Defending a city

[Baldur Nordal]

As someone said in chat:
Right now the best way to defend a city is to stay as far away from it as possible


As things are, hotly contested cities are strangely empty. You go forth to conquer and there's nobody to duel.

I would like to see some kind of mechanism that would make it more beneficial for people (especially the clan that 'controls' a town) to stick around.

One possibility would be to link who's in the city to the Ji drain. So if lots of people in a clan are in the city on the hour, the Ji drains less - and if they aren't around to stake their claim on the city, the Ji drains much faster.

Other ideas?

-bn

[fearless]

well said...

[Easar Nossredna]

I think something like this NEEDS to be added. As its pointed out, the best way to defend a city is to leave it alone and fight in the surrounding areas. Not much ji to be won fighting like that?

[Tim]

What about this (I think I proposed something like this before, but never added it): What if at the hour change, clans earn 0.5 Ji for each member they have currently sitting in the town. That's 12 Ji per member, per day. Equal to roughly 3 duels in the town or the Ji earned in one town for 12 NPC battles from the wilderness areas. Not a lot, but if you have 10 clan members camped in a town for a 10 days, that's over 1000 Ji for just sitting there. Down side is, you'll likely be getting attacked, opening things up for more Ji for other clans to earn off you. But it could be a nice trade off.

[fearless]

would that work as a penalty instead of a bonus ? if you were in the woods instead of defending your town, you would LOSE ji ??

[fearless]

or perhaps both ??

[Tim]

Penalty is harder to do. If a player is in a wilderness, which town gets a Ji penalty? Or how many of your players does it take to make a clan considered "defended"? What about smaller clan?

All of those are questions we could probably come up with an answer for, but I think it'd just be easier to go with adding small amounts of Ji instead of trying to subtract.

[King Richard]

Plus, we've already got degrading Ji.

[Stilgar]

I like Tim's idea. Just maybe amount of ji earned would have to be tuned in the version after first it will be implemented in though.

But with "hour change" that will be abused by everybody (no special skills needed) with running browser and two tabs that will autoresend POST every hour without asking (works in Opera for example), one to enter the city at *:59 and one to exit and *:01. So that should be total amount of time spent in a city, i. e. excluding all absence time. E .g. player was parked for 30 minutes, that went hunting for 15 minutes and returned. After 30 more minutes clan will get a portion of ji.

I think it's on-topic: I'd also like defending a city to be easier that attacking. For (rough) example lowering all ji earning of other clans with each ruler member in a city.

[Easar Nossredna]

Well, this goes with what Stilgar said: If there is a way to calculate the total amount of time the character stayed in the city, that would be the best way to do it. Since it would be to easy, as Stilgar pointed out, to just poke your head into town once in awhile. So; total amount of minutes in town pr day(24 h) x ji increase. Maybe also make it a small bonus to stay in the city for a full hour, without leaving(if that isent too hard to code).

[Stilgar]

> Maybe also make it a small bonus to stay in the city for a full hour, without leaving(if that isent too hard to code).

Maybe not, but why? Does it resemble something in a real world?

BTW, maybe being present in city as somebody try to get ji in it will be enough, counting presence can be postponed to future versions.

[Tim]

Calculating how long someone is in each town each day would take a lot of work and a lot more info stored in the database than there is currently. However, I could easily tell how long since you've traveled. Perhaps you only gain Ji if you've been in the city for at least a certain amount of time (something like 10,15, or 30 minutes)?

Yeah, it could still be scripting to keep you in town the minimal amount, but at least you'd have to be in the town a measureable amount of time that others would be able to hit you.

[Baldur Nordal]

Hey Tim - at first I really liked your idea of adding Ji quite a bit. But as I thought more I saw a few issues.

The biggest is that it will screw up what the Ji drain is accomplishing - give late comers and small clans a sporting chance to accomplish something. Even with the increased duels I think it will give us a situation where Ji is gradually increasing with no effort instead of slowly decreasing. Especially since I think Clan Ji is not reduced for duel losses. This will probably lead to very high Ji levels later in the game.

It will also promote keeping lots of 'deadwood' in a clan (ie - all those people that try GoS and disappear) and may invite abuse.

How about this instead:

Increase the Ji drain in general (double?), but stop it entirely if a clan has sufficient presence in the city. For ruler/ally this would be a defense, for others it would be as insurgents.

As for what is a sufficient 'presence' I would say something based on the number in the clan and possibly the number of cities the clan holds. Say 50% of the clan spread over all controlled cities (or just all cities?).

So if you are a small clan with 6 members and one city, you would need 3 members in your city to keep it 'defended' to stop the drain.

And if you are a juggernaut clan with 34 members controlling 8 cities you would need 2 in each city to keep them defended.

For very small clans with no cities, any presence in a city would stop the Ji drain.

Or simply make it a fixed number of 2 or 3. *shrug*

On reading over this again I'm not sure how much I like this idea, but I'll post it anyway as food for thought ;)

-bn

[Stilgar]

Aug 8, 2012 15:18:03 GMT -6 Tim said:

Calculating how long someone is in each town each day would take a lot of work and a lot more info stored in the database than there is currently. However, I could easily tell how long since you've traveled. Perhaps you only gain Ji if you've been in the city for at least a certain amount of time (something like 10,15, or 30 minutes)?

Yeah, it could still be scripting to keep you in town the minimal amount, but at least you'd have to be in the town a measureable amount of time that others would be able to hit you.

Quite reasonable. I think it won't drive people away from entering the game.

[Stilgar]

Aug 8, 2012 18:25:20 GMT -6 Baldur Nordal said:

Hey Tim - at first I really liked your idea of adding Ji quite a bit. But as I thought more I saw a few issues.

The biggest is that it will screw up what the Ji drain is accomplishing - give late comers and small clans a sporting chance to accomplish something. Even with the increased duels I think it will give us a situation where Ji is gradually increasing with no effort instead of slowly decreasing. Especially since I think Clan Ji is not reduced for duel losses. This will probably lead to very high Ji levels later in the game.

It will also promote keeping lots of 'deadwood' in a clan (ie - all those people that try GoS and disappear) and may invite abuse.

+1

Aug 8, 2012 18:25:20 GMT -6 Baldur Nordal said:

How about this instead:

Increase the Ji drain in general (double?), but stop it entirely if a clan has sufficient presence in the city. For ruler/ally this would be a defense, for others it would be as insurgents.

As for what is a sufficient 'presence' I would say something based on the number in the clan and possibly the number of cities the clan holds. Say 50% of the clan spread over all controlled cities (or just all cities?).

So if you are a small clan with 6 members and one city, you would need 3 members in your city to keep it 'defended' to stop the drain.

And if you are a juggernaut clan with 34 members controlling 8 cities you would need 2 in each city to keep them defended.

For very small clans with no cities, any presence in a city would stop the Ji drain.

Or simply make it a fixed number of 2 or 3. *shrug*

On reading over this again I'm not sure how much I like this idea, but I'll post it anyway as food for thought ;)

-bn

I like this, except for manually making small clans stronger. First it's pretty enough that small clans have much less cities to defend. Second we don't want to make people keep clans less, as this is fun to play in a big one too.

But I still like my idea about reducing other's ji gain more. And no sufficient presence is needed - each ruler clan member will reduce ji gain say by 20% (32.77% with five members, not 0). Ji gain isn't needed with this too.

"20%" can be made dependent on amount of active players, but I think it won't change heavily in the next version.