Lee Hammock's page

Not everything in the game currently is something that a single character, or even a single group, of max XP can take. We want to have both aspirational critters in there, and to provide threats that really big groups of players can try and tackle. Without these sorts of AI changes higher tier monsters would never be a threat.

On watching the video it looks like no one was getting Opportunity for movement, just using feats/items/etc. That is obviously a bug. If anyone else runs into that sort of situation please let us know as this could be very difficult to track down.

We are currently discussing plans to take settlements that don't have anyone in them after the first couple of months of EE and redistributing them to interested parties that have the strength to hold them. There are lots of particulars to figure out, and we will warn settlements in danger of getting reassigned before it happens.

To give the people all the information from the relevant posts on the Goblinworks forums:

Just to warn people there are some loot changes on the next update:

1. The tutorial goblins will no longer drop any loot of any kind.
2. No low level monsters will drop armor. The weapon drops will continue for the short term but will likely be ending in a few weeks as well.

So stockpile your +0 tier 1 gear so you can sell it to the people who come later.

To add some transparency to this, as several folks said, this is a change that designers can make without using programming resources. Designers cannot fix desynching, floating nodes, aggro issues, etc. We can only use the tools that already exist, and those tools include the drop tables. Us working on this in no way conflicts or impedes with other work getting done on the game. They are two completely different resource pools.

Now, as to why we want to make this change:
1. Farming the tutorial goblins is way, way to easy and we don't have a way to make them harder without taking up non-design resources or defeating the purpose of them being tutorial monsters. Also we don't want people standing around in town farming them as that just adds to server loads in starter towns, which are already going to be heavy population areas.
2. Right now the number of +0 tier 1 gear in the game is very, very high. Check out the threads where people post what they got for killing some number of hundreds of goblins and you'll see that all tier 1 +0 gear has effectively become trash loot. The encumbrance value of items can get ridiculous, so people are just destroying them. In my own experience on my non-cheater character I get actively annoyed with all the armor drops.
3. We have no economy for +0 items. People make them, they have to for achievements, but there's no reason to buy or sell them.
4. In the experience of the design team thus far by the time we've been killed enough to be near losing our starter gear we're really needing that +1 gear.

Also we are modifying the quests in the starter towns that previously gave you shortbows, focuses, etc, to give you a basic set of tier +0 gear for a given class if you buy some skills associated for that class. So the quest NPC who previously gave you a shortbow if you talked to him twice will give you a shortbow, light armor, and rogue kit if you go buy the proficiencies for all three. So players will be able to get a set of starter gear, and one tailed to their class, but not an infinite number of them.

This heart makes my little designer heart go pitter patter. Go players, trade like the wind!

Hey guys, just to let everyone know we are all keeping an eye on the thread.

A thing to keep in mind is the current list of achievements is not intended to be all the achievements in the game; we want to have healing achievements, saving people from bleeding out achievements, wizard kill achievements based on wand or staff type, etc. Problem is right now we have no tech for detecting when these things happen, so yes while we would like to get more achievements in for clerics (and wizards), we have to balance it against things like getting achievement points showing up on your character sheet, making Attacker flag functionality clearer, PvP looting, etc. It's always a trade off.

Actually you guys are right, I misunderstood something Paul said a long time ago, it is a flat count. So if you harvest a forester node, another forester node shows up.

2Stephen - you said that you aimed for 1% regrowth / 15 minutes. Do you allow >1 pine (iron, coal) to regenerate in a 15 minute timeframe? Otherwise it is still capped at 96 (92) per day and this is the amound a single player might gather.

Currently everything regens at 1% of full value with no cap every 15 minutes.

The core problem that people seem to be running into I think is caused by the relatively low value of herbs and how spread out wood is in the game.

So each resource in the game has a "value" when used in crafting recipes. We use the same value to figure out how many resources should be in a hex. For example, the total value of (a given resource)X(that resource value) for all the resources in an NPC hex is 330, while for a wilderness hex it is 674 (and much higher for a monster hex). A single piece of wood has a value generally 4-6 times higher than a single herb, so if a hex had an equal total value of herbs and an equal total value of wood, there would be a lot more herbs than wood in that hex.

Secondarily, there are far fewer varieties of wood in the game than herbs so they are spread over a larger area. Effectively half the Woodland hexes in the game drop Pine, and the other half Yew; this means the total value of Pine and Yew have be split up among half of the Woodland hexes each if we want wood to be found in every Woodlands hex. On the other hand, Comfrey Leaves are only found in a region or two, and so have much higher concentrations in those areas. We could change up and say wood is only found in some limited subset of forests, but that seems counter intuitive and puts a big bottleneck on controlling the wood supply.

It could be we have underestimated the total demand for wood in the game. These numbers have been continually adjusted, and probably will forever. That said, even if we doubled the amount of wood in the game, it would not mean you get a majority of wood each time you harvest a plant node.

To give everyone an idea of the ratings for hexes, here is the ratings for an NPC hex near Thornkeep (5.4 for those who care). This is relatively neutral territory that no one can control, so I don't feel bad posting it, but this is not going to be a regular thing. I'm not posting stats for any wilderness or monster hexes. Note this hex has a wider than normal cross section of resources for a Woodlands hex due to needing to get a lot of things into the hands of new players.

Esoteric Essence: 2666
Laurel Leaves: 1500
Dragoon Leaves: 550
Bloodstone: 203
Moonstone: 100
Onyx: 300
Coal: 800
Hemp: 250
Wool: 380
Animal Pelt: 210
Beast Pelt: 200
yew Sapling: 650
Pine Log: 1200

So if you were to go up to a Forester hex you would have a 650/3900 chance of getting yew, a 1200/3900 chance of getting pine, etc. These numbers change as the ratings change. Every 15 minutes there is a chance equal to (current value/original value) that the resource will increase an amount equal to 1% of it's full value. So if Pine was harvested down to 960, there would be an 80% chance of restoring 12 points on the next 15 minute check.

Will resources at some point be tied to the proper in game object ie pine from pine trees oak from oak trees? Obviously not important just wondering if theres a pl;an to do that at some point.

Maybe someday, but we have a lot of higher priority things on the list (the harvesting/gusher system being the big crafting one).

We are looking at scaling up the base level a PC settlement has to be the same as an NPC settlement, but scaling down the bonus each tower gives. The p[lan right now is to change it to starting at level 7 (which is what NPC settlements do) and adding a third of a level for each tower. So you'll be level 9 if you take the six towers around your settlement, etc.

As Stephen said yesterday, you spoke the language of my people: math. The arcane language of math is the best way to summon an GW game designer, especially when your math points out problems in our math. So thanks for the math. It was good math.

Hey guys

First off some info:

1. Starting value and max value are the same, so if a hex has Gold at 200 it starts at 200 and never goes above it.

2. I have target numbers of resources for the whole game that vary according to how the project demand is for that resource. For example, the projected demand for iron is such that the total iron value for all hexes is 343,152, while the project demand for gold is such that the total gold value for all hexes is 33,383. This is because the projected demand for iron far, far outstrips the demand for gold. The only things that come close to the demand for iron is coal and wool.

3. Mountains Ranges and what they should have:
Splinter Peaks (Near Callambea and Freevale): Iron, Silver, Lodestone
Northern Thorncrags (Near Golgotha): Copper in the northern end, Gold at the southern end, Iron
Southern Thorncrags (Phaeros and Brighthaven): Iron, Gold, Londestone
Southern Echo Peaks (Forgehelm): Iron, SIlver, Lodestone

I agree with Thod there is a problem with the long term harvesting of resources in that if you have two resources with differing values the lower ranked one will come to dominate more than it should. The current fix I'm working with as it is simplest (at this stage on the game programmer time is incredibly rare so I have to do the simplest implementation if I expect it to get done any time soon) fix I've got so far is changing the rate of increase to 1% of original value (which mirrors some of Thod's math, using 1% instead of DV15 in his original equations I believe which was close to 1% to begin with). Long termWe may be able to do something more complicated, and this may not make it into EE so we may do a fix shortly after EE starts and do a resource reboot, but we'll see how things shake out.

I actually found some use for Belladonna berries in a low level alchemy mixture, but I dont recall wich it was. I rememer it because I had left a heap of them in my Alderwag Vault and wished I hadn't.

Very interesting with the resource info. So there is no actual environment parameter? So all nodes within a hex is the same independent of the location such as river bed, glade or roadside. Is there any plans for a future environmental distribution, like making gold more commonly found in riverbeds mineral nodes than in mineral nodes spawned on roads...

We have a plan to go to a placed node system rather than the pure random system we have currently, which would fix a lot of the nodes in weird places issues we have now. With such a change we could make them more location relevant, but that project is a ways off as it is a lot of work.

An important distinction to keep in mind: I said that gold could only be mined in the Southern Thorncrags. I did not say it could not be scavenged elsewhere. Same with silver and copper.

And it is supposed to be Thorncrags...because I think it sounds better.

Forgehelm is in the Southern Echo Peaks.

The hills in the NW of the map have approximately 55% of the coal in the game. So in 60 hexes out of 900, you have half of all of a major resource in the game. Plus 50% of the bloodstone, 70% of the brimstone and juniper berries, 66% of the cinnabar, 90% of the saltpeter, and all of the parafin wax, quicklime, aqua mortis, and aqua fortis in the game.

All of the resources in the game show up where they do not just because of terrain and region, but also projected demand. We have a bunch of spreadsheets to try and figure out how much of each resource players will want, and gold for example never gets a lot of demand so it's never going to be present in a wide swath of hexes. Coal on the other hand is needed in such vast quantities we can't restrict it to only the hill hexes we have present on the map unless those hexes only produced coal...and maybe not even then. It's easier to restrict off higher tier stuff, thus the hills are the place to go for tier 2 and 3 chemicals. These demand numbers will be updated as we see actual demand in game (on the next build you'll get a refined resource chart that does just that, putting more copper into the world and less silver).

So the system as it's intended:

There are a 130 resources in the game. Each hex has a rating, generally 0-5000, for each of these resources. Usually hexes have 0 in most resources. Each hex has a total "value" of resources, which is the value of all the resources in the hex at server start in terms of of the crafting system. In figuring out how much of a given resource is required for making an item we assigned values to each resource, but these are not prices as the price of a piece of iron ore is ultimately going to be determined by the player. We just needed some rough relative values to determine the ratios of adamantine to iron in the world and such.

Each terrain has certain types of resources it favors. For example, you tend find more iron in mountains and wood in woodlands. These rules are not hard and fast though; you can scavenge iron in croplands hexes. Woodlands, croplands, coastlands, and wetlands hexes have dowsing, scavenging, and forestry nodes while highlands, mountains, and brokenlands (meteor craters) have dowsing, mining, and forestry nodes. In a given hex you can only get a resource out of one node type, but you can get brimstone out of a scavenging node and a mining node in different hexes.

Terrains:
Woodlands hexes produce wood and a variety of herbs from forestry nodes, gems, metals, leather, cloth, and chemicals from scavenging nodes, and essence from dowsing nodes.

Croplands hexes produce a wide variety of herbs from forestry nodes, cloth, leather, gems, metals, and chemicals from scavenging nodes, and essence from dowsing nodes.

Wetlands produce a wide variety of herbs from forestry nodes (with a higher rate of color herbs), cloth, leather, gems, metals, and lots of chemicals from scavenging nodes, and essence from dowsing nodes.

Highlands produce a few herbs from forestry nodes, chemicals, gems, and coal from mining nodes, and essence from dowsing nodes.

Mountains produce a few herbs from forestry nodes, chemicals, gems, and metals from mining nodes, and essence from dowsing nodes.

Regions:
The map is broken up into a number of regions, each of which have their own resource themes. For example, the Northern Cragthorns are the mountains to the southwest of Thornkeep and they are the only mountains in the game rich in copper, meanhwhile the Southern Thorncrags down near Brighthaven and Phaeros are the only mountains in the game rich in gold and the Southern Echo Peaks just north of Thornkeep are rich in silver.

Hex Types:
Starter/NPC hexes generally have non-zero ratings in 10-15 resources, all of which are tier 1. With the next update you will see that they provide a wide variety of resources so tier 1 characters can find what they need without going to far, but are still limited to terrain and region appropriate resources. The total value of resources in a NPC/starter hex is approximately 1/3 a wilderness hex and 1/64 that of a monster hex. Any hex neighboring a starter settlement, within 2 hexes of Thornkeep, or along the major roads is a starter/NPC hex. These cannot become infected with escalations and will not be claimable by PCs in any portion of territorial conflicts.

Wilderness hexes, which are most hexes, have non-zero ratings in 8-15 resources with a mix of tier 1 and tier 2. These resources are limited by terrain and region, some some woodland hexes have lots of pine while others have lots of maple These differences are usually along geographic lines, like mainly pine in the north and maple in the south. The total value of the resources in a wilderness hex are approximately x3 as much as an NPC starter hex, and 1/20th that of a monster hex.

Monster hexes have non-zero ratings in 6-20 resources from all tiers, but most of their value comes from tier 3 resources following region and terrain restrictions. Despite having so much more value than other hex types, monster hexes can be tapped out about as quickly as a wilderness hex, if not more so.

Each time you remove a resource from a node, the associated rating for that hex decreases by one. If that rating reaches 0, that resource stops appearing in nodes in that hex. If all the resources for a node type reach 0, those nodes stop spawning in the hex. Every fifteen minutes the system runs a check to see if the resource rating should increase by 1; the chance of increase is (the current rating of the node)/(original rating of the node). So if the hex originally has iron of 1000 and you harvest 10 units of ore, it has an iron rating of 990 and there is a 990/1000=99% chance it will get one point of iron back when the next 15 minute resource rating check comes around. This means if you really take a lot of resources out of a hex the harder it will be for it to replenish, the higher the value the more you can take out before you begin to notice the slow down in replenishment, and the more resources in a hex the more checks the system runs to see if resources are to be replenished. So a hex with a few high rating resources will be more likely to replenish those ratings, while a hex with a large number of low resource ratings will be easier to tap out on any single resource, but will have the chance to restore more value to the hex overall by running more checks.

Currently the system is refilling all the resources every server day, so a lot of the paragraph above is effectively invisible. Sure if a resource rating is 200 or below you may get it to 0 in 24 hours, but if it's 3000 that's not so likely.

The lower the resource rating is compared to the original rating, the more likely you are to get impure (i.e. heavier) resources.

The likelihood to get more than two resources per node is based on your skill level.

So final Land Rush week results. Not a lot of movement, but there was a surprising attempted move by Hammerfist Clan from M to A, which was unsuccessful as Agents of Erastil had it locked down by numbers alone. Lots of population increases among the guilds this last week.

Guild Name Base Population Population Plus Hunker Down Location
Talonguard (NG) 104 K
Golgotha (LE) 97 W
Keepers of the Circle 83 AB
Ozem's Vigil (LG) 76 E
Kabal 69 F
Aragon (CN) 60 X
Dagedai Alliance 50 L
Emerald Lodge 49 V
Forgeholm 47 B
Tavernhold 43 C
Blackwood Glade 36 39.6 Y
Hammerfall 35 38.5 Z
Sunholm 33 38.61 O
Kreuz Bernstein 30 47.4 H
Freevale 29 40.02 I
Les Compagnons 22 33.22 AD
Mystical Awakening 17 24.31 AA
Hope's End (NE) 16 17.28 S
Agents of Erastil 15 20.55 A
Hammerfist Clan 13 13 AC
Terra Australis Incognito 13 21.97 J
Brains and Brawn 12 15.96 U
The Gauntlet 12 13.56 D
Reading Between the Lines 12 18.24 P
vVv Gaming 11 M
The Guardians 9 G
The Iron Gauntlet 9 T
The Deaders 8 R
Open Road 8 N
The Bastard Sons of Daggermark 7 Q

For anyone who cares, the relevant hunker down bonuses for the week:
Hammerfall 0.1
Blackwood Glade 0.1
Sunholm 0.17
Freevale 0.38
Les Compagnons 0.51
Kreuz Bernstien 0.58
Mystical Awakening 0.43
Eastern Sun 0.5
Terra Australis Incognito 0.69
The Gauntlet 0.13
Agents of Erastil 0.37
Read Between the Lines 0.52
Brains and Brawn 0.33
Hope's End 0.08

I believe it was an error. I'm going to tag Lee on this.

I think the following bonus numbers are errors:
Kreuz Bernstein dropped for some reason
Agents of Erastil didn't increase as much as I'd expect.
vVv has no bonus, though I think they didn't move
Iron Gauntlet has no bonus, though I think they didn't move.

I'm assuming bonus doesn't apply if you don't pick your same hex, but not that it goes away.

EDIT:

Agents of Erastil should have gone up .04 more, and thus have a modified score of 14.392. Again good catch. Not sure what I did on that one, so again good catch.

vVv Gaming and Iron Gauntlets did not have the same position as last week as their first choice so no hunker down bonus. vVv Gaming had a hunker down bonus in week 5 of .16, but have been bumped out of that spot long ago. Both groups have been bumped around a lot and have never been in their first choice since the hunker down rules were clarified to only apply to first choices.

This week the sassy pants came back out as Kabal, fresh off a recruiting binge it seems rocketed up to number 6, displacing Tavernhold from F and into C (which pushed the Gauntlet out of C despite their hunker down bonus and into D). There was a lot of recruiting paying off this week aside from Kabal as the new Kreuz Bernstein moved up a few spots, Ozem's Vigil snaked around Aragon, and Blackwood Glade moved up but didn't cause any disruptions. The Bastard Sons of Daggermark got back on the list after a long absence thanks to so many mid tier merges.

Number Guild Population Population with Hunker Down Slot
1 Talonguard (NG) 95 K
2 Golgotha (LE) 93 W
3 Keepers of the Circle 74 AB
4 Ozem's Vigil (LG) 71 E
5 Aragon (CN) 56 X
6 Kabal 52 F
7 Dagedai Alliance 50 L
8 Forgeholm 48 B
9 Emerald Lodge 44 V
10 Tavernhold 42 C
11 Blackwood Glade 33 35.97 Y
12 Sunholm 33 37.62 O
13 Hammerfall 33 35.64 Z
14 Kreuz Bernstein 30 39.9 H
15 Freevale 29 38.57 I
16 Les Compagnons 21 30.45 AD
17 Mystical Awakening 17 23.12 AA
18 Agents of Erastil 14 17.22 A
19 Hammerfist Clan 13 22.75 M
20 Brains and Brawn 12 14.52 U
21 The Gauntlet 12 D
22 Reading Between the Lines 12 16.56 P
23 Terra Australis Incognito 12 18.96 J
24 Hope's End (NE) 12 S
25 vVv Gaming 11 N
26 The Guardians 9 G
27 The Iron Gauntlet 9 T
28 The Deaders 8 R
29 Open Road 8 Q
30 The Bastard Sons of Daggermark 7 AC

Hey guys

The offer to join the core land rush was made as part of the introduction to War of Towers, and was not in fact a blanket offer to rejoin at any point. Switching any those three guilds to the normal land rush rules in the last two weeks of the land rush we think would create too many weird and unfavorable situations so we're not going with it.

The Officer skill which has the formation leadership features is based on Personality. So is the Seneschal skill which will be used for infrastructure management.

Being either an Officer or a Seneschal makes you a very high priority target- for focused fire, or for assassins, or both.

The natural fits for personality skills among the core classes are Paladins, Sorcerers, and Bards.

Sorcerers are squishy. Bards aren't frontline troops either. So an LG settlement can field very tanky paladin officers and hard-to-assassinate building managers, while everyone else is left with choosing between robes or frolicking to protect their leadership assets.

Clerics might make a decent alternative if there's enough personality-oriented stuff in their channel energy design to make developing these skills practical. I just hope that we don't end up with a scenario where anyone who wants to manage a building makes a dowsing sage animal-handling persuasive bluffing fighter.

Actually the best class for settlement management is Aristocrat, which is a mixed buffer/social force multiplier/light combat sort of character. Sure it may not be as assassin proof as a paladin, but its role features relate directly to making settlements or formations better and will be less squishy than a sorcerer, probably a little less squishy than a bard but not a whole lot.

Is the hex selection also captured automatically at midnight? (i.e., if it is set as a.b.c at midnight Sunday, then gets changed to c,b,a later that night, but before the positions are assigned in the morning, which one will get used?)

Captured at midnight. I just don't get the report until I get in in the morning.

So the big news this week is the Librarians of Doom relinquished their hold on Q, joining up with Freevale. Freevale was a big mover this week, plus with a decent hunker down bonus they are sitting pretty good. We also had several other settlements move up and down in the top ten, but no real position changes.

Also it seems Kabal continued to wear their sassy pants as they staked their claim to Q despite it being pretty public knowledge that the Hands of Abbraxas had been gunning for it last week. Kabal continues to be the wild card player.

Quadrivium tried to move into H, but Eastern Sun's hunker down bonus allowed them to keep it, so Quadrivium ended up in S same as last week.

If anyone from the Guardians is reading this, please have your guild head update his draft. It reads ABCDEFGHI etc etc.

Trying a new display this week
Settlement Name Population Population + Hunker Down Position
Talonguard (NG) 92 92 K
Golgotha (LE) 91 91 W
Keepers of the Circle 74 74 AB
Aragon (CN) 56 56 X
Ozem's Vigil (LG) 55 55 E
Dagedai Alliance 49 49 L
Forgeholm 46 46 B
Emerald Lodge 45 45 V
Tavernhold 36 36 F
Sunholm 33 33 O
Hammerfall 33 33.66 Z
Blackwood Glade 32 34.24 Y
Freevale 29 35.96 I
Kabal 25 25 Q
Les Compagnons 21 27.93 AD
Elkhaven 19 22.99 G
Mystical Awakening 17 20.74 AA
Eastern Sun 15 21.75 H
Quadrivium 15 15 S
Agents of Erastil 14 15.4 A
Hammerfist Clan 13 20.28 M
Reading Between the Lines 13 13 P
Brains and Brawn 12 12 U
The Gauntlet 12 17.64 C
vVv Gaming 11 11 N
Terra Australis Incognito 11 14.41 J
The Guardians 9 9 D
The Iron Gauntlet 9 9 AC
Hand of Abraxas 9 9 R
The Deaders 8 8 T

So new rules question that I don't think I specifically stated that has come up with Tavernhold and Sunholm. Both of those guilds worked their way into the top 10 or have bounced in an out while retaining their spots. While they do not get hunker down bonus while in the top ten, should they keep their comparatively minor hunker down bonus from previous weeks not in the top ten? I don't believe this was ever specified. My instinct is to say yes, especially since it's a few percentage points that are unlikely to make a difference (Note currently Sunholm and Tavernhold's points do not represent a hunker down bonus, but adding it would not change anyone's position this week). Last time we seemed to have a pretty good discussion about a rules question, so I figured I would try this again.

Also we should warn people there are a lot of things on these spreadsheets that we have on the sheets but do not plan to implement for years, if ever (Firearms, the Fly skill, etc). Just because it shows up here don't plan on it coming in soon, if ever.

To be perfectly honest, I expected the disparity to between the top and bottom ends of the settlement population range to be smaller such that a 10-30% bonus would mean something. Given the disparities between even 20th place and 30th place the hunker down bonus means a lot less than I intended. Also other than Librarians of Doom no one in the bottom range of the list, the people who could really benefit from the Hunker Down bonus, have not been trying to use it much (and we have a lot of guilds who have never who have never updated their drafts to take advantage of changes in the list).

Also at this point I was expecting more consolidation. I know I harp on this every time I talk about the Land Rush, but all the guilds with 5-6 people need to find someone bigger to join up with. This is a contest where coming in 31st place (or 34th depending on how you look at it) gets you nothing. I don't think any guild in the bottom fifteen would turn down another five or six people in their ranks.

Lee Hammock wrote:

I have their hunker down bonus as 91%

week 2: 29th place so 19% bonus
week 3: 27th place, but tied with the 26th place guild, so 16% bonus (35%)
week 4: 29th place so 19% bonus (53%)
week 5: 28th place so 18% bonus (71%)
Week 6: 30th place (since they are still smallest by raw numbers) so 20% bonus

So 91%, which gives them a total value of 15*1.91 or 15.28, which beats your 15 barely (and if I rounded down, they are the older guild so they would still win).

That sheet says 92% which is probably off 1% due to the tie week.

Sorry for the confusion in the spreadsheet, folks. I seem to be a week behind somehow.

Never apologize for providing an awesome data collecting service to the public for free. You do damn fine work.

I hadn't been following this thread as Stephen was since it's more his day to day bailywick, but I do feel obliged to let you guys know we are well informed about archery.

STANDARD DISCLAIMER WHEN TALKING ABOUT ARCHERY WITH ME: I can be an real jerk about archery. I was previously an nationally ranked competitive archer (like top 50 in the nation in Olympic style archery), I have previously been a certified Level 1 NAA instructor back when they had those, I've been taught by Olympians, I have taught at numerous camps and clubs, I shoot multiple styles, I have read many books and written a few about archery. I've done historical reenactment combat archery (including making some good shots while running), field archery, target archery, pretty much every type of archery except hunting. Until last year I had a heart condition that prevented me from doing most sports so for the last twenty five years archery has been my sport. Until a few week ago one of my bows was in my office for use in animation reference. I can put twelve arrows into a torso sized space at twenty yards in one minute with a straight bow that I know will go through leather like it's nothing. I know archery. Chances are, I know more about archery than you. So I can be a jerk about it.

Despite my deep and abiding love for archery in all it's forms, ultimately our concern is not so much how archery really works; our concern is not so much simulation as balance. Our maximum range is 35 meters due to technical constraints, so we're already pretty limited in replicated a real bow. Ranged attacks currently are over powered due to a number of things aside from damage; movement speeds, firing arcs being way too large, no line of sight checks, inabilitiy for NPCs to effectively attack moving targets with melee, no ammunition, etc. Not saying we may not crank down damage, but there are a lot of moving pieces to look at, and I would rather not make archery the lone weapon that has to stand still while attacking. Also the lack of charge and similar abilities in Alpha thus far also make ranged characters harder for melee to deal with. All of combat is going to get tweaked, nerfed, unnerfed, and retweaked over the next month and archery is no different. But it is definitely getting the hairy eyeball.

Being wrote:

There he goes again. Third larger hat size we've had to order for him this month.

I don't think they make a size 12 hat.

From the "it's funny because it's true" annals, Stetson doesn't even make a hat big enough to fit my head. They had to special order my 8 & 1/4 sized football helmet when I was in the 7th grade.

I feel your pain my big headed brother. All my hats are custom made or were purchased on the cheap because they were made too large for any reasonably sized human head by mistake. When you custom order a hat, then call a few weeks later to check on it, give them the measurements and they say "Oh, that hat." like everyone in the company is shocked how gigantic your noggin is, you know you have a big head.

Whaaaat? No play-by-play this week? Or still writing it? :D

Yeah, I realized I forgot that as soon as I hit send.

We had a lot of ranking changes without any settlememt changes, like Hammerfall moving up. Kabal moved to F and Tavenrhold to J, but not a lot of other movement in the top end. In the mid range Mystical Awakening moved to C, but the real movement was in the bottom eight as everyone except for Librarians of Doom moved (and the Librarians of DOom sure are building up that hunker down bonus in Q). Terra Australis Incognito and the Guardians get on the board for the first time, causing a lot of the movement in the lower end. Still most people seem happy where they are, but I will be curious over time if the smaller guilds will start joining the larger.

We are just about at the point where you need 8 people to show up on the leader board, so all you settlements with only a handful of people start looking for one of the bigger settlements to sign up with! It's a joiner's market right now and there has to be someone already on the board that's close to your alignment, playstyle, etc. Five people aren't going to win settlements at the end of this, so it's better to make a deal now to live in one of the settlements as part of a team of your choosing than be a master of your fate without a home.

Unless that's how you role, all stoic and loner like, sitting alone in the corner of the tavern.

Goblinworks,

You guys need to get your story straight before you post, please. You're sending out mixed signals.

Lee Hammock wrote:

Companies will probably be able to control multiple towers.

Tork Shaw wrote:

A settlement with 6 towers MUST HAVE 6 ALLIED COMPANIES.

Therefore a settlement will have SIX COMPANIES to defend those SIX towers.

These two statements stand opposed. Either a settlement needs six companies to control six towers OR a company can control multiple towers. Which is it, please?

Yep, that's my fault, Tork's right.

Quote:

Towers have a PvP window. When the window is open, the Hex the Tower is in does not inflict Reputation penalties for PvP. While the window is open there is a capture area near the tower, probably outlined by a wall or similar structure. Standing in that area gives your company points towards controlling the tower; the first company to cross a certain threshold gains control of the tower. If you are defending a tower you control, you lower everyone elses points for each person in the control area.

Will multiple companies from the same settlement be competing against each other? It seems like support from the sponsoring settlement could well end up being counter-productive to the settlement's interests as a whole if this is the case.

I would like to see control be established based on cumulative settlement effort, with company control awarded based on the percentage of support a given company put in towards the effort of the settlement as a whole.

Can a company control more than one tower?

Only one company can control of a single tower, so if you had two allied companies fighting to take it together whichever one had more people in the capture area for longer would end up getting control. So you may want one company to try and defend the perimeter while the one actually taking the tower stays inside the capture area. Their points don't add together, but also they don't impact each other. We may be able to do something with companies from the same settlement being counter together, but that's not currently the design so the comparative complexity of it is unknown to me, and I don't want to write more checks for programming to cash than I already have.

Lee Hammock wrote:

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.

So this does, in fact, mean real, enduring, consequences to settlements for PvP results beginning on Day 1 of EE.

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.

Our goal, as with many things, is to scale things to diminishing returns, so it is never a sure choice to take more towers. Getting your 1st tower gets you more than getting your 10th tower gets you more than getting your 20th tower, so you'll have to decide if the later towers are worth it.

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.

I have a few questions about this:

When you say more training do you mean more characters can train at once in the same skill or will higher levels of the same skill open up for training.

When a settlement loses a tower how does that reduce the power of a character? Will skills have tier levels that are only available if the settlement holds enough towers to unlock them? How does this effect characters that already have learned the skill will they lose the ability until towers are recaptured?

Basically we have two concepts involved in the settlements, training and support.:

Training: You can actively learn skills from a settlement and settlements can only teach up to a certain level.
Support: Settlements also support skills, i.e. allow you to keep using skills if you have trained them. If a settlement trains something it automatically supports it as well.

For example, Torkville controls 6 towers and is a cleric/fighter settlement. It can train up to level 8 fighter and cleric related skills, feats, etc. It cannot train any wizard or rogue skills, but can support them up to level...say 5 (note I am pulling approxmiate numbers here, so if anyone tries to hold me to them in six months I will laugh and laugh). So people in the settlement can train and use up to level 8 skills for fighter and clerics, and if they train wizard and rogue skills somewhere else they can only use up to level 5 of those skills while being a member of that settlement. This is to stop people from bouncing around settlements, training everyone, and then being completely antisocial as they don't need any more training. But it does allow you to train classes other than those your settlement favors at allied settlements.

If you lose a tower and your settlement downgrades, it's training and support offerings go away, but this isn't immediate. You've got some time to fight back, or try and take some other tower, before the downgrade happens. Same sort of thing will happen in the final settlement system if you don't pay your upkeep on your training and support facilities.

Great blog! I was worried it would be too long in EE until real warfare escalated it seems GW was too.

Will settlements keep thier progress when towers are wiped and proper settlement controls are implemented? Or will everyone start on the same footing regardless of EE success?

Can individual companies control more than one tower at a time for its settlement?

Is the PvP window liner in increase ( like 1 hour per tower controlled) or more algebraic?

Thanks for the changes guys Im really excited for EE now more than ever!

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.

Companies will probably be able to control multiple towers. Long term companies will have hard making multiple POIs efficient, but we don't have all the functionality that goes into that math so for now we'll have them control multiple towers.

PvP window is more algebraic currently.

If a settlement wants to change it's name please have the founder send me a PM and I'll handle it. Only the user who founded the guild can request the change.

And speaking of unable to interpret, Not sure why Golarion Liberators with 9 members weren't able to get a spot.

As of midnight last night they had 7, and are a newer guild than the others with 7.

Map is being corrected for Los Compagnos being in the wrong neighborhood.

So it was an overall slower week than I expected given some of the high level moves we had; from places 15 and up everyone pretty much stayed in their spot. I guess they like where they are! Things for more interesting around the 20th spot where Reading Between the Lines made a pretty good placing their first week and Brains and Brawn moved up the charts, but not enough to offset the "Hunker Down" bonus of the Gauntlet and the Iron Gauntlet (but it was really close!). Otium Explorer and The Vigilant were able to hang onto their spots the same way.

Talonguard (NG) K
Pax Golgotha W
Keepers of the Circle AB
Settlement: Aragon (CN) X
Ozem's Vigil E
Dagedai Alliance L
Forgeholm B
Hammerfall Z
Thod's Friends V
Taur-im-Duinath Y
The Golden Flask F
The Phoenix Brotherhood O
Mystical Awakening C
Freevale I
Les Compagnons AD
Eastern Sun H
Hammerfist Clan M
Agents of Erastil AC
Reading Between the Lines R
Brains and Brawn A
Dreamchasers U
vVv Gaming AA
The Gauntlet D
The Iron Gauntlet J
Erastil's Irregulars P
The Bastard Sons of Daggermark S
Otium Explorator G
The Vigilant N
Librarians of Doom Q
Four Rivers Mercenary Corp T

@Lee Hammock, did you intend to give this impression?

Tyncale wrote:

Yes, so no direct mechanical influence of a character that is becoming low-rep to the Settlement he belongs to: he just will not be able to enter his own city anymore as long as the Leaders of that city keep the reputation treshold(and thus the quality of the buildings) on the same level.

Good thing to know that members going Low rep will not be able to disadvantage their fellow Settlement members in a direct way.

That is currently the plan. We don't want to let one shmuck with a bad attitude go on a PvP murder spree and ruin your town for you. As with everything we may change our minds once we see how things are playing out.

Current plan is the bonus is equal to your place in the list -10 as a percentage, min 0%. So settlements in the top ten places, not including the three early entrants, will not get a bonus for staying put. The 11th place settlement will get a 1% bonus per week it remains in place, while the last place one will get...probably a 15% bonus? In the case of ties we count all settlements with the same number of people as having a place equal to the first settlement on the list with that number of people. So everyone at 6 would get the same bonus.

This system is in place in the hopes of helping weaker settlements not get completely rooked, while not giving any additional aid to the big dogs who are already sitting pretty. Now there are sufficient variations between the top and bottom settlements that this bonus may not matter for everyone, but the longer you stay put the better off you are.

So you may have noticed we're trying a new overlay on the land rush map; this one goes from red to blue as a heat map indicating the size of the guild. So the redder the bigger, the bluer the smaller. If y'all prefer the old version, let us know, we can change it back.

Reputation does limit your ability to enter towns across the board. All towns, both player and NPC, have a minimum Reputation that you need to enter safely without being attacked, denied services, etc. For NPC settlements, especially ones like Thornkeep, this is pretty low. For Fort Inevitable, it will likely be higher. For player settlements, the powers that be determine the minimum Reputation to access the settlement safely, but higher end buildings require higher minimum Reputation. Thus high Reputation players can get access to better training, better crafting facilities, etc, while lower Reputation players will have access to those settlements that wish to be "wretched hives of scum and villainy" that will have more moderate offerings. Low Reputation players will also be evident to other players so they can be appropriately wary.

Only interactions with players affect Reputation.

So yes, if you are a maniac who kills indiscriminately, you will soon find yourself without much in the way of places to call home.

Corrected placements (affected about seven settlements):

Pax Golgotha W
Keepers of the Circle AB
Magistry K
Ozem's Vigil E
Dagedai Alliance L
Settlement: Aragon (CN) X
Forgeholm B
Hammerfall Z
The Phoenix Brotherhood O
Thod's Friends V
The Golden Flask F
Mystical Awakening C
Freevale I
Eastern Sun H
Hammerfist Clan M
Taur-im-Duinath Y
Les Compagnons AD
vVv Gaming AA
The Gauntlet D
The Iron Gauntlet J
Agents of Erastil AC
Dreamchasers U
Erastil's Irregulars P
Otium Explorator G
The Vigilant N
Brains and Brawn S
The Bastard Sons of Daggermark A
Green Mountain Militia Q
Librarians of Doom R
Phantasmagoria T

Everyone needs to have their land rush information in by midnight PDT. Results will be available probably some time around 10AM PDT Monday morning. Pretty much as fast as I can get them done in the morning (I currently have a sick toddler at home so I need to be there, not in the office until 2AM). The results so far are very interesting; we're going to have more conflicts than I expected!

In hopes of clarifying, we don't end intend to force any one to roleplay, but also we don't want names that are distracting for those who do choose to.

In some older versions of the map we had a Forested Mountains hex type, but mechanically that ended up being really ugly to balance (either you got enough of wood and metal resources that you could cover both easily, or you didn't get enough and the hexes were pointless), so we turned them into flat mountain hexes. The map icons didn't get updated as quickly as the balance math, so they showed up in some of the maps until recently.

How are you handling existing guilds with real-world or metagame references such as Spanish Inquisition, vVv Gaming, or the Bluebox Society whose motto is "Saving the Universe, one instance at a time"?

Generally speaking, those wouldn't pass muster for company or settlement names. It could be the Chelaxian Inquisition, or the Red Inquisition, etc. The other two would likely have to come up with some other options, though the motto we don't care about so much as it won't be displayed as much in game. We don't have a policy on mottos yet.

Lee Hammock wrote:

For the non-English names, one of the guidelines we've been working under in designing the game is avoiding non-English derived words as many languages that we would draw from (latin, for example) don't exist in Pathfinder. Which makes naming things like alchemy interesting since so much of it is Latinized (that and we found some awesome 15th century German wood cuts on sword fighting that we pulled attack names from but had to translate).

Now out of the Guilds we already have, things like the Pax Aeternum and Golgatha, those aren't what we're worried about. And the Finnish one I can't hope to type from memory works because it sounds like it could be in world, just means Brothers in Arms, and could go in a book. It's when we get into really long names, or names where people use the language to hide other rulebreaking, that we get into trouble.

Will this limitations expand to character names? I'm asking because this feels very much like forcing people to RP-conformity even if they have no interest in RP and I draw the line at character names because while I don't use any offensive or even provocative character names they are everything but RP conform with any kind of fiction.

Character names we're less worried about since really so many fantasy names are made up gibberish. If you name yourself some curse word in another language, sure, that's problematic, but otherwise we don't care much. We will care about the first two points on the earlier list though (names from other IPs and names referneceing real world people); we are not interested in having a game with Legolas, Legolass, Legollaass, or any of his cousins or Orlando Bloom in it so existing IP names or real person names will be disallowed when we find them.

1 and 2 are cool 4 is not as cool but understandable.

What is the reason for 3?

Mainly immersion for 3 and 4. For 3 there is no in world reason why you would reference game mechanics in a company or settlement name. It's not like the characters now they have an alignment or a Reflex bonus.

For the non-English names, one of the guidelines we've been working under in designing the game is avoiding non-English derived words as many languages that we would draw from (latin, for example) don't exist in Pathfinder. Which makes naming things like alchemy interesting since so much of it is Latinized (that and we found some awesome 15th century German wood cuts on sword fighting that we pulled attack names from but had to translate).

Now out of the Guilds we already have, things like the Pax Aeternum and Golgatha, those aren't what we're worried about. And the Finnish one I can't hope to type from memory works because it sounds like it could be in world, just means Brothers in Arms, and could go in a book. It's when we get into really long names, or names where people use the language to hide other rulebreaking, that we get into trouble.

For the Land Rush we are being pretty flexible with naming of guilds since they aren't the same social structures as will be in game, and we want people from existing multi-game guilds to be able to find their group. That said, once we get into Early Enrollment, we will not be so forgiving.

Names in PFO need to be world appropriate. Names that are not world appropriate will asked to be changed. Some rules for determining if your name is world appropriate:

1. It references characters, places, things, etc, from non-Pathfinder IP. If you had a company called the Rohirrim Militia or the Sadakar Reserves (hopefully spelling those right), those would not get approved. A good test is to think "Could Paizo publish my company/settlement name in a book without confusion or legal action?" If this answer is no, you need a new name.

2. No referencing real world things like languages, people, places, in your company/settlement name. If you want to specify your company/settlement is primarily for players in a specific country or that speak a specific language put it in the description, not the name.

3. No referencing game mechanics in your company/settlement name. No "Instance Runners" (not that we have instances) or "Crafting Skill 12+ Only" company names.

4. Names that are not in English will be dealt with on a case by case basis, but generally we would prefer to avoid them. Our languages don't exist in Golarion, but if it sounds cool and isn't immersion breaking it may work. No Stercus Accidit or other ridiculousness (yay! All those years of Latin finally were useful!).

Really the sniff test is could Paizo put this in a book, have it sound good, be legal, etc (not saying Paizo will or anything like that, but it is the best conceptual test).

Lee, that's because no on ever expects the Spanish Inquisition.

Yeah, I walked right into that one...

On the matter of ties, ties will be decided with older guilds getting the edge. I'll time the guilds from when we received the first guild application, rather than when we approved it.