Suggestion Hostile Takeover Mechanics

[Mattholomew]

Heard Kainzo mention it, so, here's my thought on it. If you want hostile takeovers, you don't want it easy, and you want to give the townies a chance to reclaim it, but you want it to be possible. The best way to do that is to have a "key block" that rests in the town hall, with something (perhaps a sign on it, or registering players/townies within X blocks of it, or if a player/towny right-clicks it) that gives region permissions to the person who controls it in some way(in the sign case, they would have to break and replace with their name, in the X blocks case, they'd have to be the last person near it, and in the right-click case, the last person to right-click). That way, if someone found a way inside, they could fight to control the key block, and would have to continue fighting until the town was cleared of people (who would cause control of the key block to be contested by interfering with sign placement/block reader/right-click spamming) to obtain partial control (fairly easy with abandoned towns). The temporary permissions would transfer to them immediately, allowing them to bar the current townies out, but, if the townies were fast or determined enough, they could reclaim the key block in the town hall and block intruders once again. "Owning" the key block would start a timer for the invaders the moment they gained control of it, and they would have to maintain control of it for a set period of time (3 days-1 week(definitely don't want someone to come into a town while everyone's offline for 1 day and come back to find their town gone)), during which they would have to keep away all townies (even 1 towny can reset permissions back, making the invaders have to restart the process and reset the timer. Not impossible if they have region access and the defeated townies don't). Once the period of time passed, the invaders would gain full permission control and access, and own the town.

 

[leftovers5]

Ehh... :l This could be bad or good. I don't really have an opinion on it because of that.

 

[Digger360]

The only problem I see with this, is towns would create sign "vaults" that were completely sealed off, with no way inside it, with everyone's recall set around it so they could recapture it at any time.

Along side that, most towns are literary boxes or domes of glass, townships are already impossible to get inside of, which is where the original problem originated.

 

[mawaty]

So you're basically pitching the idea of a king of the hill, in a town?

 

[Nalestom]

As Digger said, the problem with this concept is actually getting inside of a town. I'm sure a few rules and/or a TNT mechanic would solve that problem, but personally, I don't like the idea of a town I worked hard to build being taken over by a bunch of intruders. Towns are supposed to offer an increase in protection, but your concept seems to detract from that offer.

 

[Digger360]

Hmm. Perhaps "conquering" a town will force them to pay a fine to the invaders, something extreme, but manageable, perhaps 100 a day. Subtractions would be automatic, from the town bank, and if the town failed to pay tribute, they'd be deregioned, or the region would simply be given to the raiders.

 

[Dsawemd]

*I see a vast swathe of towns camped and dismantled by the TC. Mounds of offline non-pvpers lying decapitated in their town halls. The sun shines down upon death, and Brutal smiles. It has been 2 weeks since regions were made conquerable.*

shudder....
king-of-the-hill regions would lead to a dark and dangerous server, thats for sure.

 

[~Falker57~]

Use the king of the hill apspect of this and I will be UBER happy. http://herocraftonline.com/main/threads/outposts-whats-feasible.16714/

 

[~Falker57~]

Make people unable to build around the sign

 

[Mattholomew]

I think the only reason Kainzo asked for it (if he wasn't joking in the first place) would be to find out how to deal with inactive towns. If that was the case, no active town would have to worry about it at all, and the admins would just make an event out of it where the block would be placed and KOTH battle for the town would begin. Also, like Falker said, making it impossible to build around the block/sign or set a mark within 20 blocks of it would solve a lot of the problems that could come up. Not saying that this is an amazing idea, just that it's one of the simplest ways to go about hostile takeovers.

 

[Mattholomew]

Maybe I misunderstood, actually. Maybe by "hostile takeover" he meant making it so that any given town is siegeable. If that's the case, there's several pretty easy ways to do this. One way is to make a pathing program that's attached to the regions, that traces paths (from somewhere like the outer corner of town hall, for instance) to possible exits from the towns regions (it would basically function similarly to the movement AI for mobs in game). You'd have to make a possible exit fro the town regions that was unobstructed (it wouldn't have to be obvious, though, or even functioning, just be a 2x1 path that can lead outside of regions). It would then make it impossible to place any block in that path that would make it unusable unless it could sense an alternate route out of regions. Another possibility would be similar to what Nalestom suggested, that you could add a unique property to TNT that allows it to be used, but, instead of destroying the blocks, simply removes them for about 5 seconds, then replaces them. That would be harder to do, because you'd have to program in some type of real-time, chunk-localized reverting, but it would make TNT have a purpose and practical use without being a griefing tool. Yet another is just have every town randomly trace a 2x1 region out from the center of town to the edge of the region that would change daily, that would make it so that a part of the wall would be deregioned just enough to allow players that were extremely driven to raid to be able to find a way in, albeit a very time-consuming way to raid. Would maintain the security of the town for the most part, but always give a small opening for raiders to use. It would be impossible to just tunnel it off, because by the next day it would be different again. It would also be the easiest to do codewise, too, so, actually, forget I mentioned the first two

 

[Joka10]

The issue with adding a way to conquer towns is that you have to avoid forcing groups to have guards on 24/7. If there has to be a structural way to get into a town's core thingy, the only way to be protected is for members to spend an obscene amount of time online guarding it. A King of the Hill scenario is fun for a couple of hours, but not when you have to stop sleeping just to protect your town.

Personally, I think the best way to conquer a town would be the following. So, one group declares war on another group via a plugin. A war fee is determined based on the size of the groups, is taken from the group that declares war, and is put in a sort of stasis. If the declarer gets a certain number of kills off of the victim group (as with the fee, the number of kills would be determined by the size of the involved groups), the money is returned to them and they win the town. However, if the victim group kills a certain amount of the declarer group (this would be determined by the size of the involved groups, but would be smaller than the required number for the declarer group), or the declarer group fails to reach their goal within a time limit (determined by the size of the groups (It would be days, even weeks, generally)), the war fee is given to the victim group and the state of war is nullified. The declarer would also be unable to declare war again for several days.

For the various values in that scenario, this is what I had in mind. For the fee, it would be larger if the attackers were more numerous than the victims, and smaller if the opposite was true. The kills required for the attacker would be greater if the victim group was smaller than the attacker group, and smaller (no smaller than the total number of players in the victim town) if the opposite was true. The kills required for the victims to win would be smaller if their group was smaller than their attacker's (though not smaller than the amount of people in the attacking town), and larger if the opposite was true. The time limit would be greater if the attacker group was smaller than the victim, and shorter if the opposite was true. That was all probably pretty obvious.

As for the timer, I had some ideas to make it work a little better. The timer would not decrement while all members of the victim town were either offline, in no-pvp zones, or in towns/PRs (kills inside towns/PRs would still count). This would prevent people running down the clock while completely (or in the case of towns/PRs, possibly almost completely) invincible. People could still be crafty and just have one person vulnerable, or other things like that, but nobody could make it completely unfair.

Long, but I think it could work.

 

[Mattholomew]

Your idea is better Xp It doesn't give any way for them to kill the townies if they decide to stay in their secured town, though (unless you mean that by entering war the regions would allow them access), so members could essentially build time-depleting underground areas that only just exit the regions and sit there until the war ended (if it was getting close to being found they'd just seal up and make another). You could make a rule against that, but other than that, it sounds good.