[NEW MAP IDEA] ONLY RACIAL TILES (NOTHING ELSE)

[Priceflash 757]

Hello, my fellow Lord of the Craft roleplayers!

 

A problem that has been brought up by many people lately is the presence of "activity checks" in the community. Naturally, the administration team wants to make sure settlements are active so that activity is not spread out nonsensically across the map. In contrast, players are sickened by activity checks that make them have to AFK to maintain their region status.

 

My solution: Only allow people to live and build within large racial tiles. Remove settlements altogether.

 

My reasoning: Random settlements across the map decentralizes roleplay and makes it harder for players to seek roleplay, and makes it harder for roleplay to occur organically. Activity checks are a detriment to player experience and if everyone lived on the same few tiles, both problems would dissappear.

 

Now, there is a few problems with this. First, I'll address a few of the main criticisms people may have:

 

"Price, what about Renatus, Kingdom of Oren, and the 10 other human nations. How could we simply coexist on one big tile?"

 

Now, I'm not necessarily disavowing multiple nations of the same race. I'm not saying we should not have interracial politics. What I am advocating here is all racial cities should be on one tile (naturally larger than tiles that exist now, but not absolutely massive). We shouldn't have Norland completely across the map from Oren, and a million other human nations across the map. The new player experience would be much better if a new Human player could simply start in a racial hub and then, within a relatively small amount of blocks, travel to any human settlement. Not only would this centralize roleplay, it would allow settlements to compete for activity moreso than now, allowing  for natural activity boosting rather than artificial afk players trying to game activity checks. If you don't want everyone flocking to another human city from Oren, you better ensure your city is actually a center of activity!

 

"Price, how can we manage regions when everything is on one huge tile! It's going to be a mess"

 

This is controversial, but my suggestion here is every player of a race be automatically granted region permissions to the whole racial tile. Take it as "freebuild lite". No, you can't run across the map and build a house in the middle of nowhere, but you can build a house within the  tile itself. In general, if there's an empty area of space and you're not griefing someone elses build, you should be allowed to build as you please. Yes, maybe this detracts from national agency, but it greatly increases player agency at the expense of a relative few players royal mindgames fantasies.

 

"W-what if I'm an elf who wants to live on the human racial tile?"

 

My suggestion here is to either allow players to optionally choose which tile they want region perms on upon character creation (So yes, you can be a Elf who is culturally an orc and lives in the Orc region, but you need to commit to that at some point). You should be able to switch which tile you want region access to, but you shouldn't be able to constantly swap it out or have access to multiple tiles for the sake of the system. Should be based on per character and not per player, so if you want to be an active citizen of multiple tiles with build access, you need to do it across multiple characters.

 

"Price, what about taxes! How can i tax everyone if they're not all on muh region, how can i pay for war! How can i get money for my nation"

 

My suggestion is remove the importance of mina for nations and switch the focus over to resource based economies. Players themselves should be able to rely on the mina for their personal transactions, but a nation should not have to rely on minas to go to war or pay upkeep or anything like that -- upkeep is largely unneeded since the system itself seeks to centralize roleplay. Taxes should be an optional system for players, with nations having to worry more about how much iron and building materials they have to enhance their own cities and garrisons. You can live in a nation built house and pay a tax on it per week or buy it outright, but they can't just say "This house YOU built? You must PAY me to live there."  Subject to further analysis and criticism but it seems more activity encouraging for players to be encouraged to contribute to nation on their own accord.

 

"How do wars work if all of humanity is on the same tile?"

 

Warclaims on settlements and taking over entire builds / annexation generally kills the settlement and decreases activity. So, you can't just warclaim someone and take over their build. Plain and simple. Conquest as a war goal would be removed in exchange for heist war goals, razing small areas, more raids, and maybe nation leader pks replacing them. This would seemingly encourage more diplomacy RP since you can't just run in and take tiles away from your enemy, you need to work with them if you want access to an area they've already claimed via their occupation. Again more deliberation may be required but this seems much more favorable to whatever convoluted system we have now.

 

"what about the rest of the map"

 

Well, the rest of the map should be left to exploration, events, and resource gathering, and whatever else. You can walk around and say "Map pretty", you can go find whatever rare alchemy stuff you want, rare resources, fight the antag, but in general the main appeal of the server should be to stay within the racial tiles if you want to roleplay. That way, we don't have people who DO want to roleplay distributed across the map being unable to find it.

 

 

Overall, I think any step towards a system like this would be by far a better system than whatever we have now. The amount of OOC toxicity and petty arguments over the current regions system could be fixed largely by a large systems change.

[TreeSmoothie 4892]

hold on, let him cook....

 

I think implementing this would be really interesting -- at least, maybe just in the form of lessening the amt of settlements like what was said in the post, and then the amount of towns a Nation can have. Idk how good jamming every single racial nation into one tile would be, neutral on that. So here's an alternative idea, not racial tiles, but limiting how many of these settlements can be made.

 

It's good to give players choice, but if that means leaving dozens of inactive towns around the map because every Baron wants to have their little settlement, they need ... less of one?? that sounds bad, but hear me out.

 

It could work with something like:

Each nation has a certain amount of slots depending on player count. i.e., old Oren empire would have a fair few (like 3-5 town slots) because they had like.. what, 30% activity?

Meanwhile nations that are less active might only get the base 1. 

 

It'll make people work harder irp and ooc to show that their certain house, guild, etc is active and wanting to create events. It'll draw new players into organizing with other players and build more community than 'I make gigantic town that no one lives in because the land was cheap'. 

 

There doesn't need to be activity checks per se, just 'Is this nation consistently filled with people (i.e. by using playercount at peak times in each timezone)', 'is this nation hosting events and fun things to do?', etc. If they don't have many people OR events, then they just need to focus on making themselves bigger BEFORE creating new towns. 

 

It may be a bit RPG-esque or something like that, but I feel like it'd prevent a lot of these issues. 

 

 

(ALSO, I think lairs are at a good state rn... ish? From what I've seen they're being given to groups that need them, such as the Djinn, necros, mystics, etc etc. There have been a few that were simply wonky like someone getting a lair accepted for their broken-down Oren family, but those seem far and few.)

[Laeonathan 3950]

Shitposting has reached a new level.

[PrinceJose270 721]

 Still a great post! The only real question is how sub races would work in that spectrum.

[Caravaggio 142]

There was an old plugin where you had to build a settlement pillar and players had to commit to being members of one nation/city to have perms and so on. Would be cool to pursue a similar thread. I think the map has been too big lately and would like to see a return to the 4.0 meta of having a smaller map but no fast travel nodes.

[Reece Nolan 636]

don't know too much about the way tiles work now, but I'd argue that before throwing the entire thing out the window to try to force a new system that has a massive chance of failure, maybe remove the things that currently inhibit rp from happening on its own already. Removal of auction house was a good start, but how about making designated areas people need to go to collect vote money to make them actually leave their city to get free mina, or how about removal of /beta from public access outside of pre-scheduled skirms, which forces things like pvp and army training to be done on live instead of off of the server. Or make the map not so absurdly big and everything far away, or remove warps being everywhere and make people walk so they actually use the roads again. Activity checks shouldn't be mandatory but they shouldnt be removed either, just repurposed in a way where a player can inquire into the activity of a region and get staff involved from there (either to decay the structure, remove it or other such interactions)

[UnusualBrit 2053]

why is no one upvoting such a quality idea?

[argonian 12836]

1 hour ago, Priceflash said:

Warclaims on settlements and taking over entire builds / annexation generally kills the settlement and decreases activity. So, you can't just warclaim someone and take over their build. Plain and simple. Conquest as a war goal would be removed in exchange for heist war goals, razing small areas, more raids, and maybe nation leader pks replacing them. This would seemingly encourage more diplomacy RP since you can't just run in and take tiles away from your enemy, you need to work with them if you want access to an area they've already claimed via their occupation. Again more deliberation may be required but this seems much more favorable to whatever convoluted system we have now.

Effectively removing war (heists, razings, etc. are just worthless) isn't more favourable than convoluted war, and honestly the current war system is close to the least convoluted we've ever had. It could do with some streamlining but there aren't that many CBs and the ways you can use them are very transparent.

 

Further, sure, activity drops a bit when a nation gets annexed, but (1) we already have protections against annexation rn - you gotta vassalise their capital tile for however many months before you can try revoking it, (2) the stagnancy and total stall in story-telling are way worse for the server than a temporary dip in activity, and (3) since you mentioned raids as a compromise--suffering constant raids is way less fun and hurts activity way more than being subjugated by your neighbours (to which, I guess you could say, "then swear fealty to escape the raids!", but countries won't do that, they'll just ***** to GMs until raid rules get changed instead).

 

Anyway, one thing I really like about this whole idea is it accepts, by forcing all the racial nations into 1 tile, that it's possible to handle land-ownership without doing it on an EU4 province-map basis. And this is the direction we need to go in. We need to move away from systems that rely on arbitrary, (mostly) unchanging tiles drawn onto the map, but a good lot of the server don't even seem to realise that that's possible. Just have your one big "tile" and let people pay for regions within it based on size. Instead of tile improvements just let me pay to add those mines, etc. to my own land. Instead of saying "no your settlement can't be here because some other guy lives 20 miles away but just barely within the same tile, but it can be 20 feet away from that other settlement in a different tile"... just don't do that.

[Asutto 1948]

I agree, I think turning LoTC into Massivecraft the Sequel is just what we need to generate quality roleplay!

[E__V__O 1984]

I didn't read this post.

[D3F4LT 607]

As someone who believes in merchant warfare (scamming 14 years olds that rp some made up nobles) is healthier for rp community than direct pvp war, I think if it comes to humans having 1 giant tile to share between 10+ nations should have the ability to either consent or not to be warclaimed. An alternative to this is rock paper scissor between the two nations for a quicker auto resolve. But yeah I totally agree with Price, we should Aim for big plots shared with other racial playables.

[Lord_of_losers 950]

15 minutes ago, E__V__O said:

I didn't read this post.

same but i dont mind if people upvote me thanks

[mateolog 1551]

I think shared tiles is a good idea, I do not think it should be done racially tho.

[Kholibrii 978]

No -1

 

(didn’t read no tl;dr)

[NotEvilAtAll 9927]

I think we should all live in one big city with a High School as its central feature.