Our goal is to make a game where players can play a game with hard-hitting politics, wars, and economies, but NOT because of roleplay, but instead because these things are all actually in a winning player's best interests.

Currently, the role of castles/fortresses/"vaults" in this balance is majorly over-emphasized. Fortresses are an important part of civilizations, but they shouldn't be ALL-important to the detriment and exclusion of industrial output, population, laws, politics, etc. Right now, if your friends end up in a vault, you have no choice but to attack a vault with a frontal assault. You can not use any of those other factors of civilization instead. And that fortress can wait for you indefinitely with its defenders essentially not playing the game at all or stepping outside while they wait. This obligates constant grind-fest wall-storming battles just to stay afloat, which burns players out.

In situations like this, we find it often helps to look to real life. Not because realism itself it so inherently valuable, but because if you follow history's lead, you tend to end up in a place where politics and all of the things we want to matter in the game matter. So why are fortresses in real life not all-important and why did they not usually force fights? Because a fortress in real life is at the mercy of its supply lines and therefore does one thing and pretty much one thing only: it temporarily delays confrontation that the attacker otherwise would have wanted to happen.

Fortresses only force a fight if there is some external, contextual reason that an attacker cannot afford to delay. Such as a treaty about to expire, an heir about to inherit, reinforcing troops marching this way to lift the siege, etc.

But if you're not only outnumbered, but also expect no reinforcements or new allies to arrive, and if you have no wacky schemes in the works to change the game... then then a fortress should not save you or even really help you much. An attacker that greatly outnumbers you will in this case not storm your gates, but just camp outside until you eventually run out of supplies and simply lose by default.

How can we simulate sieges like that better in civ?

• Could we just raise all pearl costs significantly? Unfortunately, due to petty shitters and fair-weather login-pvpers, making pearls cost like 5 stam per day is totally unworkable. We need something that puts the pressure more specifically on "minority groups holed up in a box". So:

• Maybe we could change pearl costs to something that has to be gathered outside a fortress? But what? Anything bottable already exists in huge stockpiles that could last some players 10 years of siege, defeating the purpose of this discussion. Also, picking one industry's resource risks favoritism. So stamina is better. But if we already ruled out simple cost increases, then how to use it?

• We could instead pit players' stamina against one another in economic PVP. Stockpiles are less of a problem, because it's stockpile vs stockpile at worst. And it avoids petty crooks, players from other servers, or universally hated shitters taking up tons of resources to imprison, because nobody can afford to go to bat for such marginally useful players when stamina is on the line.

• (Honorable mention: siege weapons can accomplish something similar, but we could not agree on any ideas for these due to them invalidating all existing designs of vaults that people have put months or years into making. When there IS a fight, we want current optimal designs to still be optimal in the future.)

Putting all this together, we have the following mechanics in mind to abstractly simulate something like a siege or blockade of a vault's supply lines:

• A player could type /siege [name of pearled player]

• After doing this, the next time the player would have gotten their 2 login stamina, they instead get nothing, but the pearl they are targeting will burn 1 extra stamina in fuel for its captors over the next 24 hours. So you're paying 2 to make the captor pay 1. This represents a siege requiring more people and resources than those in a fortress to be successful. Lore-wise, you can think of the 2 login stamina as "what your player earned while you were offline" but instead he/she is now spending time sitting around blockading this vault and making it difficult for them to deliver supplies.

• You would have to be in the same shard as the pearl every time to apply the effect.

• You could only target one pearl at a time using siege mechanics, across all your IP linked alts, not per account.

• Each pearl could only have some max number of people targeting it at a time to keep it somewhat sane.

• When you target a pearl, you reveal your name, UUID, and a copy of your fingerprints to the pearl holder.

Discuss