The Town-Resetting War System

[Cryptite]

I briefly discussed this with some of the folk today, and I understand mag and zor have been scheming a war system which might integrate into this one reasonably well. I think there's a general agreement that a war system needs to exist that has preset rules so that the admins aren't left pondering if and by whom rules may or may not have been broken after each and every conflict on the server. The following proposal solves some problems but probably also has some issues, so contribute at will.

The idea of the Town-Resetting War System is as follows:

During any point in time if enough attackers and defenders of a town are on (preferably equal numbers +-1, and probably >= 2-3 per side), a town may have war declared on it. At this point, through, presumably, commands of some sort, a town will enter a save-state in which all chunks inside the town generator's protection zone are saved.

At this point, the war is now on for a period of time (30m, an hour, etc) or until a certain number of percentage of fighters have died. TNT is allowed and, for all intents and purposes, the town could be leveled. The idea of the previous save-state is that when the war is over, the winners receive rewards proportional to their score or success, determined by some metric I haven't thought of yet. After the rewards are dispensed, the town is reloaded from the point at which the war was initiated. This allows cannons and tnt to be used, but doesn't end the existence of the town permanently.

Some possible additions:

• If the generator is reached and disabled, the 'timer' of the end of the battle runs out and the defenders then must reactivate and protect their generator for an additional period of time. If they fail, the town could theoretically be lost to the attackers.
  
• Spawn points would change for those in the war. Perhaps defenders would spawn in or near the town and attackers would spawn a further distance from the town. Perhaps they have to build a device that acts as a spawn point? This could allow the war to persist longer than just once everybody dies once, it's over.
  
• The save-state could potentially retain each player's inventory, or more specifically, armor. Upon respawn your armor will respawn so that the fight is a bit more fair.
  
• Perhaps the declaration of war allows a 1 hour warm-up time in which sides could prepare their buildings/armor/items/tnt, etc.

DrMongrol mentioned a good scoring idea might be a ripoff of the Battlefield franchise Rush Ticket System. In short what this does is gives each side a certain number of 'tickets'. Quoted from the wiki and edited a bit:

In Rush mode the attackers are given a limited number of reinforcement tickets. When an attacker dies, a ticket is lost. If the attackers destroy the M-COM stations and move on to the next phase, then all tickets are restored.
Defenders, however, have infinite tickets, meaning the number of deaths inflicted on the defenders will not directly cause the game to end. Death inflicted upon attackers, however, cause the defenders to win if the attacker ticket count reaches zero.

This could be combined with the Conquest Version in which both sides bleed tickets, but perhaps the attackers bleed them faster, thereby forcing pvp and preventing some sort of waiting game.

Anyway, thoughts, go!

 

[mopb3]

That seems like a great idea to me. It solves many problems from my point of view at the very least. Just one thing to point out, I think it might be best to have a cool-down period after one war is declared so it cannot just be declared again and again in the space of a small time (On the same people)

 

[Cryptite]

Agreed, probably a span of days at least for cooldown. There also needs to be some manner of rejecting the war, not sure how though, but aggressors can't just always choose to attack every time they want to; plus what if there just happen to be the right number of people on at a time, yet they have to leave in x minutes. Somehow both sides need to agree to a time or something.

I suppose if players left prematurely or something like that the game could also end prematurely and rewards (however minor) could be dispensed immediately...

 

[Zor95]

As mentioned in-game my main concern with this is the returning of items and also the lag it might create to replace the chunks. I like it though.

 

[mopb3]

As mentioned in-game my main concern with this is the returning of items and also the lag it might create to replace the chunks. I like it though.

Transferring cities kept all the items intact fine, so this should work quite well (Hopefully)

 

[Zor95]

What happens though if I take some items outside of the town? Would they be cloned?

 

[thelineguy]

I guess that once war is declared, all defenders must be inside the town, and then the status of their invs and the town is saved. After the battle is won, all inventory should be returned to the status before the war happened, before rewards are received.


EDIT: We need different rules for different parts of the war, things such as siege and blockade.

 

[Cryptite]

My thought was that chests might be either blocked off or become actually locked out to the attackers somehow. Although looting does sound like it should be a part of the attack, doing it a way that wouldn't totally screw over the defenders would be difficult. Perhaps if you looted a chest, a percent of the chest's contents could be returned after the reset, like 50% or something. Seems like it could be easily taken advantage of.

 

[Magpieman]

We must however try and make it as simple as possible, don't get too carried away with the idea. I feel we should aim for a system that works more like factions rather than like on the hardcore servers.

 

[Artagan]

Smaller, less established towns ought to be exempt.

 

[Magpieman]

Well if we had it so both towns agreed to war that wouldn't be an issue. One idea of mine is that towns can formally become allies or enemies or be neutral towards other towns, but i am not sure what the advantages and disadvantages of these actions could be.

 

[Cryptite]

Perhaps allies could teleport to each other's towns via the town portal by some means. Enemies could thus declare wars on each other, and I agree that wars might have to be agreed upon by some means, although I'm unsure how well that would go if one side never wanted to be attacked..

 

[mopb3]

Perhaps allies could teleport to each other's towns via the town portal by some means. Enemies could thus declare wars on each other, and I agree that wars might have to be agreed upon by some means, although I'm unsure how well that would go if one side never wanted to be attacked..

To look at one example I'm quite sure that Hyrule would never get itself involved in any wars if it had the choice, but there are plenty of people our there who would like to go to war with it (I am not one of them :lol: )

 

[Magpieman]

To become allies both towns would need to agree but to become an enemy it would only take one town to want to become an enemy of another and they would both register as enemies. This war system would therefore only happen between towns that are enemies.

 

[thelineguy]

Smaller, less established towns ought to be exempt.

For a period while they are starting up, but it would be unfair if a town were to be allowed to keep 100% safe if they chose to stay small.

 

[Scott Miller]

Just FYI, this idea is cool (may need some polish), but there is one big snag so far, in that I'm not aware of any way to load/save chunks that doesn't bring the server down for minutes at a time. Without solving that this may be intractable. Anyone have any pointers?

 

[thelineguy]

Just FYI, this idea is cool (may need some polish), but there is one big snag so far, in that I'm not aware of any way to load/save chunks that doesn't bring the server down for minutes at a time. Without solving that this may be intractable. Anyone have any pointers?

I *think* that if you use the command /save-off it'll stop terrain saving, and if you restart the server afterwards all the blocks will be returned to their original state, at which point you can restore terrain saving with /save-on.
Not 100% sure on this, but I'll check on it.

EDIT: Also, if we were to use that we would need you or Mag on.

 

[Cryptite]

Presuming you're using world edit to save, I wonder if you could subdivide the region and then save the subdivisions over a longer period of time, so rather than trying to save all at once, the saving process could take a minute or something. This could occur during the pre-war-declaration warm up period which would likely be a half hour at least or something.

This is how the dynmap plugin renders its world chunks, so at least it's been done before. This same process could be used in reverse to reload the town.

 

[KenuDragonfire]

I like the idea of a war system and everything, but, c'mon, let's face it, we aren't a huge 200 slot server. We have one person working on custom plugins (who is a very lovely person for doing so) and even if he can code incredibly well, he is one person. The bubble gen idea came up what, 5 months ago? It still hasn't been put into place. We can't expect Asy to drop everything to work on the server, and we don't even have a set-in-stone idea yet. We'll have arguing, sudden changes, and even the limits of Java that'll create issues. This might never be finished, or if it is, a lot of other projects that Asy has in store might be slowed down as well. For now, get used to "vanilla" thievery. We're going to have to have it for quite a bit.

--Nouvellune

 

[Cryptite]

Maybe 1.3'll return some excitement to the server.