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I don't think we'll have fun losing the settlement. I hope we won't lose it.At this point the only way to lose a settlement is to be knocked out of the land rush. Everyone who gets one of the 33 land rush settlements will then be 'locked in' until 'settlement warfare' is added to the game. Thus, there should be time to try different approaches to 'War of the Towers' and still get back on your feet if things don't work out. Settlements that get it right earlier will be in better shape, but nobody is going to be 'losing their settlement' in-game any time soon. In context, "ever" is implied. :-) I think we all understood from the start that tower wars wouldn't cost us our settlements up front. Its only lasting effect is a winnowing of recruiting advantage
Back to the original reason we got off on this tangent, if you think you'll have fun losing your settlement that's cool. You're an exception to the rule and not the kind of player who's intended to be running settlements in the long term. Those who are serious about keeping them will be forming or joining alliances. I don't think we'll have fun losing the settlement. I hope we won't lose it. I'm fairly certain that if we do lose the settlement, we'll have had more fun trying than if we just went "eh! we don't have a chance, so lets be part of something else before day one and spend the next ten weeks and spend out time recruiting for some other settlement." I'm actually pretty sure that in the last four weeks I've already had more fun than I would have if I did that for those four and another six. If nothing else, I've met a few people that I hope I'll be friendly with for a long time and got drawn into an interesting community of which I'd barely heard before. And if we do lose the community, then we'll walk away and either start again or join another group to see how that goes. And just as a matter of interest, I have spent more than a dozen hours building alliances to greater or lesser degrees, some of which are going to be critical to our hopes, depending on where exactly we are in week ten. The fact that we don't have enough people to sustain our settlement today is not necessarily something that reflects our capacity to succeed at running a settlement, only this one. So don't be so quick to write me off as "not the kind of player whose intended to be running settlements in the long run" There are no real lives or fortunes on the line here. We can afford to use this a s a "practice" run, and no-one will be ruined or commit suicide because we failed.
How about this. I'll count all the times that I've told someone they'll have more fun if they leave their large group and get together with 3 or 4 friends then spend ten weeks wheedling, cajoling and urging via a mix of TeamSpeak and Skype and mumble and email and forums a variety of other people into a tiny coalition so that they can see if they can hold a settlement long enough have a little fun with it, while someone else counts how many times someone from a larger, organized groups has told me I'm not going to have any fun and am just wasting time unless I join them. Done! How's your count going?
The best place for you and players like you You have repeatedly demonstrated that you do not understand what kind of player I am. I do not care if I have no settlement to control in a year. This is an experience for me. My experience. Not yours. I am not you. The best place for me is where I want to be, not where you think I need to be to enjoy the game the way you think I should enjoy it.
The wars that determine who holds territory and who doesn't should have little difference. You are concerned from day one about "winning" the game. I, and many like me, have no illusions of doing any such thing. I plan to experience what it's like to operate in PFOnline, and over a period of a few months decide if they'll get more than I've already spent. You are trying to help me be like you think I should be, in order to have the kind of fun that you think I should want to have. I'm not interested in that particular goal. I am trying to decide if I should keep giving Goblinworks $15.00 a month when my current allotment of time runs out. I don't care how similar or different it is in comparison to any other game in the universe. I only care if my friends and I can have fun doing the things we want to do. We don't want to be part of a mighty army that dominates the landscape through carefully thought out PvP tactics and strategies. Maybe that means we can't have fun in PFOnline. Trying to convince us up front that we can't enjoy ourselves unless we do is not productive.
I'll point out that Infrastructure is understood by virtually every English speaker already as being the "stuff we take for granted in civilization" Bridges, schools, roads, sewers. The buildings and services that we don't even notice, because no-one would pay to build them if they had any other option because they aren't sexy and attention grabbing.
I see this is progressing excellently along my planned road of the larger groups telling us what we ought to do so that they can best take better care of us the way we ought to be taken care of. Do you see me there? Neither did I.
I don't know what you're getting at. Ten groups that each have 7-10 members and one or two towers are each going to have close to the minimum window. The fact that they are "allied" with each other (in terms of agreeing to a plan) is not going to make their window bigger. Even then, some will have no choice but to open at different times because of their own time zone vagaries Those groups that are able to partner with a larger group will invariably adjust their strategy to what will work best for the people that are assisting them. This isn't about a single strategy that is going to work for everybody. It's about planning for something, and arriving at a strategy that works best for your group. And about tiny groups and individuals taking advantage of the fact that they can leverage their position in this matter.
I'm trying to stay out of this, but, again, there are lots of us who have NO online gaming experience at all, let alone PvP. In the "Environment Experience" I practically have a stroke trying to not walk into trees. Engaging in combat with me really will be like shooting fish in a barrel. Possibly for months.
The Tower War companies will be completely unconnectred to in-game companies which won't be available for the duration:
I pretty much had, until told I had no business being disappointed in anyone but myself. I will shut up about it now and stay out of the way, but if I'm even close to unique in this, it's because I'm willing to talk about it, unlike the the people to whom the original poster referred.
I've acknowledged repeatedly that a large group of us are responsible for our own issues. Repeatedly. In this one case, we were told, repeatedly, that there would be no consequences to settlements of PvP until after the cataclysm event a few months in to EE. That on that day each settlement would begin on a level playing field. Now, they have changed that. Large settlements of experienced PvPers, that control multiple towers throughout the tower game will start with more and better buildings than the settlements that don't. Those of us who expected to have a few months in which to learn PvP while it would affect our ability to accumulate gear and recipes, but would not affect our settlements (and, therefore our ability to recruit new players) have lost that window. To new players entering the world after the first few days it will be obvious that the larger groups have not just a size advantage, but also an in-game mechanical advantage to their ability to train and support characters. That is different than what we were told four weeks ago I have not once complained about the existence of PvP starting on day one. I have, in fact, repeatedly said that it is newcomers own fault if we didn't realize what we were getting in to. Throughout that, we've been led to believe it would have no effect on settlements while we were getting ourselves acclimatized to the environment. You are wrong. I have every right to be disappointed in change in what we were told. I have spent four weeks working under a set of rules that have changed. Four weeks that include plunking down an extra $100.00 so that a friend could get involved. That's money I paid under a false premise.
I'm really confused where anyone got the idea that settlement vs. settlement and company vs. company PvP were not to be a major focus of development at any stage of this project. That's been clear to me the entire time I've been here. Your confusion may stem from a failure to understand the number of us who came here because it said "Pathfinder Online Kickstarter" on it, who have no experience with online gaming before. That's who has that idea. Thirty days ago, I could have read the acronym PvP and had no idea whatsoever what it meant The world is not made up entirely of experienced online gamers. The Pathfinder Online Kickstarter was not exclusive to experienced online gamers. It has attracted a large number of people who do not understand your world, and are now becoming frustrated by that mistake on their part.
Smaller settlements will *need* to form alliances and perhaps offer training their neighbors don't. Settlements who are unsure of their ability might want to consider merging with other smaller settlements if they still really want to run a settlement independently, or consider joining a larger group that will allow them to maintain their own culture and identity. Do you imagine that there is any small settlement on the list that actually has any idea what's going on that isn't trying very hard to do exactly that? I don't know if there is any group, certainly not one outside the top five or so that wouldn't happily encourage any company to retain their own identity in exchange for some cooperation. One issue is that of the 500 people who've voted that are not in one of the top dozen teams, virtually none have any way of being contacted. The ones that do are all hoping for miracles.
Do you imagine that there will never be more than 33 settlements in the game? Do you think that being the 33rd best settlement when open access starts and the real land rush begins is somehow worse than having to clear a hex and start a new settlement completely from scratch? I do. I think that until the map expands greatly, there will not be more than 33 settlements. And I think that within a few weeks of settlement to settlement combat, and until the map expands, there will be notably less than 33, probably less than, 20 discounting vassal states of a "kingdom" that exist only through it's continued tolerance as a means of supporting it. And that's as it should play out. I was, however, hoping that a dozen of the smaller groups would get some settlement running experience that would make those settlements a valuable vassal, and give them the confidence to spread out later, with the map. Now I expect that when settlement to settlement combat opens, many of the 33 settlements will find themselves with approximately the same number of active people they have on day one, and will fold immediately. What I fear, is that even before that day, many of those people will have left the game in disillusion when their free time runs out.
A company that comes out of the game of towers with less than the other 32 groups will not be able to attract enough new participants to hold the settlement any length of time at all. The smallest groups needed to have something to offer during early enrollment in order to attract new players who are not on the paizo boards and were not aware of the landrush. Starting with the same resources/buildings but in a smaller group where new people could have a greater chance of standing out was a draw. Starting with one or two or three buildings and 10 or 30 people while a larger group has six or eight or ten buildings and 350 people and the day one ability to offer better training does not create much of a draw.
A little something for people to keep in mind when thinking of the "score". Sure you can end up averaging 10 towers and end up with 5 extra builds (made up number of course)on day one of the normal POI supported settlement, but it also means you will have 5 extra buildings to maintain without any of the resources built up yet. (POI = mine, farm, etc...) A large group will have no trouble filling their six surrounding hexes on the day they need to. Any new players arriving in the intervening months will have little choice but to favour the larger groups, as they will have a solid core for training and development.
This BENEFITS small companies and is an absurdly beneficial arrangement for the really small companies that happen to win a settlement in the land rush. There is NO WAY a small company of 5, 10, 15 people can hold a settlement in the real, full game. The ONLY scenario in which they can do so is in the land rush. If they do not gather members and alliances between now and the full system they will not survive. War of the towers forces alliances and will hopefully make this easier for both companies and settlements. Some of that would be accurate if we had any way to contact the companies that are not already in the settlement count. but we don't. Even for those that do have websites, most of them are not contactable. You can't co-operate with someone who you can't talk to. It does benefit them to the extent that if they decide to abandon their settlement, they have something to offer another settlement.
That is, at least, a minor a relief.
Thanks for the clarification, Tork. I think a lot of us were figuring a big group would basically grab its Towering Tower Ring solo. At least, I was. ;P I don't think that's said at all. At the very least, a large company can easily break into groups of 20 or 30 for the duration of the Tower Wars
Some things it would help to know:
Settlements will basically get a "Score" based on their progress and will get an adjusted starting position based on their average tower holdings over the course of the War of Towers and will get starting buildings in their settlement based on this. This won't be a one to one conversion, like we controlled 8 hexes so now we control 8 hexes. It will be more like we controlled 8 hexes so now we have a keep, a bank, a level 1 wizard facility, a level fighter facility, a level 1 war wizard facility, a level 1 dreadnaught facility, etc, instead of just a keep.
More towers = more starting buildings after the great destruction and denying your opponents towers will put them at a disadvantage after the the great destruction. Any "nice" settlement that uses their forces to help others instead of accumulating towers will also be putting themselves at a starting disadvantage.
Why? Because there is no apparent method of capturing a SETTLEMENT yet. Nor any apparent benefit to capturing a tower unless you are allied with a settlement. Nor any apparent way to found NEW settlements yet. They don't have to capture it. Newcomer sees a dozen settlements where they can get any training they want, and another 20 where they can't. End of story for 90% of them.
I am not going to apologize for my tone as I am a bit frustrated. Read what people are saying, and what the Devs are saying and you will see that this is the game working as intended. This is a competitive territorial PVP game. If you don't want to participate in that, either work around it (by staying with a NPC town and not complaining when you can't get skills to any respectable level) or maybe this isn't the game for you. Give it a chance and talk with other people and work together. How do you think TEO, T7V, PAX, UNC, and others have gotten so big? We talked with others, share a common goal, and are going to reap the benefits of our agreements. We are also taking the risks that come with it, including losing any towers we control, eventually losing our settlement is a possibility, and the risk of feuds and war from other settlements. Nor will I apologize. this is NOT the game I started playing 3 weeks ago. I invested a great deal of time in something I thought would last a guaranteed few months and give me time to draw in people who are not on these boards and have no idea the game has started. Now I am certain I will have nothing left to offer them on the day they arrive, and there is virtually zero chance of my getting to 50, let alone the 500 people needed to make a go of settlement. They will enter the game, and within a week or two they will see 10 settlements controlling the vast majority of what they need in order to grow their skill set and will have no incentive to give a smaller group a try. Even in the worst of medieval situations there were plenty of small communities that did very well. Not so here. Why even have thirty settlements to start if play is going to eliminate 20 of them right off the bat? If I'd realized I was only here as fodder for large groups to train themselves the first week, I wouldn't have bothered.
Agreed. Even big settlements are going to have to take an appetite suppressant; there's little reason to take and claim a lot of towers if you can't protect them day after day. Taking them with spare companies, but not claiming them might be a technique, but then the members of the companies may be missing training opportunities and becoming relatively weaker day by day. The number of towers that a settlement "needs" might therefore start low and increase over time if they are on the leading edge of their training - leading to more conflict over time. Some of the bottom 23 groups have enough people to put 6 on each tower in their directly controlled hex. The top 10 groups can put six people in each of theirs, plus put six people in each of another 60-65 hexes What you need is not what matters. Denying your opposition what they need is as, or more, important.
A) everybody does NOT know. If a groups has six members and six towers they have to put one person at each tower. At worst, a group needs ten or 15 people to take most of their towers away. B) apparently you missed this from the blog: "The more Towers a Settlement indirectly controls the more training the Settlement can offer its members. So control of Towers dictates how powerful characters can become and loss of Towers can reduce the power level of characters."
Guys, there can't be hyndreds of alts yet, since early enrollment costs $100 per account. This interim measure won't last to OE, so the hundreds of alts issues won't have anything to do with tower defense. You are of the impression that there will be no alts permitted during early enrollment? Alts don't require a separate account or any extra money. They are a separate character on the same account. This is not a good thing for small groups.
My apologies, but I'm not sure I understand the concern you're voicing.Only this isn't about how many settlements there are. This is about how many groups will control all of the settlements starting a very short time into play, instead of a year of two later. Please don't pretend the one has anything to do with the other.Most small settlements will have to give up before they have time to train anything.A hard truth: I [Ryan Dancey] think there will be many more people who want to run a Settlement than there will be Settlements.. Apparently. Small groups expected to have several months to build up numbers before inter-settlement conflict would have any meaningful results. Now we are told that will happen on day 1 of EE. Unless a group can take/retain towers their settlement will be at a disadvantage to provide training to their members, which will be apparent, and will also be a detriment to their ability to attract residents during EE. Those with zero PvP experience will no longer have any opportunity to absorb that before losing has meaningful consequences to the future of their settlement. They will fall like glass in the face of large, organized groups.
Nobody needs level 20 training on day 1 of EE.200 person group. Each person puts an alt in several strategic spots.But all of those alts are completely untrained. If a character with a couple of weeks of training isn't powerful enough to hold off dozens of day-0 noobs, then Ryan has failed to learn the lesson taught by Professor A Thousand Goons In Rifters. The pretense was that an untrained alt could be held off by a trained character. At the star of EE, no untrained alt will be at any disadvantage to any non-alt.
Most small settlements will have to give up before they have time to train anything.A hard truth: I [Ryan Dancey] think there will be many more people who want to run a Settlement than there will be Settlements.. Only this isn't about how many settlements there are. This is about how many groups will control all of the settlements starting a very short time into play, instead of a year of two later. Please don't pretend the one has anything to do with the other.
200 person group. Each person puts an alt in several strategic spots.But all of those alts are completely untrained. If a character with a couple of weeks of training isn't powerful enough to hold off dozens of day-0 noobs, then Ryan has failed to learn the lesson taught by Professor A Thousand Goons In Rifters. Everyone is untrained on day 1 of EE. Most small settlements will have to give up before they have time to train anything.
It's worse than that. Ten hexes aside, you have no choice but to pass through two enemy controlled hexes to get to your own....
You are utterly wrong.: 200 person group. Each person puts an alt in several strategic spots. day 1 log: "Window is opening in settlement "F": All available members log into your NW Quadrant alt now and head for hex -xx.-yy" (crush all opposition in the area) Later:
Later:
Put a large number of allies in two or three settlements, and the problem just gets worse, as they can pick matching or conflicting PvP windows and use all members to defend both settlements. End result after the first week or two, a bunch of small settlements with no towers and all towers divided up among two or three groups. Nobody can train anything of note in any settlement that isn't part of a large alliance or an NPC settlement
This is going to seriously disadvantage the smaller groups. Especially if they have to hold their surrounding towers. Some groups will be hard-pressed to put a person in each immediate hex if even a single player or two aren't online.They said small groups were never intended to hold a settlement. They mentioned in a post mentioning hundreds. This definitely will play into that. As I said elsewhere, they also said we'd have months to get to that number. Now we don't. If we don't have dozens of members on day one of EE, we will not be able to hold any towers, thus shutting down our settlement's ability to support training on day one of EE.
CBD- Remember this is Alpha, and everything is subject to a wipe so I think it would be best at least until EE just to play with the system and try to have fun. I don't see anything about canceling the great catastrophe yet so. This is nothing to do with alpha. This is what will be happening the first day of EE.
Doesn't make any esthetic sense for me.I can't figure out if you're trolling or lack esthetic sense. It's absolutely sandbox because you are building your settlement's ability to support your character. EE gets some pre-made sandcakes to help keep us busy while the world is being built. There are all kinds of undeveloped hexes that can hold other settlements later. The "pre-made" settlements are simply to provide some activity while the world is being fleshed out for open enrollment. You're probably best to ignore it for another year and a half and then see whether you want to play or not when it goes open.
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