Author Topic: Darfix Portal  (Read 23341 times)

Zakky

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Re: Darfix Portal
« Reply #15: September 22, 2017, 08:55:23 PM »
Westgard worrying about Astrum is the most hilarious thing ever. Monsters can never break Eidulb. They never managed even when the monster code was not broken. Westgard at its peak couldn't hold Eidulb Outskirt and I doubt the current will be able to once the code gets fixed. The sheer amount of monsters that will get funneled into EO will crush the region. Then they will slam against Eidulb or pour into inner Westgard regions again. I bet Westgard will complain a lot when the time comes.

Chenier

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Re: Darfix Portal
« Reply #16: September 22, 2017, 09:17:10 PM »
Astrum asked for our help last time around, and we said we'd give it... we really did mean to. :/

Astrum as a whole is a tough nut. Very defensible. Don't be too cocky for Eidulb, though. Your densities are fair so you should be okay, but if the monsters decided to slam there en masse? 20k after 20k after 20k after 20k... or more? Sure you've got walls, but you can't repair them when there has been battles. The monsters' forces aren't limited by gold, they will keep on spawning huge numbers until they've done enough harm to the human realms. Attrition could very well make you lose Eidulb, especially if you've got an undefeated enemy in the East and that monsters also start swimming to those parts.

Besides, the point of fortifying Eidulb Outskirts is not merely to slaughter the monsters there, but to give more time before the monsters move on to Eidulb. These mini invasions are kind of a survival "last man standing" mode: the point is to lose as few regions for as long as possible so that the *other realms'* losses bring the global density back to safe levels.

Who knows what the future will look like, but I don't recall complaining the last time around. Now that densities are considered and that monsters swim, it feels much more fair to us. Westfold aside, we are the densest realm on the continent and have the second most nobles. It didn't feel fair that density measures would hurt first and foremost the densest realm; we do need at least a skeleton of an economy to keep going, which is hard to do when we are constantly reduced to our capital. We didn't even lose all that much last time around, though, and we retook it a while back. The monster code broke some time after that, the invasion had already ended by then.

Let's not forget that "Westgard at its peak" faced a completely different monster situation. The code was tweaked many times since I rejoined BM, each time making it less and less harsh for us. At the beginning, the code was basically "Dense realms are better than thinned out realms, so let's force realms on Dwilight to be dense by sending insurmountable hordes against the one realm that lies in the spawn zone!". Now, they'll intentionally target other realms, and they won't even need to pass through us to get there. The situation is radically different.

I'm sure there will be complaining, but I doubt most of it will come from Westgard.
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Zakky

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Re: Darfix Portal
« Reply #17: September 22, 2017, 09:28:32 PM »
Astrum asked for our help last time around, and we said we'd give it... we really did mean to. :/

Astrum as a whole is a tough nut. Very defensible. Don't be too cocky for Eidulb, though. Your densities are fair so you should be okay, but if the monsters decided to slam there en masse? 20k after 20k after 20k after 20k... or more? Sure you've got walls, but you can't repair them when there has been battles. The monsters' forces aren't limited by gold, they will keep on spawning huge numbers until they've done enough harm to the human realms. Attrition could very well make you lose Eidulb, especially if you've got an undefeated enemy in the East and that monsters also start swimming to those parts.

That's what exactly happened when the code was working properly. In 5 days, the city got attacked by 140k CS. 20-40k a day since scattered monsters recovered and came back to hit again. The wall started to take damage and it almost went down to lv4 at some point. Had to actually send our mobile army to push them out of the city to EO. Ended up fighting 80k outside of Eidulb to give the city time to repair the walls. Wasn't that hard to be honest. Westgard asked for help with Ammando but we couldn't move from EO so had to ignore them pretty much. Did help them after a refit. Everything went alright. I don't know what Astrum's current setting is but back then Astrum had mainly archer,MI and ranged SF. So we were grinding everything that was thrown at us before they could even touch us.

P.S: The fix has finally arrived it seems. I wonder what will happen now. Don't think monsters will funnel that badly. I don't know which part of the code was broken but if only the movement part was broken, they probably spawned a lot so you guys will probably see some big monster groups soon.
« Last Edit: September 22, 2017, 10:12:49 PM by Koitalike Family »

Chenier

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Re: Darfix Portal
« Reply #18: September 23, 2017, 01:53:46 PM »
Well, yea, it's a tough nut to crack, never said otherwise.

Who says the next wave will be exactly the same as the last? The bug meant that monsters: weren't looting, weren't doing takeovers, weren't rallying, weren't moving, and weren't spawning. Now that it's all unbugged, we could see a new unprecedented wave wash forth.

Last time, you didn't have a war in the East, you could focus your armies where the rogues hit. Now there's Westfold that is still in play. And who knows, HD or other neighbors could decide to try to take advantage of the rogue invasion to attack Astrum and help Westfold recover? Is it likely? Not really, but it's still a possibility. Still choices to make, though, if you send your armies West then Westfold will certainly take advantage of the opportunity to reclaim some regions, with or without any help.
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Chenier

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Re: Darfix Portal
« Reply #19: September 23, 2017, 06:54:15 PM »
Yup, hordes started spawning all over. 11k the biggest so far, and that's straight in our lands, so I'm expecting a lot more to start showing itself.
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DeVerci

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Re: Darfix Portal
« Reply #20: September 23, 2017, 10:06:20 PM »
Last time, you didn't have a war in the East, you could focus your armies where the rogues hit. Now there's Westfold that is still in play. And who knows, HD or other neighbors could decide to try to take advantage of the rogue invasion to attack Astrum and help Westfold recover? Is it likely? Not really, but it's still a possibility. Still choices to make, though, if you send your armies West then Westfold will certainly take advantage of the opportunity to reclaim some regions, with or without any help.
HD is going to be on the monster's list considering their current density! Hopefully they'll eat some druids instead of Morek this time.

Zakky

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Re: Darfix Portal
« Reply #21: September 23, 2017, 11:45:19 PM »
I do not think realms with low density gets attacked more often. Did something change? The last time I heard anything about monsters, monsters only selected a destination and headed toward that region. They will simply use sea zones if that helped them get to that destination more quickly than going through land regions. Not sure how they select those destinations but I doubt they will pick on low density realms.

Chenier

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Re: Darfix Portal
« Reply #22: September 24, 2017, 01:47:00 AM »
I do not think realms with low density gets attacked more often. Did something change? The last time I heard anything about monsters, monsters only selected a destination and headed toward that region. They will simply use sea zones if that helped them get to that destination more quickly than going through land regions. Not sure how they select those destinations but I doubt they will pick on low density realms.

Yes, that was in the last(s) monster behavior change. They will now target low-density regions (realms?) more frequently.

Morek's kinda "on the way" to HD though. ;)

Avernus looting two far apart corners on the West instead of retaking their fortresses... Guess the monsters will be able to munch on their regions while nobody's home.
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Zakky

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Re: Darfix Portal
« Reply #23: September 24, 2017, 03:34:25 AM »
Yes, that was in the last(s) monster behavior change. They will now target low-density regions (realms?) more frequently.

Morek's kinda "on the way" to HD though. ;)

Avernus looting two far apart corners on the West instead of retaking their fortresses... Guess the monsters will be able to munch on their regions while nobody's home.

Interesting. Think it is a good change to make monsters target less populated realms. Will weed out dead realms for sure.

Chenier

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Re: Darfix Portal
« Reply #24: September 24, 2017, 02:12:49 PM »
Interesting. Think it is a good change to make monsters target less populated realms. Will weed out dead realms for sure.

Yea, it seemed to pretty much work that way too, given how some sparser realms got hit way worse than the denser ones (Westgard and Astrum). Arnor worst of all, though I wouldn't have called it a dead realm.
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Zakky

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Re: Darfix Portal
« Reply #25: September 24, 2017, 08:18:14 PM »
Yea, it seemed to pretty much work that way too, given how some sparser realms got hit way worse than the denser ones (Westgard and Astrum). Arnor worst of all, though I wouldn't have called it a dead realm.

Wait. Were you speculating the code worked that way or were you for certain that it worked that way?

Chenier

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Re: Darfix Portal
« Reply #26: September 25, 2017, 02:41:22 AM »
Wait. Were you speculating the code worked that way or were you for certain that it worked that way?

I'm pretty sure it was stated as such by Delvin. Looking back, the official newsticker just mentions vague behavior changes. The specifics I believe were announced somewhere on the forums.

I'm never 100% confident in my (or anyone's) memory. But I remember it having been explicitly stated.
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Chenier

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Re: Darfix Portal
« Reply #27: September 25, 2017, 03:15:18 AM »
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 ;D

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? ;D

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.
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Zakky

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Re: Darfix Portal
« Reply #28: September 25, 2017, 06:00:34 AM »
Thx for clarifying it.

Chenier

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Re: Darfix Portal
« Reply #29: September 26, 2017, 02:10:18 AM »
No problem.

Eager to see if Sabadell resumes being the hotspot it always was. Mountain of Woe seems pretty darn popular right now, but it's still pretty early.
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