Best 'camp town' implementation?

[nox]

There's a spot in the game I've referred to as the 'dead' spot, which occurs about the time levelling slows down, and prior to capturing the player's first holding.  At this point the player has nowhere to hold prisoners or extra troops or store items or operate defensively but yet is a little too wealthy and big to be fighting the bandit trash (which by this point starts getting exterminated anyhow)

One potential fix is to permit the player (with sufficient men, engineering skill and money) to build a romanesque fortified camp.  This would provide the player with the basics of 'walled_center'-dom, such as garrison troops and stockades for prisoners and be a place to call home prior to the first siege actions.

I can imagine a few ways this might be done, but better would be to hear how it's been done right in other mods.  Ideas and speculation is always welcome, too. 

So, any takers?

 

[lotsofpaper]

custom settlement mod for warband got the idea right. Woops, I think this was actually a mod for original mount and blade.


Ability to create a small settlement (more like a village than a fort) in a very open part of the map. For this game, that could be in one of a dozen places... completing upgrades to the settlement allows it to grow larger, which results in increased fortification and commerce benefits.

I think it would be nice to eventually be able to complete quests to make unique improvements to your settlement... That is to say, do a quest that makes your prison tower nearly impossible to escape from by finding and hiring an extremely hard to find engineer! Make your city walls higher by recruiting hundreds of migrant workers or buying slaves! invest money in the financial side of your city to gather increased income! You get the idea.

This allows a player to have a very small, weak, hard to defend town at the middling part of the game. If you manage to let the town get captured through your arrogance and poor management, it should be razed. There should be some good requirements for this too... 200 renown should do it, with a starting investment of... 500k. Unless you feel like re balancing the caravans?

also PLEASE make a place for the player to store things! There is only one working chest in all of the world at the moment!!!

 

[Adijazz1706]

custom settlement mod for warband got the idea right. Woops, I think this was actually a mod for original mount and blade.


Ability to create a small settlement (more like a village than a fort) in a very open part of the map. For this game, that could be in one of a dozen places... completing upgrades to the settlement allows it to grow larger, which results in increased fortification and commerce benefits.

I think it would be nice to eventually be able to complete quests to make unique improvements to your settlement... That is to say, do a quest that makes your prison tower nearly impossible to escape from by finding and hiring an extremely hard to find engineer! Make your city walls higher by recruiting hundreds of migrant workers or buying slaves! invest money in the financial side of your city to gather increased income! You get the idea.

This allows a player to have a very small, weak, hard to defend town at the middling part of the game. If you manage to let the town get captured through your arrogance and poor management, it should be razed. There should be some good requirements for this too... 200 renown should do it, with a starting investment of... 500k. Unless you feel like re balancing the caravans?

also PLEASE make a place for the player to store things! There is only one working chest in all of the world at the moment!!!

Which chest is working.

 

[Desideratus]

Building your own temporary fort could work out nicely. It's been done in custom settlement, even though those are permanent. An easy to access, hard to defend encampment to store items, troops, and prisoners.

Nox, if you don't mind me asking, what do you oversee in development?

 

[nox]

Building your own temporary fort could work out nicely. It's been done in custom settlement, even though those are permanent. An easy to access, hard to defend encampment to store items, troops, and prisoners.

Nox, if you don't mind me asking, what do you oversee in development?

I'm in charge of continuous development for WFaS.  Once the work is completed bringing the title up to standards, it'll be turned over to me to bring the warband codebase into it, as well as other improvements as we see fit.

 

[lotsofpaper]

The Kiev fortress chest is currently functional regardless of whether or not you hold the city.

You know, you could have just typed in "storage" into the search bar...

 

[Darmoth]

I think this is a great idea.

To start with the play would need to have enough troops, as in the man power to undertake the project, and fund it. Engineering should play a key role I think as well, and it should include improvements. Additionally I'd like to think perhaps that as the player's renown grows, they should be able to appoint people, similar to cities/towns. Perhaps some drill masters that would let the players have practice fights/shooting/riding ect like the training camps in Warband did. After all I'd imagine firing drills were common practice in this day and age for musketeers, though that is speculation on my part.

Again as renown grows, perhaps the outpost could attract armorers, weapons smiths, or even just a regular ol' smithy. I mean horses need to be reshoed after all. These things could function as stores... or perhaps as bonuses that granted a regular income or even perhaps grant a bonus such a reduced upkeep (wages) for certain types of troops.

The other obvious add ons would be things like improving the fortifications, perhaps digging a well, a lookout tower, a messenger post, a makeshift prison ect.

 

[lotsofpaper]

Oooooh!

Marksmanship tournaments!!!!

Experience (and firearm skill) would be gained based on how well each hero unit and the player did in the marksmanship trial! Could even have a classic bow and arrow tournament!


Also: Enhanced traps? upgradable trap system, as the traps available in current cities tend to kill about .5% of the enemy troops currently.

 

[wannyboy]

I wouldnt make those camps too great, since they are just temporary wooden fortresses placed on the field.
It should take about 2 days to build a decent fortress, cost you certain goods (was thinking of iron, tools, wool, furs and hides) and also a lot of money
At the start, you should only be able to store troops however it should be upgradable:
- Mercenary quarter: a tavern where you only meet mercenarys, no travelers, companions, ransom brokers...
- Prison
- Storage chest
- maybe a low tier armor/ weapon smith who only makes kinda weak equipment for high prices
- quarter master: he sells food for high prices(no other goods, just food)
- militia commander, allowing you to recruit militia of a faction you choose when you build fortress. The type changes as soon as you join a kingdom as lord, vasal or rebel(with claimant)
- upgrade wooden pallisade
You can also take down your own fortress to rebuilt in somewhere else. If you do, you will lose everything you had in your fortress however so it's best to get a good location from the start
If your fortress gets taken over, its burned to ashes and disappears from the map together with all its improvements(you can go check the burned fortress to try recover some of your stored items)

This camp would be inferior to a city in every way but can replace its most important functions

I would also add more temporary entrenchments:
The entrenched camp.
This camp would have a earth wall with some spikes on it as defense, making it quite easy to breach. It requires about 5 hours to set up(wih low engineering) and 1 set of tools in your inventory. You can store as many troops as you want here, however you have to provide them with food,pay full wages and they will rebel if their morale drops too low. The camp itself will already lower their morale but since they dont get too fight and the group can be as big as you want, the morale is likely to go quite low.
The food they eat will have to be brought there by you and they only have a capacity of 12 slots meaning you will have to resupply them quite often if the army is too big. This entrenched camps is actually like a lord who cant move.
This could be usefull since it wont cost as much as a fortress and is much easier to deploy. it can also be used to station your troops while moving you fortress since you would otherwise have to disband them or to station some troops in a certain area to refill your party if you expect to have a lot of fighting going on there.
This camp can also be demolished by the player himself to be able to set a camp somewhere else and can also be burned by enemy's


I would limit it to 1 fortress per person and 2 entrenched camps

 

[Goergyboy]

The food they eat will have to be brought there by you and they only have a capacity of 12 slots meaning you will have to resupply them quite often if the army is too big.

This would just be annoyingly grindy. You're already paying them wages.

For an idea like this, it's best to keep it as simple as possible, lest the player get too attached to the home made fort.

A reduced cost to wages for troops stationed in the camp would be nice and help serve its purpose allowing the player to stockpile units despite not having a fixed income. In the center I would imagine more of a tent than a built structure, unless you want to follow up on the ideas of using materials, taking a long time, and costing a lot of money; of which I personally think are good ideas.

The enemy would probably need some way to siege the camp to a lesser degree. Ladders would almost seem excessive, and with the problem of the AI and ladders the position could become far more defend-able than intended. Being able to destroy the gate in battle would or before battle would be good. Throw a battering ram or a pointed felled tree to display that they destroyed the gate first then formed up their lines to attack.

It should still be eclipsed by a city in all aspects, and not have that many options, but a few small things would be nice. Such as the targeting range, and someone selling limited amounts of food, but other than that I wouldn't add much.

 

[wannyboy]

camp isn't meant as place to stockpile units, for that you have the fortress where the food gets provided like in city's. A camp is just a way to leave your troops behind, they don't have any comfort, they are just sleeping on the field, so they should be payed fully and supplied with food, this way people won't be using camps as fortresses, they should be temporary. U say they would get too attached to the camp? I think they would rather remove it as soon as they don't need it anymore since it's so annoying. And no need to siege a camp, the combat would be just like when the enemy attacks a village or a wagon fort, it's just a field battle where 1 faction has the advantage of some walls.

 

[Caba`drin]

Tempered's Entrenchment kit is quite good...but largely duplicated by the wagon fort system. Some of his new functionality surrounding entrenching a siege may be interesting to add, however.

Lumos' Outpost kit is good too...the coding could be crisper in many respects (some of which I've forwarded to him and he's indicated he is working on in his upcoming Warband release), but it largely gets the job done. Custom settlements may be more appropriate to what you're looking for, however.

 

[nox]

I am not thinking a great deal of complexity, but some upgrades might be a good idea rather than making the build time very long.  I'm thinking that building the thing would take several days but less for having more men in your army.

Restrict building to not being too near a walled center... 

Would expect the place to have a negative income, but also feed troops stationed in it.

At the least I think the game needs:
- a place to garrison troops
- someplace to hold prisoners
- raise morale for resting in (which walled centers should be doing anyhow)
- vendor access (camp followers) for necessities.
- storage

I think the storage should be common with an explorable 'camp' when the player sets up camp to rest. 

 

[original]

To solve the problem of storing prisoners, troops and items, you could allow the player to have those options in his first village. I'm sure any player can get a village, you get one just by joining a faction.

For troops, you can have your village create a barracks to house them. Make it limited like 50, because a village is never meant to hold back a fully-trained army. But 50 should be more than enough for a temporary staging area.
For prisoners, you can have your village create a prison cell to house prisoners. Again make it limited like 10 or 20. You can even make prisoners work manual labor and improve the prosperity of a village a bit.
For items, in previous M&B games you could construct a manor for the player to rest. The manor halves your troops wages for every full day you rest there. You could put a chest in the Manor, and allow the player to enter the manor and access it. Or you can just give it free to the player straight away just by having a village.
For playing defensively, you could allow the village to create a Motte-and-bailey, just simple wooden fortifications.

This allows villages to be defensive enough, but not so much that they are better than fortresses. They are more like a Lord's home away from home.

Another option for storing troops would be to allow the player to create a "patrol". So you're not really storing them. You are just letting a group roam around somewhere, and then come back to them when you need troops. The risk would be losing them to an enemy or larger bandit force.

Or you could give the option to store troops in any fortress or town, with conditions.
If you are a neutral player, you need to build relations with the fortress/town or the owner of those places before you can store them there.
If you have joined a faction, then you can store them in any faction-owned settlement.
There will be the main garrison, and a separate garrison for you to house your troops. You can only withdraw your own troops and not the main garrison. If there is a siege, your troops will help the main garrison in the siege.
There can be a limit, and there can be additional charges for housing your troops.

 

[Dunno477]

Excellent idea!

 

[wannyboy]

Realy love your barack suggestion, letting villages having their own little garrison. But this would of course mean that they would fight when being looted and stuff like that. I would say, 50 village troops and 50 player owned troops. The village troops are just regular farmer, who can be upgraded to militia by doing the train villagers quest. The 50 player owned troops can be put there by you and will automatically attack an enemy right before they destroy the village, so they will try to stop the village from being looted but will wait while it is being raided. They also immediatly attack as soon as bandits show up, giving you a nice relation boost without that you have to go fighting.

Anyone thinks its good this way?

 

[Ceriy]

Realy love your barack suggestion, letting villages having their own little garrison. But this would of course mean that they would fight when being looted and stuff like that. I would say, 50 village troops and 50 player owned troops. The village troops are just regular farmer, who can be upgraded to militia by doing the train villagers quest. The 50 player owned troops can be put there by you and will automatically attack an enemy right before they destroy the village, so they will try to stop the village from being looted but will wait while it is being raided. They also immediatly attack as soon as bandits show up, giving you a nice relation boost without that you have to go fighting.

Anyone thinks its good this way?

If your village has a hidden chest its already protected from being looted.

If ever the village is over-run, if it has a hidden cache, it does not receive the status of “Looted.” Instead, its wealth is reduced only by one third.

 

[Cerlin]

I really hope this idea gets implemented! I am sure it will add a lot to the mid game and even late game it would be helpful as a forward base during wars. 

 

[wannyboy]

@ cerly (srr cant quote, writing on ipod)

Well, then they try to avoid that loss, they just attack right before the raid is complete

 

[lotsofpaper]

Hence no 1/3 loss of prosperity... I like that...

But wouldn't the loss of a bunch of farmers lower the prosperity in and of itself?