Goblin Squad Member
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I'm not sure about being "gimped". But the settlement has to make decisions as to areas it will specialize in, and a good-aligned settlement might have to choose between being top of the game in religious power or martial, magical, or trade power. It might be able to do 2. It might not be able to do 3.
If you're going to restrict your game options by sticking with a good alignment, it might often be useful to have maximum 'good' power, but doesn't need to always be the case.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I really hope the way a true neutral settlement function is it's a decent settlement for all alignments, but caters best to true neutral plays where a NG aligned settlement is optimal for NG players and pretty good for LG, TN, and CG, but terrible for someone who's evil. And LG is geat for LG, pretty good for NG, LN, and maybe TN but pretty bad for everyone else.
That does kind of favor more neutral alignments but it also gives people a reason to form groups that cater to corner alignments. If in the end ~50% of settlements and the other 50% is everything else... that isn't a horrible breakdown.
I don't know how it will square when all the #'s are crunched, but I have always felt that the best way to achieve balance within the alignments is that neutrals end up with better versatility and accessibility, while the extremes of good and evil have bigger pros and cons. that would at least, be consistent with Pathfinder.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The concept of feuds sounds very interesting. I would very much like to know more on this topic. What happens when a company starts a feud against another company or a settlement?
Reduced/removed reputation loss (or even rep increase?) for killing the enemy?
Expanded looting rights?
Something completely different?
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Goblin Squad Member
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Just thought of another possibility for feuds, how about in order to raze or conquer a player made building you need to be at war/feud with the owner of the building?
Sieging a settlement requires you to be at war with them, attacking a free-standing PoI requires a feud against the owners. PoIs could have vulnerability windows in the same way that settlements will.
What do you all think?
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Goblinworks Game Designer
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Influence looks to be an interesting mechanic. I like the idea, though I have a few questions:
Can the influence of multiple companies be merged to accomplish something they alone cannot do, such as establish a settlement?
Is the influence spent or allocated?
Can a company with sufficient influence found multiple settlements?
Can a settlement be founded without the expenditure of Influence?
Could Influence be spent to instigate or accelerate an escalation?
Could influence be counter-spent to escape an instigated feud?
1) Not at the moment, but we are yet to get into the fine detail of Company management. There may certainly be some scope for merging companies entirely, but probably not for 'pooling' influence.
2) Sort of both, actually. Sorry that isnt very clear but it will become clearer in a later Influence post. In short - some things will require allocation of Influence whereas others will be short term expenditures for short term gains. There is only one pool of Influence, however, so a Company will have to decide whether to commit themselves up to the eyeballs with holdings and therefore not have room for short term expenditure, or remain free and easy in terms of holdings and be able to spend Influence with gay abandon!3) Sort of maybe a bit not really ;) Basically, the cost of doing things with influence scales according to how many things you are doing/holding. A HUGE Company might be able to have more than one holding but they would be very inefficient because of the way Influence is worked out by membership. Expansive membership provides diminishing Influence returns - so it MIGHT be possible but it would be so inefficient as to make no sense.
4) No.
5 and 6) The places one can spend Influence are still pretty fluid. We have a heap of ideas (these included, in one form or another!) but the list is yet to be finalised. It is also possible that we will start with a limited feature set for Influence and expand up as we see how things play. Influence could be a really valuable tool to us in the future for directing Company level play so it will be valuable to be a bit coy about its uses early in the game.
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Goblinworks Game Designer
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So with escalation cycles and artifact rewards it sounds like you can only claim them if you have enough influence. Will there be multiple tiers of the same artifact giving better bonuses the more influence you can spend, or would it be more of hoping the artifact falls within your companies influence?
Under review currently, as it happens. Probably not, since (as you will see when the next Escalation Cycle blog comes out) there are other factors that determine the 'power' of escalation rewards.
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Goblinworks Game Designer
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Sponsored companies effectively become part of that settlement, affecting its Reputation and following its alignment just like the rest of the settlement's population.Do you expect it will be common to have most of these facilities run by independent Companies? Are there any significant differences between having these facilities managed by an independent Company versus being handled by the Settlement directly?
Yes. Very much. Settlements are BIG and effective management and acquisition of all the resources needed to run them will have to be spread among multiple companies. Obviously this introduces some interesting questions of trust/alliance/espionage. Which we love.
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Goblinworks Game Designer
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The concept of feuds sounds very interesting. I would very much like to know more on this topic. What happens when a company starts a feud against another company or a settlement?
Reduced/removed reputation loss (or even rep increase?) for killing the enemy?
Expanded looting rights?
Something completely different?
This is going to have to come out in a later blog I'm afraid, but basically you are onto it. They will work like warfare but on a smaller scale and with a shorter duration, allowing for rep-loss mitigation and automatic hostility between feuding parties.
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Goblinworks Game Designer
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Good blog and concept of influention very well implemented, I must say.
But there lies 1 exploit i must warn about. In LotRO this isn't exploit at all - just one of the valid tactics for low-paid free players: create new character, run it for 4-5 hours to earn 200-250 turbine points (guys were bragging about 350 points, but I doubt that), then delete your char and create new one. Rinse and repeat. Boosting influence in such a way is exploit imo.
Again, this will become clearer in the Influence blog, but if you lose members you will very likely lose some influence. There will be a small amount of room for exploits, but the value of such exploits will be very short lived.
Interesting blog post. So now we have:
- Companies have to get sponsored by a player settlement to receive advanced training.
- A player settlement will most likely have to open itself to war to be able to build the more advanced training halls.
- Sponsored companies will share any alliance and hostility with their settlement.
Seems like staying outside of any war will be close to impossible for a company that wishes to advance their characters.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Will influence be something that can be won through fueds/war?
I'd hope so. In the blog Tork said "each time a member player earns an achievement, his or her company also earns a small amount of influence." I'd be very surprised if there were no PvP-related achievements.
Will/should a company be able to declare a feud, engage in consequence-free PvP while earning enough achievements to declare another feud, and do this continuously?
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Goblin Squad Member
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I hope feuds are extremely non-trivial matters or we will see veteran groups running around feuding smaller factions for easy kills. I would prefer that groups not even be vulnerable to feuds until they generate a certain amount of influence themselves.
I figured that Feuds would have the same mutual-consent requirement that Wars have.
When two entities (characters, Companies, Settlements or Kingdoms) both set their relationship standing to "Hostile", a state of war will exist between them. Killing someone you are at war with (or burning down their Inn) is not a criminal act. It probably won't have alignment implications either.
Both sides have to agree however, because otherwise you'll have a situation where people are being targeted for wars against their will, and they'll lose the value of the safety of the security system - thus negating a lot of its value.
Please remember that War here is a term of art that is specifically talking about a declared War that allows both sides to attack each other without consequences. It is not necessary to declare this kind of War in order to attack another Settlement. So, please don't think that your Settlement can't be attacked without your consent.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Please remember that War here is a term of art that is specifically talking about a declared War that allows both sides to attack each other without consequences. It is not necessary to declare this kind of War in order to attack another Settlement. So, please don't think that your Settlement can't be attacked without your consent.
A mechanic that was presented here was that it takes resources to declare feuds with. Do you think that means war also needs to have resources spent to declare? That would answer one of my oldest questions which is what prevents a settlement from just declaring war on the entire server.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I hope feuds are extremely non-trivial matters or we will see veteran groups running around feuding smaller factions for easy kills. I would prefer that groups not even be vulnerable to feuds until they generate a certain amount of influence themselves.
Reading that super-sneak peek from Tork: It also helps to deal with some problems that come up in the calculation of feud costs, which take into consideration the relative size of an attacker vs. defender. These could potentially have been skewed by Companies deliberately booting out members to make themselves look tiny and insignificant when planning a feud or knowing they were about to be subject to one in order to achieve lower declaration costs, or inflate the cost of declaring against them.
So he's still working on it, but it looks like they expect to have feuds against smaller companies cost more. Feuding with smaller and weaker companies might end up being a quick way to burn through your company's slow-to-replenish influence.
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Goblin Squad Member
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So he's still working on it, but it looks like they expect to have feuds against smaller companies cost more. Feuding with smaller and weaker companies might end up being a quick way to burn through your company's slow-to-replenish influence.
That is going to be very tough to balance. On one end you want to prevent bullying but on the other you don't want companies to min-max their membership.
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Goblin Squad Member
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A mechanic that was presented here was that it takes resources to declare feuds with. Do you think that means war also needs to have resources spent to declare? That would answer one of my oldest questions which is what prevents a settlement from just declaring war on the entire server.
That question makes me ask - do settlements also have Influence, or can they only do tasks that cost Influence through their member companies? Is there another resource that is accumulated and used at the settlement and nation level?
edit: answered by Tork below - Settlements use DI. Thx.
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Goblinworks Game Designer
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A mechanic that was presented here was that it takes resources to declare feuds with. Do you think that means war also needs to have resources spent to declare? That would answer one of my oldest questions which is what prevents a settlement from just declaring war on the entire server.
Please remember that War here is a term of art that is specifically talking about a declared War that allows both sides to attack each other without consequences. It is not necessary to declare this kind of War in order to attack another Settlement. So, please don't think that your Settlement can't be attacked without your consent.
This is all going to have to come out in a later blog about warfare, but the simple answer is 'yes'. Declaring war is not free, so wars will be tactical and considered. That is what stops folks just declaring war all the time. Influence is what Companies use and DI is what Settlements use. I hate to just drop that here and then run off without further clarification, but its really a bit of a meaty system that will need a blog post of its own. Apologies.
I will say that in both cases we are using currencies tied to game systems (rather than say, coin or harvestable materials) because we have much better control over them. Using physical currencies would eventually become problematic when large settlements have huge reserves of coin. It needs to be a resource that it will always hurt to lose/commit, otherwise the mechanic loses bite as the game matures.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think these companies might cause some interesting emergent gameplay. I'd expect, all things being equal, that it might be better/easier for a settlement to have each company with a somewhat clear role. So some companies are crafters, some are long-haul merchants, some are military or adventurers. A settlement could have multiple companies of any one type.
This is certainly something I find interesting to think about. It was something we had already been planning on in the Keepers of the Circle. I think we will be very interested to see how this kind of strategy would work out. The fact that we cannot currently combine influence across companies might cause a problem though.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Nymerias I think in game, early on, a group might want a single company to allow massing influence. Later, multiple companies might be more effective in controlling a settlement and multiple bordering hexes. If a group doesn't have the population to fill multiple companies, it will have to scale back its ambitions.
I think the very, very cool thing about the system as Tork explains it is that smaller companies/guilds can join a settlement with related goals and both the company and the settlement can benefit. An ambitious mid-sized group might field 2-4 companies and recruit smaller companies to boost the settlement numbers and capabilities.
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Goblinworks Game Designer
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Tork! Tork! Tork! Tork!
Just sounds fun to say that...
Thanks for the follow ups and tossing us so much red meat!
Tork! Tork! Tork!
Ha! If you say it out loud in front of a mirror in the correct phase of the moon I'll manifest in your kitchen and eat all your popcorn.
I've probably run my mouth off enough for a bit - I'll leave all this to settle for a while!
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Tork Shaw, thanks a bunch for coming on to post replies. I think we can handle the partial explanations in stride. What you've said so far is very encouraging.
As might be expected, several of us at The Seventh Veil are very curious about how Companies might specialize in managing Settlement Structures, and the nod to "scholarly organizations" has us very excited about the possibility of managing Libraries in a variety of other players' Settlements - a long-time dream of ours from the beginning.
Do you expect to see Companies that specialize in managing a certain class of Settlement structures, and then manage those structures across a larger number of Settlements? Or is it more likely that a single Company could only afford to manage a handful of such Structures?
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Goblin Squad Member
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@Nymerias I think in game, early on, a group might want a single company to allow massing influence. Later, multiple companies might be more effective in controlling a settlement and multiple bordering hexes. If a group doesn't have the population to fill multiple companies, it will have to scale back its ambitions.
I think this will be a very expected turn-out. Even with diminishing returns, I can imagine groups who are eager to have a settlement will start with one large core company to quickly pool enough influence for founding. Once the settlement is in place, the membership will likely splinter into smaller companies to maximize continued influence gain and more appropriately divide by role. So there may be TEO Core and KOTC Core to establish settlements. And then once a home is found, TEO White Staves, Green Cloaks, KOTC Circle of Gold, Circle of Steel, etc... may form as companies that belong to the settlement.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I hope feuds are extremely non-trivial matters or we will see veteran groups running around feuding smaller factions for easy kills. I would prefer that groups not even be vulnerable to feuds until they generate a certain amount of influence themselves.Reading that super-sneak peek from Tork: It also helps to deal with some problems that come up in the calculation of feud costs, which take into consideration the relative size of an attacker vs. defender. These could potentially have been skewed by Companies deliberately booting out members to make themselves look tiny and insignificant when planning a feud or knowing they were about to be subject to one in order to achieve lower declaration costs, or inflate the cost of declaring against them.
So he's still working on it, but it looks like they expect to have feuds against smaller companies cost more. Feuding with smaller and weaker companies might end up being a quick way to burn through your company's slow-to-replenish influence.
That's why I think measuring through the influence mechanic rather than membership count is a great idea:
1. It protects newbs better. When that 15 man group comes over as a team, they'll still be pretty safe until they actually bring in a decent bit of influence.
2. There are meaningful penalties for gaming the system. Your company gets war decced and you drop tags? Great, you just lost all your boons and you're not generating influence anymore. People will always declare their feud on the group with the most boons if their enemy breaks up into multiple groups. That guarantees they suffer a penalty even if they all drop tags.
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Goblin Squad Member
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There are meaningful penalties for gaming the system. Your company gets war decced and you drop tags? Great, you just lost all your boons and you're not generating influence anymore. People will always declare their feud on the group with the most boons if their enemy breaks up into multiple groups. That guarantees they suffer a penalty even if they all drop tags.
I was thinking there would be meaningful challenges even if someone's not gaming the system. I'm imaging being head of harvesting company, and I lock in most of the company's Influence to gain control of a hex next to a settlement. Then four of my harvesters come in and demand a raise or they'll walk. Oops - if we lose those four bodies my max Influence will drop to the point we lose control of the hex. Decisions, challenges, and player interaction. But yeah, it also will provide challenges for gamers.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Can the influence of multiple companies be merged to accomplish something they alone cannot do, such as establish a settlement?In reply
1) Not at the moment, but we are yet to get into the fine detail of Company management. There may certainly be some scope for merging companies entirely, but probably not for 'pooling' influence.
This may be stretching the analogy, but towns grow organically. The first building (at a crossroad or resource) makes it more desirable to build other buildings. First two, then three or four, then it looks like a settlement. It seems logical that several allied companies would want to build near each other in the same hex, and only later form a settlement.
Also
- All companies may use influence to forge alliances with other companies or settlements, usually to establish trade arrangements or provide mutual security.
- For empire-builders, influence is spent to claim territory in the Crusader Road region. When a company clears the dangerous inhabitants from wilderness hex, they may spend their influence to claim that location for their own.
A company that establishes control of a potential settlement hex by defeating its monstrous denizens can spend influence to found a settlement there.
Previously there seems to have been a distinction between POI hexes and Settlement hexes as being separate and distinct. The information in this blog post implies to me that POI locations can be transformed into Settlement locations. If this is true then this would change the previous estimated ratio of settlement hexes to wilderness hexes in the PFO landscape. We will have to see what future blogs says about this.
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Goblin Squad Member
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One potential I see that would be interesting is the capability of a company to join a settlement and use their accrued influence, along with the requisite BP, to establish a structure. For example, Company A founds a basic settlement. Company B comes along and joins the settlement, using their influence to establish a temple to Iomeade, providing healing and training services. Company C comes along and establishes a foundry and smithy to provide refining and metal crafting services. While company A remains in nominal control (depending on the government type selected), company B and C are responsible for upgrades to the buildings they control unless they turn the buildings over to another group or the settlement at large.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Where's GrumpyMel? I remember he was 'clamoring' for different communities in settlements... maybe more districts but this seems more rigorous in terms of human structures albeit not alignments. Very good blog post.
Any more details on the variability of actual settlement sites within settlement-possible hexes (aka settlement hexes)? Eg location, choice, variety in site suitability (eg natural defence of a cliff or river or whatnot etc??
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Goblin Squad Member
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I think having reasons for war and feuds would be great, but I can't imagine having a game programmed to cover more than a handful of reasons for a war. Making a company spend 100 or whatever influence to either publicize a decent reason for a feud or to fabricate a bogus reason for a feud allows us to sort of hand-wave that. The expenditure of scarce influence on a feud still makes it a decision that a company/settlement needs to consider seriously. Do the Montecchis spend influence to feud 3 more days with the Capuletis, or do they use their remaining influence to expand their holdings by another hex?
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Goblin Squad Member
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Out of curiosity, and this is coming from something out of Eve.
Is it possible to be in a permanent war? I am playing in eve atm in a corp / alliance called Red Federation that is in a permanent war with Blue Federation. This allows us to fight wars in hi-sec all the time.
So would something like this be possible with compagnies as well in PFO?
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Goblin Squad Member
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Out of curiosity, and this is coming from something out of Eve.
Is it possible to be in a permanent war? I am playing in eve atm in a corp / alliance called Red Federation that is in a permanent war with Blue Federation. This allows us to fight wars in hi-sec all the time.
So would something like this be possible with compagnies as well in PFO?
Red vs. Blue is a PVP training set up. They are always at war by design.
You can certainly learn some PVP tactics from them, but it will never rise to the same level as you would in two corporations legitimately at war.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Yes, I know that (I am part of it and I have been part of the null sec power blocks).
I was just wondering if something like this is possible for PFO as well as it can teach people stuff and learn them how to do PvP without having to wander into dangerous areas and then be frustrated if they die.
Also, the only reason they are at war is because the wardec is paid for all the time.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Yes, I know that (I am part of it and I have been part of the null sec power blocks).
I was just wondering if something like this is possible for PFO as well as it can teach people stuff and learn them how to do PvP without having to wander into dangerous areas and then be frustrated if they die.
Also, the only reason they are at war is because the wardec is paid for all the time.
With the proposed Feud mechanics, I think it's safe to say that you could set up a similar system.