Territorial Warfare Without Timers

[Daztur]

Longtime lurker, first time poster :)

In virtually all MMOGs in completed or in development that have territorial warfare (Eve, Shadowbane, Lineage, AoC and PotBS) there's a timer system involved that forces the attackers to give the defender notice about when they're going to attack. It is fairly annoying to show up with an army and have to say "ha ha, we have crushed all of your opposition so we will now go away and wait for an arbitrary timer to run out!" and it results in massive lag fest as both sides know exactly when to log in for a big battle.

The only alternative to this produced so far that I can think of is DAoC's system in which objectives can be captured by players at any time (I believe that something similar exists in Planetside and WoW). I remember being in a DAoC zerg that wandered around taking a handful of keeps, then going to bed and waking up to find out that all of the keeps we'd taken had been retaken while I was asleep. It made the whole thing feel rather pointless.

So the question is how to make a territorial warfare system without timers while making it much easier to hold territory than in DAoC and making 4 AM raids not be able to destroy any objective at will.

Well in the real world the reason that, say, Hitler didn't launch a 4 AM raid on New York is that armies are fairly slow and in most cases (with exceptions like Pearl Harbor) you can see an army coming. Of course you could make the world really really big and players really slow, but I don't think that people would must enjoy having their character on auto-run for 24 hours in order to be able to siege an enemy objective.

But how about this: let players zip around as normal but have the only things that are able to knock down/capture enemy-held objectives (siege engines, units of NPC soldiers, capital starships, dinosaurs, whatever) be only able to move incredibly slowly and only capable of being logged off at capturable/destroyable forts/castles/star bases/whatever. By really slow, I mean taking days to roll/fly/walk/whatever the damn things from one end of the map to the other.

That way if you want to go and knock down/capture enemy buildings/whatever you'd log on and take some siege engines out of one of your forts and start wheeling it towards one of your enemy's forts and once it got there it would start lobbing rocks at it until it was destroyed. The siege engines themselves would be fairly vulnerable, quite expensive and easy to destroy if unguarded, but the forts would take a good bit of bombardment to knock down/capture and have NPC-operated defenses of various sorts.

Pretty simple basic idea but here's what I think the tactical/strategic implications of it would be:

-People would tend to not base their siege engines in their capitol/heartland, instead they would base them in forts near the edges of their territory so that they'd able to get their siege engines into enemy territory quickly without having to lug them all the way from their own capitol to the border (thereby giving the enemy more notice that an attack is coming).

-If the siege engines were slow enough, people would tend not to attack the enemy heartland until they have a staging area inside the enemy's (former) borders. After all, if it takes a long time (exactly how slow the siege engines should be would have to be established after testing) to wheel your siege engines from your border to the enemy's heartland then it'd be almost impossible to protect the siege engines for that along since they enemy would have lots and lots of chances to attack, respawn and attack again while the siege engines are being wheeled towards their heartland. If you first captured a fort where siege engines could be logged out halfway between your (former) borders and the enemy's capitol then it would be much much easier to wheel the siege engines from there to the enemy's capitol while keeping them intact.

-4 AM raids wouldn’t be anywhere near as powerful, since if you started wheeling your siege engines towards the enemies at 4 AM, it wouldn’t be 4 AM anymore by the time they got there.

-It would be much to your advantage to knock down/capture forts that the enemy has along your border to keep the enemy from using them as staging areas for sieges of your own forts.

-It would be very difficult to launch sieges at enemies on the other side of the map since it would take so damn long to get your siege engines in place that a 4 AM raid that would destroy all of your siege engines before they got there would be pretty much inevitable.

-In order to keep your siege engines intact you'd have to defend them all the way over to the objective that you're sending them to destroy and then all the way back again, somewhere along the line they'd often get destroyed, thereby making attacking expensive.

-The defender would have a general strategic advantage.

-More wars would end in stalemates than in current MMOGs with territorial warfare.

-Sieging would become more tactically complex then "set a time and then show up with a big zerg." People would do things like feint with one bunch of siege engines and then attack elsewhere with a bunch of other ones, in order to make it easier to get sufficient siege engines to enemy forts intact, thereby making warfare more tactically complex and interesting.

-It would be harder to project power (because of the difficulty of wheeling siege engines to the other end of the world), which would make politics more local and fragmented.

-A surprise attack first strike would be potentially devastating, thereby making people more afraid of their neighbors backstabbing them and making alliances less stable.

I think that all of those tactical/strategic implications would be good things and would be ways of making a "Shadowbane without the suck" kind of game a lot of fun.

[Stephen Zepp]

You've pretty much hit on the only major way to accomplish this in a persistent setting and avoid the whole "bane time" thing that Shadowbane had.

I've been thinking about the concept myself for a couple of years, and you're pretty spot on regarding both the good points and the bad ones! The biggest design concern really is making it feasible to have "defense in depth", meaning that you can't zoom to the final target and kill it at a moment's notice.

Whatever implementation strategy you go with, for a game to have both meaningful and "not time zone restricted" persistent territorial capture, it has to have multiple encounter possibilities over a decently long period of time.

[tazelbain]

NPC armies that are crafted and require supplies to maintain. Their march to the city would be the timer.  The defender can choose the time of the conflict by sending their army to meet them them along the way or except the attackers time keep the army close to defend at the attacker's choice.  Of course all this would imperfect with unit composition, terrain, supplies and morale impacting army movement and both sides can do stuff to slow/weaken the opposing force before the main battles begin.

[Murgos]

The answer is really supply logistics but no one wants to tackle that because it is not fun.

If you have to take base A to take base B so that you can protect your supply lines for the attack on base C which is the one you really wanted to attack because it screws up the other guys planned logistics trail for his probable attack on base D you now have to worry about defense in depth and no one can just 'win'.

Good luck implementing it or making it fun to play the first dozen or so times.  You can go look at Gary Grigsby's War in the Pacific from Matrix games if you want to see the concept done well for a two player game.  Of course, games of WitP can take 3 or more real life years to play...

[Yoru]

One of the issues I see with this would be the caretaking involved in babysitting a siege engine all the way to the target, and possibly back. Having to actually walk along with a catapult wagon would be just as boring as waiting for a timer, most of the time. Worse, you now have to deal with catassing and setting up round-the-clock watches for the damn thing.

A patch for this might be to have the siege engines be difficult to kill while en-route and then vulnerable while approaching or bombarding the target. This alleviates the need to actually have to babysit the thing - merely having defenders "on call" would work and alleviate the tedium somewhat.

[lesion]

a neat mix, eye-em-oh, of supply logistics and gameplay mechanics is found in Rise of Nations with unit health decay when in opposing territory (if the opposing faction has researched it)

you could apply a similar mechanic (I never liked health decay) to the siege device in lieu of a big movement speed decrease, simultaneously encouraging outpost captures along the path to slow down/pause rate of decay

it'd enable the freedom to ignore supply logistics if you really wanted to, but increase difficulty in proportion with that convenience. taking a siege device from your border all the way to the heart of the enemy would be doable, but likely a huge waste of resources as your bringer of fortressy death would arrive less "Juggernaut of Doom" and more "We Replaced The Wheels With Peasant Corpses, Do You Have A Carpenter Nearby"

[Daztur]

You've pretty much hit on the only major way to accomplish this in a persistent setting and avoid the whole "bane time" thing that Shadowbane had.

Well the other way would be to build up a complete set of strategy game style mechanics, but that would be harder.

The biggest design concern really is making it feasible to have "defense in depth"

I think that the best way of doing that would be to making it as difficult as possible to launch an attack on an objective that's far from your staging areas/borders. That way to get at an enemy capitol you'd need to push back the enemy's borders and establish staging areas near their capitol first, which would make defenses in depth useful.

NPC armies that are crafted and require supplies to maintain.

Right, that would basically be taking my siege engine concept and taking it to the next logical step and would serve the same basic purpose. If you made the NPC armies slow, vulnerable to 4 AM raids while outside their borders (and not too vulnerable to 4 AM raids inside their own borders) and need some kind of logistical support you'd have a great basis for a strategy MMOG, which would be a great thing for a DIKU-infested genre.

They're march to the city would be the timer.

But the twist would be that they can change directions, feint and retreat, which simple timers can't. And, like you said, they can be counter-attacked before they reach their target, giving defenders a much-needed advantage.

The answer is really supply logistics but no one wants to tackle that because it is not fun.

Right, and fun has got to trump realism. I don't think that it would be too bad if the NPCs did all of the transportation (nobody wants to be a virtual porter) and the PCs raided each other's logistic networks and try to defend their own networks against raiders.

Having to actually walk along with a catapult wagon would be just as boring as waiting for a timer

That is a problem. At least in theory the solution would be that people would launch attacks on nearby objectives (enemy border forts etc.) to reduce the amount of baby-sitting going on, hopefully the basic game mechanics would penalize people who do too much boring babysitting by making long periods of babysitting make the expensive siege engines vulernable to raids.

Worse, you now have to deal with catassing and setting up round-the-clock watches for the damn thing.

Now that's what I'd be very worried about. Never ever underestimate the persistence of cat-assers. Maybe a potential solution solution to this would be putting in kamikazi mechanics. That way if the cat-assers launch a long-distance attack straight at your capitol from the other side of the map, even if they're cat-assy enough to mount an effective around the clock guard on the siege engines you could have your guild launch constant suicide attacks on the siege engines that would take them down one or two at a time, thereby not leaving enough cat-ass siege weapons left by the time they got to their target. This would encourage short-range operations since if you attack a nearby enemy border fort instead of their capitol there won't be enough time for suicide attacks to take much of a toll before they get there.

A patch for this might be to have the siege engines be difficult to kill while en-route and then vulnerable while approaching or bombarding the target.

That could work, my concern with that would be is that it wouldn't give defenders enough of an advantage, which would lead to massive alliances predominating more than I would like. It would also make it possible to launch an attack directly at the enemy capitol without having to deal with their border defenses, which would make it possible to have your capitol destroyed in the first siege of the war. But maybe if you could give defenders an advantage in a different way like giving capturable objectives shit-loads of powerful NPC guards.

unit health decay when in opposing territory (if the opposing faction has researched it)

Sometimes similar happens in www.battlemaser.org (interesting free MMOG with a strong strategy element) in which the NPC armies get big morale penalties when outside their borders (including in the territory of allies) that and making it only possible to raise new NPC armies in one's capitol and making NPC armies fairly slow make it very hard to operate large empires/alliances effectively, which makes it pretty much the only multiplayer strategy game I've seen that has lots of localized in-fighting rather than a handful of massive alliances. This makes it a good source of inspiration for strategy MMOGs despite the very simplistic gameplay.

you could apply a similar mechanic (I never liked health decay) to the siege device in lieu of a big movement speed decrease, simultaneously encouraging outpost captures along the path to slow down/pause rate of decay

That could work. The only issue if is you have the siege engines be fast enough, even with big health/effectiveness penalties when operating outside one's borders, it wouldn't stop 4 AM raids. It wouldn't matter how weakened the juggernaut of doom is if it arrives at the enemy capitol when all of the enemy are asleep.

[Yoru]

Having Bruce flashbacks. Send help.

[Lightstalker]

The following jumps out:

By really slow, I mean taking days to roll/fly/walk/whatever the damn things from one end of the map to the other.

This (babysitting siege weaponry transporting overland) was demonstrably not fun in Shadowbane and violates the notion that folks should be able to log into the game and start having fun with their friends in 10 minutes or less.  I put up with quite a few 3-4am 1 man 8 account siege raids in Shadowbane and even paved 45 buildings in 60 minutes with a crew of siege barbarians wiping out literally months of work for The Other Guy (TM), so had incentive to prevent such shenanigans from continuing or spreading.  Leaving a physical resource vulnerable in the field usually results in a requirement of 24-7 overwatch on that resource because the time-in-transit becomes such a valuable resource in itself.

My observation, was that travel to the point of conflict was too easy when that point was deep within enemy territory.  Summon should work to the border of your territory, advancing into enemy territory should be limited by desire to keep pushing on, but extending your territory waits on checking off control of the border regions.  Being able to summon past the front negated any meaning to territory in Shadowbane aside from the land under your actual city itself.  The 'front' was meaningless so every fight became a desperate fight for your guild's survival.  Eventually the Mine system was implemented which provided a remote thing to fight over that wasn't your entire guild's existence.  That helped a bit, but summoning still meant territory was largely irrelevant.

bbcode is hard, apparently

[KyanMehwulfe]

The supply train progress being devolved to a glorified 'bane' rather than an actual gameplay sink came to my mind as well.

I've been playing Romance of the Three Kingdoms lately again and inevitably considering how an online version of it could work, and the supply train topic immediately made it come to mind. Specifically in reference to Rot3K, consider if the area of 2 enemy cities are split into 3 sectors. City, Field, City. Getting siege to the enemy city requires Siege Production, Siege Transport. When the first starts, the enemy cities gets a warning (let's assume a Scout system of whatever sort is in place). They then have X days to respond (somehow; assume it's fair). Then once done, it prepares to enter Transport Mode in the Field. During that time, the enemy again can respond by entering the Field by starting a Skirmish or something. But if they don't, the Siege transport is a success and it slowly and safely moves to the enemy city (or the war camp near it), serving as that eluded glorified 'bane'.

I describe this carefully since it has a lot of terms which may be perceived as artificially controlling and obviously the topic is about a more realistic and uncontrolled system. But break down some of those terms and consider it basically just as Siege Production and Siege Transport. During each you have a chance to officially respond--Open War, if you will--and that gives you full freedom to decimate either project.

But if you don't, each project receives a safeguard of some sort. Exactly the "glorified bane" that was referred to; a nearly unbeatable supply train crossing the land that doesn't fully need a babysitter. But even though the chance to wage Open War against it has passed, you could still wage... Guerrilla War, let's say for a lack of a more creative term, and do minimal damage do it - important for not only some sake of defense yet, but more importantly that sense of realism which an invincible "glorified bane" moving across the land would certainly hurt.

There's still a lot of systems in place for the sentiment of trying to break down as many of those as possible. It's a form of moderation nonetheless though, which in itself may be the key; not to streamline such warfare to be more realistic for the average gamer, but rather to also moderation its occurrence so slight excessiveness becomes more tolerable. In the very least, it's constructive early A.M. brainstorming all the same.

[Vinadil]

I think that SB's original design of limited invulnerability that depended on your Base size (TOL rank etc.) and that did NOT include walls (or barracks I would say) was a good one.

The issue really becomes this... Everyone LOVES taking part in a well-timed raid that catches their enemy off-guard.  Heck, it is how those of us who play outside of the Mega-guilds can ever compete.  But, nobody enjoys logging on to find their city has been demolished over night by some random group of whoevers.

I have been part of both groups, and the main things that will help the situation in my mind are:

1) No instant transport of siege equipment.  It does not have to be "slow", just normal speed will be enough really.  As long as you cannot toss a few catapults into your pack and get summoned to the front lines then I am fine with that.

2) Make the "Main City" invulnerable (or at least most of it) until the outer cities are captured.  This is basically the EVE model (as I understand it) in which you have to have a controlling presence in the sector before you can siege the Capital.  If we looked at SB it would mean placing multiple resource Mines in one Territory.  Then the attackers would have to take a majority of those mines (or forts) and hold them for a full 24 hours before they could attack the main city.  After that 24 hours there is no more time buffer... the city is completely open.

The biggest goal, really, is to have targets that are Always vulnerable but are not Too devastating when lost.  I never really minded losing a city in SB... lost tons, killed tons... it was part of the game.  But, it never failed that members would disappear for a week, month, or forever when a city was lost.  I doubt that would have happened over losing a frontier fort.

3) Only allow people able to defend a city 24/7 to own one.  One of the problems I see with many siege-type games is everyone thinks they "deserve" to own a city.  This just is not true... anywhere.  It takes real work and organization to establish something that big, and if you cannot handle it, then you don't deserve to have it.  Basically this would mean Fewer cities with Larger populations.  Inevitable that Larger population will contain people from different schedules/timezones.  This means you have a greater chance of having people online 24/7... putting you in a great place to defend your city at all times.

In SB (Corruption server for those who remember) I got to lead a multinational guild of equal parts USA/Germany/France/Italy/Russia.  It was probably the most fun I had in SB as there were ALWAYS people on.  If you want to play the territory-control game... you need to be able to project your guild power at any time of day.  I suppose Dev's can try to create nifty ways to let people play in that realm who are not willing/able to do what it takes to compete... but really the players have the ability to do that also.

[lesion]

Then the attackers would have to take a majority of those mines (or forts) and hold them for a full 24 hours before they could attack the main city.  After that 24 hours there is no more time buffer... the city is completely open.

this is the whole timer issue though--you could have large attacking forces wiping out all opposition but the main city and then having to guard the place for a day, taking leisurely walks to the edge of camp to piss on suspension of disbelief

or have defenders stalemate by taking back the stuff when the attackers are doing things like having a life

unless you had huge, rigid factions with a huge main city full of people from different time-zones that could continue to fight after others went to bed or whatever, but outside of chance it'd only be attainable with troops of AI running around (oh man, or a big enforcer demon with a sword the size of several small houses! yes! totally cool!)

forcing players to do things or wait for something dictated by policy out of their hands is old-school, and not in the remember-my-awesome-Contra-score-best-summer-ever way

I dunno!

[tazelbain]

> 3) Only allow people able to defend a city 24/7 to own one. 
Talk about a niche market.

Tactical surprise is good, but strategic surprise shouldn't have a place in these games.  The problem with 4am raids, beside being antithetical to any sort of causal gaming, is it is players playing around each other.  It's really not PvP if guilds are just attacking each other's empty cities.

[pxib]

Seige SHOULD be a pain in the ass. It's hard. Seige equipment is build for a specific assault, and if anybody is planning a seige on your faction's city you get some onscreen warning to that effect. This plan and buildup takes a mandatory 12 hours, say, but nobody actually needs to be online or do anything during that period. Nothing can disrupt it. When those 12 hours end, the seige equipment begins moving from your base to the enemy city and everybody had better be there to protect it. It can move relatively fast and is immortal so long as anybody of its faction is "near" it. Once it reaches the enemy city its immortality goes away and seige begins.

The buildup period requires the seige engine materiels and expenses, and can only be executed by high ranking members of a faction. Those materiels are gone whether anybody shows up to babysit the engine or not. Only one seige per faction. Choose wisely.

Like surprise attacks? I recommend Raiding! It doesn't require a declaration (other than that your factions must not be friendly) or any special cash investment.

Cities cost a lot to create, but once created they make resources and cash rather than requiring them. If raiders can form a big enough group to handle attacks by the guards, they can go in and steal money and resources. Diminishing returns over time that have nothing to do with the amount of money and resources available. Back off and let the city respawn resources before you try again. Set those returns such that it's impossible to completely drain a city of resources in less than 24 hours. Even a drained city isn't destroyed, it just isn't making money for the folks who control it.

I also like permanent, capturable, developer-placed forts and ruins. Give them special abilities too... temporary buffs, maybe, a healer or a shop.There should be an array of them throughout the land. If you control any the forts within the "territory" of your city, your guards are tougher, buildings and walls are hardier against seige, and raiding rewards are lower.

I also agree that territory ought to prevent non-friendly teleportation within it.

[Lightstalker]

I also like permanent, capturable, developer-placed forts and ruins. Give them special abilities too... temporary buffs, maybe, a healer or a shop.There should be an array of them throughout the land. If you control any the forts within the "territory" of your city, your guards are tougher, buildings and walls are hardier against seige, and raiding rewards are lower.

I think one aspect of this will work against territorial combat - the buffs for controlling more terrain features (forts, mines, etc).  As one side gets beaten down they have to defend less land and should therefore be harder to continue to beat down, until such time as the aggressor has gotten so big they have trouble continuing to advance or hold their now larger borders.  By making the stronger parties continue to get stronger the bigger they get, you make it unlikely for late adopters or new powers to arise in a game in progress.

[pxib]

I imagined terrain features that were relatively easy to capture and hard to hold. They're just there to provide options. Also the buffs are given by something at the feature.. praying at a shrine or talking to an NPC or, I dunno, stepping in a pond. Area-wide buffs would only alter the defensive strength of cities, players have to actually visit the site on a regular basis for personal buffs. Realistically those buffs could be available no matter who "controls" the site, assuming you can get close enough to activate them... in which case cities would be placed near as many forts as possible, but controlling them would only be a hedge against losing the power they bestow. It would be handy to be near towers with spiffy buffs, but that's just one more place you have to care about defending if the city comes under attack.

More generally, "the rich get richer" is a problem with any of these large-scale conflict games... and probably an important topic for its own thread.

[Vinadil]

> 3) Only allow people able to defend a city 24/7 to own one. 
Talk about a niche market.

Tactical surprise is good, but strategic surprise shouldn't have a place in these games.  The problem with 4am raids, beside being antithetical to any sort of causal gaming, is it is players playing around each other.  It's really not PvP if guilds are just attacking each other's empty cities.

The thing is... history of games where the Defender gets to decide when combat happens shows that people STILL play around each other.  The biggest example is when you have East vs West (a rather usual setup in SB).  Each side will set the defense to their Prime Time... which is obviously not a prime time for the other side.

The same thing will happen if the Attackers sets off some "set-time" attack.

One of the things that used to be very fun in SB was going to a person's town... any time... and just tearing stuff down.  Generally you would not even get through 1 wall before the guild started recalling to their town and calling in reinforcements to kill you.  The point of sieging was to Force PvP... not avoid it.  As long as cities are invulnerable then the players just go out and about and don't care if you are sitting there waiting to kill them.  But, you start tearing down some of their stuff and they all run back and fight.

Now, I would be fine if you could steal resources... say there are regularly spawning merchants/harvesters or some such... or that each Guard Respawn costs the defending guild resources... then your attack is actually Hurting them in some way besides just random inconvenience.

As a person who comes from a smaller guild (30-50 people), I like games that still allow Guerilla style warfare.  If we have to we can get together 100 people at 4 am to go bash town a city... but that is not fun or realistic on a daily basis.  But, I would still like to be able to take my 5-man team and go cause some Real damage to the other side.

Moving the conflict Away from city-sieges is probably a good way to go.  That makes them more rare, more epic in scope (because of the logistics involved).  If we keep the conflict around resources and trade then we are basically "destroying" future earning rather than past development.  It is still significant but it does not hurt so much for the Defender.

[pxib]

Yes.

The idea of a small team of raiders roping over the walls of a city, killing guards and stealing gold in the off hours sounds an awful lot like player-created content. Better yet if raiding shows up as cosmetic damage... busted windows, broken furniture, and burned thatch roofs. Show up in the morning and check the city: "Aw damn, raiders." Maybe the guards know what faction they were (...and better still if there's a chance that sort of information can be faked by the raiders).

The goal isn't to destroy what people love and care about, it's to initiate conflict in which the players have a stake. If the cities require resources to upgrade, then raiding them for loot slows their growth and pisses their guardians off. It doesn't require heavy planning and it still has rewards for the raider. Even landless guilds could enjoy it.

If siege is expensive, but knocks out upgrades before it destroys things, then a partially successful siege would feel positive to both sides. The attacks would still feel productive because it would knock back the city's progress, and the defenders would feel productive because they'd know that had successfully protected their city and couldn't be attacked by that faction again without some delay (plus they spent a mint on that siege and WE'RE STILL HERE!). Even if the siege only knocks their walls down three upgrades and drops a tower... hey, three upgrades and a tower! Woot.

If the damage took more than 24 hours to repair then a siege could theoretically take place in multiple waves over multiple days and start to feel like a real siege... exhausting and demoralizing to both sides. Kinda like a raid endgame. Hmm.

If only one siege at a time is allowed per city, large factions will form mini factions specifically designed to harmlessly siege them over and over. If multiple sieges are available then decoy sieges might be set up, with the faction just concentrating on whichever city was looking most promising. Siege should be absolutely be a BIG THING... but multiple siege engine setups should probably have pretty steep diminishing returns or, again, mini-factions will ally with large factions specifically to crush opposition with piles of siege engines. More fun for all involved if they can only donate troops.

Blahblahblah. We've had a better Everquest, now I want a better DAoC dammit.

[Edit: Spelling, grammar, He-Goal and the Masters of the Universe]

[Stephen Zepp]

Man, I still need to write that essay on "Positive vs Negative" conflict.

Pxib (and others) are correct--the siege mechanic was designed to give positive value to PvP--instead of ganking vs being ganked, it was "attack their homes" vs "defend our homes".

The problem was, they made it too invested--basically one loss and you were done.

I got a lot of shit for my time on the Fear server as a nation leader--forcing conflicts, declaring territories (and defending them), forcing people to sub to my nation, etc...but for every "you're an ass dude" tell I got, I'd get people that understood that my goal was to generate positive conflict, and force the gankers/griefers to at least meet in a middle ground of why we fought--and it was a PvP game after all, so if you didn't want to fight, go away.

[CaptBewil]

One of the issues I see with this would be the caretaking involved in babysitting a siege engine all the way to the target, and possibly back. Having to actually walk along with a catapult wagon would be just as boring as waiting for a timer, most of the time. Worse, you now have to deal with catassing and setting up round-the-clock watches for the damn thing.

A patch for this might be to have the siege engines be difficult to kill while en-route and then vulnerable while approaching or bombarding the target. This alleviates the need to actually have to babysit the thing - merely having defenders "on call" would work and alleviate the tedium somewhat.

Or have about 10-15 NPC guards escort the wagon.  That way, it would at least be somewhat protected from small group player attacks.  Maybe the players for that team has a wagon location indicator on a map so they can keep track of where it is along with an ETA.  This would allow players that are on to check-up on the wagon from time to time to help make sure it gets to where it's going.

Same could apply with Supply movements between forts or whatever...

[Typhon]

Going to try to briefly explain the (half baked) idea I've been playing around with since I read the first post.  There are keeps and villages (which the keeps "keep").  The keep is on a hill, nearby to the village.  You can think of them as a combined entity.

Villages have villagers which provide; revenue, defenders, a scouting network, a marketplace and other stuff (half baked!).  Villagers have faction.  Killing villagers to take keeps will negatively impact your faction.  Villages will be less beneficial to an invading force which hasn't done anything to offset this penalty - either proactively or retroactively.  Examples include tricking someone else into killing the villagers, spreading plague to the villagers, infiltrating and subverting the villagers, etc.

Keeps are expensive.  You need a healthy village to offset the expense drain the the keep represents.  Creating a healthy village requires some interaction with the village (selling ill-gotten loot there, often at prices not so favorable to the hero/guild/realm)

I'm going on too long.  The idea is that having a village change hands too frequently is good for no one because then that faction/that village becomes worth less and less to the taker.  Riding into the heart of another country and sacking a village is possible, but if you do it too often you get 100% KOS turnout whenever you ride into that faction's area (in general I'd think that villagers would put forth about a 33% of the population defense response - which should be a significant obstacle to overcome).

Therefore - attackers don't attack unless they think they can secure the village/area because paying to upkeep the keep without the assistance of the village is a significant drain on their guild's economy (and not upkeeping the keep + sacking the village = really pissed off villagers).

I know we all see "faction" and think, fuck no! not another faction grind!  I'd really like to see things that build faction be things that player want to do anyway (i.e. loot dungeons, sell stuff to someone - the choice of who you sell to involves who you get the best rates from + who's faction you need to be boosted).  I'd also like to see religion played up a bit more in villages (e.g. building a church in a village gives access to healing, and really pleases the villagers).

Why I'm pushing this idea is because it seems like it could finally add a way for these games to have/support a spy/intelligence network (subverting the villagers, killing off the runners leaving one village to spread news of an advancing army, etc).

I agree it does seem fairly complicated.

[Vinadil]

I am a fan of having this kind of MMO/RTS merger... I have just never seen it happen.  I guess it might be worth my time to test out Dreamlords or whatever game tried to do the RTS/MMO thing, but the reviews made me shy away from it.  I don't know if it was their particular design or the nature of the beast that makes the player base so small.

I bring up the RTS thing because every idea here seems to involve intelligent, controllable NPC units that are owned/created by the players and continue to work in the world when the players log off.

Is there a game out right now that has such a thing?  I remember hoping years ago that WoW would be just that... a MMO version of the RTS in which I got to send off my human woodcutter and go kill horde peons all in an Epic battle of moving territory control lines.  But, for those who missed it... that is not how the game turned out.

What is it about the combination of RTS (NPC units that actually DO something in game) and MMO that is so difficult?

[Krakrok]

Time of Defiance, Darkspace, and Savage are three MMO/RTS style hybrids.

Time of Defiance is a little like VGA Planets except you build RTS style on floating islands. The games reset every X time (or maybe when someone owns everything). The problem is that one person usually streamrolls everyone else in the game.

Darkspace is another space RTS style game. You can build up planets and then fly your space ship around and battle it out with other factions. The problem is the MMO part of it is all locked up. Everyone already has so much shit you can't break into it. You're stuck fighting it out in 64 player arena's that regularly reset.

Savage is an RTS/FPS hybrid. One person is the RTS commander who builds things and tells people what to do. Everyone else runs around and fights off opposing faction. You can also mine and help your buildings build faster. You gain levels which have minimal benefits but the levels are lost after the game ends. Savage 2 is suppost to have persistent levels and items between RTS games.

What is it about the combination of RTS (NPC units that actually DO something in game) and MMO that is so difficult?

That is dynamic content. Developers are afraid of dynamic content. This leads to the main issue which is someone ganking your shit while you're offline.

[Vinadil]

The thing is... dynamic content does not have to mean PvP.  Though I generally have only looked at PvP games since EQ, I was very interested in a game I want to call "Myth" or some such that was being tested a couple years ago.  It basically sounded like a huge PvE epic where the players were battling against a RTS style enemy that would conquer/build/siege the lands unless the PC players fought against them and took over the land.

Granted, it seems TR is trying to do this now... will be interesting to me if they can pull off truly dynamic content or if they will merely give the illusion of it while pushing their own storyline.

[Krakrok]

Sounds like something Horizons was suppose to have. See this thread.

[Stephen Zepp]

Time of Defiance, Darkspace, and Savage are three MMO/RTS style hybrids.

Time of Defiance is a little like VGA Planets except you build RTS style on floating islands. The games reset every X time (or maybe when someone owns everything). The problem is that one person usually streamrolls everyone else in the game.

Darkspace is another space RTS style game. You can build up planets and then fly your space ship around and battle it out with other factions. The problem is the MMO part of it is all locked up. Everyone already has so much shit you can't break into it. You're stuck fighting it out in 64 player arena's that regularly reset.

Savage is an RTS/FPS hybrid. One person is the RTS commander who builds things and tells people what to do. Everyone else runs around and fights off opposing faction. You can also mine and help your buildings build faster. You gain levels which have minimal benefits but the levels are lost after the game ends. Savage 2 is suppost to have persistent levels and items between RTS games.

What is it about the combination of RTS (NPC units that actually DO something in game) and MMO that is so difficult?

That is dynamic content. Developers are afraid of dynamic content. This leads to the main issue which is someone ganking your shit while you're offline.

(Historical note: for those that may remember, when I joined this forum it was as a game designer, not a GG employee, at the time working on exactly this type of hybrid game)

One of the biggest technical challenges I found actually was the sheer overhead of the AI for having those units do things when the player wasn't online. Pulling guards in shadowbane, the whole concept of pulling in general taught us that if you rely on "off line defense" that is performed by NPC's, they need to be able to process well, and that AI takes a lot of server CPU processing power.

If you allow every single user to control NPC's, then you are basically talking about an AI process for each of those players--or an incredibly well integrated external AI package, which is very very expensive.

The other factor is simply making the hybridization of vastly different genres work well--from economy time scales (RTS games make thousands of "gold" an hour--what does that do to your FPS/RPG item economy, etc) to play time scales (RTS games are over in 3-60 mins, RPG games expect much longer play periods, and endless ones), to all sorts of other issues.

It's not impossible, and I honestly wish I had the time to get back to working on my prototype, but unfortunately that's not gonna happen in the near future :(

[Krakrok]

One of the biggest technical challenges I found actually was the sheer overhead of the AI for having those units do things when the player wasn't online. Pulling guards in shadowbane, the whole concept of pulling in general taught us that if you rely on "off line defense" that is performed by NPC's, they need to be able to process well, and that AI takes a lot of server CPU processing power.

This is the part I can't figure out. MMOGs are already full of NPCs. How does making them do something different take more CPU? I can see if maybe they all have to run A* vs. cheating by just moving towards the player that could be CPU intensive. However, Unreal, Quake, and Battlefront all seem to run fine with say 64 FPS bots. You can have X number of AI machines connect to the server just like a normal player client would connect (without the graphics obviously) to offload the AI onto as many additional machines as you need.

[Lightstalker]

One of the biggest technical challenges I found actually was the sheer overhead of the AI for having those units do things when the player wasn't online. Pulling guards in shadowbane, the whole concept of pulling in general taught us that if you rely on "off line defense" that is performed by NPC's, they need to be able to process well, and that AI takes a lot of server CPU processing power.

This is the part I can't figure out. MMOGs are already full of NPCs. How does making them do something different take more CPU? I can see if maybe they all have to run A* vs. cheating by just moving towards the player that could be CPU intensive. However, Unreal, Quake, and Battlefront all seem to run fine with say 64 FPS bots. You can have X number of AI machines connect to the server just like a normal player client would connect (without the graphics obviously) to offload the AI onto as many additional machines as you need.

Most of those NPCs operate on the, Am I Mad At X? form of AI, where X is determined to be the last guy who hurt me (by entering aggro range or reaching the top of aggro gain).  Pretty simple stuff that doesn't do well to defend a city at 4am as the guards happily chase players around the desert instead of protecting their home city.  That AI is dumb for defense, it doesn't represent coordinated action, and doesn't provide much obstacle to a player who wants to exploit it.  Do FPS bots have to worry about coordinated attacks?  Do they have decide against attacking into massed blaster fire?  Do they stun the healers and target the dps next?  Do they protect their property or do they just die and respawn and go again?

Maybe we shouldn't count on our NPC defenders to defend in the usual way...  Instead of trying to kill transgressors, maybe they should just try to hide from transgressors and so long as they exist their protected assets are immune?  It is pretty much the same problem (same boundary and FOF identification issues) but instead of trying to directly play into the aggressors attack they are attempting to avoid it.  If the players initiated the assault there is a good chance the NPC rushing out to meet it is a bad idea, denying the decisive confrontation may be a better road to buying time, which is all NPC defenders can be expected to provide anyway.

My Shadowbane capital had ~200 NPC guards and it was still impossible to defend when the tower archers weren't forcing the other side to sb.exe ad naseum.  There were a few hundred cities per server.  The NPC load, even with poor AI, begins to weigh on the hardware.  There will always be more (NPCs, Players, objects as the world ages) we need a solution that scales resource demands reasonably.  Better AI over an arbitrary number of NPCs isn't something that scales.

[pxib]

AI is a red herring.

For whatever reasons, even if it's just numbers and respawn rate, the NPC defense will either be effective or ineffective. Players and game designers lose either way. If the NPCs are effective against a coordinated raid all by themselves, then once players join the defense they'll be nigh impossible to beat. If the NPCs are ineffective against a coordinated raid, then the city can get stomped as soon as the players leave. Even if the NPCs are tuned such that they can reliably hold off a coordinated raid for six hours before they fall, then the attackers will be pissed because they've got to invest six hours of constant attacking or the defenders will be pissed because their player defense force can only take six hour breaks.

Somebody's unhappy either way. Worse than unhappy: They feel cheated.

A six hour seige isn't fun... it's work. Rather than figuring out how to produce the perfect six hour seige somebody needs to figure out how to break up a war into five exciting (but individually optional) hour-long skirmishes over the course of a week with an epic two hour battle scheduled on the weekend... which is, itself, only one step in the larger war AT THE END OF WHICH there's a chance somebody's city gets destroyed, or more terrifying still, captured! NPCs may play roles in that action, but they cannot be important ones. Defenders must feel their skill is critical in the defense, and attacks must feel their success depends on the same.

[DarkSign]

Savage is an RTS/FPS hybrid. One person is the RTS commander who builds things and tells people what to do. Everyone else runs around and fights off opposing faction. You can also mine and help your buildings build faster. You gain levels which have minimal benefits but the levels are lost after the game ends. Savage 2 is suppost to have persistent levels and items between RTS games.

What is it about the combination of RTS (NPC units that actually DO something in game) and MMO that is so difficult?

That is dynamic content. Developers are afraid of dynamic content. This leads to the main issue which is someone ganking your shit while you're offline.

Man am I glad I found this forum. RPGCodexers loathe debating MMOs. Anyway, this is exactly what Ive been designing myself. The game being post-apocalyptic, RTS style resources would be gathered by guilds who have SB cities, each with buildings conferring different benefits as well as uses. Not only would the cities themselves be seiged, but the resource gathering could be attacked and the resources stolen. As was said before, this means you dont lose your entire city and have a focus for small to medium-group battles on a regular basis.

Savage was a great game with the way Commander mode (not surprised Battlefield2 stole the idea) let you garner your troops to a point and give them a task. I'd love to give that ability to a group leader (but imagine groups are larger like 15 people or so) to earmark destinations with waypoints and flanking maneuvers.

Furthermore, for every task you followed, you'd get guild points which might decide who got promoted or whether you got cool weapons from the guild armory.

NPC guards should have skill levels comparable to regular players which could be upgraded along with weapons and armor. Of course done in different styles (wasteland rough, corporate military etc.).

Speaking of NPCs...why not have randomly found NPC towns that you could sub, ally, or conquer, upgrading their weapons and armor and having them join in the fight on your side?

Great thread.

[Stephen Zepp]

AI is a red herring.

For whatever reasons, even if it's just numbers and respawn rate, the NPC defense will either be effective or ineffective. Players and game designers lose either way. If the NPCs are effective against a coordinated raid all by themselves, then once players join the defense they'll be nigh impossible to beat. If the NPCs are ineffective against a coordinated raid, then the city can get stomped as soon as the players leave. Even if the NPCs are tuned such that they can reliably hold off a coordinated raid for six hours before they fall, then the attackers will be pissed because they've got to invest six hours of constant attacking or the defenders will be pissed because their player defense force can only take six hour breaks.

Somebody's unhappy either way. Worse than unhappy: They feel cheated.

A six hour seige isn't fun... it's work. Rather than figuring out how to produce the perfect six hour seige somebody needs to figure out how to break up a war into five exciting (but individually optional) hour-long skirmishes over the course of a week with an epic two hour battle scheduled on the weekend... which is, itself, only one step in the larger war AT THE END OF WHICH there's a chance somebody's city gets destroyed, or more terrifying still, captured! NPCs may play roles in that action, but they cannot be important ones. Defenders must feel their skill is critical in the defense, and attacks must feel their success depends on the same.

Be pedantic there pxib--you're talking about combat AI--in a persistent RTS or RTS/Hybrid, you still have "orders" that have to be processed, as simple as they may (or may not) be. And therefore, you need AI to process them.

To be able to handle that well, and also handle a large variety of other "human offline" tasks, you need to basically disconnect the human directly from controlling his units/buildings, and instead have him give orders to a "controller" of some sort, that then processes those guidelines/orders. And that means a controller for basically every player that ever happens to have the possibility of controlling a unit or two--and while it's not a linear multiplier really (internal vs external bandwidth), having a process for every one of your human account holders (and you can't go with just the online users here, which is what most servers need to optimize for--max online loads) is a really daunting concept, especially for an indie ;)

I't doable--in fact, I have the design pretty much all laid out with prototypes for some of the stuff working, but it's not trivial by any means.

[Vinadil]

It is interesting how quickly a talk about AI and Dynamic worlds degenerates into "will the guards be able to protect me while I am gone?"

I am much more interested in a group of goblins that sieges my city than I am at how well my NPC guards defend it.  The Goblins give me something to do while I AM online... the guards just try to help me out while I am not.

It seems that the basic RTS "mindset" for the AI is as follows:

1) Game created: You are on Team A.

2) You have resources X, Y, Z... build A, B, C in that order.  Build unit 1, 2, 3 in that order.  Send out scouts.  Locate the enemy.  Send Groups 1a-2c to attack... yada yada build your base while attacking theirs.

The way you make the AI "harder" CAN be to make them smarter (see Galactic Civ 2... nice AI there), or just to give them unfair amounts of resources.  I am cool with the unfair resources if that is all we can do, but we SHOULD be able to do it.

The economy/time thing seems to be just a matter of playing with the spreadsheets.  There will be a point where the NPC units that "gather" are not worth the Resources it takes to produce them either because they a) gather too slowly or b) die too easily... or some mix of the two.  So, you find that point, let them gather just slightly More, and test it out again.

In that type of game I would find a quest that says, "Go and kill 10 Orc Peon Woodchoppers and return" instead of "Go kill 10 wild bears and return".  And, the woodchoppers that die would eventually lead to other things happening in the "enemy" camp... say walls falling down due to disrepair, or even entire buildings falling down.  Put in the WoW world that would mean the Horde no longer has access to certain vendors or quests until they protect their woodchoppers or go chop wood themselves.  This causes other problems... but most of those come from the level/class/equipment-design of the game (IE one level 70 character could solo-siege Tarren Mill), not with dynamic content.

[pxib]

And that means a controller for basically every player that ever happens to have the possibility of controlling a unit or two--and while it's not a linear multiplier really (internal vs external bandwidth), having a process for every one of your human account holders (and you can't go with just the online users here, which is what most servers need to optimize for--max online loads) is a really daunting concept...

....and despite all that complexity and hard work, I still believe it's a waste. Even if players could individually alter each NPC's AI to the point that fruit merchants fight like bots in an FPS, those bots either win or lose. They do so when players are not around, and either the attacker or the defender feels cheated out of a fair fight. Coming online to find your city destroyed sucks... and it probably sucks even more if you put a lot of effort into programming a defense. Discovering that an offline defense is impregnible sucks, too. It's like running into an unwinnable PvE quest... except in this case it may be literally unwinnable, because the defending player doesn't care whether or not you love the game, only whether or not her city is standing tomorrow morning.

Could commandable units add a lot to a MMOG? Absolutely. I also like base-dependent "power armor" and "gun turrets" (substitute whatever genre-appropriate nouns you like). They are not the solution to the "Territorial Warfare Without Timers" problem. Honestly, the attacker hasn't got as much to worry about... an unbreachable defense will be seen as a game-breaking bug. What's the point of PvP if you can't win? With a breachable defense, tjem. city seige becomes no more than a higher stakes version of the "you killed me while I was afk" or "you shot me while I was lagged" or, more fundamentally, that elementary schoolyard favorite: "I wasn't ready!"

The higher the stakes the more likely the losing player gives up and quits, and he feels cheated no matter how capably his assets defended themselves while he wasn't in direct control. Economic reality, gritty nethers or no.

I am much more interested in a group of goblins that sieges my city than I am at how well my NPC guards defend it.  The Goblins give me something to do while I AM online... the guards just try to help me out while I am not.

I agree that eliminating PvP would be a great solution to this problem. The PvE goblin AI could be designed to manage the odds in the player's favor. An empire might lose a few important cities, but will defend its capitol. A faction with a single fort might just lose a few walls and important buildings. Good AI, from Checkers to Hearts to Half Life 2, is just a puzzle to be solved. It puts up a good fight and then loses so the player can feel the thrill of victory and continue to love the game. Although player factions should want the same thing -- the game won't be any fun if they scare away all their opponents -- basic game theory predicts that they won't think that through.

[Lightstalker]

To be able to handle that well, and also handle a large variety of other "human offline" tasks, you need to basically disconnect the human directly from controlling his units/buildings, and instead have him give orders to a "controller" of some sort, that then processes those guidelines/orders. And that means a controller for basically every player that ever happens to have the possibility of controlling a unit or two--and while it's not a linear multiplier really (internal vs external bandwidth), having a process for every one of your human account holders (and you can't go with just the online users here, which is what most servers need to optimize for--max online loads) is a really daunting concept, especially for an indie

So you've got resource gatherers or shopkeepers or crafters under your dominion that need to perform their non-combat actions without grinding the server to a halt.  If each NPC performs its duties autonomously then each one is poling timers and checking status.  In NWN if you create a module and want all the NPC Guards to take out torches at night and put them away at dawn an easy way is to put it in the heartbeat script for that NPC.  This won't scale and leads to unpredictable behavior as soon as you have a few NPCs reaching for their torches.  A better solution was to put a single timing object in the world for the day/night cycle and have it run through a callback list whenever this single object identifies a state (day/night) change.  Then each NPC only runs code/script when told to by the central timing object, instead of all the time checking to see if it should be doing anything different.  Of course, if the callback list, or the activated script gets a bit long your game can stutter at the update.  I think you could see this vendor stutter in Shadowbane if you were in a big automated production city where all the vendors were completing at the same time (i.e. the ring/jewelry production facility of a particularly large merchant city).  Staggering the callback execution only works so much to spread the load, as would creating a seperate timing object for each class of NPC actor (which is again just another way of staggering the loads). 

So at the end of the day you really want to avoid putting anything on the individual NPC instance that doesn't absolutely need to be there.  e.g. the crafting interface just connects this particular crafter's inventory record to the global craft queue and at the appropriate time the global entity will fire the callback, but instead of asking the NPC to actually produce now it will tell the NPC what it produced (by calling the producer itself).  The callback producer builds a queue of inventory addresses with production parameters to generate the actual items asynchronously.

If you are willing to break the instant feedback of independent timers by NPC (independant NPC timers were visible in SB) then you don't need a controller per Player (or per NPC) but one per class of NPC.  "Oh, you want a Hammer of +4 Lolz?  Well I'm not starting it until I finish my lunch."  The NPC drops that work into the queue for the next timed callback and the player gets to micromanage only to within ProductionTime+1 timing segment for that NPC type.

Funny, how a thread on territorial warfare without timers has turned towards putting timers on AI. 


Closer to the topic: Without NPCs to drag out combat or hard timers to limit asset destruction over time you are left with a game of capture and hold where if you log off your team loses control of whatever assets they happened to be holding at the time.  That's a pretty hard core model for a persistant world and under such a model I'd expect ~60-300sec construction time for assets - because they'll be gone as soon as you lag out and can't get back through the login server.  It would require human guard duty to establish long lived assets, which is not fun and poses a problem for the small group that can't cover 24-7-365. 

However, the folks who actually got to build the cities in Shadowbane were very few but the folks who got to knock them down were legion.  Much cheaper but less persistant buildings would go a long way to spreading the "builder" play feature across the entire game population.  That alone might make it worth pursuing a two fold approach: the skirmish game has no timers, but the capital game does.  Folks who want to be really serious about their asset construction can build the capitals while the rest can have most of that same fun without the grinding/farming/stress outlay of maintaining a persistant asset in a PvP world.  We lost more buildings to first time build and upkeep mistakes than to enemy attack in SB, the costs were really too high for a nation to be able to let everyone play at city building.

Draw the skirmish buildings from local terrain limits (no trees here == no fast tower building, no stone and no trees == no towers at all), so players don't even have to "farm" to build them.  That might start being fun - Fog of War being dispelled by watch towers, being knocked down by an attacking enemy, etc.

[Krakrok]

The Monster Play in LOTRO has a lot of what we're talking about. It basically has DAOC battlegrounds where you have a zone with a bunch of different keeps in it. The keeps can be captured by the freeps (players) or the creeps (players as monsters). The keeps are mostly defended by NPCs. The freeps and creeps come in and beef up the NPC defenders. If an attacking side kills the keep captain they take over the keep. I assume a freep attack on a creep keep is a lot like a Raid.

There are also camps of freep NPCs, creep NPCs, and neutral NPCs around the map so if there is no other players to fight you can still kill things. The NPCs (I assume on both sides) give you quests like collect elf ears and legs (in the case of the monsters). Plus other quests like 'collect a bunch of logs for our destroy the forest sawmill' which you can walk around and find on the forest floor. I don't know if completing the quests beefs up the NPCs on your side or not. Might be cool if completing the quests upped the level of your side's NPCs.

I don't know if you gain control of the whole zone if you 'win' the zone and the battle moves on to another zone or not (battle front line).

As a monster you get points for completing quests and ganking people which you can put towards beefing up your stats. There is no custom armor or weapons for monsters though. I also don't know what a freep gets if you kill a creep. A creep might drop money he's collected but I'm not sure.

Really nothing dynamic there. I think I'd rather play something like Battlefront if that's all it is going to have to offer though.

That's a pretty hard core model for a persistant world and under such a model I'd expect ~60-300sec construction time for assets - because they'll be gone as soon as you lag out and can't get back through the login server.  It would require human guard duty to establish long lived assets, which is not fun and poses a problem for the small group that can't cover 24-7-365.

The building buildings in the middle of a running battle in Savage worked pretty well. You have people defending the builders and additional people helping the builders to make it build faster.