Unintended dirtwall meta? How about this?

[Alexgopen 2,376]

[##:##:##] The ground is too unstable and you are unable to build here. 

 

Disallow building longhouses or fences on dirtwalls by checking the slopes of the tiles on either side of where the building/fence plan goes.  If the slope of the tile next to it is more than 100/200/300 (take your pick) up or down, then you cannot build there for risk of landslides (which wont actually happen) either onto the structure from above our out from underneath the structure.  Without longhouses or fences to hold dirtwalls in place, they are easy to dig away, and the utility of building dirtwalls would be greatly diminished. 

 

Illustration of this idea:

[shakys 526]

-1 i would like to see more defenses brought into game before making it easier for larger side.

Edited May 10, 2016 by shakys

[MisterTeddy 284]

Ehhh I'm a little skeptical of this because of some possible unintended consequences and that it could be too limiting in some cases. However, I agree with the premise behind it regarding the absurdity of the dirtwall meta.

 

Something was suggested a few years ago by an old BLE member (Fawkes I think? although probably discussed internally by the entire DSC crew beforehand) about tying catapult max damage to distance between the target structure and the rock layer. The suggested numbers were something like 10 max damage for a structure one dirt from the rock layer and 25 max for a structure 300+ from the dirt layer. Exact numbers would have to be fleshed out, but I liked this idea when I saw it, and I still think it could make a good solution in a way that would give people some choices instead of simply making dirtwalls unviable.

 

Edit: +1 to that picture tho

Edited May 10, 2016 by MisterTeddy

[Postinglels 1,270]

Already have a deed design that bypasses this dirtwall counter. Next

[Odynn 2,248]

both pvp and pve use flat raise for either defensive or look purpose (sometimes both in case of a switch being flicked again).

 

25 minutes ago, Postinglels said:

Already have a deed design that bypasses this dirtwall counter

 

indeed, unless you plan to avoid X tiles from a slope you can always get a deed design that fit with that strategy.

 

Real castles were often built on mountains, hills, or dirt raise (feudal mounds - have a look). So that meta is something that was used in RL by our ancestors, what was the counter, besieging said castle and starving the defenders, trying to breach the walls, poison them... anything you would find in a game like mount and blade in fact.

 

Seeing the current state of PvP and the lack of information / data from the devs on how they want the game to be played / balanced / yadda yadda, hard to do some proper suggestions.

 

TL;DR : Won't work.

Edited May 10, 2016 by Odynn

[Xalorum 765]

maybe I don't understand.  couldn't you just make a three-tile-wide dirt wall for a 1 tile house, or a four-tile-wide dirt wall for a 2-tile house? the slope on either side of the structure would be zero.

[Revelation 288]

Yep, which means that this would be almost no use whatsoever.

 

Existing dirtwalls are unaffected, and new dirtwalls have to be made twice as wide which as we all know is only a small hassle on PvP servers

[Slickshot 1,195]

-1  The consequences to pve would be stupidly detrimental.

Edited May 10, 2016 by Slickshot

[JakeRivers 2,921]

You know what this is a great idea, start digging down your dirt walls and removing those pesky long houses and fences, I will be over later to make sure you did a good job and show you how effective your defenses are.

[Amadee 1,543]

I would hope never to see anything even remotely resembling this idea to ever be inflicted on the pve side.  I like all the cliff houses, and majestic keeps & castles, and amazing creativity I've seen and would hate to see that stifled.

 

If you're talking about pvp-only, then I have no opinion on it since I don't play there. 

[Gaeron 551]

If this had to happen would much rather we went with actual castles.

 

Create support buttress and foundations on which actual castle walls can be raised, the foundations need to be strong and can't have too much slope.

 

Use towers as pinning points then plan entire wall lengths between the towers and raise the whole thing as a unit with each bit dependant on its neighbours.

 

In the long run it won't make much difference functionally but it would sure look a whole lot nicer!

 

 

[Fawkes 1,567]

It's hard to nerf the dirtwall meta without breaking something else, so I won't get into that whole discussion, but what I will say is: what comes after a nerf? Unfortunately, dirtwalls are a necessity right now (barring a few crazy experimental deed designs that may or may not work). So if those get nerfed, we'll need an alternative to them if we don't want defenders getting steamrolled.

With the upcoming PvP changes, raid mechanics are deserving of a long discussion all on their own. Raids have the potential to be a really fun and interesting aspect of PvP, but the lack of options on both the attacking and defending sides makes it way too bland and predictable. Hopefully this issue doesn't get drowned out by all of the other changes that are supposed to take place.

[Ecrir 887]

So if I read this correctly, you effectively want to make it impossible to build houses/fences on any tiles which have an adjacent tile over a certain steepness?

 

So if there's a highway going past the side of a mountain, on the left is the mountain and on the right a steep dirt drop of 200 or so steepness and then lots of cliff (certain death for most) then your suggestion would make it impossible to put fences on that side in order to protect people from accidentially falling to their death? Yeah that sounds like a great thing, -1

It would then also massivly limit many artisitic options, really harming how much people can express their creativity, I can't express in numbers how bad this would be.

 

Finally it won't even put a dent in dirt walls. Just make the top of the dirt wall 3 tiles wide, put the house/fences on the middile of those three tiles, then remove the outer two tiles and you have your dirt wall back. Of course you could even keep the outer tiles just fine, no need to remove them as their presence doesn't deminish your defenses in any way. Thus this suggestion fails to even accomplish it's goal.

[Zekezor 3,188]

-1

 

Rather have a system where player-created dmg is boosted based on the steepest downward slope connected to the attacked wall.

Example:

DMG modifier = (1+SLOPE/300*1.5)... in other words normal (100%) dmg at 0 slope and 250% dmg at 300 slope. Catapults would go from a minimum of 5 shoots to destroy them to merely 2 at 300 slope.

 

No functionality in terms of "railings" to avoid falling off cliffs or decorational/practical housing is lost, merely the rate a player can destroy them is altered.

Players can still make their 10 story high skyscrape longhouses on their 300 high dirtwalls, but it would have some side effects in its ability to withstand dmg. still a massive pain in the ass to remove, but not as cray cray as currently.

 

Seems more logical this way and no functionality is lost for players.

Edited May 12, 2016 by Zekezor

[Shrimpiie 3,665]

Nope.

-1

[Propheteer 7,139]

On 5/10/2016 at 7:30 AM, shakys said:

-1 i would like to see more defenses brought into game before making it easier for larger side.

 

id like to know how you raid this, but before that i'd like to take a moment to really be upset at you for thinking that deeds are hard to defend with any number of people attacking. I don't think a deed has ever been drained while i've been defending it, even by myself and im nowhere near an expert on the matter. I mean if the deed is well designed and you are against overwhelming odds, like 30 to 1, one smart player and a prepared kingdom can easily buy themselves a few hours. If just repairing and rebuilding wasn't enough, when your deed is under siege the defenders get a CR bonus that scales with how many enemies are on the deed.

 

 

With design, bear in mind a few things.

1. The small stone walls are very difficult to hit. Sometimes you will hit it just fine, other times you will literally never hit it whether you land on the tile in front of it or behind it because well thats just how wurm is. (I've also raided a deed like this, and it took us about 40 minutes just to get through those due to how buggy the catapulting is.)

2. If you manage to remove the small stone wall, you need to remove three of them. You also need to collapse nine cave tiles, bash at least however many shards of statues were made, and every lamp per cave entrance before you could start doing that (and keep in mind your damage is reduced due to it being on deed.)

2. It is impossible without bringing A LOT of your own dirt to catapult the top of the longhouse, and even then due to the height of the dirtwall and the house having 5 stories, some of those walls you wouldnt hit anyway (i would know, i tried this for days on days.)

3. If the deed was properly planned on an area with sufficient rock level where the interior deed had to be lowered, with mines under the dirtwall you are limited by that. (I know a few deeds that have done this and the lowest you could get the dirtwall would be 230ish, if you managed to remove the longhouse to begin with.)

4. If you wish to dig it down to allow for easy transportation of loot in and out, you have to get rid of an entire 2x18 longhouse, five stories at a minimum (thats like 200 walls? not counting if people are repairing or rebuilding.) You could also make your own ramp, but then again the best scenario for that is if you know where the interior ramp is.

 

Now, with all that being said, once you really let the preparation you would need settle in, you don't even know what you're going to encounter on the inside, and in some cases you don't know where the ramp to get in is (and if you aren't on that side welcome to dirt city or sandwich palace, your choosing.)

We also haven't thrown in all the bugs you can abuse with this design like parapets yet either. :^

 

and before you say I haven't seen a deed like this, yes, yes i have, and yes, i've raided a few like them, and yes, every time i was there for more than 10 hours and the looting didnt take more than one or two. (And the few ones with dirtwalls this high didn't even have the rock moat set up properly so that saved us hours of time.)

 

 

So yeah, +1 to anything making raiding easier, ever. Although the solution proposed could be bypassed with even more work, it is still progress.

 

 

and with people doing all of this, the amount of work that actually goes into getting into something like this is so insane that people think its griefing when you just literally do the bare minimum to make it in.

Edited May 12, 2016 by Propheteer

[Oreo 5,793]

the person above me is a nerd and has spent too much time building worthless things that nobody ever attacks

 

i kinda feel bad for him

[Propheteer 7,139]

Just now, Oreo said:

the person above me is a nerd and has spent too much time building worthless things that nobody ever attacks

 

i kinda feel bad for him

 

sorry i abuse game mechanics to the fullest.

[Wurmhole 3,650]

is there any dirt left in Chaos?  Love the dedication to making a brutal defense.

[Aum 771]

wants to play terraforming pvp game, finds out it requires effort, applies effort to remove terraforming from game ......

 

-1

[zigozag 918]

**peaks in from the pve world**

 

Wouldn't allowing tunneling in dirt (with supports) help lower the value of this meta tactic?

[shakys 526]

15 hours ago, Propheteer said:

id like to know how you raid this, but before that i'd like to take a moment to really be upset at you for thinking that deeds are hard to defend with any number of people attacking. I don't think a deed has ever been drained while i've been defending it, even by myself and im nowhere near an expert on the matter. I mean if the deed is well designed and you are against overwhelming odds, like 30 to 1, one smart player and a prepared kingdom can easily buy themselves a few hours. If just repairing and rebuilding wasn't enough, when your deed is under siege the defenders get a CR bonus that scales with how many enemies are on the deed.

 

all your drawings and ideas so far are based on people with max skill levels, most people don't have and are unable to build.

Also places like chaos is full of new players atm, and usually raids consist of being outnumbered. my overall view is still -1.

the game should be more about pvp, and not raids all the time. that way players don't get there deed drained (destroyed) every day and forced to leave the server. reason i say bring more defenses to the game.

Edited May 13, 2016 by shakys

[Klaa 4,872]

12 hours ago, Wurmhole said:

is there any dirt left in Chaos?  Love the dedication to making a brutal defense.

 

Eh can always export it in from other maps even if Chaos could ever go dirt less. (only map larger is Xanadu) Pretty old map so doubt it will happen anytime soon.

 

Always found it amusing that dirt ended up being so valuable with Wurm's gameplay.

 

Anyways... Sand everything!

 

Far as the OP, like Gaeron's and personally felt having some kind of support embedded in the dirt should be a requirement over certain slopes. Some kind of support beam to reinforce the dirt. Otherwise even the flat-raising technique would just end up having dirt spread out further and further.

Edited May 13, 2016 by Klaa

[Propheteer 7,139]

6 hours ago, shakys said:

 

all your drawings and ideas so far are based on people with max skill levels, most people don't have and are unable to build.

Also places like chaos is full of new players atm, and usually raids consist of being outnumbered. my overall view is still -1.

the game should be more about pvp, and not raids all the time. that way players don't get there deed drained (destroyed) every day and forced to leave the server. reason i say bring more defenses to the game.

 

Really? To start this off, all of my "drawings" and "ideas" have been either seen or recreated ingame, and at that point it kinda stops becoming an idea and starts becoming more of a series of abused unintended features.

 

You can even skim the 300 part and drop it to 250 and it would still be too strong. (and i know plenty of people in JK and MR that can raise a 250 dirtwall and make a 2x18 longhouse AND make a 90 deep rock trench AND make 70ql lamps.)

Your server may have new players on it, but every kingdom shares extremely skilled accounts, and your server also is the oldest out of every server in the game so while deeds may not use that exact design there are deeds built with extremely strong ones similar to it that use at least two of the things in that design that nobody will ever bother raiding.

 

There needs to be more defense brought to the game, but there needs to be defenses that don't take so long to breach that they encourage griefing such as what i posted. You want deeds to be lived in, the whole idea of abusing deeds to control land is moronic, especially when i see people quit over it. (and wardeeds are the reason 90% of any PvP on chaos occurs within 5 tiles of the gatehouse, the defender, if he knows what he is doing, is never once in danger.)

Edited May 13, 2016 by Propheteer

[Alexgopen 2,376]

1 hour ago, Propheteer said:

 

Really? To start this off, all of my "drawings" and "ideas" have been either seen or recreated ingame, and at that point it kinda stops becoming an idea and starts becoming more of a series of abused unintended features.

 

You can even skim the 300 part and drop it to 250 and it would still be too strong. (and i know plenty of people in JK and MR that can raise a 250 dirtwall and make a 2x18 longhouse AND make a 90 deep rock trench AND make 70ql lamps.)

Your server may have new players on it, but every kingdom shares extremely skilled accounts, and your server also is the oldest out of every server in the game so while deeds may not use that exact design there are deeds built with extremely strong ones similar to it that use at least two of the things in that design that nobody will ever bother raiding.

 

There needs to be more defense brought to the game, but there needs to be defenses that don't take so long to breach that they encourage griefing such as what i posted. You want deeds to be lived in, the whole idea of abusing deeds to control land is moronic, especially when i see people quit over it. (and wardeeds are the reason 90% of any PvP on chaos occurs within 5 tiles of the gatehouse, the defender, if he knows what he is doing, is never once in danger.)

 

the last two ele deeds i built (Hades and DSCv2) had 270 slope rock edges lol

 

no digging those down, better bring some sandwiches