Message #161436

[Chenier]

Look up the thread "Monster Problems"

There's actually a combination of different things going on.

Smart monsters, those spawning in the big rogue area in the west, have a chance of getting an actual long-distance target that they will then charge off across land and sea to wreck. At present, I believe these are now correctly going preferentially for low-density realms, and within those preferentially for regions without lords and/or without knights. (These are the ones that have an entry in the database.)

If they don't have one of these targets, they'll look in their general vicinity for a non-rogue region and attack it.

This is why Sabadell, in particular, gets hit so damn hard: it borders a LOT of regions, which means monsters from almost all of those regions see it as the only bordering non-rogue region. (And, of course, monsters slightly further away see it as a possible nearby target.)

I'm trying out a change to the system where monsters essentially see regions of high-density realms as being rogue for the purposes of targeting—that is to say, they might wander into them totally at random, but they'll never move in en masse deliberately. There was a small bug in that, that was causing some of the cases to fail to properly respect the high-density status, but I just located the source of it. It will be fixed for next turn change.

Well, not if something happened there like happened to Paisly the other day. I don't think you could ever stack enough militia in any region to repel over 100k CS of monsters in one go

They're not prevented from using ferries, but they might very well decide to just hop on a raft at this point, depending on where they want to go to.

As far as monster targeting...I'm not entirely sure what you're asking.

At present, monsters never target realms. They target specific regions, and if they take it into their head to hit a particular region, they really don't care what's between them and it. They will charge for it in as straight a line as they can manage, until they forget about it (which they will do, after a certain number of turns).

And yes, holding that pass will now be much easier, as monsters should be vastly less interested in using it.

...For what it's worth, if you could manage to get enough people together (probably a coalition of realms would be required, starting a new monster-buffer-realm), you could cut the entire northwest section off from the main rogue area, pacifying the monsters there (somewhat), by holding Duil, Chrysantalys, Wallershire, and the Corridor of Torment.

Of course, that would probably be nigh-impossible to take, and hell to hold, but hey, life goals, right?

I've made some of the changes I outlined: monsters will now have a much lower chance of attacking high-density realms, and more groups will take it into their heads to go charging off across the sea to hit random human-held regions in large bands.

Please keep me updated as to how the movement of monsters changes.