Chryasor

 [[OOC]] IGN: Chryasor

[[ OOC]] Discord: Chryasor#2356

Name: Praelia

Category participating in (Male / Female): Female

  IGN: Chryasor

Discord: Chryasor#2356

Name: Praelia

Where are you from?: Celia'nor

Optional Alias: None
Joust, Melee, or Archery?: All

1 hour ago, Llir said:

We look at the evidence surrounding the report, and I want to highlight what we consider valid evidence in these cases. Yes, screenshots and logs are always the best form of evidence, though there are numerous bans where all we have to go off is victim testimony, and for me that is just as valid as any ‘hard evidence’.

**** you, we both know this isn't true. In the time I've been here alone I can recall multiple controversies where none of the admins did ANYTHING before players forced them to, but perhaps the worst is the case with firegirl who was a known groomer with multiple victims sending in screenshots, and still nothing was done until the forums were blown up with topics for multiple days. And even then, nothing happened, instead there was a massive apology post explaining called something like "a plea for humanity" where you cited exactly that it wasn't "good enough evidence" to not ban an open pedophile off your shit ******* server.

12 hours ago, THUNDER37 said:

however given it's infancy I do find it a touch rude to the developers to slate it as the worst thing ever to happen to LoTC

Let me take an example elsewhere - when a company releases an unfinished game, the playerbase is in an uproar because the game promised is unfinished and sometimes near unplayable.

Why should LOTC's playerbase be happy and content having to work with a plugin that just now added iron, the absolute bare minimum, almost a month after its release.

Also to add my own take : 
I've seen people say "Vortex is great on paper but doesn't work in practice"
only, it isn't great on paper, it's a massively flawed system where once you reach a new tier its a repeat of the exact same grind as the tier before, only now each and every one of your tools are irrelevant and you could lose all of your progress to random combat or just falling off a roof when parkouring around. 

It's a grinding system built not on levels or actual improvement but arbitrarily repeating the exact same grind to go up "tiers". 

The entire system can be skipped in full by just buying a hammer from someone higher up in the advancement progress. 
All your progress can be lost in an instant with no proper way of recovery if you didn't have extra hammers.

Every tier is immediatelly irellevant as soon as you reach a new one,, not a single soul will ever be using bronze or iron once the next level of tool arrives because everyone will have steel or whatever it is via the AH after having slogged through hours of repeated grinding from all the previous tiers.

If it was a decent system there'd be some variation, an older tiers would be implemented in the new ones. Instead, as it is now, we just need to find the exact same resources as before and repeat the exact same process over and over,  only it's now more rare, and it has a new name. Copper, then tin, then bronze, then iron, then i assume steel is next.

Same with the leather, same ****, but a new mob.

On 12/14/2020 at 3:10 AM, Luciloo said:

I agree with Matt insofar that I take my character's knowledge of combat and then 'give and take' from there.

At least to me, and a few others on the thread, this is one of the core issues on the thread. That doesn't really matter when the baseline for how "skilled" characters are for most people is how many skallagrim videos they've watched.

Now for a lot of people this isn't the case, a lot of us, me included, generally try to work in weaknesses, give the characters their own "style" so to say, a way they fight and act under the stresses of combat that reflect them. But far too many, especially among the younger roleplayers, play the unbeatable hero who has the combined knowledge of schola gladioatoria and skallagrim, as well as the power of god and anime, who knows no fear and jokes in the face of death. I've been very guilty of this myself when I first started out on the server, I bet that's how a few people remember me if they do remember me at all. I was a shitty teenager once too.

But the fact that this server is mostly populated by people in that age range means there should be some better worked out combat system that puts on a few limits, maybe adds some block measurements with weapons to make people put more thought into it.

It's impossible to measure skill in a lot of cases since we can just emote our characters being great and whipping heavy equipment around like they're nerf guns, so perhaps it's worth looking into a system of positioning that makes where you stand more important because of weapon range, maybe an official ruleset on what different kinds of weapons and armour can do, because twelve different people will give you thirteen answers on how to beat plate.

Maybe weave it into the new PVP system, we have the armour IRP we carry mechanically, which will limit people a bit more, and I think that in the case of CRP limits are more neccesary. It provides a challenge, makes us think an extra second before we act.

Now, i will add this as a kind of afterthought - there are moments you can measure skill. usually this is when two older players CRP with one another. Because they think a tad more since they're more used to it, more "veteran" in minecraft text combat so to speak, so they don't just shout out german poses but describe in a different way, have some kind of plan, act according to their character and generally use simpler motions in CRP, at least in my experience.

But the system we have right now doesn't support that kind of RP. It should encourage it, and I think that can be done by putting more weight on positioning and equipment in the rules - how much I can't tell. Maybe I'd be able hammer something out if given a couple days and some people to talk about it with. It would need to be fair which is kinda hard.

And as a final couple notes - I larp, we havee a general guideline. It isn't about winning, it's about who can look the coolest while losing. That's a mindset more people could benefit from, and could easily become more prevalent considering the threat of a PK isn't common at all.
And finally, far too much weight is put on realism, it's a fantasy world with magic and druids and anime teenagers, **** realism. We should focus on fairness in combat instead, give everyone prepared for combat the same chances. 

In real life a single knight could take out twenty peasant levy dudes with shitty spears, in RP that just isn't fun.

4 minutes ago, Werew0lf said:

Oh my god. Settlements don’t have the same perks as nations!

 

why hasn’t the newly made admin of one day fixed everything?!?!???

 

lae abused pex, he went behind peoples back with false promises, and now ur crying that you aren’t getting them?

Aight, I understand this is a tad too complex for some of the more dense members of our community, so let me try to simplify.

- This isn't about settlements not being given nation-tier perks. We don't want them.

- This is about settlements being repeatedly presented with utterly insurmountable obstacles to even be able to build a house, neglected completely by staff for sometimes months even before this new map begun, being repeatedly lied to by all levels of staff, and now when we finally got even the slightest bit of help that is being immediatelly reverted and the only staff member who gives the faintest of fucks about us got removed for doing nothing wrong.

This is not about a bunch of whining crybabies expecting results within a single day, this is months of utter neglect by the previous admin, a map that makes it impossible to gather materials effectively for nations, impossible to gather them full stop for settlements.

This is being lied to repeatedly, having our playerbases essentially stomped on by staff.

At this point it would be five times as transparent for them to just edit our plots into holes to the void and tell us to go to nations instead, that is clearly the end result wished for.

We don't want perks. We want the ability to build a ******* house without grinding for 3 days for it. We want a basic ******* soulstone pillar to the settlement so we can get back without running through-bandit infested roads we can't fight since we don't have any mines. The basic decencies that any playerbase should expect. It's not as if we haven't proven ourselves, we had all this last map, we had activity this last map, we have activity this map.

So let me get this right.

We're given permission to do all this by mutliple staff, work for ******* weeks, finally get our ****, and now they're going back to it after our communities finally built up trust.

I'm ******* HOPING this is them trying to kill the playerbase because this server genuinely doesn't deserve to stay afloat if this is how they treat their players.

Laeonathan is one of the ONLY staff members to show even the slighest amount of support for the smaller playerbases, he's genuinely a great staff member and player, I've praised him in Vaelya's VC for the last week before i took a break from the server when i thought all this was finally settled.

If staff is going to roll back our cities, destroy our playerbases, at least finish the ******* MAP so we can gather resources to rebuild first. give us tents, something to house our players in. Do the absolute bare ******* minimum to take care of your playerbase instead of playing rainbow six : siege in staff chat while the server ******* burns. I understand the apathy from higher levels of staff, but this level of utter disregard for the servers players is nothing short of a spit in the face of the people who dedicate  the most time trying to work on this piece of **** server.

It's telling that Laeonathan is removed, we all know most high-up staff are more concerned with their petty wannabe game of thrones politics than actually doing what they're in their positions to do, but that man volunteered days on end to work for the players, something I have been unable to say about any other staff  member for as long as I can remember being on this server. Probably one of the best among them, and it is utterly disgusting for the world team to have the gall to remove him for doing things he was given permission for. Nothing short of a stab in the back for your best member.

17 minutes ago, Sham404 said:

Do you want me to post your concerns on the discord where it can be responded to by the staff properly or are you gunna do it yourself?

Or are you just gunna whine

Buddy, listen, I understand that you're new here, and jsut becuase you have a good spot, you think you know everything, and how everything works. Imma tell you a secret - the staff can read the forums as well you dimwit.

You go on every thread, act better than everyone else, speak out of your ass on issues you know nothing about and embarass yourself yet still act like you're right. At least look into the issues before spewing nonsense

1 hour ago, Nathan_Barnett36 said:

Trying to claim the hangmen arent real bandits is quiet strange...

The hangmen are absolutely real bandits, but the bandit I've encountered, and a lot of the people I've seen talking about banditting on discord don't usually partake in this kind of stuff, it's just the best way to get materials and gear by far

6 hours ago, Will (TauFirewarrior) said:

Leave this pvp grind **** elsewhere, stop trying to appeal to the pvp goblins

See I must disagree here, I think this was genuinely made for RP, but because it was released unfinished in this kind of state it's just fucked and goes towards PVP instead.

My reasoning here is simple, a lot of the people who bandit and PVP right now aren't actually bandits, but because of the state that vortex was released in, PVPing is the single most efficient way to get materials, and most people don't have the time to grind properly. That doesn't in any way excuse the state of it, but at least its slightly hopeful

3 hours ago, Slorbin said:

Oren looks like Duloc.

It also looks like that one school roleplay server.

Really, the best solution is to demolish Oren, and give the materials and gold to little non-nation charters so they can do something more interesting than whatever the hell Oren is.

Based.

24 minutes ago, Sham404 said:

How many people from your settlement are actually contributing?

Not all too many, since msot of our palyerbase doesn't log in to run between different nodes, grind, waste obligatory numbers in "energy" to remake the same tools over and over to run back and forth and back and forth to nodes to not even have access to a fifth of the blocks we need for our builds, in numbers or just what kind of ******* blocks.

We could have had this done in hours with last maps system of just having resource pits and vanilla items, but guess not, here we are.

3 minutes ago, Sham404 said:

Your screenshot has to be a joke right? Like....are you serious or not? This has to be a joke.

It is a very slight exxageration but, very slight. After the start of the server, the settlement I'm with barely has a wooden pallisade, nowhere near buildings or walls.

3 minutes ago, NotEvilAtAll said:

You don't want no charters, no. You just don't want them to be very relevant at all. You literally admitted to me that the whole system is purposefully rigged against their favor, the system existing to fill a niche need and not actually provide anything else. How is that out of context?

 

It's blatantly biased in favor of nations, being done to centralize the server, which won't happen because these nations will spam out baronies anyways and have massive oversized capital builds regardless.

 

I'm not here to blame you personally man, it's just a tell-tale sign that the system doesn't have the best interest of charters and charter communities at heart when you literally tell me it doesn't.

I usually take part in shitting on staff, but this once I'll make an exception, since the entire community seems to have gone completely mad recently, this is absolutely absurd.

Laeonathan is genuinely working his ass off to help us settlements, he's been actively communicating to us and helping us more in the past four days than any other staff member has in the past month.
The system is fucked, yes, but thanks to this there are genuinely improvements being made even if they'll take time. Attacking the few staff who want to help us shows us as nothing but ungrateful and childish, we need some level of patience for them especially when these few people actually want to help us in a system rigged against us. Take a step back from the computer, calm down, look at this all again. It's fucked, we need to cooperate with people to fix it.

7 minutes ago, FlemishSupremacy said:

this will mean that their builds will be of inferior quality to those who have had creative

With the bar big nations like Oren sets, this is an incredibly depressing, but true statement. We're limited to basic dirt huts and oak houses with cobblestone decorations.
Which, thinking about it, might still be better than Oren's build, but the point remains. It's borderline impossible to make an attractive build, and thankfully, at least a couple of staff have noticed this and is helping out, but there needs to be a lot more work.

27 minutes ago, kujo said:

could staff explain their plugin instead? tossing a tag wont help ppl suddenly make sense of it and lengthens the time we're without a guide, if a good one even comes of this.

Please, this Vortex plugin is complex, most of it isn't even implemented yet, I doubt it's even finished - why is it up to the playerbase to write our own guides when we don't even have access to anything more than the extreme basics?
 

So this is what happens when someone incompetent looks at LF, sees that they have a resource system that starts with copper, a nice and streamlined crafting system, and goes "I can do that!" without putting any thought into why it worked for LF, and utterly ******* massacering the UI.

I'm not blaming the devs here, coding is really ******* hard, minecraft is a hard game to work with, they probably just did the best with what Telanir **** out in their discord.

- Actual response pending once I've tried the system out 

Edit : I've been told I sound rude to the devs. I don't blame any of the devs for this, nicky or anyone else. I blame Telanir fully for trying to implement a system that doesn't mesh with lotc, that has already been implemeneted once but better and was hated as much then as it will be now.

5 hours ago, Spoons said:

All great weapons have the same crit damage tho

Then I might just have noticed it more with the warhammer since it’s the most used one, and I can’t really tell the difference between longsword and greatsword, and those are the only ones used – greatsword and warhammer fro the great weapons – because axes are frankly completely and utterly useless since nobody uses shields. I realize i forgot to mention that issue with lacking axes in my original post, but i said a lot about shields

Before I get into the post – this is not to kick up controversy, nor get attention or any such, just some feedback on the surge PVP system after trying it out for a couple days. I also realize it may be way too late into development to make any changes based off of this feedback, and that it might just get disregarded. But then, oh well, I’ve already wasted my time writing it.

I like surge this far even though I’m way worse at it than 1.8 pvp. I hope it stays relatively even with equipment differences as to avoid another Axios situation. But there’s a few flaws, and a few suggestions I’d like to give.

Firstly, chainmail and piercing weapons.
At the moment the only piercing weapon is ranged, and ranged isn’t especially dangerous – just rush them down, or shoot back, not a big issue. This means that chainmail is a very safe option in armour, and to prove this, is the most widely used in the current beta, gambeson being a close second with plate a distant, distant third.

To help shake up the dominance of chainmail, and to add on the versatility of using the surge weapons as proxies for RP weapons, I’d suggest adding one of two meele piercing weapons. Maybe a thrusting sword and a spear, a ravens beak, or even a trident.  This would change the armour balance a lot, add a few new options, and diversify the weapons.

To add more onto ranged – at least in the now, I feel it needs a buff. It doesn’t provide a noticable threat and does maybe three or four hearts of damage before meele begins. Of course you shouldn’t be able to kill someone from afar without them having options, but adding a bit more damage so you need to consider how to counter ranged would maybe add something to combat.

To touch on anti-ranged, and combat in general, shields see very little use. This is because of two reasons I think. Firstly, they take up a weapon slot, which leaves you with far less options in gear if you take a shield. And secondly, two-handed weapons are powerful to the point that taking a one-handed weapon and a shield is just giving yourself a gigantic disadvantage. Buffing one-handed weapons (perhaps by giving them a much shorter cooldown to allow some basic combos) and buffing ranged would change this a lot as shields would now be more viable.
Alternatively, just give shields their own slot so that you can carry three weapons and a shield, or make shields take up the fifth armour slot right now used for reserve armour.

I’ll also briefly touch on the warhammer – it is right now by far the most dominant weapon due to its incredibly high crit damage.
This leaves other weapons behind, and a lot of users, since it’s hard to get the timing correct, especially when its lagging, which is a fair bit of the time. Maybe lowering crit damage in general to make them a good tool but not absolutely essential could fix this, and make combat a bit more fair between those skilled and not skilled.


And this is where my post veers off into the purely theoretical – mounted combat.
We haven’t seen any mounted combat yet, but I’m concerned about it nontheless purely from reading lances and pikes.
Firstly, the new pvp system is based heavily around crits, which you get from jumping and then striking the opponent on the downwards arch of your jump. As you may notice, this is very hard on a horse.
This leads the main option for horsemen to work as horse archers, and as I mentioned above - ranged combat just isn’t especially powerful.

A fix to this that’s of course heavily theoretical, but would lean into historical precedent, is to give lances an incredibly high damage, but stupidly long cooldown. Let’s say straight off a fourth or third of your health, but with a six second cooldown. This would add a niche for mounted combat as opportunistic high-risk high-reward gambling, as if you charge in and land your lance you’ll likely deal massive damage to your opponent. If however, they hit you with their pike to dismount you, or you miss, you’re done for since your weapon still has a six second cooldown til it can be used again.
Such a long cooldown also allows time for countering, by shooting them from range, backing up and eating to heal since healing is pretty quick with enough saturation, backing up to join your group again, etc, etc.

This would give cavalry an active and interesting role, make pikes a viable thing to carry around to counter this, and add something realistic – lancers, heavy cavalry, shock cavalry, whatever you want to call it. Something very real in the late-medieval-ish era we find ourselves in on lotc.

It would also make cohesion very important, since the best counter to high single target damage is to swamp them with numbers, in this case a mass of pikemen counter-charging the cavalryman to dismount them. Which is also realistic, but leans into the current dynamic of group PVP – cohesion and coordination is extremely important, and this would only enforce that even more.

But those are my thoughts, I’ll probably come back and add more to this when I remember something or come up with something new, I’d encourage others to give their thoughts as well, this changing of the pvp system si very important and will lead to a lot of changes within the community.

(also, @nickrocky213 sorry mate, thought it best to ping you, if I wasn’t supposed to, very sorry about that, have a good day)

Shuo would lay aside one of the fliers with a deep sigh and rise from his sitting place on the pallisade “Months ago they asked me to take down the defenses. Very well, I’ll see what I can do about the assassins.” The man muttered to himself, jumping off it and down into fort hope’s courtyard to go about his patrols

It’s something that’s been touched upon in a few responses, but I do think some people are taking the separation of RP and OOC a bit too far. 
Now, this is not to say there shouldn’t be a barrier there – i have personally advocated for people to keep them separate for a long while to avoid conflict. But we need to accept that there will always be some level of connection there. Your character will always have some part of you in it, no matter how wildly different they are.

And in topics such as this, where its an actual IRL issue, we do need to be rather difficult in how it is handled. I think the recent forum posts have been a pretty good example, an irp discussion with in rp basis and arguments, and little outside conflicts. 
Many of the comments on them have not been, especially some that essentially just go “oh ew disgusting burn foul gay!” without any nuance of RP, thankfully they’re rare.
But we do need to keep it in mind nontheless. It’s a sensitive issue, identity politics (yes the feared two words) in general are, because they’re about someones identity. That’s why I don’t really think we can say “well it’s just RP” because a fair bit of the time, it can be motivated by ooc beliefs, if exaggerated in rp.

This is not to say “Ban homophobic RP” no it has a good basis. It’s in human history, for elves it’s because their race might damned well go extinct if there’s too many homosexual people, and it is a topic that can be handled well and discussed in a way that can help people. Because it’s not really them, it’s a character. So there’s a barrier there when discussing these things in RP. 

We just need to be careful with what we say, how we say it, and why we say it. It’s one thing when my twink elf gets questioned for his choices by a canonist, perhaps denounced or threatened. Another when you just screech about killing the gays in rp as a “joke” or harass a homosexual character for it repeatedly.

Another even worse step is when it’s brought to some level oocly, which at least in my relatively limited experience from sitting in groupchats the past four years, that’s not common but not unheard of.

In short, to sum up my thoughts : It’s a conflict that’s well-established in multiple playerbases, it’s an interesting topic in RP because of LOTC’s lore, and it should be allowed and separate from OOC. But we need to be careful with it so that it doesn’t spill into OOC, or so that it’s not just parroting OOC homophobic talking points but through the mask of an elf/dwarf/human/orc. It’s not as simple as “Just play your character oh my god keep it separate” because it’s about people’s identity, and an ongoing OOC conflict in the real world about whether or not they’re allowed to be who they were born to be.
But it’s still an RP conflict and as long as it stays an RP conflict in the community, that’s a good thing and should be encouraged, because it can lead to genuinely good RP, as we have seen with the recent forum posts, “public letters to the pontiff”.


 

also entirely unrelated but wtf

On 10/22/2020 at 10:51 PM, ABruhhMoment said:

You can ask if homophobia belongs, but at the same standard does homosexuality belong? The point being, you can’t ask someone to not RP being homophobic without also allowing them to ask not RPing being gay. 

“Yeah man just don’t be gay, they won’t be homophobes” that’s not at all how that works, one is someone’s genuine and legitimate identity, the other is a bad-faith opinion. **** argument, not everything is equally balanced on both sides of the debate

[!]Pinned up on the noticeboards of cities spread around Arcas, a new open letter sits hammered in with a simple nail.

Over the past two or so years, public letters to  the pontiff have posted up in many major cities - each concerning the existence of same sex relationships and marriages.

This content of them I care little for, it should to all civilized be an obvious answer. However, the responses, is what takes my interest.

For near all of the responses echo the very same thing. 

‘This is not in our tradition.’ 

‘The first relationship was between a man and a woman, thus we should not do anything different.’ 

‘The scrolls say husband and wife, thus we should not seek out other relationships.’

‘this has never been done before, so should never be done.’

I wish to extend a simple request to those spewing these thought-free sentences taught not with education but indoctrination - return to the old traditions.

Form still not in empires but simple tribedoms, where noblemen rule over tiny slices of land. 

Work not with steel tools in factories, work the fields with flint and bronze.

Do not fight with advanced armour and weapons, but rather pelts and slings.

Do not build tall walls, construct rather earthen ramparts supporting wooden pallisades.

Build not tall houses of concrete, live rather in huts of clay and thatch.

If tradition is your very truest calling, then live by tradition. Do not act a hypocrite by taking to heart those traditions that keeps away that which makes you uncomfortable, only to discard those traditions that it benefits you to forget.

I am not as old as many, but I remember still when the empire was pious. When the church ruled as much as the state. This is not the empire of today - Helena has pretended to enter an age of thought and logic, not fanaticism and religion.

If this is true, then why is it needed to cling to rotting tradition?

Another verse has been used in this meaningless defense of ancient traditions.

‘And as I made for you the worldly pleasures, so too have I made the pleasures of the spirit, and the love of the husband and wife.’

‘So I am the Most High, and in pursuit of My Virtue, I bid my faithful this: You shall not lie with your kin, nor those of other tribes, and none shall lie together but in holy union.’

These very words undermine the message the church and those ‘traditionalists’ wish to send, that homosexuality is unacceptable and unprecedented.

It is not stated that the only pleasure is the love of the husband and wife, simply that it is another pleasure. This is not excluding that of the wife and wife, nor husband and husband. Simply describes the two partners in a relationship.

In fact with how it is written, these do not in any matter have to be correlated with one another - it simply mentions the wife, and the husband. The man, and the woman. Not as one, not as bound nor exclusively as these, but as the members of any relationship.

And the second verse, you shall not lie with your kin. 

As anyone may see, save perhaps the Orenian noble bloodlines, this refers to family, not gender. One shall not lie with their sister, cousin, brother or such - anyone can see this, and it is an obvious truth all agree with.

I take more interest in a part of it never truly mentioned. ‘Nor those of other tribes’.

This is most often used to excuse hatred towards those who interbreed with other descendants, but the scrolls too speak against this.

For the four brothers were brothers, brought forth from the first man and woman. They are of the same tribe, and still today, despite our differences, we all are. Descendants are not separated.

Our greatest moments of strength is when we all stand together without borders or kings.

As has it always been - for only in fighting together as one, could the brothers hold back Ibless.

And only in fighting together as one have we stayed alive through armageddon after armageddon.

Only across borders of race has the greatest alliances been forged, and the strongest friendships found.

And even today, near two-thousand years later, we can and do breed between one another without creating mules. The descendants of the four brothers remain kin, despite the curses the great enemy put on our bloodlines.

The scrolls and history as a whole can then, by a different interpretation, can be told to support interbreeding and unity as a whole, and in a matter support homosexuality.

Thus, I simply ask, to those still willing to argue against such.

When you do, I expect the writing to be on a clay platter or carved into either wood or stone. I expect you to wear simple pelts and use bronze tools and send your response from a thatch hut. 

For if you do not,you have abandoned a part of the four brothers tradition and lifestyle. And if you do not follow all of it, why follow any of it?

Especially when your own rulers follow none.

Tradition is a decaying cage, descendants should not be held in by rotting chains held by a corrupt church and cowardly tyrants. Act on it all, or abandon it all.

- Shuo.

“Arguments are made for tradition – for precedent in history. However these ignore that many improvements upon society have been made that did not exist when the four brothers still worked with stone axes and bronze swords.” Shuo would move away from the poster with a sigh “To keep being hung up on such a minor thing – who loves who – and calling to a tradition that is readily ignored in other cases, shows more a fear of social change than call to the righteousness of the texts. Or any change at all should be called out as heresy – for I doubt the four brothers made ready use of steam engines, metallurgy as advanced as our own, or many forms of architecture that have recently evolved.”

Honestly man, yeah, this is pretty ******* good

[!]Letters are sent to each city involved with the firewatch alliance

To refortify Fort Hope

Addressed to the leadership of the firewatch alliance.

To refortify Fort Hope.

While this may seem like little less as a propaganda move, this suggestion has worth.

With the inferi moving further to threaten our coast, attacking the mainland, a battle for Aegrothond being built up to, and the enemy having sent in raiding parties to harass our roads already, it is clear we need a united position.

And while the mountains housing the skull should be priority, Fort Hope remains a vital position.

It lays close to the coast, yet far enough away to not be immediately threatened. However, it is a barrier to all demonic movements.

Laying with direct paths to Sutica and Aegrothond, as well as blocking the path further inland towards the orcish and druidic lands, it also cuts off the swiftest route to the cloud temple and the road network centered around it.

This same road network makes it an optimal position to reinforce the coastal lands. Near to the ferry to the queens isle, within sight of Sutica, within marching distance of the bridge to Korvassa and within running distance of Aegrothond, armies stationed here can reinforce any position currently under threat by the inferi. It can also move swiftly to cut off any road leading further inland from these positions, and is easily reinforced from all of these positions, as well as any place further inland such as the human lands - due to its close proximity to the cloud temple, around which our road network is centered.

So that is Fort Hope’s positional advantages.

In advantages of fortification - it is true that the current fortifications face the wrong side of the cliff island to be useful in this fight. 

However, they serve as a good base, and with its walls extended around the relatively small top of the rocky island - a task inexpensive and cheap, as they need not be taller than two or three meters to provide adequate protection due to the cliffs already surrounding the island being the greatest fortification there is.

As stated, extending these fortications will make it into a formidable fortress even inferi will have difficulty storming. And with space within enough to house all of our united armies, as well as space to store provisions and weapons for them all to hold out it is optimal for a war on this scale.

In terms of weaponry, there are already ballista that have before been used to bring down mutated beasts brought from the void - beings that were challenged in scale and power perhaps only by the largest of the inferi war-monsters.

These ballista could without spending any resources be moved to the other side of the island to provide a basic battery, and just a few more, perhaps supported by cannons, will provide enough to cause the inferi to suffer every step on the advance.

In infantry positions, the height provides a perfect position for archers to shoot imps out of the sky, and whittle down the infantry on approach.

Even when the demonic invaders cross the river and attempt to climb the cliff, their armour will slow their advance in this terrain and they can be slaughtered - for we know they die as any other man.

In this, use of combined arms - artillery to bring down monsters, and archers in a naturally perfect position for humanoids and imps - can make the inferi suffer unprecedented losses.

And do not make the mistake of believing this will be a wasted effort. With the before discussed position of Fort Hope allowing it to stop any army from moving inland will force the inferi to storm the fort before any efforts can be made at further attacking us. 

So, in conclusion. Fort Hope is one of the single best positions available to descedantkind - cheap and easy to fortify, already armed with weaponry able to fight off an army, and controlling the way into the continent.

And lastly, as touched upon in the beginning, it is a meaningful position.

Fort Hope was the base of operations when fighting back the void, another, very similar, invader of our land from another realm. And that time too, we beat them back with the strength gifted to us, the strength all descendants have in their will.

To rebuild this fort in this time is to light not a candle in the night, but to light a blazing fire in defiance against our foes.

• - Shou.