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NewLexican

Creating beachhead mechanics

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The doubling of harvest rates, which are again doubled on double XP weekend, has highlighted something I consider a problem. As it stands, establishing a beachhead often doesn't require more than a pick, a hatchet, and a momentary lull in the defender's activity. You don't necessarily need any meaningful preparation nor logistical effort. While I do expect non-peak hour invasions to remain the norm (especially on NA where not everyone's peak is the same...), I would like to see mechanics come into play which make establishing a beachhead more of a contested effort.

My idea:
If an attacker does not yet have any claims on an island (i.e., they have not established a beachhead), rather than simply planting a claim flag they must drop a "beachhead flag." A beachhead flag takes, say 8x as long to capture a piece of land as a normal claim. However, similar to a shipyard, the beachhead flag is a container into which you may place (but not remove) some yet-to-be-named beachhead components. Each component added accelerates the rate of the remaining claim time up to the standard claim rate for a non-beachhead flag. These modifiers would either sit on top of the existing curve affecting claim rate vs number of claims held by the defender or on top of a custom curve to meet the devs' goals regarding the difficulty/ease with which you take land from someone with a lot of land.

While inexpensive to produce, beachhead components are crafted in a special workbench which may only be placed on land. I.e., you can't simply harvest resources local to your beachhead and build the components offshore on a ship. The components could come in two sizes: one light enough that strong characters may carry one themselves but will be encumbered regardless of their weight capacity and another larger component requires a beast of burden to transport.

The beachhead flag has a maximum capacity, and weight-for-weight, the larger components have a greater impact on the claim rate than smaller components. So a flag filled to capacity with large components will result in a faster claim than a flag filled to capacity with smaller components. So, if you want to make the fastest claim possible, your beachhead will likely be near the actual beach rather than on the highest mountain top.

So, you may still attempt to establish a beachhead with minimal preparation, but a rapid assault will require preparation and logistics. How much logistics is a subject of balance, but I'd like to see the maximum capacity of a beachhead flag tuned such that a maximum-effort attack would require many ships to transport enough components to fill a flag in a single run or several runs with fewer ships.

I'm not sure if companies without any claims should be required to build components on Lawless (that's going away, isn't it?), or be exempt from the mechanic. If they are exempt, some anti-exploit measures will have to be devised. E.g., a company cannot join a new alliance or be merged with another company within five days of their first claim.

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