Goblinworks Blog: The River Kingdoms Go to War

[Junior Halfling]

How many towers can one company take?

I've been searching the forums for the announcement suspending or dropping the one company/one tower rule that Tork gave us in June but I can't find it. Do we know how this will shake out in EE?

[Xeen]

as many as you can hold.

[Junior Halfling]

Thanks Xeen. A quick follow up:

Will the game engine revert to the one company/one tower rule in EE?

Is there something from Goblinworks on this one way or another?

I hope I'm not just being pedantic; this seems like an important question for planning out our first moves in EE.

[Kadere]

It is safe to assume that the current one-to-many relationship for companies to towers will continue into early EE. Beyond that, hard to say.

[Xeen]

From what I read, It stays as it is now, which a company can hold as many towers as it can.

I think they realized that it was a bad idea to begin with (limiting one tower to a company).

[Caldeathe Baequiannia]

Yes. Much to the delight of those of us who gave up settlements because Ryan all-but-guaranteed we wouldn't be able to take more than 2-3 towers with 20 people.

[Xeen]

Potentially you could hold 20, with the old system, one per character. Or one character per company.

[Caldeathe Baequiannia]

He seemed pretty adamant that you couldn't take towers without six people in a company.

(edit: that's just an interpretation, but it was certainly shared by plenty of people.)

[KarlBob]

I just hope that companies will be able to lose towers in EE. If the PVP window remains broken, the first days of EE will see some companies engage in a mad scramble to claim every tower on the map.

[Urman]

I don't know if the idea was bad (limiting one per company), or if it was running into the player resistance to collecting multiple companies in each settlement.

I think of all of PFO's ideas, the idea that there are two levels of "guilds", that is companies and settlements, and settlements are collections of companies... I think that concept is pretty foreign to both MMO and TT players. It's not the most foreign concept we've seen, but was the most foreign we faced in the Land Rush.

[Ryan Dancey]

I have been, I think, as clear as possible in telling people that the ability to take and hold territory in the game is going to be something that large cohesive groups do, not something that small groups do. I have not, as far as I know, ever told anyone anything about the tower mechanics that was not in the blogs we've posted about them.

If someone wanted to act on something I said that they felt implied a rule, they should have asked straight out if that was an actual rule, or a misunderstanding.

My opinion is that even in the very early stages of War of Towers you will not be holding towers without large organized forces. The idea that there's going to be an unclaimed, uncontested Tower on that map after the first day you can capture towers strikes me as highly unlikely. The idea that one character will be able to hold a Tower for any meaningful length of time also strikes me as so unlikely as to be not worth planning for.

Some group will, I am 99.999% certain, make sure to show up at any such towers with sufficient force to take them every single day.

[KarlBob]

We'll see about unclaimed towers. With the NAP brewing, many settlements may be content to leave a less organized neighbor's inner ring unclaimed on Day One. Non-signatories, on the other hand...

[KarlBob]

Speaking of Towers, please don't give them any game effects until they can be claimed and taken away. Without a functional PVP window, an organized but underhanded group could seize a huge advantage by claiming 20 or 30 towers within the first hours of EE. (Or the first few hours of the second week of EE, if the blog post remains accurate. Thanks, Caldeathe.)

(Not to say that you haven't thought of this, but it's a very worrisome possibility under the current system.)

[Caldeathe Baequiannia]

The blog said the war won't start until the Second week of EE, but your point remains valid.

[KarlBob]

Caldeathe Baequiannia wrote:

The blog said the war won't start until the Second week of EE, but your point remains valid.

At that time there was no indication that we'd see a WoT preview during Alpha. Since we received a preview, I've been assuming that the timeline might be different than what the blog said.

Previous post edited to include the second week possibility.

[Caldeathe Baequiannia]

The mention in the blog was not about availability, but about giving people a chance to get in and make sure their systems were up-and-running ahead of time. Many people are simply not bothering with alpha and we need a chance to get our footing as groups and settlements.

[KarlBob]

Caldeathe Baequiannia wrote:

The mention in the blog was not about availability, but about giving people a chance to get in and make sure their systems were up-and-running ahead of time. Many people are simply not bothering with alpha and we need a chance to get our footing as groups and settlements.

Also true.