Max settlement size.

[Lord of Elder Days]

From what I understand any settlement has the potential to grow into a city. I had for a long time assumed that all settlement sites were not equal. For example one site may have the potential to grow into a busy city while another could only support a moderately sized village. I think this would make prime settlement areas the focus of ambition for larger kingdoms and give a chance for relatively small groups to claim a small part of the world for their own.

[Nihimon]

Interesting idea to leave the low-value Settlement sites for the smaller guilds... Worth pondering.

[AvenaOats]

At a high level it might work like Ecological Succession with smaller settlements a stage towards larger as the player population increases and more settlements increase in development and complexity and memberships.

That said I can imagine a few differences:

- Smaller, highly specialised settlement with highly dedicated members
- Location allows smaller eg border of map or border of allied powerful kingdom in non-strategic area.

I thought size of site would be standard for all sites ie all equal potential? Though local resources would be different. I also wonder if the quality of the site will varying in terms of natural defences? Certainly with some hexes remoteness will increase where the topography inhibits road development.

[Korvak]

Interesting idea but I wouldn't like it if there was a cap on how big your town can get. If you start a small village in a "small village" zone with great players..& everyone wants to move there because you've made such a great community...does the game start telling people they can't move there because it will be too big? Or does the Village Counsel have to start taking applications for people to move in? Eventually getting to the point where that if someone "Kooler" than you submit's an application to move in..you get told to leave..so they can have your spot..??

["The Goodfellow"]

I agree with Korvak, what happens if the settlement starts small, with only a few members and that is fine, but then it becomes the "go to" spot and everyone wants to live there? Their max population/size cap would limit that. Other side, what if a large guild (like I think TEO is huge) takes a "big city spot" but then they fall apart and everyone leaves? Then we have a large spot taken by a failing guild. That might be able to be overcome by having a "smaller" city take it over and then that would increase their population cap and grow their settlement.

Maybe that would work now that I think of it. LOL funny how a train of thought develops while your typing.....

[Jazzlvraz]

Korvak wrote:

..."small village" zone...

What's a small village zone? I thought settlement hexes would simply support what was built in them, allowing for growth over time as appropriate; I've missed the mention of size-limits.

[Nihimon]

Jazzlvraz wrote:

What's a small village zone?

It's the idea proposed in the Original Post.

[Lord of Elder Days]

If a settlement grows populous enough that it threatens to bump into the cap I would say there are a number of choices. The first could be an application/wait listing approach. The second would be for the community to search out a new and larger settlement area and start anew. The most exciting option for me would be for a small up and coming group to target an old and decaying group that can no longer control their domain.

[Jazzlvraz]

Nihimon wrote:

It's the idea proposed in the Original Post.

Oops, me = idiot. Ignore me utterly.

[KitNyx]

An interesting quote...

Ryan Dancey wrote:

Andius wrote:

But rather quickly we are going to be looking to establish minor outposts outside our original settlement.

Like Inns, Watchtowers or Forts.

A "Settlement" is an advanced Fort. It's not a city. The important aspect of a Settlement isn't its construction, it's the people who are members of it. You could have a Settlement that had a very low population density but a very high membership.

Quote:

From the impression I have, you need a very large number of players to establish a kingdom, but from the impression I am given here you need a full fledged kingdom in order to have multiple settlements.

The size of a Settlement isn't a factor of its game mechanics. It's a factor of how many people you'll need to have protect it and supply it. The more you advance the Settlement's buildings, the more protection and supply you'll need. The riper a target you become, the more you'll have to work at ensuring you keep what you've built.

RyanD

[Lord of Elder Days]

My concern maybe unfounded but I worry that it will be very hard for a mid sized guild to carve out a modest holding without being swept away by a larger kingdom. Also another reason for suggesting grow limits on settlements is to combat urban sprawl. Rather than running into a fortified town every three hexes the countryside would be dotted with hamlets and villages. It's really another topic but I'd also like to see a substantial minimum distance between settlements implemented. Something like no settlement can be founded within x hexes of another.

[Wurner]

It would be most interesting to know how many active players you'd approximately need to be able to run a simple settlement. I too think that medium sized guilds may find it hard to manage on their own with much success.

The thought of traditional-sized guilds having to band together to manage a functional settlement is kind of appealing to me though. So much potential for negotiations, fallouts, democracy-vs.-dictatorship discussions, success stories, tragic epic fails etc.

[Nihimon]

@Lord of Elder Days, I can't find it right now and I need to leave for work, but Ryan has talked about designing the game so that Player Nations become prohibitively expensive once you reach a certain number of Settlements, so that they can't grow too large. I seem to recall him saying that would probably be around 5-7 Settlements.

That's still fairly large, and Ryan's been very clear that he expects there to be far more players who want their own Settlement than will be able to actually hold one.

[Jazzlvraz]

Nihimon wrote:

...I can't find it right now...

I can't either, but I do remember seeing it. I did find:

"We also need to have sinks that can remove huge sums of Coin from the economy to keep the older, richer characters from accumulating so much excess wealth to trigger "MUD-flation"; the spiral of rapidly inflating costs for higher-level gear. Wealth in MMOs tends to become concentrated in large social organizations so that is where we'll focus significant Coin sinks. Operating a large Settlement and/or Kingdom is going to be expensive."

and

"I think there will be many more people who want to run a Settlement than there will be Settlements. The difference will be which of those people are good enough social engineers to put together a large enough group that is cohesive enough to take and hold territory."

[Nihimon]

Found it.

Ryan Dancey (Goblinworks Blog: RESPECT: Find Out What It Means to Me!) wrote:

I also intend there to be a mechanic which scales the costs of running a Player Nation such that the first couple of Settlements don't impose much in the way of costs, but after that the cost to add another Settlement gets rapidly more expensive to the point where there's effectively a hard cap due to the inability to fund more expansion.