change my mind. The goal for now is just to reduce the pain for killed guards but still allow raiders to kill away.

Here are the things I hate about our current system.

1. Cities are laid out around guards. Things like closing off areas and buildings. Rooms strung together in straight lines for siege, etc. I hate it, but without major changes, that is not going to change too much.

2. Rooms with 30 or more guards in them. Bleh.

3. Killing guards is the only objective for attacking a city.

I would like to move to an objective based system, but I am not sure if this really changes things much. Players will still raid a city, take all the objectives, and defenders will feel like they suck. They will just be losing objectives instead of guards. I'm not sure.

We will stay away from thinking about using townes. We have already started code work on a large towne questing and mob generation system for later this year. 

I am currently thinking of adding objectives in a city to claim or objective in the area around the city to claim. Or, items held by city mobs in the city which you must kill and steal. Or some sort of combination of things. Objectives would reset once a week or something like that.

I don't really like the feel of it yet though. It just feels like exchanging one form of griefing to the another. That said, any form of city competition will feel like that when you are losing.

Also, there is the big problem of coming up with a meaningful reward for capturing objectives.

Anyways, we will be making some adjustments soon so that we can run our nexxt couple events while working on a possible (not for certain) objective based city conflict system.

Septus

The nice things about objectives is that other cities can retaliate. Honestly? Current raiding isn't a thing if you're not part of the tiny subset of the game with the experience/artefacts/class abilities to make it a viable thing. If Antioch goes to raid Kinsarmar, Kinsarmar isn't coming into Antioch to retaliate because the players with those capabilities are all either in Antimagick or Demonic now. The system won't be give and take as it'd need to be for it to be fun for both sides unless that accessibility barrier changes in some way.

With the defenders not having a recourse with objectives, I think (Wysrias maybe?) mentioned earlier that you'd need an opportunity system. I know the system isn't popular, but obelisks do this really, really well. Its probably the best thing about the system, in my opinion. If you repel an obelisk attack, it really feels like a win, because you know it cost the attackers a lot of resources and they'll be locked out from trying again.