Howdy, Stranger!
Categories
- 4.8K All Categories
- 4.3K Life in Lusternia
- 453 Announce Posts
- 75 Event Posts
- 1.7K Common Grounds
- 589 Q&A
- 83 Combat Overhaul
- 1.5K World Library
- 86 Combat Logs
- 870 Event Scrolls
- 403 Mechanic's Corner
- 329 Ideas
- 314 Last Chance Trading Post
- 478 Life Outside of Lusternia
- 9 Forum News
- 275 The Real World
- 94 Meet and Greet
- 37 The Funnies
- 63 Mafia Hideout
Aethercolonies, or a New Branch of Conflict
This was mostly prompted by me reading through some old threads about things that people wanted to see and perceived problems with Lusternia which got some ideas flowing. Recognizing that this is a huge project that will probably never happen, I still throw those ideas out there for discussion and inspiration. Beware the wall of text.
Section divisions and the names of ideas that I think are important are BOLDED.
THE GOAL
To add a new form of PvP to the game which
-is reasonably easy for people to get into.
-integrates multiple aspects of the game. It seems like there's a few different player types that are almost independent subcultures who each have their own sorts of competition. I'd like to see something that makes the different groups work together more. The main groups I'm thinking about here are the BASHERS, PKERS, QUESTERS, and CULTURERS
-has meaningful consequences. Power and commodities don't really seem to matter, and I think there should be something to incentivize competition that people care about.
Secondarily, to provide a major goldsink and commsink, ideally at the org level. Cities have a lot of gold. I'd like to see them actually care about taxes and have a reason to do fundraising things like the Hallifax art auctions. Since gold enters the system mostly from bashing (I'm including influencing in here, since they're fundamentally similar) this is one way to integrate the BASHERS into the system. Using comms also ties it to another form of competition, namely revolts, which I think is a good thing. I like interlocked systems.
THE FLUFF
One of my favorite things about Lusternia flavor-wise is the fluff behind village influencing. It's got a really cool cold war vibe to it, with the empire building through influence. It kind of has a colonialism aspect too, and that's what I want to emphasize with this.
The idea is that the orgs are trying to expand their powerbase by absorbing minor powers into their sphere of influence. Not as tribute paying vassal states like the villages, necessarily, but more like puppet states and protectorates that are only sort of independent. I'm calling these "aethercolonies" because I think the best and easiest place to put them into the game would be as minor aetherbubbles. I think adds a nice piece of age of discovery style colonial fluff to them, plus it helps make them distinct from villages.
Once an org holds an aethercolony, they get that aethercolony's rewards until somebody else takes it from them.
THE MECHANICS
Each org has an INFLUENCE SCORE with each aethercolony. When the org with the highest score is X points ahead of the org in second place, they control the aethercolony. If nobody is winning by that margin, the aethercolony is neutral. Scores change up or down in response to player actions, and they can go negative. They decay by Y percent towards zero each year. The percentile decay is important both to keep people from getting an unassailable margin of control and to help make this an ongoing goldsink.
The score is broken up into categories. The influence score used to determine who holds the aethercolony is the total of these subscores. The scores are as follows: MILITARY, ECONOMIC, POLITICAL, CULTURAL.
How does one adjust these scores? I'm glad you asked.
MILITARY: This one is for the pkers and the bashers. Killing a player during an event (think revolts, aetherflares, wildnodes, that kind of thing. Basically something that happens for a certain interval of time, instead of being available whenever a player wants) adds to this score. Dying during an event reduces it. Furthermore, it gets an event where some number of mobs spawn in the aethercolony and people score points for turning in their corpses to some designated npc in the aethercolony. Two main aspects to this event. The first is bashing them quickly, and the second is surviving to deliver their bodies, since they drop on death. I think the nature of this event puts the primary focus on killing players, and the bashing as a secondary aspect.
ECONOMIC: This one is mostly a goldsink, so it's primarily for the bashers. Orgs can invest money and commodities into "public works" to essentially buy this score. Put a cap on how many points an org can get through this to prevent it from simply coming down to who has the most commodity gems in their manse, although ideally the costs would be high enough to limit how much people would put in anyway. As an event for this, commodity style quests that only use things from within the aethercolony could open up for some amount of time. Race to finish the quests to get point and avoid getting killed while you do it, while trying to foil the opposing teams' quests and kill their people.
POLITICAL: This is for the bashers and the questers. First, let this score increase whenever people influence the npcs in the aethercolony, just like village feelings in the villages. Don't make an invidividual influence have a huge effect, just give a few points for each successful beg/weaken/empower/seduce/paranoia whenever anyone does it. This makes it reasonably easy for anyone to contribute to the effort, and it's pretty safe. Plus, you can do it anytime you want. As an event, you can temporarily boost the points per influence. If the aethercolony includes any honors quests that are accessable to anyone, make them give points too. In terms of time/difficulty, I think you should put them on the scale of the hand quests, as the sort of thing that one person can do but will go faster if a whole org is working on it. If they're on that scale, make sure to make it so orgs can interfere with each other.
CULTURAL: This is for the culture people. Whenever an org publishes a book or produces a play, they can dedicate it a single aethercolony to increase this score for that aethercolony. If that book/play later wins prestige, it gives another boost to this score. I cannot conceive of a way to do an event based on the culture mechanics, but if possible this category should get one too.
Those get everyone involved in the effort, but it still keeps them fairly separate. So, here's what I propose to get them more interlocked.
First, diminishing returns on points in each category. The higher a score is, the less you get per action that increases it. This forces orgs to try to compete in as many categories as possible.
Second, add in modifiers such that actions in one category can effect how actions in other categories are scored. Let's start with cultural. For some amount of time (my instincts say one year) after a book is dedicated to an aethercolony, each kill during events gives more military points, to represent heroic poems and allegorical readings of the published works that glorify the org. You could make plays do the same thing, but I like the idea of having plays and books effect different categories so that orgs want to do both. So have them work the same way, but have them boost political gains per influence instead. Similarly, make having a high military score slightly boost gains for publishing, since authors look better if they're associated with a glorious and powerful nation.
Link economic and political by making the economic score provide a boost to the power of influencing attacks based on how high the score is. Makes sense that the people from the richer and presumably more powerful factions would be more politically influential, after all. If you make the mobs tough enough that they provide decent xp, you could even make this branch of competition be good for grinding out essence, especially after the power boost from economic, which would encourage more participation. Make this one go both ways too, such that having high political gets you more bang for your buck on buying economic points.
I think that links the different categories reasonably well without making it too complicated. But as it is, that just makes this into a race to score points. There isn't much direct competition outside of events, and we should add some that works all the time. To add that in, we give people a way to reduce the scores of their opponents. As a general rule, I think a single action to gain points should give more than its closest equivalent that takes away points removes, until an org hits the diminishing returns point. This would make it so that it's a better use of time to boost your own org than to hit an opponent unless that opponent is doing well already. Combine this with putting a floor on negative scores and it will prevent orgs from getting hit too hard while they're down, so to speak.
Military has its negative action inherently with people getting killed, but the others need new things.
ECONOMIC: Let org pay to reduce the score of another org. If increasing this is building monuments to your own glory and public works with your name on them, reducing it is building monuments that commemorate that time the other org would really like to forget.
POLITICAL: Lose a debate in an aethercolony, lose some points. This encourages people to interfere with each other's influencing here. You can also add in quests that reduce a target's score when completed. You could also have those quests reduce their rate of gain for some amount of time instead, which might be more interesting, especially if it applies to all categories and not just political.
CULTURE: When publishing a book, you can use it to reduce target opponent's score instead of increasing your own. Similar to political, you could also use it to reduce their rate of gain.
I think that covers more or less everything with scoring and the competition itself. I think there's enough there for all sort of competition, for everyone to get involved, and for there to be interesting org level macrostrategy.
REWARDS
All that's left is making people think this is worth doing. You can, and probably should, have the standard power tribute for holding an aethercolony, but that isn't tempting on its own, so here are some other options.
First, have honor quests that are only open to members of the controlling org. People like getting honor lines, so I think this would make them want to compete to get access to them. Make them have org level benefits, like giving power on completion, to make it more tempting at an org level. You might also have them give out special temporary artifacts with small effects, like +25% XP or something along those lines, to make people want to do them more than once.
Second option, give them their own set of constructs similar to the ones for the aetherflares Give each org a choice of two or three for each aethercolony, and make each aethercolony have a unique set to encourage people not to just turtle up on one aethercolony. You can even specialize the aethercolonies with this to provide differently themed benefits. Maybe one gives boosts to things like XP gains and other progression type things, while another might focus on bonuses to aetherships deeded to the org, providing (as an example) the org's choice of either a boost to turret damage or a boost to hull strength.
Third option, give each one its own power that it provides to the controller. Like constructs, but bigger and without choice. I'd like to see these tie back into other forms of conflict. One could give a bonus to village influencing in revolts, another might give a small boost to the library points of books that are published while it's controlled. This is another chance for interlocking systems!
These aren't mutually exclusive, either. You could absolutely use more than one of them, probably option one with either two or three.
So there we are. I think this has potential, aside from being an undeniably huge project. Lots of things it could add to the game, and lots of ways for everyone to get involved and have a united effort for an organization. Plus, I think that while there's room for alliances in events, it generally encourages orgs to compete individually, which prevents a super alliance from dominating a smaller one too much. That makes it easy for people to get into it and compete at the org level too, not just as individuals.
Discuss.
Section divisions and the names of ideas that I think are important are BOLDED.
THE GOAL
To add a new form of PvP to the game which
-is reasonably easy for people to get into.
-integrates multiple aspects of the game. It seems like there's a few different player types that are almost independent subcultures who each have their own sorts of competition. I'd like to see something that makes the different groups work together more. The main groups I'm thinking about here are the BASHERS, PKERS, QUESTERS, and CULTURERS
-has meaningful consequences. Power and commodities don't really seem to matter, and I think there should be something to incentivize competition that people care about.
Secondarily, to provide a major goldsink and commsink, ideally at the org level. Cities have a lot of gold. I'd like to see them actually care about taxes and have a reason to do fundraising things like the Hallifax art auctions. Since gold enters the system mostly from bashing (I'm including influencing in here, since they're fundamentally similar) this is one way to integrate the BASHERS into the system. Using comms also ties it to another form of competition, namely revolts, which I think is a good thing. I like interlocked systems.
THE FLUFF
One of my favorite things about Lusternia flavor-wise is the fluff behind village influencing. It's got a really cool cold war vibe to it, with the empire building through influence. It kind of has a colonialism aspect too, and that's what I want to emphasize with this.
The idea is that the orgs are trying to expand their powerbase by absorbing minor powers into their sphere of influence. Not as tribute paying vassal states like the villages, necessarily, but more like puppet states and protectorates that are only sort of independent. I'm calling these "aethercolonies" because I think the best and easiest place to put them into the game would be as minor aetherbubbles. I think adds a nice piece of age of discovery style colonial fluff to them, plus it helps make them distinct from villages.
Once an org holds an aethercolony, they get that aethercolony's rewards until somebody else takes it from them.
THE MECHANICS
Each org has an INFLUENCE SCORE with each aethercolony. When the org with the highest score is X points ahead of the org in second place, they control the aethercolony. If nobody is winning by that margin, the aethercolony is neutral. Scores change up or down in response to player actions, and they can go negative. They decay by Y percent towards zero each year. The percentile decay is important both to keep people from getting an unassailable margin of control and to help make this an ongoing goldsink.
The score is broken up into categories. The influence score used to determine who holds the aethercolony is the total of these subscores. The scores are as follows: MILITARY, ECONOMIC, POLITICAL, CULTURAL.
How does one adjust these scores? I'm glad you asked.
MILITARY: This one is for the pkers and the bashers. Killing a player during an event (think revolts, aetherflares, wildnodes, that kind of thing. Basically something that happens for a certain interval of time, instead of being available whenever a player wants) adds to this score. Dying during an event reduces it. Furthermore, it gets an event where some number of mobs spawn in the aethercolony and people score points for turning in their corpses to some designated npc in the aethercolony. Two main aspects to this event. The first is bashing them quickly, and the second is surviving to deliver their bodies, since they drop on death. I think the nature of this event puts the primary focus on killing players, and the bashing as a secondary aspect.
ECONOMIC: This one is mostly a goldsink, so it's primarily for the bashers. Orgs can invest money and commodities into "public works" to essentially buy this score. Put a cap on how many points an org can get through this to prevent it from simply coming down to who has the most commodity gems in their manse, although ideally the costs would be high enough to limit how much people would put in anyway. As an event for this, commodity style quests that only use things from within the aethercolony could open up for some amount of time. Race to finish the quests to get point and avoid getting killed while you do it, while trying to foil the opposing teams' quests and kill their people.
POLITICAL: This is for the bashers and the questers. First, let this score increase whenever people influence the npcs in the aethercolony, just like village feelings in the villages. Don't make an invidividual influence have a huge effect, just give a few points for each successful beg/weaken/empower/seduce/paranoia whenever anyone does it. This makes it reasonably easy for anyone to contribute to the effort, and it's pretty safe. Plus, you can do it anytime you want. As an event, you can temporarily boost the points per influence. If the aethercolony includes any honors quests that are accessable to anyone, make them give points too. In terms of time/difficulty, I think you should put them on the scale of the hand quests, as the sort of thing that one person can do but will go faster if a whole org is working on it. If they're on that scale, make sure to make it so orgs can interfere with each other.
CULTURAL: This is for the culture people. Whenever an org publishes a book or produces a play, they can dedicate it a single aethercolony to increase this score for that aethercolony. If that book/play later wins prestige, it gives another boost to this score. I cannot conceive of a way to do an event based on the culture mechanics, but if possible this category should get one too.
Those get everyone involved in the effort, but it still keeps them fairly separate. So, here's what I propose to get them more interlocked.
First, diminishing returns on points in each category. The higher a score is, the less you get per action that increases it. This forces orgs to try to compete in as many categories as possible.
Second, add in modifiers such that actions in one category can effect how actions in other categories are scored. Let's start with cultural. For some amount of time (my instincts say one year) after a book is dedicated to an aethercolony, each kill during events gives more military points, to represent heroic poems and allegorical readings of the published works that glorify the org. You could make plays do the same thing, but I like the idea of having plays and books effect different categories so that orgs want to do both. So have them work the same way, but have them boost political gains per influence instead. Similarly, make having a high military score slightly boost gains for publishing, since authors look better if they're associated with a glorious and powerful nation.
Link economic and political by making the economic score provide a boost to the power of influencing attacks based on how high the score is. Makes sense that the people from the richer and presumably more powerful factions would be more politically influential, after all. If you make the mobs tough enough that they provide decent xp, you could even make this branch of competition be good for grinding out essence, especially after the power boost from economic, which would encourage more participation. Make this one go both ways too, such that having high political gets you more bang for your buck on buying economic points.
I think that links the different categories reasonably well without making it too complicated. But as it is, that just makes this into a race to score points. There isn't much direct competition outside of events, and we should add some that works all the time. To add that in, we give people a way to reduce the scores of their opponents. As a general rule, I think a single action to gain points should give more than its closest equivalent that takes away points removes, until an org hits the diminishing returns point. This would make it so that it's a better use of time to boost your own org than to hit an opponent unless that opponent is doing well already. Combine this with putting a floor on negative scores and it will prevent orgs from getting hit too hard while they're down, so to speak.
Military has its negative action inherently with people getting killed, but the others need new things.
ECONOMIC: Let org pay to reduce the score of another org. If increasing this is building monuments to your own glory and public works with your name on them, reducing it is building monuments that commemorate that time the other org would really like to forget.
POLITICAL: Lose a debate in an aethercolony, lose some points. This encourages people to interfere with each other's influencing here. You can also add in quests that reduce a target's score when completed. You could also have those quests reduce their rate of gain for some amount of time instead, which might be more interesting, especially if it applies to all categories and not just political.
CULTURE: When publishing a book, you can use it to reduce target opponent's score instead of increasing your own. Similar to political, you could also use it to reduce their rate of gain.
I think that covers more or less everything with scoring and the competition itself. I think there's enough there for all sort of competition, for everyone to get involved, and for there to be interesting org level macrostrategy.
REWARDS
All that's left is making people think this is worth doing. You can, and probably should, have the standard power tribute for holding an aethercolony, but that isn't tempting on its own, so here are some other options.
First, have honor quests that are only open to members of the controlling org. People like getting honor lines, so I think this would make them want to compete to get access to them. Make them have org level benefits, like giving power on completion, to make it more tempting at an org level. You might also have them give out special temporary artifacts with small effects, like +25% XP or something along those lines, to make people want to do them more than once.
Second option, give them their own set of constructs similar to the ones for the aetherflares Give each org a choice of two or three for each aethercolony, and make each aethercolony have a unique set to encourage people not to just turtle up on one aethercolony. You can even specialize the aethercolonies with this to provide differently themed benefits. Maybe one gives boosts to things like XP gains and other progression type things, while another might focus on bonuses to aetherships deeded to the org, providing (as an example) the org's choice of either a boost to turret damage or a boost to hull strength.
Third option, give each one its own power that it provides to the controller. Like constructs, but bigger and without choice. I'd like to see these tie back into other forms of conflict. One could give a bonus to village influencing in revolts, another might give a small boost to the library points of books that are published while it's controlled. This is another chance for interlocking systems!
These aren't mutually exclusive, either. You could absolutely use more than one of them, probably option one with either two or three.
So there we are. I think this has potential, aside from being an undeniably huge project. Lots of things it could add to the game, and lots of ways for everyone to get involved and have a united effort for an organization. Plus, I think that while there's room for alliances in events, it generally encourages orgs to compete individually, which prevents a super alliance from dominating a smaller one too much. That makes it easy for people to get into it and compete at the org level too, not just as individuals.
Discuss.
Any sufficiently advanced pun is indistinguishable from comedy.
2
(c) Iron Realms Entertainment 2012.
Comments
Big no to any kind of negative effect coming to a whole org due to members dying in PvP.
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
The divine voice of Avechna, the Avenger reverberates powerfully, "Congratulations, Morkarion, you are the Bringer of Death indeed."
You see Estarra the Eternal shout, "Morkarion is no more! Mourn the mortal! But welcome True Ascendant Karlach, of the Realm of Death!
Glom worked enough to put in 1000 points, Celest got 800 points, Seren (lazy bastards) only got 200 points, Halli got 1200 by cheating with the timeline, Gaudi forgot about it completely except towards the end and managed to scramble together 300 points, and Mag got 700. Thus, the total amount of points gotten was 4200. With 24 bonuses, they'd be worth 175 per.
By reducing the scores of the highest org by 175 24 times (and ties benefiting the one with the fewest bonuses), it'd mean Halli would get 7 bonuses, Glom would get 6, Celest 4, Mag 4, Gaudi 2 and Seren 1. In fact, Seren could've gotten as few as 125 points and still gotten a bonus.
This would distribute it in a rather fair fashion, and it would encourage underdogs to fight as well; it wouldn't matter if you had the fewest points, you'd just have to have enough points.
As I said, this would require a _lot_ of fleshing out, but that's the general concept of it. Could probably make it mesh with aethercolonies somehow, as long as they all provided roughly equal resources (and the distribution was random).
Didn't think of that, yeah. I didn't mean to say that flares deaths and such count for this, just that those are examples of events. The only ones that should matter for military score are the ones directly related to the aethercolonies, but that still has the same problem. Definitely take that part out.
@Ssaliss I like it, as long as there's a fluff integration into the game for it. Not sure how I feel about different bonuses being handed out randomly, but if you have a lot of different ones there probably isn't a better way to do it. They'd have to be individually pretty small, too. Definitely flesh it out. There's a good core there.
I don't think it'd be possible to set buffs to affect mobs alone, then again I've been wrong about many things before. And I see your point with setting things against allowing one to min-max with Mork.
I'll have to think on this one for a while, at least on the rewards aspect. As for the org level benefits I think it might be best to force each one to pick one benefit alone to draw from the most. I.e. Hallifax takes over the Aethercolony with its underhanded tampering of the timeline, and since it gets the largest slice of the delicious pie it has to figure out what benefit it'll draw from most from it, while the other benefits take the back seat and scale down from there. Though this is the only biggest buffs I can see being gleaned from the Aethercolonies with the constraints against Mork in place.
I'll try to flesh more of this more out later, I'm in the middle of the move so I'm unable to add more to this outside the rewards aspect.
I like the Cankermore minigame. I would very much like a competitive version of it. And I think you could add in that competitive version as an org level competition.
You have a set of aethercolonies for the orgs to compete over. Every so often (I would tentatively say that they should be about half as frequent as revolts, to allow for buildup time as described later) one of these aethercolonies will be up for grabs. Cycle through which of the aethercolonies is available exactly like villages/flares do.
All of the orgs then have an (ideally expanded, and described below) opportunity to compete in a Cankermore minigame. Everyone org against every other, the last one standing claims the aethercolony.
So, how do we want to change that minigame for this? A change to the controls would be nice, although not strictly necessary. Instead of walking around and SAYing commands, anyone who is giving troop orders gets a map with their troops marked on it, and can ORDER <TROOP> TO <POSITION>.
Institute a time limit of 10 seconds or so for each turn to keep things moving.
In the interest of getting more people to be able to do this part, allow more than one (for argument, I shall say three. This is arbitrary) person in each org to give commands. Have up to three people lock in command positions, and split up the org's troops among them. Each one gets one move per turn. If less than the maximum number of people have locked in command positions at the start of the competition, divide the troops amongst whoever has locked in as equally as possible, and give one of them an extra move (or two extra, if there's only one person!) to make sure that every team gets three moves per turn. The ability to lock in a command position is restricted to the Viceroy (see below) and his aides, so that it can be limited if an org sees fit.
If no members of an org lock in a command slot, the AI that is currently used for Cankermore (or an upgraded version) commands that side. This is a disadvantage, but if an org starts with an overwhelming advantage (See below!) they might still be able to win.
That doesn't get many people involved on its own, though, and it has no combat, but we can fix that problem! In the aethercolony area itself, start an capture the flag type combat event. Every X turns, an item will spawn in a random room in the colony. This item is dropped upon the death of the carrier. If this item is brought to some NPC, your org spawns a few extra troops in the minigame. This would result in the noncoms playing Cankermore, and the combatants competing to give buffs to their team. Something for everyone!
Next thing, every org should have a unique set of troops. This could just be names and be a flavor thing, but if you want to add more complexity and room for strategy to the minigame, you can change up the troop types accordingly. I'll give an example.
You can designate certain points on the minigame's board as being different types of terrain, like water or forests. Each of these can provide a modifier to the power of troops in that space. If you do that, different orgs can have different modifiers on their troops. Celest could, on the whole, be stronger on water spaces than not, but take a penalty in forest spaces.
-----------------------------------------
That's the competition that happens on the aethercolony itself to decide who claims it. If that was added, I would be very happy. But it still doesn't integrate in different game systems very well, and it absolutely can. Here's how:
Organizations do not start with equal numbers of troops. Instead, the starting troop numbers are determined by actions taken by players in the time before the minigame starts. This means that an org with a small but diligent population can prepare heavily to make up for the numerical disadvantage in fighting, and helps protect big orgs from suffering if a match happens to trigger at an awkward time for their org, since they'd also have a size advantage in preparing.
If you wanted, you could tie government type into this. Each government type could provide a bonus to troop production from a given action or set thereof.
Link each troop type to one action. Performing that action gives you X troops of that type on that bubble. You can even link the fluff description of the troops to the action, and I'll give examples for Hallifax. Have them be as follows:
Culture: Publishing 1000 words in the library, scoring X stage activity points, or wining prestige gives Y troops of the culture type on a aethercolony chosen by the Viceroy. Hallifax might fluff this as 'Vanguard Collectivists' who have been swayed to Collectivist ideology and want to violently align their society with it. Think Che Guevara types.
Economic: An org can buy a troop of this type for a given aethercolony for X gold and Y coms. You can vary the coms invovled by org to fit the fluff. This should be capped to prevent it from overwhelming the other types. Hallifax might fluff these as 'Aetherspace Company Agents', something along the lines of the East India Company.
Military: Give every org some equal number of these for free to make sure they can compete in every match if they want, albeit with low odds of success. Spawn this type when the flag is delivered by combatants during the match. Hallifax might fluff these as 'Colonial Commissars', regular troops that have been deployed to help seize control.
Furthermore, there should be two special types that are the same across all orgs.
Aethercolony: Give every aethercolony a set of bashable creatures and at least one quest. Turning in X creatures or completing the quest gives your org Y troops of that aethercolony's type. Each colony should have different troop types for this.
Gnomish: @Karlach mentioned in another thread that very little aethership combat happens outside of the occasional flare, which is bad. To help solve that problem, you could add in another event that uses aetherships. When that event triggers, a few points are designated in aetherspace. One for the Gnafia, one for the traders, and some number as starting points. Any aethership can pick up a macguffin at a start point. If they deliver it to the Gnafia point, they get X Gnafia troops for the Viceroy to distribute to aethercolonies. If they deliver a macguffin to the trader point, they get trader troops instead. The event lasts for either Y minutes or until Z macguffins have been delivered (I can see upsides to both. Time limits prevent it from lasting too long if it's strongly contested, and until Z macguffins prevents an uncontested event from giving one org an overwhelming troop advantage.) People want to fight to prevent enemy ships making deliveries, but there might also be strategic value in launching a bunch of small ships to make the delivery runs without fighting, and accepting that some will get destroyed. Balance it so that this choice is available, because choices are interesting.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Let's talk rewards. Winning should carry some, after all.
First, this requires a new minister position, which I've referred to as the 'Viceroy' above. You could do all sorts of other names too, like 'Admiral of the Aetherfleet' or 'Minister of the Colonies' or any number of other ones. In addition to the powers mentioned above, the viceroy makes the choices for rewards, and has general jurisdiction over aethercolony things.
Each aethercolony gives three rewards:
The first is easy access. The org gets something like a construct built somewhere, and people can touch it to go to the aethercolony. Other orgs have to use an aethership/bubblix equivalent/any other method you'd use to get around in aetherspace.
The second is a passive bonus. Each aethercolony should have a different one, for reasons I'll get into in a bit.
The third is a choice of related, but distinct passive bonuses, chosen by the viceroy. The viceroy should probably either have to pay some cost to change passives or else only be able to do it once after a given match. All of these passive bonuses should ideally tie into other systems of the game.
Let's have an example. Say there's an aethercolony with fluff based on the Musaeum at Alexandria. With fluff like that, it makes sense to link it to culture. It might have a set of passives like this. Please remember that all numbers are somewhat arbitrary for the sake of example and should not be taken as being terribly important to the fundamentals of the suggestion.
ALWAYS: +2 to the value of each bard and scholar.
CHOICE: +150 culture points OR each book published while this power is chosen gets +1 library weight per 1000 words
This leads to interesting choices at a lot of stages. Say there's an org like Hallifax that's strong in culture but weaker in other areas. Do they want to prioritize taking this aethercolony, in order to maintain that advantage, or do they want to focus on other ones to help shore up their weaker areas? If they decide to go after this one and they win, do they want the short-term boost to culture points or do they want to use this to boost their growth in the longer term?
The first of those is the more interesting one, I think. It allows org, if they want, to try to win aethercolonies by generating troops through whatever they're best at and use those colonies to shore up their weak points, but it also gives them a chance to reinforce their strong areas if that's what the people in that org prefer. Some orgs might even focus all of their resources on one or two aethercolonies that subsidize really weak areas and ignore others (to get extra time to build up troops), which creates an interesting dynamic from people valuing different aethercolonies differently.
You want to keep the passives fairly small, of course. Take the bonus to library weight as an example, since that'll almost certainly be the most controversial type of bonus. That's pretty small, but it is enough to help. People still have to write for it to be useful, and the people who publish more will still have a larger library for doing so. But, it will tilt things in favor of the side that holds it on the rare occasions when the library scores are close in a category, and if an org's library is very far behind it is enough to be just a little easier to catch to the others.
-----------------------
The short version of this is that Portius wants competitive Cankermore, and that could be implemented in a way that produces org level competitions that involve a lot of people, even ones who are into different parts of the game.
Ultimately, your idea as is would be shot down, because it does come somewhat across as designing a game for you to win. This would be conflict without PK for example, where's the appeal to fighters? Also hunters and influencers would be forced to compete over a limited resource of units, and a single quest.
Purely DA here, but your idea needs to flesh out to count for things that levels the playing field for everyone, and doesn't just become something only few people bother with. As Siam said in a previous thread, culture is its own system, you'd be trying to expand it into the conflict and territory setting here, and with quite an advantage.
Also reading previous posts before this, there's constraints against me? oO
The divine voice of Avechna, the Avenger reverberates powerfully, "Congratulations, Morkarion, you are the Bringer of Death indeed."
You see Estarra the Eternal shout, "Morkarion is no more! Mourn the mortal! But welcome True Ascendant Karlach, of the Realm of Death!
"That doesn't get many people involved on its own, though, and it has no combat, but we can fix that problem! In the aethercolony area itself, start an capture the flag type combat event. Every X turns, an item will spawn in a random room in the colony. This item is dropped upon the death of the carrier. If this item is brought to some NPC, your org spawns a few extra troops in the minigame. This would result in the noncoms playing Cankermore, and the combatants competing to give buffs to their team. Something for everyone!"
Of the existing systems, that's probably closest to wildnodes, although based on turning in an objective instead of holding it. You'd want to scale it so that each turn in of the flag provided enough troops to be meaningful without being excessive, of course. Ideally I think it'd be set up so that a very strong combatant effort could make up for less prep, and vice versa.
Prepping through combat is a difficult thing to set up. As far as I can tell it has to be through an event, either scheduled or semi-random, to make sure that there are enough people there for combat to actually happen. You could absolutely add some number of those events into the prep stage if desired to increase the role of pk, if limiting it to the Cankermore stage seems insufficient. I'd be wary of adding too many for fear of clogging Lusternia with too many conflict events, since they can make people feel obligated to abandon something they'd rather be doing, but adding some wouldn't be unreasonable if pk looks like it needs more weight in this.
As for the bashing/influencing people, economic troops are ultimately their thing. Most gold enters the game through bashing drops, after all, so anything that involves paying gold will ultimately come from bashing, either from bashing the gold directly or through selling things to people who did. There'd be a period early on in implementation where this isn't the case, of course, since orgs have big treasuries to work through, but after the greater part of that stockpile was filtered out bashing would become more relevant for the economic troops. This in addition to the aethercolony troops, which are relevant to both bashers and questers.
The proposed systems of troop generation and flag capturing encompass questing, bashing/influencing, culture, combat, and aetherspace competition (which is kind of its own thing but also kind of like bashing and combat in some ways. Best to classify it on its own, I think.) which I think covers more or less everything, unless there's something I've forgotten.
--------------------
RE: culture being it's own system, I am of the opinion that that is something of a problem. For reasons that I'm guessing are pretty well known at this point, I think that encouraging the different systems to cross over with each other to some extent is a good thing.
----------------------
As an aside @Marcella the RNG is definitely the biggest downside on Cankermore. More troops split into more groups instead of the four groups of ten you get on Cankermore will probably help reduce the swinginess on that to a reasonable level, though.