ON WATCHTOWERS AND TERRITORY CONTROL
Greetings former and future denizens of Agon.
First of all, we at Ub3rgames wish you all the best for 2016 and look forward to this year that we’ll spend together bringing Darkfall Online back.
Over the break, we decided to refine our communication and focus on smaller updates that get straight to the point. Now that we finished most of our in depth looks at features, all details are out there and we can focus on summaries of the big picture.
As the first entry, we wanted to touch on a feature we deem capital for the long term success of New Dawn:Watchtowers.
We are convinced that this is one of the feature that former players will be looking forward the most and it makes sense for us to explain in concise terms what their purpose and usage will be.
They should be the main daily activity for well established empires and will be entirely player driven.
Watchtowers are siegeable player crafted structures freely placed in the world by clans.
They can be upgraded with tax collector, land buffs, merchants and local storage. They can also be expanded with decorative/tactical structures like walls, gates and banners.
Their initial purpose is to add a new tier of clan warfare content. A step between random skirmishes and sieges, something with clear win/lose conditions and rewards. Tax collectors accrue loot when players use the land around it and other clans can siege them for a wager to recover the loot.
Expanding on that simple idea, we added more purpose to the watchtowers as physical representation of a clan’s territory. Watchtowers need to be organized in a network of overlapping areas, and the more watchtower there are, the more expensive additional ones are. As we upgrade the user interface, we’ll be able to generate a political map based on watchtower networks.
Through upgrades, individual watchtowers can either serve as a simple link in the network or can be expanded to be a base of operation near a lucrative spawn or as a forward fort to fallback and defend when patrolling borders.
These networks interact with the player holdings system as they extend the system detection range for advance warning, but they also prevent any sieges until all surrounding watchtowers have been destroyed/captured. Losing a holding now is the consequence of a war campaign over several days/weeks rather than over a single victory/defeat.
In conclusion, this system allows for a player driven world while still following a predictable pattern, thus avoiding the traditional issues of urban crawl past free building games have had. It also let’s us place the most powerful player owned structures in fixed locations (holdings and villages) while still letting players shape the landscape meaningfully.
We expect to see daily border wars and back and forth captures with ruined watchtowers being reclaimed based on resources or left in place as empires crumble.
Attrition will have an impact and wars will be decided on tactical, strategical and economical might. Every type of player will serve a purpose in the war effort.
We hope this new update format is to your liking.
If you have any comments or questions regarding Watchtowers or what topic you want us to address next, please drop a comment in our forums.