Nuxyr
15 days ago
I expressed my dissatisfaction with the balance of sieges with "defender advantage" not existing at all. But thinking about it once again, I realized that, what may have caused the problem is the fact that making a million blocks "solid brick cube" forts was not meant to be META at all, and the nerfs that were meant to target such forts ended up just nerfing the defenders without actually ending the "fort" meta.
I am aware that what I suggest might be very radical, but I will try to break it down and explain all the reasoning behind it, along with the intended consequences of the changes.
To quickly summarize this suggestion, The result I would expect from those changes would be making sieges less of a "faction-like Melee Slugfest" and more of a planned coordinated effort, while solving some of the travel time problems and bringing back the defender advantage without making a recipe for "eternal geopolitical stalemate"
So, Lets get started with list of issues:
1. Creating a real "walled town" type of fort is simply unreasonable, it is much easier to keep actual towns peaceful while just having 1 player non-peaceful towns with minimal claims as "designated forts" with all the relevant towns just being protected by their peaceful status.
2. Traveling to sieges is long and annoying for both defenders and attackers, I understand that this was meant to make conflicts less global, but with "Forts" usually being a place where not a lot of players normally spend time outside of sieges, and "siege bases" mostly "solving" the issue of "global participation" while also being a place where not a lot of players usually spend time, It is almost guaranteed that participant of any siege, be it defender or attacker usually needs to travel a long time to get to siege. This often means nearly an entire hour. Therefore dying is just something that is not affordable by anyone (which makes a problem of its own)
3. Defenders simply do not have any advantage, This would not be bad on its own considering that all the battles that do happen are sieges therefore one side is always defending and the other is always attacking. However, the way this is achieved is simply unreasonable. All the advantage that defenders may have comes from ganks and auto-anvils and potion grinders alone, with ganks being an unintended mechanic in the first place. Meanwhile the said "advantage" is easily negated by the "siege towns" which literally bring the same thing to the table with exception of not needing to be made "sturdy" since they can not be blown up and therefore do not need walls at all. So every siege simply ends up being a melee slugfest between two towns, one of which is peaceful and the other is made of millions of fortified blocks. Both towns have auto anvils and potion grinders, and the fighting is almost always done mostly melee with a little "spice" of guns. This means that wall cannons serve little to no purpose, while walls are just there to stop the attackers from infiltrating the town(which defenders can not do anyways since siege towns are always peaceful) Therefore it really does not matter who is defending and who is attacking as defenders usually use tanks and PvPers and so do the attackers.
So the changes I would make are following.
a). Defenders Start with the amount of points depending on their town's size, as well as the town's population, For example, 100 points per chunk and 1000 points per player. (additional points can be gained for each /recruitbonus claimed, to reduce the possibility of "tomato farms)
(this is meant to disable very small forts with few claims and only 1 player. You can not make a "solid brick wall" fort that occupies 200 chunks reasonably without risking the attackers being able to set the siege chunk far far away from any defenses, and you also can not have "placeholder mayors" as the only person inside the fort town if town gains more points for amount of players it has.)
b). Defenders can not capture the siege chunk at all, and attackers drop 3x less points per death than defenders do (for example 90 points per attacker and 270 per defender death) Also, Defenders can remove attackers from the banner list, which possibly earns points depending on amount of players who were on the list (90-270 per player) This is meant to replace reversals and disable attackers from just claiming the chunk and going away.
c). Re-enable Inn plots and crew signs, and possibly add some kind of Armored cargo airship to the game, which allows respawns and can house cannons and larger inventory, which is meant to replace siege towns, It can be even slower than zeppelin. This is meant to house potion grinders, space for armor sets, as well as auto anvils, This is simply something that should entirely replace siege towns but still requires a person to travel once to set the respawn point to not make wars even more global. (this is important, spawning straight into battle is much preferred and reduces the unreasonably high punishment for dying)
3. Buff up the wall cannons to the extreme, We established that cost of dying for attackers is much lower as they can respawn straight into battle and they drop less points per death than defenders do. This means that they can afford to die more, meaning that one-shot cannons are probably not too big of a deal, especially since the attackers already do have MANY tools at their disposal which can work to disable the cannons, and simply capping the banner chunk while getting uninterruptedly hit by cannon fire should not be possible. (also the Armored airships can be allowed to have howitzers which allows for arty bombardment of the defenders beforehand, so you realistically NEVER have to just capture heavily defended siege chunk)
4. Allow for more than one siege chunk. Reason is simple, if defenses are actually effective, having 1 siege chunk can be easily countered by concentrating all the cannons at a single place, which makes it almost impossible to cap against those cannons if they really do deal damage. We established that the "forts" need to be bigger, so with more siege chunks it would be possible to have 3-4 entirely different points of attack that are reasonably distanced from each other.
Hopefully with all those changes in place, the "fort towns" would not exist any more, and the "walled towns" such as old Norston would become the new siege targets. This would also change the PvP as it is now and make it less "factions-like" and more tactical and "purposeful" without the main objective being to "melee away" the enemies from siege chunk and then capture it.
