The Darkfall political landscape is growing more and more grim by the day. Large alliances of clans are sweeping smaller clans and alliances into their fold and consolidating power on a grand scale. Epic battles are on the verge of being a daily occurrence which makes you worry about the stability of the server as these battles become more commonplace. Why is all of this happening you wonder? The answer seems pretty plain to me – survival.
Darkfall in it’s beginning stages was a massive land grab, clans and alliances were in a mad rush to grab every city and hamlet across Agon. Now that all the land has been claimed, the owners naturally want to keep it. But due to non-existent game mechanics in place to help protect the cities and hamlets, clans need to form alliances to help protect each other’s territory. As these alliances grow they wield greater influence and make it seem foolish to not join them, lest you risk losing your own territory to them. It’s a vicious cycle.
Obviously, alliances aren’t going anywhere – but proper game mechanics in place could help keep their growth in check for the health of the game world. This is a PvP game and quite frankly will end up getting boring if everyone is allied with everyone else. Some of the obvious mechanics needed are better city and hamlet defense. Cities have the ability to have walls but no working gates, which means the attackers can waltz right into a city to lay siege. Some cities have tunnels leading into the cities or poorly placed walls allowing intruders easy access even if gates were in play. Hamlets just have no defense what so ever, aside from natural defenses such as steep mountains or lava pits to help protect them – which only serves to protect usually one or two directions of attack.
It seems to me the simplest way to offer some protection, albeit limited, would be to introduce NPC guards that guilds can hire to protect their holdings (I’m not a big fan of the guard towers). Of course, these NPC guards must be limited in number according to hamlet or city size and not be overpowering to dissuade all attacks. But they should offer some protection for off hours to keep small groups of players from coming in and harassing a city or even laying siege when no defenders are online. Guards will most likely be rolled over quickly in larger sieges.
My proposal is to have NPC guard patrols be about the equivalent of a mid-range or low-range player with only starter weapons. They should be, in my opinion, a one time payment to hire the guard and when they die – they are gone. You’ll have to spend the money to hire another. These should only be able to guard a city or hamlet from attack, not to farm resources for a guild or spar with guild members – just defend the territory. I would love to see a system in place to allow guilds to increase the power of their NPC guards through donating looted weapons and armor to a guard bank or directly to the guards themselves to outfit them and increase their stats.
I would also love to hear your ideas or opinions. Do you think this would benefit or hurt Darkfall Online?
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2 comments so far
Personally, I like the idea. I don’t imagine it would be difficult to implement — functionally, its just a mob in your city. However, the cost and availability would be difficult to set a priori. Personally, I would err towards “prohibitively expensive”, “pay by the hour”, and “unlimited”. Thus, a very active guild could afford 10 guards for 24/day, whilst a non-active guild may only be able to afford a few guards every once in a while.
Also, guilds could survive sieges happening after midnight local time by hiring a huge guard force. This might break the “pay by the hour” aspect, however. Perhaps a limit on the amount you can purchase each hour?
Its worth implementing, though at this point, I wouldn’t expect any large “game play” time changes in DF. AV still trying to iron out bugs and let the population stabilize.
April 8th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
Cost prohibitive I think is the best approach, though if they die once and you lose them I don’t think they should be overly cost prohibitive. Maybe 1-2k gold per guard?
I just think there should be some sort of cap depending on city/hamlet size where guilds can only hire so many. They should be meant to defend the area by themselves, more to supplement the defenders. That way rich guilds don’t have 10,000 guards in there city – that’d be just insane.
April 8th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
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