Agreed. But i think we should offer smaller clans a different stake in the world politics. The biggest clans/alliances will dominate the city scene by nature of being the largest.

For politics to work the big clans must be constantly desiring to expand, or else things get stale. Less holdings creates this desire to expand. If small clans aren't squeezed out of cities it means the politics have gone stale because large clans are choosing to not claim a holding they easily could.

Instead lets take advantage of the new housing system. Clans which own a city can not claim land slots, this is reserved for "unsettled" clans. They can claim a location and setup their houses there as a quasi-holding. Allow the "mayor" of these claims to place a bank accessible by tenants on the land. With this you give small clans the ability to have their own holdings, but they lack the defenses of a city. For blue players they'd get to choose to respawn at their house, or at their bindstone (starter town if they choose), so they can avoid being griefed due to their settlement being hard to defend.

In order to claim land in this fashion they may even be required to maintain control over local village-style outposts (smaller time commitment sieges), otherwise their settlement can be uprooted via siege. Local capital cities could fight over these outposts in order to try and uproot these settlements.

You would obviously need to give cities a large benefit for the owners or else everyone will just choose these more fluid style settlements. I also see no issue with allies of a capital city claiming these sorts of settlements nearby as its just another form of power projection for an alliance. Its a large map, plenty of space for small clans.

 

If you want me to have the slightest interest in building cities in the game your going to have to make them self building.

The city would have to issue guild members "Tasks" like capture X villages to construct a Fighters Guild.
or kill X creatures or complete X trade route style quests / daily quests.

Houses and Walls would be fine to have building mod costs. Houses could use a 50% cost reduction (10 down to 5) and be destroy-able like walls. Every other building should have self repair if they are active 20% or more HP. (The building above 20% would heal About 20% every day)

Guard Towers in player cities should gradually get stronger closer in line with NPC cities unless a city is being sieged or taking asset damage.

I would like to see City nodes moved from inside the cities to outside and changed to grant resources to the controlling clan only, unless the city walls have a gap. This would force raiding parties who want to drain mines to breach a wall and punish inactive clans for not defending an empty holding.

 

Remove stone and make cities built using the TCS Points?

Capturing villages, sieging hamlets, control towers etc. all give points which then are spent to build up your city. No harvesting required.

Oh and with their lore deities idea - each deity is tied to a race, so your deity dictates what style of buildings your city gets. As well as potentially alterring what types of bonuses your buildings city (mana regen, stam regen, health buffs, etc. ). So TCS points are more like Patronage to your deity, hence your deity rewards you with new buildings. LORE

 

I like this idea.

The party system could use an update with a Party leader; a party should disband with less then 2 players to help stop Solo players from capping villages.

 

This would just promote and reward alts. Not a bad thing for the game, i guess, as you will have more active subs, but it'll piss off the community something fierce.

 

If it is to be a full wipe, then cities should be able to be placed anywhere, no presets for cities or hamlets. Upon world wipe, clans get a placeable bank and a X amt of building mods and a clanstone. The world would have to be broken up into "Hexes" for the sake of preventing those whom may seek to exploit the city placement system. A city/hamlet can be placed anywhere inside of said hex. There would be only X amount of city or hamlet stones in relation to the current amount we have now.
There could even be a system where with each season, the city and hamlet stones could be randomly placed across the world and must be "discovered" Dont know if possible but if islands and mainland could also be randomly rotated, this would give players a newish world entirely without having to make new game assets.
Season length however would have to be long enough to make building assets worth while. Being able to rebuild a city from the ruins of one that was sieged and lost would add to the depth of the environment.

A city maintenence system to prevent one clan from taking a majority of the holdings. System would be a gradual decay over time based upon the amount of gold paid to maintain it, so a holding may still have some buildings ok but others fall into a decayed state. Think of how roads irl need funding and when there isnt enough, only crucial repairs are made while maintenence on other parts falls behind.
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Or have capture points produce a box of resources that your character must carry back to the center point to gain any progress in securing the village. Center points produce power nodules that must be taken to the points in order to produce goods.

 

That's sound like a fuck you to solo players. Our clan is small. Sometimes we find ourself playing solo. Solo play already is very though and hardcore and less rewarding then zerging stuff down. Don't take away more solo content. Even people in bigger clans like to solo once in a while

 

dont take away solo lol. Don't be mad cause yourparty of 10 can't take a village cause a party of one had the balls to do solo.

 

Not bad Scrubby. I miss you!

 

I wrote in bold under stuff.

All sounds good on paper. Just hope it won't take a year to implement. But im excited.

 

Don't forget to add a Darkfall Arena if you want to make the PvP Seasons work.

Player Points awarded in a Darkfall Arena could be used to build up the cities instead of the need to grind out resources against tree and stone nodes!

 

So the conquest is exciting, and one side burns out after it's over, and this is the mechanic that you want to repeat every 4 months? That won't work well, even if you make the reset/loss consequence low it's still going to get boring fast. Quin's idea of making control of wonders (or some territory construct) lead to some cataclysm on mainland sounds interesting as it would at least be a mega zerg vs the rest of the server. That could spread the load as it were across more people and make less of a burnout situation. If you make it so that clans/alliances fight to rotate the rare resources of the map that might be interesting as they could keep their favored homeland and fight to bring desired resources to them.

 

I think people are getting hung up on the word "wipe". Please just do what you guy's think is best. Any new content and evolution of the game is far better than nothing. I love that you guys listen to the community but sometimes people dont know they like something until they try it. @Andrew

 

they only have to make it so that you do not have to get involved in a season if ya choose not to, they can instead do factions or some other activity while they play and if they create options then the idea they have can work cause some people actually do like pain over n over again.

 

I could see seasons being fun if there was an actual feeling of starting again everytime.

Sieges and City-building should require resources that must be acquired new every season so we feel like we have to build up once again. Otherwise it'll just feel like we lost all our holdings for nothing because we have the gear and resources to siege again and are just retracing our steps from last season.

I'd also say that if any clan with a capital city, come the end of a season, should have the ability to move their reserved capital to any other city in-game for the next season, so long as it isn't already owned and reserved by the current owner. This way clans can pick new starting positions prior to the next season instead of being stuck growing out from the same point each time.

 

Normally I'm the type to enjoy some seasonal stuff. In this case though as it's been presented I don't think it would be engaging enough for most to keep people around. There needs to be a reason above and beyond "rebuild our holdings and fight new fights". We already essentially have that mechanic with all of the wars I've ever been in with a clan/alliance. One clan assets down the other, some fights/sieges happen, after a few weeks of it people get fed up, people quit. That's the way it's been since the original DF in my experience. The enthusiasm for that on a regular basis will last at most two seasons and, as they've presented it, it seems participation is not an optional thing if you own a holding. Replace asset with having to rebuild a city for the new season and you have essentially the same mechanic.

As for ways to make it compelling, if there were significant holding taxes and the victors went tax free for the next season that could help. Maybe the alliance/clan gets tax and listing fee free market use, free portal/village portal use, crafting cost buffs, etc. The rare resource jumble thing could help too. There has to be something more there though..