War

I would have edited this part on, but I feel it deserves a separate post.

Consider this option as well:

Top players can start to be overwhelmed with the micromanagement of their towns as they get LOTS of towns.  Players who are knocked out of the game (or even new players to the game) are tremendously excited but are slowed tremendously by the lack of resources and the pace of the game (at first).

What if you introduced some system where a player could be governor of another player's Cities?

Example:

Player A is a long-time player with 6 villages.  He can choose to appoint a player as his governor.  This player gets control of ONE of his cities.  Now this works great!  He can learn from the veteran player, he can get resources shipped to him, etc.  And the veteran player doesn't have to manage another town, lessening his burden in a sense, though keeping his overall power.

Who can be governors?  Players who have only ONE town of their own.  Or, players who have been destroyed and only have 1 town left.  

This way, if alliances are at war and someone gets knocked out, a player who lost all his towns can still jump right back in the game by controlling a town as a governor, while he nurses his own demolished empire back up.

It would seem to solve many problems:  

-makes the game easier to manage for longtime veterans who have lots of towns to manage

-makes the game fun for new players, especially being taken under the wing of veteran players / alliances.  Not only do they learn the game faster, have questions answered and likely get supplies to build, but they feel community connections right away

-gives players who get destroyed a reason to not get demoralized and quit the game.

Anyways, I hope these ideas give the GMs some ideas.  Helluva game, keep it up.

-Grun

It would be optional.  Nobody needs governors if they don't want to. 

I just see it as a fun option to solve a key problem:

How do you keep the game fun?

Well, wars are fun.  And winning wars is pure satisfaction, so removing that would suck.  (my opinion)

But being sent to square one is brutal.  How do you keep players playing, and willing to rebuild?

- give em something to do as governors of an ally (friends) town

- or give total noobs a reason to be taken under the wing of veterans who teach em stuff

It's a rough idea.  The staff could take it in any direction they'd want... but it could solve some concern areas in a fun way.  And the # of governors you can appoint or the fine details are up for discussion.  The core idea though, seems solid.

(as for players:  the only real annoying thing would be a player building stuff in places you normally don't build them.  If for instance someone lays all their towns out the same way with the buildings in exactly the same spot - it will be annoying to have a tavern where the barracks are, barracks where the library usually is, etc.  so perhaps when a governor resigns/quits and the owner controls it again, he can choose where to relocate the buildings, that's all.  But if a player had a million thieves and he wants a million troops, well too bad, disband em :P   )

Edited by Grunvagr - 26 Sep 2010 at 21:00

What if players could actually gift cities to other players. Depending on who the player was there are some players i'd be willing to gift my 3rd or second city to in order to keep them in the game.

GM Stormcrow wrote: Just wanted to say that we're all reading this thread with *a lot* of interest.

Thank you for saying this. Even though I knew that by now a GM had probably read this thread it means a lot for you to say it. =)



In regards to the idea of speeding up a players city to get them back on their feet, I think it's a brilliant idea. A lot of people seem to like siege and while I still think it's a bit over powered this idea allows them to keep it the way it is while still helping to keep a player motivated to keep going.

Maybe they could revive a speed boost for a certain amount of time. Something like 30% building reduction time and maybe they could be given a bit more resources to start out with than normal.

The only problem is how would it be given? If it simply started to take effect as soon as the players last city has been destroyed and lasted, lets just say 3 days, it could kind of suck if you were going on vacation that day or had a heavy work load or weren't able to spend as much time as you'd like to make the bonus worth while.

I suppose it could be population based, so once the player reached 750 pop or something it would stop.


Edited by Brids17 - 26 Sep 2010 at 22:57

HonoredMule wrote: Even just starting with level 5 resource plots would make a huge difference.

That's really not a bad idea at all - for every plot the player has over L5, they restart on L5 by default in their new city at the other end of the map.

This idea definitely helps the small-mid sized players - though for big players not so much...

As mentioned, I'm all in favour of supporting the whole range of human emotion - as this is what makes sandbox games tick: retribution, revenge, "just" wars, comeuppances, payback, good-samaritanism, protecting-the-underdog, nurturing, abandoning, betrayal, loyalty, etc etc etc.

But equally I don't want players with months invested in the game to have their empires undone in hours/days, as that will ultimately foster a "Who's next? For your time has come" mentality. 

As mentioned earlier in this thread: We're fairly blessed on UK1 with a large number of alliances who want Illyriad to thrive and prosper, but that's by no means guaranteed for other servers when they arrive.

We also need to change the current rule that sieged players "keep the technologies that the last city had" rule, as we've had some particularly vicious, rampaging siege parties that destroy the largest cities first, and save the smallest for last, knowing that the player resettles with the technology from his smallest and least developed city, and therefore gets practically nothing compared to their invested time.  This will probably change to "resettling the player with *all* the technologies researched in his or her largest population city regardless of when it was destroyed (or possibly al the techs researched in all his or her cities prior to destruction)" to remove this as a particularly vindictive means of punishment.

Anyway, as mentioned earlier, we'll take baby steps to provide consequences for full-on-sieges, which initially will take the form of reportage rather than intervention.

One possible route we have in the future is Faction (NPC) intervention, and this might be worth exploring. 

Whatever the route is for us, it can't get in the way of the comment that Ryuuku quoted above with his "+1,000,000" addendum (tyvm btw Ryuuku).

Despite my typo of "ourselves" , that comment from me is pretty much the defining game philosophy of Illyriad. 

We don't want to be moral interventionists; we want to leave that to the players. 

We do, however, want to provide the players with sufficient tools to enable and inspire them to become interventionists.

Best,

SC