I wasn't able to watch much of the village influencing of Estelbar, but I'm wondering how people view the difficulty, the length of time required, and the crusade/sanctuary setup.

The impression I got was that breaking demesne was a bit hard. No idea, otherwise.

I loved the crusade/sanctuary thing. Granted, I was only there for 2-3 hours, and Celest was helping us so we barely lost at all during the fighting, but it looked like it did a pretty good job all the same.

Also, it seems difficulty took a sharp drop. I'm only CR2, but I still could take on most of the dudes, unless they're all pansies in Furryville.

EDIT: Or, I should say, CR3, but only using the CR2 influencing wossname.

I was involved in it for the majority of the time, and I think it went quite well. It's a bit too cumbersome to generally start and hold a full debate, as a person can usually just run off if they think they might lose and the debate will eventually just end. That and the fact that unless you sanctuary immediately you'll just get killed before you finish debating. I think a few more things could be tweaked to make debates a more strategically viable course, but overall, things have improved.

It was nice. Granted, I haven't actively influenced to this extent, but I think the use of sanctuary (I haven't really seen crusade in use) is great and provides an alternative to the previous combat-intensive influencing. By the way, since I don't remember the help file, sanctuary doesn't have any negative effects, right? I'd just assume that influence was halved in a sanctuary room, but I'm not sure.

I want to debate, but uhm.. I'm a little inexperienced. Maybe I'll poke at Rhysus in Lusternia for some practice.

It's not halved in the sanctuaried rooms, it's just doubled in the crusaded rooms.

I was the only CR4 from Serenwilde there for almost the whole time, and to make matters worse, as Gwylifar is a soldier and not particularly good at Influencing (in terms of the skillset) he wasn't prepared really at all to be an influencer, let alone the lead one. As a result, I really didn't have time to do anything more than just influence best I could as fast as I could and not take time to think about anything else.

And let me tell you, that's tedious. I know everyone else already knew that, but... dang. How badly I wished there was some way, any way, to get at least a vague idea of "how are we doing?" and "how close are we?".

In the rush, I never had time to really think about using sanctuary, and I hadn't prepared ahead of time to crusade. I used sanctuary a few times, notably once after I'd gotten trapped in a carcer with three Magnagorans with violent intent, and when I got out and got back to my influence target, I thought it might be a good idea, but didn't really have time to think about it strategically. And I frankly forgot about the whole possibility of debate, there wasn't time.

Several times when we were positive that every single Estelbar native was simultaneously influenced for us, and wondered "isn't that enough?", we wondered if we needed to rescue farmers so we could influence them, which we did. I wonder if that helped. I also wonder, would it have helped to have done quests for them beforehand? (It's always irked me that Magnagora could kill them to hasten their rebellion, but we couldn't help them to hasten their rebellion, because they refused to let us help them since we were enemied to Magnagora. Just doesn't seem symmetrical or logical.)

Speaking only for myself I don't think I can really use this instance to comment usefully on sanctuary, crusade, debating, or really much of anything in the original question.

A way to see how close we are would be very nice. However it would work.

I heard lots of complaints about demenses.

Make Avatars not hunt when a village is in open influence. It's just messed up. I refuse to use your Avenger system because of how little I care for the concept, but I'm still entirely subject to its failings, so at least make it so my entire city isn't affected by it this way.

Here here, Rhysus. Down with the Avenger.

I was there for only a short while, but I really didn't see anything different, other than jem setting up a sanctuary which we used as a teleport room. I just chanted for gwylifar and diverted and stuff. I think if I had been able to, I would have used sanctuary when I ran into a bunch of mags, though, just to save myself from being killed, but running did the job quite well. I do like the concept of debating, though, and I am trying to make myself good at it.

Does anyone realize that this is thread number 1337?

http://lusternia.ire-community.com/index.php?showtopic=1337

NECROMANCER! I'd kill you, but you'd just lich and it'd be pointless.

He's too sucky to be trans. I'll webwhore/omen, you kill!

Though I'm just voicing what others have said, I would like a way to see how far along we are in influencing.