[Map] Marshes of Aurum

The RP Faction + Village should be a safe area without any war, where players can farm in safe a bit gold by serfing or create merchants caravans.
Therefore the faction will have all serf/creating trainings and mid-class warrior/weapons/amour to defend themselves. It should be similar like
the St.Micheal Abbey in Boderlands 2 . Village and a smaller Castle(Or Abbey or Tavern) combined with the safety of the needed permission from
an Admin to declare a war against them. It should be the only faction which will have this privilege.


Yes I will add cuttable trees at each faction(maybe not cavern). The cuttable forest should only provide a start money possibility after a reset/new player.


The fps...hm indeed. I think the most Objects load will be at the Cavern Faction and the City Nantes since the one is in a mountain and the other on the sea.
At the other places I will try to minimize the amount of objects.

Okay before you get too far I'm just going to say that an admin protected faction is complete and utter horrible map design. It doesn't benefit "roleplay" at all, it just lets assholes have a safe place to hide behind admins after taxing/killing/being an ass to other factions. It would be far more beneficial to just make it isolated but not invincible, and the so-called "roleplay" features can still be there.

I am going to side with Splintert. I would integrate the village with the city, place fields and all these things outside Nantes. Cities tend to be ghost towns in this mod.

Also, I think that the version with infinite stocks could be really good to provide something different. Resource gathering is then another way of grinding money but you don´t need to coordinate it in complicated ways with crafting.

In any case, what concept do you have for the map, salva?

In the case of Borderlands it was, in principle, competition for delivery of goods to castles, since castle chests were linked to stocks.

Let me know if you are open for suggestions!

Does the whole "Trade between castles" work? Any time more than 2 factions are powerful they are at war and that means absolutely no trade, I also hate it when castles are purposefully impaired; its all like " where's the ****ing linen? we have iron but no linen!" "where's the ****ing iron? we have linen but no Iron!".

Anyone who actually takes time to spread around the resources is probably sent from the faction itself so that they aren't dead in the water and it requires extensive knowledge of the map to find: A resource, where to refine it, and what to transport it in.

clant said:

Does the whole "Trade between castles" work? Any time more than 2 factions are powerful they are at war and that means absolutely no trade, I also hate it when castles are purposefully impaired; its all like " where's the ******** linen? we have iron but no linen!" "where's the ******** iron? we have linen but no Iron!".

Anyone who actually takes time to spread around the resources is probably sent from the faction itself so that they aren't dead in the water and it requires extensive knowledge of the map to find: A resource, where to refine it, and what to transport it in.

Click to expand...

That's the point, to encourage trade between factions and the like.
That is also why you need specific men to go around "Trading and Acquiring new materials" for your future war effort. I personally like the Idea of having each castle impaired in some way, it makes factions think rather than going on all out war against each other. This is course all my opinion.

More accurately, it stops anything from happening because each castle is missing one vital part of a war effort.

A lot of people suggest having incomplete resources in various castles so they will "trade" this is total fantasy - never happens.

Maps should be designed to ensure stocks reach all armourys. This in itself is a tricky task. Trying to add complication like trading between castles will just mean empty stocks.

A two tier trading system, with cheap stocks and the source, and expensive at the target, has proven to work though.

No more crafting! Now there is a version with unlimited stocks. Let's just use that. Crafting is a pain, horses never get restock, etc.

By narrowing the amount of features, one can do a better job in the important ones.


But other than some players mentioning inter castles trade, we haven't heard yet what the intended gameplay will be for this scene...

Yea I agree with Erk, No more Crafting instead. Solves all our problems.

Erk said:

But other than some players mentioning inter castles trade, we haven't heard yet what the intended gameplay will be for this scene...

Click to expand...

A bunch of people killing each other. 

Right!


But see I think that map designs with a "theme" or "intended gameplay" work much better than those that are just "pretty". You need to offer incentives for players to do something. For example, with Borderlands we tried to create competition between castles to make caravans sell in their stockpiles (the stockpiles were linked to the chest and they made money out of it).

However, the castles where too far away and people didn't bother too much with it. Rewards were also too high so you didn't need to do that often enough. A bunch of design flaws.

Anyway, you see where I am going.

Actually, in the version of Borderlands I played, I think the real issue was a) starting stocks, b) indestructable "merchant" island protected by admins, with a huge amount of weapons and armour, and c) admin refunds. Those three factors lead to an attitude of "why the hell would I craft when there's a pile of weapons on that island and I already have money?".

That was Borderlands V2; I wasn't involved in it.

Nevertheless. I have yet to see a scene implementing crafting successfully. I don't think it adds that much anyway, so I would simply go for the unlimited stocks.

Ideally, you could have some of the stocks unlimited and others not, but I honestly don't care much.

My point is that Borderlands (the first version) had some incentive design behind it. It was like a map from an RTS game. There was a guy who even found a warcraft 2 map that looked almost exactly like Borderlands.

I want to know what Salva plans to achieve with this map. How is people going to play it?

I know that Salva is better than most map designers, but I have seen plenty of maps that are flawed due to naive incentive structures. For instance, those that assume that castles will "trade". Or that factions will "tax certain important roads". And so on. As Blucher said, this never happens.

Everytime I lead a faction and the armory is empty, step by to visit the hard working smith(s).
And I must say I personally would dislike it very much if people who put no effort in controlling their economy had access to gear same as factions who actually organize things have (Not to mention the obvious point that endless weapon stocks would support mainly the people that just want a quick fight, compared to people who actually want to spend their time with the mod, crafting or not)

I disagree. Crafting has never worked overall. My opinion.

If you want a castle to craft make it fullly self sufficient.

Low value ressource, flax, wheat, and leather should be IN the castle, in a easy access so even if people take time to do so, it's would be easy and safe to do so.
Medium value ressource, like small iron; salt and wood, should be out, yet not too far away from the castle.Each castle should have not far away a small mine of a weak iron to be able to maintain an army.

Hard value ressource and easy to exploit, like iron, silver and gold should be far from the castle in contested point.
Make sure you give large starting stock for weak weapon ( like 50 for war spear and leather/light mail) . Medium armour and weapon, 25 starting gear
and heavy armour 0-5
then you put 40% starting stock to avoid people swiming in weapons at start.

Also make sure that ALL stockpile got a maximum pile so people don't stock to infinite and rather use them for crafting.
To set up trade you can.
1. Allow a castle to compensate a lack of low value ressource by importing them. Setting up a cheap trade post with a lot of stock for linen, wheat, and leather.
2. Allow castle to sell their overstock by selling refined ressource ( long iron bar/board/gold bar/silver) In trade post, however, the sale price should be a little above the standard price.

The trade road MUST be dangerous and not so convenient, and slightly more rewarding than working for a castle. Crafting should always be the most rewarding.

In terms of reward from the lowest to the highest

1. Safe farming in castle, harvesting mid ressource (wood, salt, weak iron)
2. Harvesting hard ressourcing (more dangerous)
3. Trading low ressources and exporting refined ressource
4. Crafting

In terms of mapping.

EAch castle MUST be able to close its training, and his armoury.
The armory with a wooden door, the training with a steel door. Serf and enginneer should always be joinable, they can't be close as they are worker class.
That way the lord control who join as military and can choose to not allow certains people, in order to focus them to work rather than stand around with a blunt sword.

The low ressources must be imported if the castle don't have the manpower to do the safe farming. Wheat is a must for horse, and leather/linen are needed for nearly all the armour.  It's a must for a successful crafting place 

No one wants to farm.

Farming, mining, cutting trees or any other form of grinding is NOT fun in itself.

What makes it fun is the fact that it is dangerous.

I would advice to leave only very few protected and very low reward activities. Just to make sure you got enough to buy tools and a horse, nothing else. Maybe just some sticks with a higher price. That's about it.

Forget about crafting. Ever re stocked an armory during war? It is just frustrating, takes you a long time to craft every single item and people just spawn, gear and die so fast that you wouldn't believe it. Crafting is a nice idea that has NEVER been well implemented in any server. Name one. NEVER seen a scene where items and horses where systematically replaced. I think it is a problem with the mod dynamics and how freaking painful crafting is. 

I refuse to devote any more mental effort to crafting now that Vornne allows us to have unlimited stocks.

Now in an scene where there are unlimited stocks, resources are just collected for the sake of grinding. I would make them similar reward per time (including farming), of course risk adjusted. Just to have a variety of them, it looks nice to see people farming, playing with cows and cutting trees. Just for the visual effect, no actual meaning.

I agree, and I think the worst thing for this mod was armour crafting.

I wish for there to be no more of the "Peaceful village" part of the game. It just makes all the serfs go to the village and the different lords/factions have extremely few serfs. In my opinion, this counteracts the whole "Supply wins wars" thing that the mod makers are trying to do, seeing as the serfs do nothing for the factions.