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Since obviously it might be a bit unfeasible for a guild to go to war against a city, I'd suggest an alliance system along with it that would allow multiple organizations to join up in the fray.
What this could potentially do:
- Guild versus guild wars on a more official level.
- Allow clans the ability to have more bite behind their bark since they could also wage war.
- Allow guilds to form coalitions to war against a city.
- Create intricate alliances between guilds, clans, and cities.
- Allow some separation between guild and city, which assists in identity development. If a city goes to war, the individual guilds could choose to involve themselves as well, since most times the people in a particular guild aren't all part of the same city.
I remember, involve me and I
learn.
-Benjamin Franklin
I got'cha!
I remember, involve me and I
learn.
-Benjamin Franklin
the way she tells me I'm hers and she is mine
open hand or closed fist would be fine
blood as rare and sweet as cherry wine
-Scavengers--Someone has got to be a supplier of goods, and the goods got to come someplace, usually off a rotting corpse! Least likely to see arm get ripped off, but at same time, competition to make most out of what you get.
-Merchant--The profiteer who pays for (not always) quality items that are easily obtained to exploit the masses at price holding both sides greedily to exploit. Gold is like liquid booze, you can never get enough, and it passes many people's palms back and forth during war.
-Militia--Your typical individual city scouts, soldiers, engineers, commandeers, political con-artists, commanders, and officers split into each specific individual place you belong to, fighting to capture areas of interest to each specific party.
Recruiters--Every city needs citizens willing to join the war-front! Villages, towns, underground run-away Mhun....There is always someone that should be sent to represent their side to try to convince the masses to sway them to fight on their behalf...
Detainment Officers--Every decision has consequences. Sometimes people simply get CAPTURED! Someone's got to bloody watch them!
PC's can fit into all these roles, people who perfer not to PK can easily fit into first two supplying their city, Recruiters simply talking to the masses by a soap-box maybe though a debating system of politics to convince villagers without confrontation can be targets simply BECAUSE they supply them. Mind you, this is just how I personally think, there's hundreds of not thousands of other things could be added here. However if a war-themed future is in for Aetolia, all I have to ask, is what is going to keep it interesting in the first place? IF it turns out like lessers, ((or how face-roll dull Midkemia gets bouncing territory back and forth with very little actual influence on you're city beyond fact locked it down temporarily in pvp just cause)) I respect the fact it could really turn out fun role-playing investment, but I'd rather just have fishing if the next RL year or two is drawn-out war. War should be saved for moments when we need key-defining destruction of our little lovely cesspit we claim as a home in Aet ((tee hee!)). Some decisions should come with incredibly important consequences, could even re-define things in the lands.
I'd sooner like see more testing right now, so we can make sure to do it right. Something can work hard to satisify and make Aetolia incredibly unique in how it handles conflict.
1) Tangible Benefits
Both personal and city-wide. For example, and this has been "done before" (think WoW), I get to collect the rank insignia from whoever I kill. Non-army = 1 pt, Private = 1 pt, Corporal = 2 pt, Sergeant = 3pt, Captain = 5pt, etc. It would give meaning to city army ranks as you don't want every person in your army to be a Grand Marshall because you'll give your opponent a ton of this arbitrary currency. Then, you can trade them in. Small, limit-time buffs perhaps. Like, 5 pts for a 1 hour +10% exp boost. It doesn't have to be completely amazing, but if I get *something* that will actually make a difference in my other activities, then it makes my participation in the war system worthwhile.
2) Multiple ways to participate
Don't make it all or nothing. Not everyone can play at the same time, so if every war happens at 1900 EST, I would prefer you DON'T implement it because I'll never benefit from it. But that's just me being completely self-centered. Mining, cutting lumber, gathering food, cooking, cleaning the barracks, stupid things like that would actually fit with other people's characters more than jump in the front lines.
3) Archery
I want to grab my darkbow and jump in and lead a group of archers and rain death upon the so-called good guys. This sort of falls under the "multiple ways to participate." And not necessarily with other players like we theoretically could do now, I want my bowmanship to actually mean something.
4) Sabotage
I want to be able to sneak into the enemy camp and blow something up. Because who doesn't love explosions? I'll even settle for stealing supplies or poisoning the watering hole.
5)Story
Eh, it would be nice, but having it both ways would be just fine, too. Story sometimes, probably requiring a GM to run, other times it's player initiated and whatnot.
Just a few thoughts. I'm going back to sleep.
War camps:
Each city has a war camp area adjoining it's city. This space is ciem style with an npc general at the top of the encampment. War ministries can declare a raid on these camps and in 24 hours the conflict starts. Both sides are notified when it will begin.
The participants will be militia and war ministry members only, anyone else gets kicked out like you would a novice area. Fighting is determined by the attacker and can be purely ciem style with npc troops aided by players to attack and defend. Capture the flag style. Or could be like the Juxa event with troops and fortifications.
Ylem research trees can buff your troops for battles, give access to fortification and trap options, and or new troop types. Unit speeds should be increased to limit the conflict time down to something manageable.
Winners might get ylem, gold, resources, or a low number of credits. (Not necissarily from the loser, particularly if it's credits)
1) Reintroducing old versions of the landmarks wouldn't work for obvious reasons but introducing landmarks that have individual weight for opposing guilds could be fun though the detrimental affect would have to be toned down.
2) To combat off-peak fighting during wars, you can always scale troops to a ratio of active militia online. You can have a crown of omens type effect for lone militia etc.
3) Beyond the Sect of Blades, I think another 1v1 mechanic that revolved around a group of people who would be randomly matched to fight each other or suffer a drawback would be fun. Think fight club / lottery.
The gist of my perspective is as follows:
We do not need a war system. War in and of itself is only one means of conflict and is insufficient by itself to fulfill the needs of the game as a whole, or to be compelling enough to be the sole aspect of what needs to be done.
We need an entire conflict system, that incorporates Economic Conflict, Personal/Ideological Conflict, and Military/Armed Conflict into a single interlocking set of mechanics, skills, and abilities.
It needs to cover multiple scales of conflict as well, from the personal/individual level, to the medium/guild/clan/order/city level, to the massive nation-state/total culture levels of organization.
It needs to be a self-moderating system, one that requires a minimal level of input or interference from the gods.
It needs to provide for different player types, not just PK/PvE orientated players.
It needs to have meaningful and new types of binding agreements with outcomes and consequences that are automatically enforced by game mechanics.
We need to have an influence system and much more advanced economic process, that includes high-level, macro-scale, abstract resources, which can be translated into military and/or economic power.
I realize all of that sounds great, and also insanely ambitious, but the fact is that I am suggesting this with about...75% of a system* written that would very likely do all that I just listed and more. While I'd like to share the details with folks, it still has more writing to do and that will take a while yet. But... I can still try, if anyone is honestly interested at looking over my little pet project.
*I'm sorry, I mean one of the three segments of the system. The others I've outlined and know how they'd work, but I haven't actually written out the specific details yet.
I remember, involve me and I
learn.
-Benjamin Franklin
So I guess I can go more into detail about my conflict system ideas.
I was writing an entire proposal to actually send to...someone (I have no idea who, I was still writing it and trying to work up the courage to send it) to look at and at least consider, if not actually implement. I suppose what I'm trying to say is that what I was writing was to help spark ideas/debate/development for a conflict system and I while I'd love the idea of it being partially or wholly implemented, I also am not so married to it that I'd be hugely disappointed if it was turned down.
Anyway... I'll provide a more detailed outline and some idea of specific features and functions here. If anyone really wants to know more, once again...I can seriously provide waaay more detail than what'll be provided in this post, so if you're curious to know more about how I'd envision a particular aspect of it functioning, by all means ask. I will probably be able to drown you in specifics and the reasoning for them. Some might be specifically vague, as they might require wider consideration or tweaking than what I may imply or state and thus remain very flexible (and prevents me from being too invested in a specific mechanic or detail and lose my objectivity).
If you want to TL;DR, just read the main bullet points and skip smaller ones. I honestly kept this as short as I felt I could; the document I've been working on as the more detail proposal is already more than twenty pages of single spaced, 10 point font writing, and really only got most of the way through the basics of micro and meso-level contracts...
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That's about it, folks. If you want more, I could provide it. Provided I haven't broken the forums or people's patience with my bloody unicorn huge post of unicorning doom. Cheers!
Edit: Oh sweet baby bunnies in a basket, it doesn't like preserving my formatting. WHY!? I'll provide a link to a Googledoc later, with proper formatting. My apologies.
Edit of an edit (Edit edition): Here's the GoogleDocs link that is formatted in a legible manner: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KyFcIGDHc3eskRlRV_QtN3WeYuNPXTEjBW7GvzfTUNY/edit?usp=sharing
You should be able to read it there.
But since people seem to be posting here again I'm going to dig up some stuff I jotted down years ago, after the old war system got shut down.
Basically, my thoughts at the time was that the old war system failed for a couple reasons:
With this in mind, I drew up some requirements for a good system:
My idea for the implementation goes something like this (warning, longish):
[spoiler]First, the current militia system should be split in two: The army and the militia. Membership in the militia opens up the ability to participate in wartime activity, without being subject to constant open pvp status. Membership in the army is similiar, except that members of the army can freely attack members of the army belonging to cities they are at war with at any time.
Second, rather than messing around with game objects (divisions) that are ordered around individually and capture individual rooms, the war system should be reimagined as an abstract system on the macro level where the map is divided into regions that each contain troops from zero or or more city-states. During battles, having troops represented by mobs is fine, but it's unnecessary and unwieldy on the strategic layer of conflict.
A region being a number of rooms that together form a larger territory which cities can compete over. How big these regions should be is debatable- personally I'd argue each one should consist of at least one current area. The reasoning here for the necessity of a new subdivision of rooms is that many of the game's current areas are too small or otherwise problematic stages for conducting a campaign (roads and rivers, mostly).
Each region that contains troops from only one city would be considered to be owned by that city, producing resources (comms or whatnot) and a supply route that links to its adjacent regions. Cities could deploy troops in any region it can trace a supply route to through its owned regions. If two or more cities have troops deployed, it is considered to be contested, producing no resources and no supply lines for either side. Deploying troops to a region owned by another city would start a war.
When two cities are at war, high-ranking members of either city's army or militia can muster the troops for battle in a contested region. A global echo goes out. Ten minutes later, a battle starts in the contested region. During a battle, the troops of the cities involved duke it out on the field, while players try their best to aid the troops and lead them against the enemy. To get the imagination going, there could be goals like:
A basic look at a conflict zone from a ranking officer of Bloodloch could look like this:
And a new Warfare miniskill could look something like this:
The contracts and treaties bit would be pretty easy, systemically, to create. Standings and how those would work would be pretty straight forward. Influence and reputation calculations might require some extended testing and tweaking, but I can't imagine it being insanely difficult to actually create the basic system. Certain aspects or features could be 'locked' until the complimentary systems are ready for release, such as economic contracts for shipments.
If anything, the most complex thing would be the actual trade networks between NPC and player factions and orgs and determining what trade goods and commodities are unique to which area of the continent.
I was just an angsty novice back then who enjoyed drama more than mechanics, but before everything was shut down and the steam ran out of the engines on alot of folks who got kinda upset the main conflict point of the game (I dont consider ylem conflict, because its just part of everyday unicorns) I remember lots of plotting and planning for an entire part of the playerbase who enjoyed tactical shit.
Playing Aetolia with economic and territorial risks is fun, and would require a bit of learning...education, revamping old military clans and promote some roleplay between the PKer mindset and the RPer mindset which this game has become. Having conflict again in a manner that is not just punch the opposition will really help bridge the gap between two sections that drift apart from one another.
I like the plans, I however am no mastermind to creating of conflict but I am interested to see what else comes from you, so far @Sarkis and @Luna have given some pretty decent insight.
Good reads and thoughts, @Luna and @Sarkis. When we eventually launch this beast, I'm going to really enjoy sitting down and talking through the design process on the forums or in a stream. The likelihood that we will adopt any of these concepts in a complete, recognizable form as you've presented them is extremely low. But elements, repurposed or approached a different way, are already in place in our drafts, and I'm sure we'll incorporate further elements with this inspiration.
It's always interesting to me in this thread and those of similar intent ("what would you change about X..?") where our analyses and wishlists for Aetolia line up and diverge. We use much of the same terminology and approach things in similar ways. I'm excited to begin sharing these elements (and the reasoning behind them) as we nail down what we want and continue development.
Signup: 100k gold and required Sect membership/level TBD
Perks: Gold per victory, blessings, stat bonuses, weapons, tons of experience, pride etc.
How it works:
Serrice, Valingar, Yettave, Aishia, Konai and Conner are the only members. Each week all members are actively paired to fight one another at random.
Those selected to fight one another MUST fight resulting in a death by one from the hands of the other by the time the next fight is selected. Failure to fight to the death will result in a penalty for both parties, the more "failures" you have the worse they get.
The positive aspects are easy to work. You win, you get a blessing for that week, or more damage to NPCs for that week or one stat is increased to maximum at random for that week etc.
It's random, it's fair and it's fun. You can opt out at any time but depending on when you do you still get the detrimental affect.
Why would anyone do this who isn't a cold blooded PKer?
It will provide a lot of opportunities for roleplay and strife where it may not have existed before.
E.G.
Serrice must kill Conner or vice versa. They are friends and council members. They could arrange for one to win but how soon would that arrangement turn into resentment? Will one hide in a city and the other risk enemy status to collect the bounty and avoid the repercussions?
Aishia and Valingar get paired to fight. They are married and that in itself is a can of worms.
The rewards can get insane. You've been successful in the past five lottery fights. You've always had a blessing for 5 weeks, you get gold, herbs, elixirs, amulets etc. Then one or two weeks you get busy and can't fight, you lose all your momentum and end up getting the "cowardly" debuff for a bit and the negative aspects start to pile up.
You have to fight an you have to win. Cold desperation breeds ingenuity and I think we'll see some exciting things happen when people have a reason to think outside of the box.
Optional Aspects:
If you have five members one can not be paired to fight and so they automatically get the resulting buff OR they can choose to kill any other member that they know of, which could result in both of those paired to fight getting the "cowardly" debuff.
Outside of Foci, if the paired fighters are engaged in single combat and someone else interferes for the kill then both get the cowardly. You could get paired fighters working together to preserve the integrity of their single combat.
At the end of the week all of those who have lost their single combat fight can have one final chance to preserve their "honor" by competing in a real-world FFA in which the last man standing does not have to suffer the negative drawbacks or can gain the same positive aspects as if they won their weekly fight.
Finally. Once every ten in game years the wins and losses can be tallied and those who are eligible can enter into a tournament to qualify for immunity and perks for the next ten years.