Goblin Squad Member
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There hasn't been much discussion on how settlement level alignment / reputation will work so here is my suggestions.
Alignment
Supreme Structure = Highest level of structure, marginally better than major.
Major Structure = Almost as good as supreme, noticeably better than regular.
Regular Structure = Everything you need to be pretty competitive but major and supreme have a noticeable edge.
Every settlement chooses a primary alignment. That primary alignment allows the construction of supreme structures of that alignment. They can also build major structures of any alignment within one straight step of their primary alignment, and can build regular structures within a diagonal step
It is possible to build regular structures two or more steps from your primary alignment but each one penalizes the effectiveness of your supreme and major structures, eventually making them effectively regular structures.
For reference here is some visual examples. Bold = primary alignment / supreme structures, capitalized = major structures, lowercase = regular structures, "xx" = structures that would penalize supreme/major structures.
lg - NG - cg
LN - TN - CN
le - NE - ce
LG - NG - CG
ln - TN - cn
xx - xx - xx
LG - NG - xx
LN - tn - xx
xx - xx - xx
Because of this there is no restrictions on joining settlements because of your alignment. Some settlements will just cater to your needs better than others.
Reputation
Before I start, let's take a look at what the development indexes do for us.
Security boosts the settlement's own automatic defenses, such as town guards and structure saves, but also affects the settlement's ability to police itself, reducing corruption. Developing a high security index works best for settlements who enjoy a lot of defensive support from programmed systems.
Morale boosts a settlement's ability to field large units in mass combat, granting bonuses to formations. Morale also boosts the defender's ability to make a "last stand", affecting the time it takes to capture a settlement's hall and therefore claim it as your own* (see Capturing a Hall, below). Developing a high morale index suits settlements who wish to make best use of their formations in combat, and who prefer to rely on safety in numbers.
Civilization reflects more of an emphasis on individuals within in a settlement. A high civilization DI reduces the delay between player respawns during warfare, improves the speed of actively repairing structures in combat, and makes skills more readily available for training. A high civilization benefits a settlement where heroic individuals rely on skill and personal power to combat invaders.
There are two major factors in settlement reputation. The first is minimum acceptable reputation and the other is civilization decay.
Your settlement and company must set a minimum accepted reputation between +5000 and -7500. There is a penalty to a settlement's security rating that scales from nothing at +5000 to quite noticeable at -7500. This penalty won't completely break your security rating on it's own even at -7500. This also has a major effect on how much influence it costs to war or feud your group making it darn near free at -7500.
Groups and settlements can choose whether they want it so that if a member of their organization who drops below that rating is auto-kicked, placed in probation (loses all settlement membership benefits until they get their rep above the minimum), or auto-lowers the minimum reputation with them.
At any point a member of your settlement below 0 reputation does something that further lowers their reputation it also harms the civilization rating of your settlement. This does have the potential to absolutely trash your civilization rating if the problem is widespread enough.
Wanted List
One major incentives to keep your security rating high is your wanted list. Your wanted list allows you to maintain a list of individuals your flagged to your settlement members who they can kill without penalty. The ammount of people you can put on the list is determined by your security index and their reputation with the players at the bottom of the list getting knocked off first if either changes to a point you can't maintain all your wanted players.
There is a one hour period in which "wanted posters are spread" before wanted status takes effect after being declared.
While this does allow you to put absolutely anyone down as wanted the limited number of slots mean that settlements will be very selective in who they put on that list.
Champions / Enforcers
Champions / Enforcers are a major reason to keep you civilization index high. Each champion / enforcer can kill anyone who's initaited an attack against or attempted to rob a member of their settlement anywhere within the last 24 hours or broken their laws inside their territory in the last 24 hours without penalty. The numbers of champions and enforcers a settlement gets is determined by it's civilization rating. Enforcers get a slight bonus to the number of threads they receive and probably number in the dozens among most highly active settlements. All gear equipped by a champion is automatically threaded and the number each settlement gets can be counted on one hand.
Whenever a champion or enforcer is killed by a champion or enforcer of a warring settlement some of their security index points are transferred to that settlement. When they are killed by an assasin they lose their champion / enforcer status for awhile, but still consume one of their settlement's champion / enforcer slots.
Note: Alignment no longer has any bearing on these statuses.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Your settlement and company must set a minimum accepted reputation between +5000 and -7500. There is a penalty to a settlement's security rating that scales from nothing at +5000 to quite noticeable at -7500. This penalty won't completely break your security rating on it's own even at -7500. This also has a major effect on how much inclunce it costs to war or feud your group making it darn near free at -7500.
That's an interesting take on the mechanics of settlement reputation. I thought I had seen somewhere the concept that settlements would set their reputation floor, but the idea of using that as a factor in war dec costs is a logical extension of the individual rep system.
As an aside - should the settlement rep be the factor in determining feud costs, or should it be based on the company's reputation (which could be an average or a set floor)?
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Goblin Squad Member
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The disadvantage to basing it on the group instead of the settlement is you would likely see dedicated crafters segregate themselves into +5000 rep groups.
The disadvantage of basing it on settlements is that that leaves no incentive for groups to pick a reputation level higher than their settlement's.
I have no strong opinion either way.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Are your suggestions based on the current understanding of alignment and reputation, or are they suggesting a revamp to a certain extent?
Tork Shaw had said that GW has moved away from the one-step alignment and in particular the "designated" alignment, for fear that no settlement would be able to support advanced training to Paladins in the long term.
By requiring a settlement to be LG at its core, in order to have the highest training, you effectively do just that. The same holds true for Chaotic Evil by the way.
You draw a conclusion that a settlement with a high population of -7500 rep characters would have a low security. That assumes that their crimes were committed in their own territory, which might not be the case.
As the quote goes, "Dogs don't sh*t where they sleep".
Your wanted list is fine, although I would like to see that it requires a crime actually being committed against you in order for it to be posted.
Your Champion / Enforcer idea won;t see the light of day, I'm afraid. 100% threaded gear.... Come on, risk a little something, won't you? No consequences at no cost of influence, undermines the feud system.
Will criminals that are wanted have the same consequence free attacks and 100% threading as well? You know, balance?... I doubt it.
Seems to me the deck is stacked and you want the mechanics to do a lot of the fighting for you, removing 100% of your risk.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Tork Shaw had said that GW has moved away from the one-step alignment and in particular the "designated" alignment, for fear that no settlement would be able to support advanced training to Paladins in the long term.
I remember a tease of a hint that they were considering doing something other than a rigid 1-step rule. I don't remember anything about worrying that Paladins wouldn't find training.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The bit I remember from Tork was from August. I haven't seen anything more clear than this on settlement alignment, at least not since then:
The choice of alignment for settlements/VCs is possibly slightly more fluid than simply 1 step. It is possible that we will need to allow a settlement to choose which of the 9 alignments they permit, and to allow them to be much more permissive. I'm still playing with this a bit (as I battle with VC/settlement relationships) but a single step restriction is potentially going to be too harsh - particularly early on in the game's life.
The difficulty with this from a settlement's perspective, however, and the reason they are probably going to want to choose a limited selection of alignments (if they end up with the choice) is that there are factional consequences. A settlement's alignment will CERTAINLY determine the kind of factional alliances and therefore the kind of factional buildings they can have in their settlement. If lets say 40% of the players want to be clerics of Sarenrae (I dont think is the case by the way I'm just using it as an example!) then it makes sense for settlements who want to attract high populations and become centres of trade to build a shrine to Sarenrae - for which there will be settlement alignment requirements.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Tork Shaw had said that GW has moved away from the one-step alignment and in particular the "designated" alignment, for fear that no settlement would be able to support advanced training to Paladins in the long term.I remember a tease of a hint that they were considering doing something other than a rigid 1-step rule. I don't remember anything about worrying that Paladins wouldn't find training.
Not that Paladins wouldn't have training, but Paladins or any LGs wouldn't have maximum training if there were no LG settlements. The Devs have also said that perhaps the hardest settlement to maintain would be LG.
You may also want to revisit the Dev interview on the Gobbocast.
The way things are shaping up, I could see alignment as being something that segregates the playerbase to a large extent and makes it harder for people to play with their friends. I think they need to be careful about this, as MMO's have a social aspect not found in the TT games.
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Goblin Squad Member
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You draw a conclusion that a settlement with a high population of -7500 rep characters would have a low security. That assumes that their crimes were committed in their own territory, which might not be the case.
As the quote goes, "Dogs don't sh*t where they sleep".
Consider that Security Status is largely about automated defense strengths, such as NPC Guards. Then think about low reputation areas in cities. Criminals from Detroit do not travel to Lansing to do their dirty work. The places where most of these folks live also happens to be the places where the police are least likely to go, simply because it is more dangerous for them to be there. For every "smart" low-repper that travels out of town to do their work (players), there is likely another ten "stupid" ones that only range a couple neighborhood blocks away (represented by the abstract presence of an NPC population, even if it is not directly observed).
It makes perfect sense that a low-reputation area is not going to get many NPCs looking to guard it. If I were hiring out as a guard, I would certainly look to work in the region where the populace isn't known for shanking strangers. It doesn't much matter that they do not do a lot of it at home, the fact that they do it means I better get damn good hazard pay to work as law enforcement (however minimal the laws are) around such low reputation folk.
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Goblin Squad Member
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There hasn't been much discussion on how settlement level alignment / reputation will work so here is my suggestions.
Alignment
Supreme Structure = Highest level of structure, marginally better than major.
Major Structure = Almost as good as supreme, noticeably better than regular.
Regular Structure = Everything you need to be pretty competitive but major and supreme have a noticeable edge.Every settlement chooses a primary alignment. That primary alignment allows the construction of supreme structures of that alignment. They can also build major structures of any alignment within one straight step of their primary alignment, and can build regular structures within a diagonal step
It is possible to build regular structures two or more steps from your primary alignment but each one penalizes the effectiveness of your supreme and major structures, eventually making them effectively regular structures.
For reference here is some visual examples. Bold = primary alignment / supreme structures, capitalized = major structures, lowercase = regular structures, "xx" = structures that would penalize supreme/major structures.
lg - NG - cg
LN - TN - CN
le - NE - ceLG - NG - CG
ln - TN - cn
xx - xx - xxLG - NG - xx
LN - tn - xx
xx - xx - xxBecause of this there is no restrictions on joining settlements because of your alignment. Some settlements will just cater to your needs better than others.
The spirit of the idea is good, but I do not believe this implementation is great. The problem is the mechanical superiority of middling alignments. TN > LN/NG/LC/NE > LG/LE/CE/CG as far as training options.
I do not really like the idea of a CE building in a LG town actively reducing the effectiveness of the LG building. I support it being more expensive to maintain a CE building in such a town, as with the reputation example it would be more difficult to keep staffed and operating. In addition, it would draw unsavories to your settlement.
I much favor the notion that a Settlement's alignment will be an aggregate of its population. It adds pressure to pay attention to alignment. CE buildings make your LG buildings less effective because your alignment is pulled by the CEs drawn to those buildings and thus it becomes more expensive to maintain the LG buildings if you drop alignment to TN. This is offset by CE buildings becoming a little cheaper at the same time.
If you take away concern over alignment, we're just going to have lots of chaotic folks living in lawful towns to take advantage of the potential DI bonuses.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Tork Shaw had said that GW has moved away from the one-step alignment and in particular the "designated" alignment, for fear that no settlement would be able to support advanced training to Paladins in the long term.I remember a tease of a hint that they were considering doing something other than a rigid 1-step rule. I don't remember anything about worrying that Paladins wouldn't find training.Not that Paladins wouldn't have training, but Paladins or any LGs wouldn't have maximum training if there were no LG settlements. The Devs have also said that perhaps the hardest settlement to maintain would be LG.
You may also want to revisit the Dev interview on the Gobbocast.
So, I just listened to the whole Gobbocast again, and there's not even a tease of a hint that the reason for moving away from a rigid 1-step rule had anything whatsoever to do with the devs worrying about whether or not there would be any LG Settlements.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Tork Shaw had said that GW has moved away from the one-step alignment and in particular the "designated" alignment, for fear that no settlement would be able to support advanced training to Paladins in the long term.I remember a tease of a hint that they were considering doing something other than a rigid 1-step rule. I don't remember anything about worrying that Paladins wouldn't find training.Not that Paladins wouldn't have training, but Paladins or any LGs wouldn't have maximum training if there were no LG settlements. The Devs have also said that perhaps the hardest settlement to maintain would be LG.
You may also want to revisit the Dev interview on the Gobbocast.
So, I just listened to the whole Gobbocast again, and there's not even a tease of a hint that the reason for moving away from a rigid 1-step rule had anything whatsoever to do with the devs worrying about whether or not there would be any LG Settlements.
Then it was somewhere planted in that thread, because that was the concern that was expressed. The Devs did not want to wait for there to be a Paladin, two or three years after EE began, or if there were Paladins, they would not have to rely on a settlement that was exclusively LG. Imagine, if there were only one settlement, the forces of evil could wipe out all high powered (present or future) by taking out one settlement.
I have a dog in this fight, for my LG Monk. I would like for him to have more than one place option to train maximum skills.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I do not really like the idea of a CE building in a LG town actively reducing the effectiveness of the LG building. I support it being more expensive to maintain a CE building in such a town, as with the reputation example it would be more difficult to keep staffed and operating.
I could see some buildings having contradictory effects. So one of the effects of a Thieves Guild might be that it makes it more difficult to reduce corruption (for any given level of Security DI). Having a faction house of the Hellknights might have the opposite effect, making it easier to reduce corruption.
Building the thieves guild might be possible with any alignment - they could/might even self-build if the town's reputation is set/kept low enough. Building a chapter house for the Hellknights could require the average alignment be within some range, or it might require that > 50% of the population is Lawful.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The spirit of the idea is good, but I do not believe this implementation is great. The problem is the mechanical superiority of middling alignments. TN > LN/NG/LC/NE > LG/LE/CE/CG as far as training options.
This idea is not seeking balance in the traditional sense that everything is perfectly matched with everything else but in that there is a justification for existence of a town of every alignment.
With no alignment system for settlements every single town is effectively true-neutral, and it makes sense that most towns will be true-neutral / that true-neutral caters to very diverse audiences the best. I expect the majority of towns to go TN and I personally have no issue with that.
Let's say regular structures are 97% effective when fully upgraded, major are 99.5% effective, and supreme are 100% effective. A true-neutral settlement is going to be able to cater to every alignment effectively but if you choose to go with one of the other neutral alignments you cater to your axis slightly better at the expense of being able to cater to the opposing axis if you want to maintain you full bonuses. It's not a bonus so powerful you will go with another settlement other than the one you want if just to get it unless you were already debating between two (especially if you play a non-alignment based class), but it is a bonus that will make settlements with strong themes have an incentive to go something other than true neutral mechanically. Remember it's only alignment based skills that are going to see that bonus and no class works entirely off of alignment based skills.
Also this is assuming a settlement is fully upgraded. Most settlements probably won't be. A true neutral settlement could have better paladin training than a lawful good one if it's lawful-good facilities have been upgraded further / it's related development indexes are higher. A LG settlement is likely to upgrade it's LG buildings faster as there will probably be more demand for it, but that's entirely up to the settlements and what they choose to / have the ability to do.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I do not really like the idea of a CE building in a LG town actively reducing the effectiveness of the LG building. I support it being more expensive to maintain a CE building in such a town, as with the reputation example it would be more difficult to keep staffed and operating.I could see some buildings having contradictory effects. So one of the effects of a Thieves Guild might be that it makes it more difficult to reduce corruption (for any given level of Security DI). Having a faction house of the Hellknights might have the opposite effect, making it easier to reduce corruption.
Building the thieves guild might be possible with any alignment - they could/might even self-build if the town's reputation is set/kept low enough. Building a chapter house for the Hellknights could require the average alignment be within some range, or it might require that > 50% of the population is Lawful.
Do these buildings just automatically become defunct if average reputation shifts so that the requirements are no longer true?
Contradictory effects are acceptable, but I wouldn't penalize training. For example, a Courthouse offers training in Smite Chaos and Reduces Corruption. A Thief's Guild offers training in SAD and Increases Corruption.
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Goblin Squad Member
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The spirit of the idea is good, but I do not believe this implementation is great. The problem is the mechanical superiority of middling alignments. TN > LN/NG/LC/NE > LG/LE/CE/CG as far as training options.This idea is not seeking balance in the traditional sense that everything is perfectly matched with everything else but in that there is a justification for existence of a town of every alignment.
With no alignment system for settlements every single town is effectively true-neutral, and it makes sense that most towns will be true-neutral / that true-neutral caters to very diverse audiences the best. I expect the majority of towns to go TN and I personally have no issue with that.
Let's say regular structures are 97% effective when fully upgraded, major are 99.5% effective, and supreme are 100% effective. A true-neutral settlement is going to be able to cater to every alignment effectively but if you choose to go with one of the other neutral alignments you cater to your axis slightly better at the expense of being able to cater to the opposing axis if you want to maintain you full bonuses. It's not a bonus so powerful you will go with another settlement other than the one you want if just to get it unless you were already debating between two (especially if you play a non-alignment based class), but it is a bonus that will make settlements with strong themes have an incentive to go something other than true neutral mechanically. Remember it's only alignment based skills that are going to see that bonus and no class works entirely off of alignment based skills.
Also this is assuming a settlement is fully upgraded. Most settlements probably won't be. A true neutral settlement could have better paladin training than a lawful good one if it's lawful-good facilities have been upgraded further / it's related development indexes are higher. A LG settlement is likely to upgrade it's LG buildings faster as there will probably be more demand for it, but that's entirely up to the...
I would much rather see this as a Cost to Operate instead of an Alignment Limited cap. The NG or LN town can host the best paladin trainers if they wish, but it will cost them +10% or +20% in resources / DI allocation over what an LG settlement might. The further you get from LG, the more expensive maintaining an alignment specific trainer might get. Under this model, the LG settlement will be able to build up LG training more quickly because it is cheaper to progress.
The more freedom in settlement set-up, the more unique settlements we might see. A settlement that hosts both the best Paladin Trainers and the best Assassin Trainers is not going to have much resources to provide for anything else such as crafting or economy.
Additionally, as Bluddwolf mentioned, limiting the best trainers by settlement alignment is going to extremely limit the availability of trainers such that opponents will be able to easily cut off access through targeting those settlement alignments specifically.
Finally, keep in mind, that alignment specific training is likely to be exceedingly rare. Only a few skills are really tied to an alignment. Trying to carve out settlement niches specifically to provide for edge case skill sets is probably more headache than it is worth.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I would much rather see this as a Cost to Operate instead of an Alignment Limited cap. The NG or LN town can host the best paladin trainers if they wish, but it will cost them +10% or +20% in resources / DI allocation over what an LG settlement might. The further you get from LG, the more expensive maintaining an alignment specific trainer might get. Under this model, the LG settlement will be able to build up LG training more quickly because it is cheaper to progress.
That actually is a better solution as long as it's an ongoing cost like you said, instead of a one time thing.