Design Talk – Guild Content

Lately I started a little discussion about Guild Warfare in the Community Chat. Thanks to everyone who participated, it really helped a lot and got us some very fancy new feature ideas!

Soo, let’s take a look at what’s going to come and change throughout the year, shall we?

Imminent Changes (January + February)

These will make it into the game during the remainder of this playtest.

Siege Weapons

Trebuchets, Catapults, Cannons and all the other fun weapons of destruction which have been suggested by you will be turned into a single Building: Siege Weapons. They can be loaded with ammunition and – when loaded – will increase your guilds campaign strength by a set percentage!

Ammunition will be craftable from a mix of Stones and explosives, thus serving as a resource sink for those materials.

More Campaign Sites!

Given the increase in campaign strength, we’ll also need some harder sites for you to conquer! There will be a few more high-level campaign sites which will require more the same (or even more) effort than the current dragon hunt, yielding some rare resources needed for end-of-world related stuff.

Stat points will affect explore/defend/campaign strength

Right now, your action has a flat strength equal to your soul level. This will stay true, but additionally, you’ll receive a small bonus given on how you distributed your stat points, allowing for some kind of further specialization, like this:

• HP: 40% to all activities
• DEF / MDEF: 100% to defend strength
• ATK / MATK: 100% to campaign strength
• SPD: 100% to exploration strength

Keep in mind that this only affects your stat points and not the general stats from equipment and such, as this changes a lot… and I really don’t want people to have a “campaign armor” they need to switch into every 8 hours.

Maybe a players’ race will also affect activity strength by some amount, but I haven’t made any plans on that yet.

Guard House Changes

Guard houses obviously grant way too much defense right now, therefore they are in need of a nerf. Right now, the provided defense boost depends on the companion level, but that results in a slime being just as strong as a goblin slayer, which obviously isn’t really realistic. Instead, it will take a certain percentage of their stats, similar to the stat point change above, but with different ratios.

The Effigy

Yet another resource sink that’ll come soon, this Building for some reason attracts more monsters to your territory, while at the same time also increasing glory and experience rewards when fending those invaders off!

Changes in preparation for the next Playtest (March + April)

There are some big changes planned to be implemented during the break between this and the next playtest as they require some changes in the database, would impact the active gameplay too much, or just don’t fit into the remaining time of the current playtest.

Building Tiers

Buildings will receive tiers! Upgrading a building will only use up materials of that item tier, and production buildings will only produce materials of that specific tier, maybe with an optional upgrade to widen the tier range. Increasing a buildings tier will work pretty much in the same way as upgrading it works, but comes at a cost: the building’s level will decrease by a few points to make up for the increased value of the Materials needed for that tier.

Examples:

Guardhouse:

• Tiers will increase free slots in the building
• Level will increase the stat scaling for companions
• Tiering up will increase the companion slots, but (due to the level decrease) temporarily reduce how strong each individual companion is.

Lumberyard:

• Tiers will affect which items are produced – Wood T1, T2, guess that’s pretty self-explanatory.
• Levels will affect how many of those items are produced.
• Tiering up a T2+5 Lumberyard will result in a T3+3 Lumberyard.

Watchtower:

• Tiers will affect how many campaign sites can be found at once and improve precision of attack/defense predictions
• Levels will affect the likelihood of finding one (or more?) campaign sites and improve precision of attack/defense predictions.

Territory Plots Rework

Right now, every building uses up one building slot. I want to change that so that infrastructural/unique buildings won’t use slots, but this requires a rebalance of the costs per territory upgrade and maybe even a reduction of the slots per level.

Guild Member Roles

Guild leaders can set up roles for their members and give each role certain permissions, such as taking items from the storage or administrative stuff like setting the active campaign site or inviting/kicking members.

More Buildings!

• Laboratory: Increases luck when members craft consumables
• Forge: Increases luck when members craft weapons/armor

Far in the Future Stuff (June++)

These things have no direct date attached to them and aren’t fully planned out yet, but will – in some shape or form – come at some point before we hit 1.0!

Even more Buildings!

• Farms: Produce various Grains or Herbs.
• Coops: Produces Eggs.
• Stable: Produces Milk or Meat.
• Cantine: Uses the aforementioned resources to craft buffs which will affect the whole guild for an ingame day.
• Construction Office: Expensive building which will reduce construction & upgrade costs of other buildings.

Advanced Campaign Sites

These will be juicy! Some rare campaigns might consist of multiple sites which all need to be cleared within a set timeframe in order to unlock yet another site or special rewards / events for the participating guilds.

Warfare

I’d rather have cooperation between guilds than direct competition and drama, so direct attacks on other guilds will remain deactivated for the foreseeable future.

Instead, the current plan for warfare is more like a (purely optional) friendly competition over certain regions on the world map – such as special resource nodes or production sites which can be claimed by a guild and then must be regularly defended against other guilds.

Public Campaign Sites

Usually, campaign sites are private to whomever found them and then can be shared with other guilds as needed. This is nice, but in some cases you might just not care about a certain campaign site because its rewards don’t fancy you or you are already busy dragon hunting. In such a case you can set it public, so other guilds can see & select it instead.

Who knows, maybe we’ll at some point even have a marketplace specific for campaign sites in the future? :D